by Tonya Bolden
Like godliness, like cleanliness, making the most of the mind was a must in Dovey Mae’s home. Grandpa saw to it that the family had The Book of Knowledge, a richly illustrated children’s encyclopedia that came in pieces: one volume a month.
Dovey Mae and her sisters were to go way beyond The Book of Knowledge. Mama, like Grandma, like Grandpa, wanted college in their future.
That was no ordinary ambition back then. In 1920, when Dovey Mae was six, a mere 6.3 percent of Black Americans (and 22 percent of white Americans) in their mid- to late twenties had a high school diploma. So it was no small thing when Dovey Mae’s sister Bea headed off to Winston-Salem Teachers College (now Winston-Salem State University).
IN CHARLOTTE, THE PUBLIC school system didn’t treat its young people equally. While white teens had a high school in 1908, Black teens didn’t get one until 1923, when Dovey Mae was nine. And she remembered her grade school, Myers Street Elementary, as a “broken-down old frame building.”
Brooklyn street scene, around 1915.
Betty W. Barber, who attended Myers years after Dovey Mae (and later earned a PhD and became a college dean), agreed that as a facility the school left a lot to be desired. But Barber also spoke of an often overlooked truth about many schools for Black children when Jim Crow ruled: “The classrooms were crowded, the desks shabby, the books old with pages torn, but we were blessed with wonderful teachers. They were strong disciplinarians concerned not only with our education but with our overall well-being as children.”
One of Charlotte’s wonderful Black teachers was Edith (in some sources Edythe) Wimbish. She had Dovey Mae train her sights on the all-woman Spelman College in Wimbish’s hometown of Atlanta, Georgia. There, in 1881, in the damp basement of Atlanta’s first Black church, Friendship Baptist, two white missionaries, Sophia B. Packard and Sarah E. Giles, had opened the Atlanta Baptist Female Seminary with a student body of just eleven young Black women.
The school’s prospects improved greatly when it attracted a benefactor in the Rockefellers, the powerful white family headed by oil magnate John D. Rockefeller Sr. After his donation of $5,000 in 1884 (roughly $120,000 in today’s dollars), the school became Spelman Seminary (and later Spelman College) in honor of John D.’s wife, Laura Spelman Rockefeller, and her parents, Harvey and Lucy Spelman. They had been abolitionists.
Spelman! Spelman! Spelman!
That was Dovey Mae’s high hope as she made her way through Charlotte’s Second Ward High, where she was a member of the debating team, president of the Athletic Association, and an honor student, ranking second in her class for three years. There, she also took up the French horn and dreamed of becoming a doctor, at a time when only about ninety Black women in America had ever earned a medical degree.
But dream on Dovey Mae did!
She had many examples of dreaming big in Black Charlotte. As elsewhere in the nation, Queen City was the home of Black barrier-breakers, people who succeeded despite being perceived—and treated—as second-class citizens. In 1915, a year after Dovey Mae was born and fifty years after the abolition of slavery, Black Charlotte had, for example, three real estate companies, thirty-one restaurants, five blacksmith shops, three hotels, three insurance companies, twenty-four grocery stores, five drugstores. It also had two lawyers and twelve doctors.
One of those doctors was J. T. Williams, and he owned one of those drugstores. His real estate holdings also included a sublime house on South Brevard where other well-to-do Black families lived. South Brevard was also home to Black Charlotte’s most prominent church: the stunning Gothic Revival Grace AME, which Dr. Williams had helped to get built.
The achievements of people like J. T. Williams surely inspired Dovey Mae.
But could she really leave Black Charlotte?
WINSTON-SALEM TEACHERS COLLEGE, A public school and so tuition-free, had taken Bea about 80 miles away from home. In contrast, Spelman, some 250 miles away, was a private school. And not cheap. Between entrance fee, tuition, room and board, textbooks, and other expenses, Spelman could cost about $300 a year. At the time, a full-time domestic worker who didn’t live in, like Mama, may have earned about $10 a week (or about $500 a year).
Bea had gone off to college with some funds for living expenses thanks to money one of Grandma Rachel’s brothers left her in his will. When Dovey Mae was in high school, there was no such legacy.
Then disaster struck.
Dovey Mae was fifteen when newspapers flashed headlines like this on October 24, 1929: “PANIC SEIZES STOCK MARKET.”
And like this five days later: “STOCKS LOSE 10 BILLION IN DAY.”
These headlines were harbingers of the Great Depression, the worst economic downturn the nation had yet seen, one that would last for ten grueling years. Thousands of banks would fail, wiping out customers’ savings. Tens of thousands of other businesses, from factories to hardware stores, would fold, which meant millions of people lost their jobs. Without jobs, without any or much savings, tens of thousands of families lost their homes.
As joblessness, homelessness, hunger, and hopelessness rose, the suicide rate soared.
Dovey Mae’s family was not spared the blows.
Grandma’s laundry business lost customers. So did Grandpa’s store, to the point that it closed. Luckily Mama still had work as a domestic.
Spelman?
When Dovey Mae graduated from high school in May 1931, Spelman seemed a doomed, dead dream.
But then . . .
3
WORTHY WISH
AMONG THE FAMILIES MAMA worked for were the Hurleys, Margaret and Bailey C., who lived on Crescent Avenue in an all-white part of Queen City. She was a homemaker. He was a district supervisor for the American Telegram and Telegraph Company.
Mama was chiefly a cook for the Hurleys. Dovey Mae worked for them, too, on weekends, mostly as nanny to the couple’s little boy, Bailey Jr.
And just when Dovey Mae had probably given up on Spelman, Mr. Hurley got a job offer in, of all places, Atlanta. When he decided to take the job, Mrs. Hurley pressed Mama to work for them down there. She wanted Dovey Mae to come too.
Spelman would be within Dovey Mae’s reach!
But there was a problem.
Grandma Rachel. She didn’t want her daughter and granddaughter to be so far away.
For weeks, Dovey Mae sent up “my own silent prayers as I watched Grandma struggle and heard my mother’s quiet, persistent arguments.”
One: If Lela didn’t pull up stakes with Dovey Mae and follow the Hurleys to Atlanta, what would she do for work?
Two: Dovey Mae’s mentor, Edith Wimbish, had moved back to Atlanta. They’d have a friend in town.
Three: The Hurleys were “good people.”
Grandma Rachel eventually gave the move her blessing. Leaving Dovey Mae’s younger sisters in the care of their grandparents, in the fall of 1932 Dovey Mae and Mama packed their bags. They took with them a plan as well: while working for the Hurleys, they’d squirrel away every penny, nickel, dime, dollar they could to allow Dovey Mae to start at Spelman.
WHEN DOVEY MAE FIRST laid eyes on Spelman’s twenty-acre campus, it took her breath away.
The red-brick “stately white-columned buildings.”
The “lush green lawns ringed by dogwood and magnolias.”
This was another world.
Spelman’s crown jewel was Sisters Chapel, built in the late 1920s thanks to John D. Rockefeller Jr. and named in honor of his mother, Laura, and her sister, Lucy.
Students were required to assemble at the chapel for devotions every weekday morning, a preaching service every Sunday, and a midweek prayer meeting. Sisters Chapel was where faith—in God, in the progress of the race—was majestically on display at this school whose motto proclaimed “Our Whole School for Christ.”
But it was nearly three years before Dovey Mae applied to Spelman College, some one thousand days of cooking, cleaning, serving, minding Bailey Jr., in the Hurley home about five miles northeast
of Atlanta in Decatur.
Spelman's Sisters Chapel in 1927, the year that it was dedicated.
At one point Dovey Mae earned four dollars a week, Mama seven, with both of them probably sending pieces of their wages back to Queen City. Forty dollars was all Dovey Mae had toward college when she applied to Spelman in mid-May 1934.
“I [have] been obsessed with the thought of continuing my education,” wrote twenty-year-old Dovey Mae Johnson in her application. “Every year have I hoped and prayed that my worthy wish would be possible but money held me back. Alas, I have found the only way to conquer such a difficulty was not in the praying and wishing but in the rising above the obstacle.”
In response to the question “How do you expect to get the remainder [of school costs],” she wrote “by obtaining work on campus.”
Her worthy wish came true in what scholar-activist W. E. B. Du Bois called “the city of a hundred hills.” Dovey Mae—who began to refer to herself more often as just “Dovey” around this time—was soon part of the dynamic intellectual hub, the Atlanta University Center Consortium, originally an alliance of three historically Black schools: Edith Wimbish’s alma mater, Atlanta University (now Clark-Atlanta), Spelman, and its brother school Morehouse, which had also started out in the basement of Friendship Baptist church.
WHILE DOVEY HAD TO work and scrimp to get through college, not so for many of her peers. One classmate was Alice Carey Holmes. Her father, Hamilton Mayor Holmes Sr., was the first Black doctor in East Point, not far from Atlanta. Another classmate was Patricia Constance McWhorter. Patricia’s father, Morehouse graduate Millard H. McWhorter, was the first Black doctor in Coweta County, Georgia. Patricia’s mother, Anna, a Spelman alumna, had been an English teacher.
“Most of the stylishly dressed, beautifully spoken girls in my classes,” Dovey said, had come from a world of “cotillions and coming-out parties and summers on Martha’s Vineyard, a world so different from mine I could scarcely comprehend it.”
It’s hard to imagine when Dovey saw Spelman students stylishly dressed. The school had a dress code. “A student’s wardrobe should include clothes and shoes suitable for out-of-door activities and for general wear in a moderate climate,” stated the 1933–1934 catalog. “Elaborate or extensive wardrobes are not in keeping with the standards and ideals of Spelman College, and, if students bring them, their use is discouraged and may be prohibited.”
Perhaps Dovey saw Spelman students in finery when they were leaving campus for winter, spring, or summer break. In any event, Dovey wasn’t at Spelman to comprehend the Black elite, but to make the most of the excellent education the school offered. Surely buoying her up was Grandma Rachel’s insistence that her children were “as good as anybody.”
Margaret Hurley didn’t agree. When Dovey was accepted at Spelman, and with Mama back in Queen City, Mrs. Hurley went from benefactor to beast.
On one occasion she mentioned to Dovey a young Black woman who had been a servant to one of her friends. “She’s just doing fine now, isn’t she? Without any old college.” Another day, a friend of Mrs. Hurley flat-out called Dovey an “impudent little thing” as loud as she pleased.
Dovey the servant—absolutely acceptable.
Dovey seeking to rise in life—a prime vexation.
So much for the Hurleys being “good people.”
STEELING HERSELF AGAINST DIGS and barbs, Dovey kept her head down, did her work—washing dishes, doing laundry, cleaning house, tending to Bailey Jr., serving tea.
Nights, tucked away in her bedroom, Dovey lost herself in her schoolwork.
Luckily, she had a refuge at 149 Fort Street. This was the home that Edith Wimbish, still a teacher, shared with her sister, Hattie (also a teacher), and their widowed mother, Maggie Baker Wimbish, principal of E. P. Johnson Night School.
Sunday dinner at 149 Fort Street—what a “feast,” with its “heaping portions” of food, its “elegant dining room.” Those dinners, which Dovey attended regularly, it seems, were also feasts for the mind, the soul: “Mrs. Maggie Wimbish gathered Atlanta’s most distinguished black citizens—lawyers, doctors, professors, educators.”
Clerics too. One was Baptist minister James Madison Nabrit, whose mother, Margaret, had been one of Spelman’s first students. His sister, also named Margaret and also a Spelman alumna, became the school’s first Black faculty member and eventually a dean. Reverend Nabrit was a Morehouse graduate, as were his sons, one of whom would play a critical role in Dovey’s life.
It was probably thanks to the Wimbishes that Reverend Nabrit had given Dovey a recommendation when she applied to Spelman. One question he had to answer was “What is your opinion of the applicant’s moral character? (Honesty, dependability, earnestness of purpose, determination to do right?).”
“Very good,” responded Reverend Nabrit. And at the end he wrote, “She comes highly recommended from her pastor and church at Charlotte, NC.”
“She has the ability to lead” is the highlight of the recommendation furnished by Lula Norris, secretary of Charlotte’s Black YWCA, where Dovey had been a Girl Reserve and a member of the Industrial Club.
Along with having folks outside of Spelman rooting for her, Dovey had a guiding light on campus in Mary Mae Neptune, a professor of English literature and faculty adviser to the student newspaper, the Campus Mirror.
In Dovey’s eyes, Mary Mae Neptune was “as much a warrior with her Shakespeare text and her red pen as my grandmother was with her broom” and “without question a revolutionary, decades ahead of her time.”
Mary Mae Neptune, a native of Belmont County, Ohio, in 1925. Neptune earned her bachelor's and master's degrees from Ohio Wesleyan University. Right before she joined Spelman's faculty in 1926, she taught English at Iowa Wesleyan College (now University) where she was also the dean of women.
Neptune made her students face the racism in Shakespeare’s Othello, the anti-Semitism in the bard’s The Merchant of Venice. “She taught me how to think, helped me to become studious and to live unafraid. She turned on the light for me.”
Neptune also encouraged Dovey to write for the Campus Mirror. Rising from contributor to news editor to associate editor in chief, Dovey covered on- and off-campus news, from Harvard University’s celebration of its three-hundredth anniversary to the death of John D. Rockefeller Sr. and exhibits of Japanese woodcuts at Atlanta University. She covered guest lectures at Spelman and at other schools in the consortium.
In October 1936 she reported on the lecture of Dr. Rufus Jones, a white professor of philosophy at Haverford College. He spoke on “The Challenge of the Closed Door.”
From the May-June 1938 Campus Mirror. In the staff photo, Dovey is in the middle of the second row.
In November 1936 she praised an address by theologian Howard Thurman, then at Howard University. In Sisters Chapel, Thurman warned students against being imitations of another people. “We must learn to understand and to appreciate our roots,” he said. “We represent one of nature’s interesting syntheses, since we have one part of our root in Africa and the other part in the New World.”
Wrote Dovey: “The fact that we have become so expert at imitating other groups, and that we are ashamed of our African roots, Mr. Thurman described as insipid and disintegrating.”
In the December 1936 Campus Mirror, Dovey wrote about a presentation at Sisters Chapel by Black singer and actress Etta Moten. Spelman students were “enraptured” by Moten’s singing of three songs after her talk about three keys for success: “preparation,” “initiative,” and “the making of right contacts.”
Having the right contacts had definitely been on Dovey’s mind months earlier when she landed in jail.
4
MIRACLE-MAKER
“THIEF! YOU’RE A THIEF!’’
That was Margaret Hurley one May day in 1936, hollering and carrying on something awful, accusing Dovey of stealing.
What?
Money?
Jewelry?
Food?
What?
Dovey couldn’t make sense of it, didn’t know what the woman was ranting about.
Thief!
What had she supposedly stolen?
Thief!
And it got worse.
Dovey was carted off to the Decatur jail.
JAIL.
A scary place.
A nightmare place if you were Black. White guards were known to beat Black inmates for no reason, known to prey upon women, young and all-the-way grown.
And jail was where no Spelman student was ever to end up. The white woman at the helm of Spelman, President Florence Read, made it clear that if a student found herself in trouble off campus, she shouldn’t assume that Spelman would come to her rescue.
Entering the jailhouse, Dovey was “nearly numb with terror,” but she had the presence of mind to give a guard Mary Mae Neptune’s telephone number. “I knew only one white person bold enough to involve herself, and that was Miss Neptune.”
Dovey made no mention in her memoir of giving any thought to reaching out to the Wimbishes, whose sphere, she well knew, included Black lawyers. Perhaps, at that time, in that place, distraught, in a panic, Dovey believed that only a white person could save her.
She waited.
Waited.
Thief!
Prayed.
Thief?
And—
“Throughout my life,” she later reflected, “I have found that there is always somebody who would be the miracle-maker in your life if you but believe.”
DUSK WAS DESCENDING WHEN a well-dressed white man, an attorney, arrived at the Decatur County Jail. He’d been dispatched by Professor Neptune and Spelman treasurer Phern Rockefeller, a woman the Atlanta Constitution later praised for her “dedicated work in interracial and humanitarian activities.”