Their Highest Potential: An African American School Community in the Segregated South

Their Highest Potential

Their Highest Potential

An African American School Community in the Segregated South

Vanessa Siddle Walker

The University of North Carolina Press Chapel Hill and London

© 1996 The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

Portions of this book appeared in different forms in Caswell County Training School, 19331969: Relationships between Community and School, Harvard Educational Review 63, no. 2 (1993): 161-82, and Interpersonal Caring in the ‘Good’ Segregated Schooling of African American Children: Evidence from the Case of Caswell County Training School, Urban Review 25 , no. I (1993): 63-77. These sections are reprinted with the permission of the publishers.

Vanessa Siddle Walker is assistant professor of educational studies at Emory University.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Walker, Vanessa Siddle. Their highest potential: an

African American school community in the segregated

South / by Vanessa Siddle Walker.

p.  cm.  Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-8078-2276-0 (cloth: alk. paper)

ISBN 0-8078-4581-7 (pbk.: alk. paper)

1. Afro-Americans—Education—North Carolina—Caswell County—Case studies. 2. Community and school—North Carolina—Caswell County—Case studies. 3. Caswell County Training School (Caswell County, N.C.) 4. Segregation in education—North Carolina—Caswell County—Case studies. I. Title.

LC2802.N8S53 1996 95-39504

371.97’96’756575—dc2o CIP

04 03 02 7 6 5 4

For my mentor, friend, and mother

Helen Elizabeth Beasley Siddle

1929–1991

Contents

Preface

Introduction Remembering the Good

Chapter One A Couple of Three Years Ago

Chapter Two The Plot Thickens

Chapter Three Working Together

Chapter Four Meeting Needs

Chapter Five We Are Family

Chapter Six Their Highest Potential

Chapter Seven Standing on Moving Ground

Afterword No Poverty of Spirit

Appendix Notes on Methodology

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

Tables

1. Educational Status of Parents, 1953 66

2. 1940-1941 CCTS Curriculum 115

3. Teaching Certification Levels for White and Negro Teachers, 1957 143

4. Average Salaries for White and Negro Teachers, 1957 144

5. Extracurricular Activities, 1966-1967 175

6. Sale Prices of Negro School Buildings, 1957 186

Photographs

Rosenwald school 17

Students on the back of Ulysses Jones’s truck 33

First graduating class 34

Lineup of school trucks 38

Lineup of school buses 43

Graduating class seated in front of the old Rosenwald school 45

Lumber parents donated for the new school 55

The school as it appeared before the new gymnasium was constructed 62

Popularity Contest held at the Rosenwald school 77

Dillard with Reverend and Mrs. Warner 86

Dillard’s parents 145

Anthony and Annette Dillard 147

CCTS faculty 151

Teachers who were part of the Caswell County Education Association Bulletin staff163

Dillard away from CCTS 165

School picture 172

The CCHS band 176

A winning science fair project 177

Plaque presentation 196

Map

Bus Route 42

Preface

My first public speaking experience occurred on a stage in Caswell County, North Carolina. I was in first grade and had been assigned by my teacher to memorize Psalm 100 for the devotion that my class would present as part of its chapel program. (Chapel was a school assembly that featured class and club presentations.) I still remember the pounding fear I felt as I struggled to learn the psalm, but I also remember the warm applause that greeted the six-year-old who stood center stage and recited it. That stage was in the segregated Caswell County Training School (CCTS). My teacher was Mrs. Gladys Dillard, wife of the well-known and much-loved principal.

In my choice to write about how this school operated during the era of legal segregation, my relationship to the place and to the people cannot be discounted. I am a product of the community. My mother was a teacher at CCTS from 1955 to 1967. My father once served as PTA president. When I travel back to the community and to other places around the state to interview former participants, I am given almost immediate access to their presence, their knowledge, and their materials.¹ I am, after all, Mrs. Siddle or Reverend Siddle’s daughter to many of them. More than that, I am one of their own—one of the students they produced. As such, I have doubtless been given an access that would have been more difficult for someone they did not know.

My relationship to the place cannot be overplayed, however. My experiences in the school have had a negligible impact on the content of the story, since my own memories of CCTS are vague at best.² I do remember the packed auditoriums for the Christmas programs and listening with awe to the high school choir sing Born a King as I sat with my family in the balcony. I remember that I played one of the angels in the performance of the Christmas story in my second grade year (though I must confess that my dominant memory of this event is that I could never wave my arm sufficiently to suit the high school teacher who directed the play; every time, either my timing was off or my arm was not sufficiently arched). I also remember my third grade teacher, Miss Steepleton, coming to my desk to give me special help when I was having trouble learning to divide and keeping me after school one day to talk with me about why I should be nice to a new girl in our class. Just barely, I can still see Mr. Dillard, the principal, standing like a fixture in the hall. But these recollections and the other shadowy images and bits of conversation are all the memories of a child. I was only nine years old when the elementary department moved out of the CCTS building into a new facility; court-ordered desegregation occurred in the county two years later.

Like many people, I gave very little thought over the years to my early education. CCTS was a fact of my school life, but while I was traipsing around the country in graduate school and in several high school and college teaching positions, I had no reason to think about segregation. It was rare that anyone talked about it, and when they did they never suggested that anything good happened in the schools. I internalized the negative messages of the poor segregated schooling of African American children and never thought to compare those messages with the shadowy experiences I remembered.³

Two events happened that facilitated a change of mind. The first was precipitated by a trip back to North Carolina in 1989. That summer, talk was in the air about the anticipated closing of Dillard Junior High, the former CCTS. The comments I heard from members of the African American community in informal settings went something like the following: Mr. Dillard worked so hard for that school; It was such a good school; I sure do hate to think about them closing it. I was stunned to hear the fondness people expressed as they recalled an era twenty years past. Was it possible that people were saying that they liked their segregated school, that they thought their school had been a good one? Did the memories have any external confirmation? It seemed impossible, so I began seeking information. I talked with my mother. I went to visit my former first grade teacher. I started looking at a few yearbooks and reading old newspapers. I talked informally with some CCTS graduates. The comments were remarkably similar. They liked their school. In spite of what the educational literature said about the poor quality of the segregated schooling of African American children, the voices from this community told another side of the story. For the first time, my personal and professional worlds collided, and the familiar really did, in the favorite phrase of ethnographers, become strange.

Yet my resolve to understand the story of the school was not solely traceable to my discovery of the value it held in the community. During the same time period I was involved with several reform projects that allowed me to spend some time observing children in school. Because of my own background as a teacher and my perspective as an African American woman, I found that during these visits I frequently focused on the experiences of African American children. What I saw is not unheard-of. Large numbers of the children were invisible academically, often silent or asleep, and visible in areas that didn’t matter—like in the halls or the cafeteria. Many struck me as unengaged, alienated, misunderstood, distracted, overlooked, or uninspired. Their strong appearances of disinterest were unnerving in contrast with the old CCTS yearbook pictures of African American children involved in debating, drama, literacy clubs, and so forth. As I drove back to Philadelphia at the end of that summer, I resolved to understand more about the school and why it seemed to have been valued so highly by the community.

Thus began a long journey that has carried me through dusty papers, lengthy visits, and endless hours on the highway and in airports. I have met with people in rest homes, restaurants, hotels, homes, and corporate headquarters. They have been kind enough to go through file drawers, attics, and long-ignored boxes. They have talked, and listened, and talked some more. I owe debts to many.

Foremost, my thanks go to the members of the CCTS school community who have so willingly shared a portion of their history with me and allowed this story to emerge. In particular, I want to express my gratitude to the key informants, whose names are listed in the bibliography. In addition to providing me with interviews—usually many more than one— each also read the manuscript at various stages and assessed the accuracy of my conclusions. I offer these people my deepest thanks.

For enhancing my thinking on the meaning of the story, I am indebted to the readers who provided consultation for the University of North Carolina Press—Jim Anderson, Marvin Lazerson, and George Noblit. Their insightful comments pushed me to think further and increased the depth of the manuscript. Likewise, Laverne Byas-Smith, Marian Elbert, Carole Hahn, Charles Strickland, and John Williams also provided significant content assessments, without which the final story would not appear as it does. Special thanks to Russell and Jackie Irvine, whose pioneering work reinforced the validity of this idea and whose support and feedback through the various drafts have been invaluable.

Thanks also to the staff at the Gunn Memorial Library in Yanceyille, as well as the Caswell County Schools administrative staff, the Caswell Messengerstaff, and the principal and administrative support at Dillard Junior High School for their willingness to provide written and oral documentation. The librarians at Fisk University, the North Carolina Division of Archives and History, and the North Carolina Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill kindly located information that none of us were even sure existed. It is hard to imagine editors who would be more helpful than those with whom I worked at the University of North Carolina Press, Christi Stanforth and David Perry. My thanks to both.

A postdoctoral grant from the Spencer Foundation and a research grant from the University Research Committee at Emory University assisted in providing me with the resources to locate information and the time to write. The faculty development grants at Emory and the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania have also assisted in this process. My colleagues in the Division of Educational Studies at Emory provided a departmental climate conducive to writing and research.

On a more personal note, research assistants Trudy Blackwell and Evelyn Lavizzo furnished key assistance in the early stages of data collection. In particular, Trudy Blackwell interviewed most of the informants in the second round of interviews and retrieved forty years’ worth of local newspaper articles about the school. Shannon Hawkins and Christy Burford cared for me and my daughter during the most intensive writing periods. Indeed, during the final phases of my work Christy not only provided child care but was also the most efficient administrative assistant one could ask for. Neither my husband, Melford, nor our daughter, Sarah Elizabeth, can imagine family life without Mr. Dillard and CCTS; for their patience, encouragement, and all other forms of assistance during the years of this work, I am extremely thankful. I am also grateful for the support provided by my extended family and other friends.

I now know for certain that the author of a book is only the lead name among many who have shaped its contents. To all those listed, and to the many significant others who have not been named but whose words have touched this project, I am indebted.

Their Highest Potential

Introduction

Remembering the Good

The history of the public schooling of African Americans during legalized segregation has focused almost exclusively on the inferior education that African American children received.¹ Indeed, the meager materials, the inadequate facilities, the unequal funding of schools and teachers, the lack of bus transportation, and the failure of school boards to respond to black parents’ requests are so commonly named in most descriptions of segregated education that they have created a national memory that dominates most thinking about the segregated schooling of African American children. In this national memory, southern African Americans were victims of whites who questioned the utility of providing blacks with anything more than a rudimentary education, who believed themselves to be bearing an unfair tax burden for the Negro schools, and who grossly under-funded African American education.² The children suffered immeasurably and, the memory assumes, received little of educational value until they were desegregated into the superior white systems.

In truth, the memory of inequality in the distribution of resources is not inaccurate. The story of the education of African American children during segregation is one in which blacks were continuously denied adequate funding and consistently had poor facilities and materials compared to those of their white counterparts.³ In 1935, for example, when North Carolina was widely reputed to be the South’s most progressive state in education, a commission of fifty blacks and fifty whites reported on the condition of the Negro schools to the governor of North Carolina:

In a great many instances the school buildings now in use for the colored children are in a poor state of repair. Generally many are poorly lighted and heated, and in many instances are too small to give adequate accommodations to the pupils.... In many of the classrooms the furniture is antiquated, the blackboards are insufficient in size and badly abused.... Very few rural colored schools are equipped with modern single desks. Little or no provision is made for teaching health and sanitation. Laboratories for science and the vocational subjects are few and inadequate.⁴

During the time of this dismal assessment, the Rosenwald Fund had already assisted in building 813 new schoolhouses for black children, a number that exceeded the foundation’s expenditure on rural schools for any other southern state, and the schools thus had ostensibly been improved.⁵ Yet the North Carolina report vividly describes the poor facilities that most black children still used. At the end of the Rosenwald building program in 1932, the per pupil value of school property was less than one-fifth that of the property of white schools.⁶ In North Carolina in 945-46 the value of school property per pupil enrolled was $217 for white students and $70 for black children.⁷ In 1951, even though blacks comprised about 30 percent of North Carolina’s population, they possessed only about 14.2 percent of its school facilities.⁸ As late as 1954, when the South had already begun accelerating its building efforts as a result of increasing court attention to the importance of the equal side of the separate but equal clause, wide discrepancies still remained between black and white education.⁹ These discrepancies were evident throughout the South in the pupil-teacher ratio, the length of school day, the supplemental services provided, and the expenditure per pupil in average daily attendance.¹⁰

This blatant lack of equality in school facilities and resources was, of course, a reflection of the unequal treatment of blacks in all aspects of American life. Though some degree of racial desegregation existed for several decades after the Civil War, the public spirit that had initially at least tolerated blacks’ presence in voting booths and some public accommodations gradually reversed itself. The Negro, even public-spirited humanitarians later conceded, was incapable of self-government, unworthy of the franchise, and impossible to educate beyond the rudiments.¹¹ Shortly after the turn of the century, Jim Crow laws segregating whites from former slaves and former freedmen were passed in all the southern states, restricting blacks’ access to trains, restaurants, parks, buses, and other areas where the races might have occasion to mix. North Carolina went so far as to require the segregation of the textbooks used by black and white children. The North turned a sightless eye to the new laws—partly because of its own dismay at the numbers of former slaves flocking into the cities, perhaps, and partly because of a general loss of interest; hence, the South was left to handle the Negro problem at its own discretion. Its discretionary preference was white supremacy. Legally mandated separation continued into the 1940s and was not governmentally dismantled until the Civil Rights Act of 1964.¹²

The memory of inequality is thus not inaccurate. However, to remember segregated schools largely by recalling only their poor resources presents a historically incomplete picture. Although black schools were indeed commonly lacking in facilities and funding, some evidence suggests that the environment of the segregated school had affective traits, institutional policies, and community support that helped black children learn in spite of the neglect their schools received from white school boards. Most notably, in one of the earliest accountings by Thomas Sowell, the schools are remembered as having atmospheres where support, encouragement, and rigid standards combined to enhance students’ self-worth and increase their aspirations to achieve. In Sowell’s description of six excellent black schools, students recount teachers and principals who would not let [them] go wrong; they describe teachers who were well-trained, dedicated, and demanding and who took a personal interest in them, even if it meant devoting their own money, or time outside of the school day.¹³ Likewise, in the first book-length manuscript describing the good in segregated schools, Faustine Jones provides a portrait of one of the two well-known Dunbar High Schools.¹⁴ According to her survey results, teachers didn’t give students a choice between learning and not learning; failure to learn was unacceptable to teachers, family, peers, and the community. The choice was how much one would learn, and what subjects would be mastered.¹⁵ Moreover, in these and other later descriptions, the segregated school is most often compared with a family where teachers and principal, with parentlike authority, exercised almost complete autonomy in shaping student learning and insuring student discipline. Parents played an active role also: they are remembered for the monetary and nonmonetary contributions they made to the education of black children.¹⁶ The segregated black school was thus, according to Irvine and Irvine, an educational institution that addressed the deeper psychological and sociological needs of [its] clients.¹⁷

To these important early descriptions of segregated schooling may be added the long-overlooked stories of parents, students, and teachers who wanted to maintain their schools when court-ordered desegregation was implemented. For example, David Cecelski has chronicled the story of the African American community in Hyde County, North Carolina; these blacks refused to send their children to school for an entire year in protest of a desegregation plan that would have unnecessarily closed two black high schools.¹⁸ Kluger’s history of the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision presents evidence that some members of the black community resisted desegregation. Most notably, a PTA in Kansas wrote to the school board endorsing the board’s support for retaining segregated grade schools.¹⁹ This small body of material suggests that schooling for African American children during the era of legal segregation may have been more highly valued by some of its constituents than has been generally considered. Indeed, it is possible that communities may have lamented the loss of their schools for reasons that were more complex than the fear of loss of jobs, a rationale sometimes cited to explain some community members’ resistance to desegregation.

Instead of seeking to understand more about why the schools were valued, however, the negative historical account has linked lack of materials and resources—the descriptions most frequently provided—with educational environment and has consigned both to inferiority. As an example of this implicit relationship, consider this conclusion by a historian who studied the status of the black schools: The facilities available to the race were grossly inadequate, he writes, "and the standards were generally lower tha n those of white schools" (italics mine).²⁰ Although his preceding discussion had focused on resources, his conclusion leaps to a generalization that relates poor facilities with lack of standards. His data do not merit this conclusion.

To be sure, the lack of facilities and resources did create, and still does create, tremendous burdens for principals, teachers, and parents, who desired educational opportunities for black children and were forced to regularly compensate for the neglect of white school boards by creating the system of self-help that Anderson refers to as double taxation.²¹ My own thesis does not overlook either the injustice of the sacrifices these teachers, principals, and parents were forced to make or the stifling of educational experiences that resulted from the inequality of resources. However, historical recollections that recall descriptions of differences in facilities and resources of white and black schools without also providing descriptions of the black schools’ and communities’ dogged determination to educate African American children have failed to tell the complete story of segregated schools. Because of this omission, several generations of the schools African American educators and parents created with so little public support have been lost.

Thus, for a more complete picture of the learning environments that skilled black principals and teachers created in spite of poor facilities, we must revisit the segregated school. A useful conceptual framework is that of historian Henry Bullock. The fundamental query, within that framework, is this: what were the unintended consequences of the intentional school board neglect?²² In other words, what did the schools become that whites never expected they would be? This is the part of segregated schooling that has been too little addressed. Although Michele Foster has begun to document the history of good African American teachers in segregated settings across the country, and her research supplies important information on the teachers’ expectations of students and their conception of the teaching task, much remains to be learned about the internal operation of the black schools.²³ For example, in what ways were parents involved in the school? How did the school interact with the community? What kinds of educational activities did teachers and principals view as important for the successful education of black children? How did teachers and principals view their own role, and how did they construct professionalism in an era that consistently assumed their inferiority?

The chapters that follow provide a reference point for a more complete discussion of the segregated school environment. Though the scholars cited above have provided important data on the learning environments of segregated schools, the existing studies are largely quantitative case histories of excellent schools, as defined by easily measured outcome variables, such as students’ graduation rates or standardized test scores.²⁴ This historical manuscript builds on the thesis of past descriptions—that is, that there was something good within the environment of segregated schools—but it will differ from them in several significant ways.

First, this look at a segregated school is from the emic perspective. That is, rather than using some externally imposed variable to define the school as good, this case begins with the community’s evaluation of its former school as having been a good educational environment for African American children. That school was, as eighty-six-year-old grandmother Alice Jeffers remarked, a place where colored children learnt something. Even today, when the school’s name is mentioned, former students are emphatic in their declaration that that school was somethin’. This work accepts the community’s evaluation of its school as good and seeks to understand and describe what environmental factors the community valued.

The work also departs from previous works in that unlike accounts of schools in successful urban settings, this history recounts segregation in the rural, small-town South, a setting in which black schools were historically even more deprived than their urban counterparts. Like countless other now-forgotten black schools throughout the South, the school is not well known either by reputation or by the national visibility of its graduates. It is indeed a very invisible school outside its local area. However, a little-remembered school in a rural setting is much more representative of the education of most blacks during the first half of the twentieth century. In fact, one historian has noted that two-thirds of the South’s Negro children were educated in rural Negro schools. Until now, the stories of these schools have received little attention.²⁵

Finally, in addition to uncovering themes that were central to this school, the work focuses on placing the themes in the historical moment and discussing them within the context of a complete school environment. The effort is thus not just to name the critical themes but also to explore the context in which they operated within the school and to consider to what extent they were present over time. Additionally, although I provide a description of what participants valued, my analysis seeks to place the successes of the school within the framework of its challenges.²⁶

Caswell County Training School

This work focuses on the Caswell County Training School (CCTS), located in rural Caswell County in the Piedmont area of North Carolina.²⁷ This area of the state is well-known for its production of tobacco, and with its 435 square miles of forests, farmland, and rolling hills, Caswell County is no exception. According to a Caswell County historian, agriculture has been the primary interest of a large portion of the people ... [and] cannot be considered out of the context of the total development of the county, since it is reflected in every facet of the land and the people. Even today, amid the decline of the tobacco industry, the county continues to celebrate the Bright Leaf Hoedown, an annual craft and entertainment festival that commemorates two slaves’ accidental discovery of a method of bright-leaf tobacco curing that was later copied by producers across the region and used to increase the crop’s market value.²⁸

At the geographical center of the county is the small town of Yanceyvile, an incorporated county seat that in 1970, the first year of complete desegregation of the schools, housed 3,207 of the county’s 19,055 residents.²⁹ Yanceyville’s town center contains a grassy square where a Confederate soldier monument has stood, generally ignored, since it was unveiled in a ceremony at the turn of the century. On three sides of the square are local businesses (a drugstore, a pawnshop, a clothing store); some government agencies (a driver’s license bureau and the county agricultural agency); and one regionally known bank. Adjoining these businesses is the office of the Caswell Messenger, the weekly newspaper that, according to a prominent local resident, has long influenced the political thinking and affirmed the status quo of the county. On the fourth side is the majestic old courthouse, reportedly built with slave labor the year the state seceded from the Union, and still used to house the historical society.³⁰ Although three streets containing their own small businesses branch off from the circular street that separates the grass and monument from the businesses surrounding them, this circular area—called the square—is the heart of Yanceyville. As one newcomer described the town when she arrived in 1963, We rode around in a circle, and that was Yanceyville.

Caswell County Training School was located approximately a mile from the square. By following one of the three streets down a slight incline and past a few black businesses, and making a right turn at the well-known and black-owned Little’s Service Station on the corner, one reaches the school, which still stands at the end of the street. On the way down the hill one passes monuments of the past. Two green-painted stucco homes, formerly called teacheries because they provided a living residence for the CCTS teachers, are still standing. So is the stately white home where the principal lived next door to the only black funeral home. A close look will uncover the steps to the old school on the hill, as residents called the building that was used before 1951, when the new CCTS was built. The area is still African American residential and, except for a new street near the school building that allows another outlet and easier access to the formerly all-white high school, the construction in the area is much as it was when CCTS was the county’s only all-black high school.

At the outset of this project, I did not intend to discuss any goodness about the school other than the points of value described by members of the community; however, the research has uncovered some data that assist in understanding the overall picture of the school within the county; in some cases, the picture painted by this information contrasts sharply with many of the dominant images of rural segregated schools. Some of these points are worth noting. For example, at the point of court-ordered desegregation in 1969, CCTS had a physical facility that included a three-story brick building with a 722-seat auditorium and full-sized gymnasium; this structure was the county’s largest school building (indeed, the county’s largest building of any