Black adults did not merely tell us what to do, they engaged us in doing real work with them. My brothers worked side by side with master masons, hauling bricks and mixing cement as Daddy struggled to complete Shiloh Baptist Church, still stately today, patterned after the chapel at Benedict College. Through daily family meals, we learned how to set the table, prepare food, hold a conversation, sit up straight, say please and thank you, and thank God for the food we were fortunate to have to nourish our bodies. All my young life Daddy kept in the middle of the bulletin board of our church vestibule a newspaper cartoon of a group of affluent White people sitting at a table filled with food. All around them stood hordes of emaciated, hungry Brown people gazing at them as they ate. The caption of the searing cartoon was: “Shall we say grace?” We learned to share, to clean up after ourselves, and to take responsibility for our household’s and church’s yard upkeep. Regular chores at regular times were assigned and supervised.
We learned how to set priorities. Homework and housework before play. Chores before naps and movies. Running an errand or doing a deed for a needy neighbor before Saturday fun or visits with a friend. And Sunday was always about worship and fellowship and hospitality in our home and others and for visiting the sick.
The ten beautiful women in one photograph I’ve included in this book personify the formidable and loving network of community support with which I and many children of my generation were blessed. Four of these women were college-educated teachers married to the deacons and trustees of our church who were also our dentist, undertaker, and skilled artisans. Six of them had little or no formal education but were as smart, wise, and faithful as their more middle-class peers who lived in well-appointed homes. All were equally valued and valuable as they—together with our teachers and parents—wove a seamless safety net of caring for children. Some like Miz Prudence and Miz Glenn and Miz Rosa McCollum—who married three brothers—reflected and reinforced the importance of high academic standards as did Daddy and Mama. While stressing the importance of education, of proper English, and of reading, not a single one of them ever equated book smarts with common sense or goodness. All sought a better standard of living for all in our community but none saw money or things as the primary aim in life. Education, like money, was another means to help improve the lives of others.
Miz Tee Kelly and Miz Lucy are not home anymore to keep many of today’s children when parents have to go away or are working. There aren’t enough strong McCollum women left who spend as much time working with children to set high standards and to make clear their belief that every child can achieve at high levels. Too many of our churches are no longer the activity hubs and safe havens they used to be for children in strong and in struggling families. And while many Black families are better off economically today, thanks to better jobs and education and choices about where to live, too many still are not: There are still millions of poor and struggling parents whose children are falling behind in public schools that don’t serve them well. And too many Black middle-class parents don’t emphasize achievement and service strongly enough or exude the spiritual commitment needed to nurture the next generation of leaders that was so evident in my day. This is also true in the White and privileged community where children’s needs often take a backseat to adult needs and desires.
I do not seek to reinvent the past or think we can stop the bulldozer of “progress” ushered in by technology and by the globalization of our economy. I do think, though, that we must stop and assess what we have gained and what we have lost over the past half century, and how we might adjust our institutions to meet changing child and family needs in a positive rather than in a punitive or impersonal way. The prison complex in my home county is bigger than the consolidated county high school. It costs far more to keep a prisoner who dropped out of school than to educate a child for success. With so many working families, and so many families headed by teens and single parents, and with low wages that keep millions of working families still poor, so many children are beginning school not ready to learn, and large numbers in my county, in South Carolina, and in every state in our country are going through the motions of school unable to read, write, or do math at grade level. Today some youths are committing crimes and scrawling nihilistic graffiti on the walls of my little hometown’s grocery stores and waiting idly for the drug dealers’ drop just like children are in many suburban or urban areas. Michael Jordan’s father’s body was found in my home county, slain by youthful murderers.
While there are these and other disheartening signs of trouble there are also hopeful ones. In the still sturdy clapboard house at 119 Cheraw Street where I was born and raised, the Children’s Defense Fund office is headed by my sister Olive Wright Covington, a gifted educator who is working harder in “retirement” than ever before in her life. Inside, every room is teeming with activities and full of books. It is the incubator and curriculum development laboratory for Children’s Defense Fund-sponsored Freedom Schools—academic, nutritional, and cultural enrichment programs that operate in my home county and in over forty other sites in rural and urban areas across America. Black college students, after training, have taught reading to and instilled a love of learning in over 12,000 five-to sixteen-year-old children in the summer and, in some communities, after school and on Saturdays. Children learn to play chess and to resolve conflicts without violence. So do their parents and college-age mentor-teachers, who stayed in school, went on to college, and have come back to reach out to teach younger children. Miz Tee, Miz Lucy, and Miz Kate would have recognized and been proud of this newest generation of mentors and young servant leaders who give children hope that they can follow positive paths to college and jobs rather than negative ones to drugs and jail.
The ultimate mission of Freedom Schools is to reengage the whole community in the lives of its children and to reweave the kind of community caring Miz Tee and others provided for my generation of children who faced a hostile segregated world. All children need adults who believe in them and expect them to achieve, who love them, and whom they love so much they live up to their expectations of success.
3
TEACHERS AND THEIR MESSAGES
I WAS FOURTEEN years old when the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case was decided by the United States Supreme Court. It had a profound psychological although not immediately practical effect on me. Daddy and I had talked about the case often. His death came right before the ruling and the South’s subsequent resistance to its implementation. I graduated from an all-Black high school two years later in June 1956.
It was a new school on the outside. My school district, like many throughout the South, had made a hasty effort to equalize physical facilities in order to circumvent Brown. But the hand-me-down books and equipment from White schools remained. The presence of Black teachers who cared about us and who often were better qualified than their White counterparts because they had fewer professional choices was a plus.
However, the racial tightrope my public school principal and teachers walked, trying hard not to rock the segregationists’ boat or to jeopardize their jobs, was not lost on me or, I’m sure, on other Black children. They were content to timidly request incremental resources to help equalize educational offerings for Black children but unwilling to push hard or publicly for what was just. Like many White southerners, many Black southerners were threatened by the changes Brown portended. Some Black teachers feared competing with White teachers who were often better trained as a result of the unequal and segregated elementary, secondary, and higher education systems.
I cannot recall a single Black teacher in my hometown ever speaking up or organizing publicly to challenge the educational or racial status quo. Septima Clark, one of my role models whose courageous voice I describe later in this book, said the greatest disappointment in her life was the failure of her Black teacher colleagues to support the NAACP and her in the successful effort to equalize Black and White teacher pay in South Carolina�
�a stand for which she got fired and from which they benefited.
While most of our teachers did not stand up for children in the White world where they felt disempowered and on which they depended, many of them tried to compensate by giving each Black child personal attention. They helped ground us in our history and culture through daily singing of the Negro National Anthem by James Weldon Johnson and his brother Rosamond, “Lift Every Voice and Sing;” by holding oratorical contests in which we memorized and recited before our class (the winners recited before the whole school community) speeches by great Black historical figures; and by bringing Black speakers like Langston Hughes and other achievers to inspire us and to let us know we could go higher. They expected us to achieve and we did. Some served as our Sunday school teachers and were in and out of our homes on a regular basis. Today many teachers do not know the parents of the children they teach, visit their homes, or even live in the school district.
Teachers—like parents—make a big impression on children for good or ill. I remember as if it were yesterday how I felt when I went with one of my teachers and a church member into Belk’s Department Store on Main Street when I was six or seven years old. I was thirsty and went instinctively to drink from the nearby water fountain. I recall my teacher jerking me away in panic from the “White” water fountain, water trailing down my pinafore. It was the first thing I remembered when my sister told me that she had died in her nineties. All of her many kindnesses to me and my family never erased that moment that defined her as an adult unable or unwilling to affirm my personhood and child’s fragile self-image. Perhaps if she had exuded less fear or had stopped and gently explained to me that segregated water was a stupid symbol of a stupid unjust system that had nothing to do with my intrinsic worth or hers, and that she was sorry she could not do anything about it just then but that it was wrong, I might have felt differently about her then and remember her differently now. I took my tiny wounded soul home to recount my hurt to my parents and sought reassurance that I was indeed as good as White people and that it was an inferior system and not an inferior me that denied me—a thirsty, small child—water. “Whosoever gives even a cup of cold water to one of these little ones in the name of a disciple—truly I tell you, none of these will lose their reward,” I had learned in Sunday school and church. I believed it and wanted adults I cared about to do so too.
I worry all the time about disappointing and letting my own children or any child down. Children look to important adults in their lives for signals about what is right and wrong, and how to interpret people or events that insult and assault their self-image. While parents and teachers cannot control or shut out so much of the vulgarity and violence bombarding our children, it is crucial that we try to listen to and talk to them about it, help them put it into a larger context, assert our values, and say what we think about it.
Like parenting, teaching is a mission, not just a task or a job. I don’t care how fancy the school, how low the student-teacher ratio (which I believe should be lower), how high the pay (which I think should be higher): If children don’t feel respected by adults who respect themselves, and don’t feel valued for themselves and if the lotteries of their births dictate the inputs and often the outcomes of their lives, then they and all of us lose. How sad and unfair that the children who come into the world with the least—whose parents are the least able to provide them with health care, good nutrition, shelter, and stimulation—are also the children who are least likely to have access to quality developmental early childhood education. Children who are the least likely to be read to and sung to at home by their mothers, or by their fathers, whom some too seldom see or know, are the most likely to attend schools with the least qualified teachers, the poorest equipment and supplies, and the fewest counselors. They are least likely to have access to school nurses and art and music programs and computers and to have opportunities for after-school and summer enrichment programs that affluent parents can pay for. And they are likely to live in neighborhoods with fewer safe playgrounds and greater violence and drug trafficking.
These wounded child victims of violence and neglect inside and outside their homes, inside and outside their schools, are wrongly labeled as “superpredators” by some political demagogues before they are even born or can toddle. And they are unjustly portrayed in the media without individuation, analysis, or understanding as an undifferentiated group of young irredeemable criminals who ought to be jailed with adults. The last thing any young offender needs is adult criminal mentors.
Some professors and students at predominantly White schools and universities also engage in unjust stereotyping and place the burden on all minority students to prove they are not less able than all White students. Minority students are often so wounded by the time they reach college campuses that they need to be prepared with the tools of self-understanding and combat needed to fight their battles to achieve in society just as my generation was prepared to fight these same battles.
But stereotyping, hate crimes, and intolerance are not limited to attacks on Black youths. The Littleton, Colorado school massacre with its Nazi overtones, religious intolerance, and violent punishment of those who rejected or annoyed the privileged perpetrators is a loud alarm bell for teachers—and all adults—to clarify, live, and inculcate more positive values and to build more positive learning communities for our young.
4
SPELMAN COLLEGE—A SAFE HAVEN
Benjamin Elijah Mays, Howard Zinn, and Charles E. Merrill, Jr.
I DID NOT WANT to go to the all-Black, all-women Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia, with its reputation as a tea-pouring very strict school designed to turn Black girls into refined ladies and teachers. I desperately wanted to attend all-Black Fisk University from which my sister Olive had graduated. It had a distinguished history with alumni like Dr. John Hope Franklin, Dr. W. E. B. DuBois, civil rights attorney Constance Baker Motley, and professors like Arna Bontemps, Langston Hughes’ great friend and collaborator, artist Aaron Douglas, and the world-renowned Fisk Jubilee Singers. Fisk also held the lure of my possibly snagging a Black doctor husband from nearby Meharry Medical College which I considered a better catch than a mere graduate of Morehouse, the all-Black men’s college across the street from Spelman from which Dr. King and many stellar Black male leaders graduated.
But after a family debate about whether I should go to a “White” university in the immediate aftermath of Brown v. Board of Education, which we hoped would usher in a new America, and under maternal duress, I did enroll at Spelman. The college’s generous scholarship offer and the presence of my Daddy’s best friend, Morehouse religion professor and pastor of Providence Baptist Church, Lucius Tobin, a brilliant but depressive man, tipped the scales and landed me on the train to Atlanta. That my much loved big brother Harry, my surrogate father after Daddy died, had graduated from Morehouse (so did his son, Harry, Jr., many years later), was a final factor in my family’s deciding on Spelman.
I rebelled during the first semester of my freshman year against Spelman’s rigid routines which included compulsory daily 8:00 A.M. chapel, 5:00 P.M. curfews, and dress requirements when off campus.
Spelman students were required to sign in and out, leave campus in groups of threes, and fit our romantic pursuits into a one-hour calling hour when Morehouse men could come courting in full view of stern matrons. We had fifteen minutes to get into our dormitory after dances on Spelman’s campus and thirty minutes after Morehouse campus dances. Designated and well-lit routes were monitored by hawk-eyed chaperones to prevent us from straying from the straight and narrow path of propriety. In the face of so much regimentation, I would occasionally feel the need to sneak off campus to go to the movies or to Paschal’s restaurant for its addictively good fried chicken.
Spelman’s adults seemed to have as many eyes to watch over its students as did my home community. I got caught off campus one day and was campus-bound for three weeks by the very stern, no-nonsense, tough-love
dean of students Eugenia Dunn who looked straight at and through me and said ten words as she grounded me: “From her to whom much is given, much is expected.” I got the message and tried to live up to her and my parents’ expectations from then on.
As a Spelman freshman, I thought I wanted to be a doctor until I met the frogs in my biology laboratory whose sustained company I contemplated without an iota of enthusiasm. I began my sophomore year trying to please my mother by becoming a music major but a Merrill Study Travel Fellowship to spend my junior year abroad changed my course and subverted my mother’s desires to have at least one daughter follow in her musical footsteps.
I’ve never regretted, though, my years of compulsory musical training. The piano lessons my mother insisted my sister and I take, the choirs she led in which we sang, the songs we practiced in our home, the Spelman Glee Club that Dr. Willis Lawrence James directed, and the Morehouse College Sunday morning chapel choir led by the late, great Wendell Whalum, have remained indispensable sources of meditative and spiritual strength throughout my life. Music connects me to my past and was the glue of the Civil Rights Movement, holding Black communities together and renewing our spirits with the fuel we needed to struggle each day. It was the outlet for our fears and our hopes, and our language to communicate with God and each other when words failed to capture our emotions as they so often did. When the music died, the movement died. When the music dies within me now, when I am too dry to sing or play a hymn, I know I am out of balance and in emotional trouble. Like the mountains and the rhythmic ocean tides, music renews and reconnects me with life and inner spirit and the cloud of witnesses who went on before who shared the human quest for freedom and justice and for God. Music, like kindness, is a universal language that transcends race and place and connects freedom fighters and freedom seekers in Georgia, Mississippi, South Africa, and Eastern Europe. “We Shall Overcome,” the anthem of the Civil Rights Movement, expresses a longing throughout the world for life beyond the now, for a life that can and will be. My husband and I were thrilled on a honeymoon stop in Prague a few days before the 1968 Soviet invasion to join with Czech citizens singing “We Shall Overcome” in one of the old town squares.
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