Lyman was confused, but he decided that a tour of the white school could be interesting. He followed along as the man stooped to pick up trash in the halls until they reached the school gymnasium. The wood floor glared with polish. There was a roof overhead. Lyman had never seen anything like it. At his school, recess was held outside and the students learned to shoot baskets while dodging stones jutting from the field. College Hill didn’t have a cafeteria with hot lunches as the white school did—the black children who could afford a midday meal ate from brown bags outside. Lyman’s school lacked plumbing and children used fetid outdoor toilets that were eventually closed down by the state health department.3
Lyman remembered that tour as he prepared to graduate from College Hill in 1924. Of the one hundred students in his class when he began in first grade, only nine graduated. Lyman was the only one to go to college. Even then, he had to spend two years at a remedial boarding school because College Hill’s courses ended in eleventh grade, not twelfth, like the white school. He buckled down, learning Greek and calculus. But history was his favorite subject.4
He was particularly obsessed with the history of the black struggle for education: After blacks were freed following the Civil War, most stayed on the plantations where they had worked as slaves.5 Progress for blacks overseen by Northern troops during Reconstruction—including the election of black politicians to local and national offices—eroded after only a decade, when Rutherford Hayes pulled out the Northern army in return for Southern electoral votes in the election of 1876.6
Despite these circumstances, Southern blacks forged ahead to build an education system for their children from scratch. There was no movement for integration with white schools because in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, there were no public schools at all.7 Independently from whites, black communities opened schools in churches, family homes, and buildings donated by Northern philanthropists and churches. And although help from white Northerners allowed for the construction of new black schools, they were sustained by the efforts of black parents, teachers, and administrators.8
They were proud of what they built. The community and the school were symbiotic, sustaining a sense of pride, culture, and history in the children and the adults, generation after generation. Although black schools often lacked plumbing, heat, textbooks, gymnasiums, cafeterias, school buses, and sufficient classroom space, the principals and teachers worked hard to make up for these deficits. Even if the schoolbooks were old, curriculum in some schools was state of the art, with offerings ranging from Latin to black studies.9 In a seminal case study of one segregated black school in North Carolina, historian Vanessa Siddle Walker wrote that in many of these schools, there was not a choice between “learning and not learning.”10 Failure was not an option. Expectations were high. Black teachers and administrators cared deeply about their students—they were the children of neighbors, friends, and family. They often saw their work as a religious calling.11 Their job was to uplift the race.12
The black southerners’ efforts awakened whites to start demanding a public school system, too. The white schools soon had the upper hand, with better facilities, better supplies, and better-paid teachers. The tax systems that eventually funded both school systems, white and black, were usually heavily weighted toward white schools. But though the white teachers were better paid, they were not always more qualified. Many black teachers, especially in the early years, were assigned to schools only a few years after graduating from elementary school themselves. Before the 1930s, only about 9 percent of black teachers had a degree.13 After 1930, however, 42 percent of black teachers had some college. Black normal schools and colleges, also funded by sympathetic northern whites, churned out a formidable force of highly trained professionals who had no other options but to teach.
In 1896, the Supreme Court handed down the Plessy v. Ferguson decision.14 In the case, Homer Plessy, who was “seven-eighths” white, boarded a whites-only train car in Louisiana in protest of the state’s segregation law and refused to leave. The Court decided in favor of Louisiana. Southern states soon applied the Court’s decision to all facets of public life. Racial separation in schools became law, but for many blacks, integration was not a desirable goal. The most prominent black voices during this period instead called for black independence from whites. Booker T. Washington, who said he believed in integration, but only once “the Negro learned to produce what other people wanted and must have,” became the face of black America for the white world in 1895, when he gave a speech in Atlanta calling for blacks to accept their segregation from whites and to “cast down your buckets where you are.”15
Although many cringed at what they saw as Washington’s capitulation to white supremacy, his support for separate black schools reflected the sentiments of many ordinary blacks in the South. Reacting to the overt racism of southern whites and the condescension and paternalism of northern whites, a large swath of blacks in the South favored “black teachers for black children.” They were encouraged by the two most powerful church denominations in the black community, the African Methodist Episcopal Church and the National Baptists, which had both followed a separatist agenda after the Civil War and carved out their independence from the white church.16
Lyman admired Washington. As the president of the Tuskegee Institute, Washington had convinced wealthy white patrons in the South to fund the education of thousands of black students. But in the early years of the twentieth century, as Lyman was immersed in his studies, new black voices out of the North were calling for change. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People appeared in 1909 to oppose Washington’s ideas and to fight for equal rights through integration. That message spoke to Lyman.17
For Lyman, the academic star in his small-town school in Tennessee and the second generation in a family of teachers, a career seemed set. He would be a schoolteacher. But Lyman wasn’t willing to settle. He wanted to move beyond the expectations of both his community and the white world. He had kept track of the daily humiliations that the grown men around him suffered: When white vegetable peddlers refused to call his father by his last name, insisting instead on calling him “Uncle.” When his uncle, a dignified college professor, had to ignore the white farm boys who called him “nigger.” When a classmate of his was lynched after being falsely accused of raping a white woman.18
After graduating from high school in the mid-1920s, Lyman headed to Virginia Union for college. The school was cut in the mold of northern liberal arts schools—a place where philosophy and Greek took precedence over the vocational training offered at many other southern black colleges. After he graduated, he applied to graduate school: Yale, Michigan, and Iowa. All accepted him, but he couldn’t afford Yale, where he had planned to study theology. He settled on Michigan, and a history degree instead.19
Lyman’s journey north coincided with the path followed by tens of thousands of other black southerners in the 1920s.20 Few came from an advantaged background like Lyman’s. Many were former sharecroppers. But they moved for the same reason he did: to find better jobs, dignity, and freedom.
The early waves began in the first decade of the twentieth century. Northern industrialists, in need of workers to replace soldiers off at war, enticed the migrants with jobs that paid more than double what they could make down south. The black newspaper founded in 1917, the Chicago Defender, lured them with biblical allegories of Exodus and the Promised Land. Many found their way to Chicago and other northern urban centers. Others made shorter journeys: Southern cities, including places with more progressive reputations and growing industries, such as Louisville and Nashville, saw their black populations swell. From 1890 until the Great Depression, Kentucky lost blacks to out-migration, but many more entered the state.21 And thousands moved internally, away from the state’s rural tobacco fields and isolated mountain hollows into the cities.
Among the tide of young men, women, and families traveling north was Fran Thomas, who at age sev
en made the journey alone. Fran made it as far as Louisville, officially still the South, but with a friendlier reputation. She wasn’t looking for a job; she wanted to go to school.
Fran was born Frances Newton in 1928 on a farm in the northeast corner of Alabama, outside the town of Florence. She and Lyman grew up in similar circumstances: in a small cabin inherited from family members who had worked as chattel. Fran’s great-grandparents had been slaves, and her family also acquired its own land after the Civil War. In contrast to Lyman’s experience, however, her family, along with an extensive network of uncles, aunts, and cousins, lived in an all-black community called Bailey Springs. Town life centered around the one-room schoolhouse, built and maintained by the community, and the church.
Lyman’s father, as a teacher, was an elite in the black community. Fran’s parents worked as sharecroppers. Her family lived in a log cabin of two rooms divided by a breezeway. One served as a bedroom, the other as a kitchen. Fran was an only child, but her parents still struggled to support her. They had attended school until sixth grade, but hoped for more for their daughter. The local school was five miles away, and in those days, a ride on a school bus was a privilege reserved for white children. Her mother walked with her because she was so young, but the farm’s success depended on both parents working from sunup to sundown. After a couple of years, the family decided that if Fran was going to continue her schooling, she would have to leave home.
In the 1930s, Fran, a pale, freckled girl still in elementary school, made the journey north on the Louisville & Nashville Railroad, alone. She followed family, and many in her town, who had already headed north. The train was dirty—blacks were forced into the car nearest the engine’s grimy smoke stack—and it was crowded. On the other end, in Louisville, Kentucky, she was met by a teenage aunt who had found work in the city as a housekeeper.
The two girls lived in an apartment a few blocks west of downtown, but Fran never ventured far from her new elementary school on 16th Street, in a black neighborhood known as California. Louisville, to her, was the small area of the inner city that blacks were confined in, although as the country came out of the Depression and headed into World War II, that area in Louisville was growing.
Chapter 5
Louisville was built along a two-mile stretch of waterfalls and rapids at an N-shaped bend in the river, the one interruption on the Ohio’s smooth, southwesterly meander toward the Mississippi. Locks were constructed in the 1820s to tame the rapids, and the city boomed.1 The river was the state border with Indiana, and it served to constrict the population’s northern expansion. To the south was a marsh, and to the east were hills. But to the west, curled into the river bend, was a flat expanse of lush, forested floodplain.
At the end of the nineteenth century, this floodplain was gradually being built up as one of Louisville’s first white suburbs. In 1937, after days of rain, the river broke over its banks, turning the West End into a lake.2 When the waters receded, the houses were rebuilt. But this disaster, along with the end of World War II, accelerated a transformation. Whites headed for new suburban frontiers to the south and east, many with the help of housing loans from the federal government. The wealthy concentrated in the hilly sections to the east of downtown. Poorer whites headed south, where the floodplain extended until it hit a ring of steep hills and the village of Fairdale. By the 1950s, black families had moved into the bungalows and old Victorians that whites had left behind.
During this first half of the twentieth century, Louisville was slightly more welcoming to blacks than Alabama. Blacks owned their own businesses and a significant black middle class was up and coming. But they were not allowed in public parks, hotels, restaurants, or stores. In 1914, the city passed a law barring blacks from moving to white residential streets, which the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional three years later.3 The reversal of the law made little difference in practice, however. During the Depression, blacks were still largely confined to the shantytowns formed by ex-slaves: Little Africa, deep in the West End; California, the neighborhood just west of downtown where Fran lived; and Smoketown, just east of downtown. Their numbers were growing, however, as blacks fled the Deep South and the tobacco fields of Kentucky and Tennessee.
Forced to settle in segregated inner-city ghettos, these migrants were discovering that racism was endemic outside of the stifling plantation culture, too. During the height of the Great Migration, integration was not the dream embraced by most blacks, however. The NAACP’s platform, at least at first, had to compete with the much more popular Black Nationalist movement of Marcus Garvey.4 Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) reached its peak in the 1920s, with a membership estimated at between 1 million and 6 million members—more than half the population of black Americans at the time.5 The UNIA rejected integration as an undesirable and foolish ideal. The organization’s goal was to promote “pride in race.”6
Fran’s world in Louisville was all black, but she didn’t notice. No one had a car, but everything she needed was in walking distance. Her neighborhood had its own skating rink and swimming pool. The streets were lined with black-owned barbershops, funeral parlors, clothing stores, and even a movie theater. The Great Depression had hit its peak just a few years earlier, sending African American unemployment soaring to 37 percent in Louisville, but the city was relatively resilient compared to other places.7 The cigarette and alcohol industries—two of the city and the state’s biggest—were booming.8 The factories near Fran’s apartment hummed with activity.
Her new elementary school was an improvement on the crowded schoolhouse back in Alabama. There, the education for girls included cooking lunch for the rest of the students. Still, at Fran’s new school, books were hand-me-downs, and the building was old. Eleanor Roosevelt visited the schoolyard during her travels in 1938 to investigate the nation’s poverty.9 And Fran missed home terribly. She took the grimy train, or sometimes the bus, back to Alabama each summer to visit her family. But her parents insisted that she return: the black high school in Alabama didn’t have the same reputation as Central.
Louisville’s Central Colored High School, as it was called at first, originally opened in 1882 in a three-story brick building south of downtown.10 It quickly outgrew its facilities. The original 27 students ballooned to 185, and the number kept expanding. By the time Fran enrolled in the 1940s, the school was on its third building, which was still too small.
Like its books and desks and chalkboards, the structure, an edifice of heavy stone and Greek revival columns, was secondhand. The building had originally been built for Male High School, Louisville’s pride and joy, the first public high school west of the Allegheny. Male, for white boys only, had moved on when the city built it an expansive new facility farther away from the encroaching black neighborhoods downtown. After a half century of use, the hand-me-down building was decrepit. The hallways were so dark students bumped into each other while changing classes. In an annex built to hold the overflow of students, the gas heaters spewed more fumes than warmth. Rats infested the basement and the maid had to double as the school nurse. On one occasion, a student who began hemorrhaging blood during class died as the cleaning woman helplessly held him in her arms in the school bathroom. The death didn’t prompt the city to assign a nurse to Central.
Fran’s homesickness faded when she began attending Central. Among her classmates, she was something of an anomaly: Many of the students who made it to Central were from Louisville’s black middle classes. Poorer students often had to drop out and work full-time. Left to fend for herself for most of her childhood and teenage years, she reveled in the fierce embrace of Central’s teachers. Just as Central drew its students from as far away as Alabama, it also attracted some of the South’s brightest teachers. They mixed maternal love with a strict discipline code that students dared not break.
Maude Brown Porter, the assistant principal, stalked the hallways in cat-eye glasses and ugly black shoes, sending students skitteri
ng into class at the sound of her low but powerful voice.11 She was tiny, but it was rumored she had the strength to lift up a basketball player twice her size. The students loved and feared her. They felt the same about their teachers, who on Saturdays and Sundays visited the homes of students who were absent during the week or doing poorly in class. The classes ranged from Latin to physics and from typing to woodshop. Many of the teachers held multiple master’s degrees. A few had doctorates. The goal at Central was to bolster Louisville’s growing black middle class—with or without the help of whites.
Academics were rigorous, but sports were key to Central students’ sense of identity, engendering fierce loyalty and love among the school’s alumni.12 Until 1919, the school didn’t have fields or basketball courts, but as soon as the school gained a gymnasium, the Central Yellowjackets began winning games. Central won the National Negro High School Basketball Tournament twice. The second time Central came home with the trophy, in 1952, the Louisville mayor threw the high school a parade, complete with a brigade of fire trucks and a key to the city. In Kentucky, basketball was king, but football at Central was big, too. Under one beloved coach, the Yellowjackets football team racked up a record of 280–30 during the 1930s and ’40s. Thousands of black Louisvillians lined the streets for the Thanksgiving football game each year to belt out the refrain of the Central High School song: “Long live Central, our beloved Central High. Ours till we die.”13
Fran graduated from Central in 1946, fulfilling her parents’ dream. She missed home, but no longer saw going back as an option. Florence, Alabama’s plantations were giving way to factories, including a Reynolds aluminum plant. The foundry was nicknamed the Pot, and the men who worked there—most of them black—were worn down by the brutal conditions. They often came home with severe burns, and they died young. Beyond manual labor and farming, Florence offered few opportunities; a black woman could help tend the farm, work for a white family, or maybe teach. Central had pushed Fran to think bigger: she was going to college.
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