I was walking across campus one day the next semester and saw a teacher named Mrs. Lacey, whom I recognized from my visits to Dr. and Mrs. Evans’s home. Mrs. Lacey was a math teacher who had been living with the Evans family as a boarder. But shortly after I met Mrs. Lacey, she got married and lost her job at the Institute because of the marriage clause. I was thrilled to see her back on campus. The school had lifted its marriage clause to allow openly married teachers to join the faculty. I would learn later firsthand that some teachers felt a need to hide their marital status from their employers to keep their jobs. Mrs. Lacey seemed genuinely happy to see me, too.
“Katherine, I’m teaching math again,” she said. “If you aren’t in my math class next semester, I’m coming after you.”
We both smiled. “Yes, ma’am,” I replied.
It was time to register for the next semester’s classes, and I quickly changed my schedule to take her math class. I had been enrolled in the class of another new, young professor, but I withdrew from his class and kept my word to Mrs. Lacey. She was a fantastic teacher. When I signed up the following semester to take the next math class under the new professor whose class I had dropped, he told me exactly what he’d thought of that decision. Apparently the word had gotten around the Mathematics Department that I was a promising math student. “I was so furious,” the professor told me, feigning anger. “I thought I had this good math student and you get up and go to Mrs. Lacey’s class!”
He was Dr. William Waldron Schieffelin Claytor, and he had just received his PhD in math from the University of Pennsylvania the previous spring of 1933. That made him only the third Negro in the entire country to receive a doctorate degree in math. The previous two doctoral recipients had taught him at Howard University, where he received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees. In his mid-twenties, Dr. Claytor was well dressed, confident, and very good-looking. All of the girls on campus just swooned over him when we spotted him playing a vicious game of tennis or driving onto campus in his sharp sports car. But Dr. Claytor was, above all else, a fabulous mathematician and teacher. He would stroll into the classroom, reach into his pocket for a piece of chalk, and walk immediately to the blackboard. It always amazed me that he knew exactly where the class left off the day before. He stopped at his desk only to get the textbook out to give our assignment for the next day. I was mesmerized, so I kept signing up for his classes. Sometime after that first year he said to me, “You know, you would make a good research mathematician.”
I hadn’t heard that term before, so I asked, “What does a research mathematician do?”
He chuckled and replied, “You do research in math.”
Before college, I didn’t even know colored people could get a job higher than teaching. When Daddy and Mamà would suggest to me that I should be a teacher, I would tell them I wanted to be a college teacher, not even sure back then what college was. But it sounded important, so I figured a college teacher must be an extra-big job. But a research mathematician? I had to ask:
“Well, where do you get a job doing that?”
“That will be your problem,” Dr. Claytor responded. “But I will have you ready.”
And he made sure I was. When I had taken every math course the college offered, he said I still needed a couple more, and he added them to the curriculum. The final class I took from him was one that he created just for me, and it was called Analytic Geometry of Space. I couldn’t have known then how prescient that move would be. And it never occurred to me to ask him why I might need such a class. None of my schoolmates was interested enough in math to take the advanced course, but Dr. Claytor didn’t give me an option. “You’re going to take it,” he said simply. I was the only student, but he taught that course as if the entire room were full of people. I was fascinated by this math. Dr. Claytor stretched my mind farther than I ever believed possible, but the thing I loved about math, more than any other subject, was that there was a definite right or wrong answer. It was sometimes hard to figure out, but when you got it, you knew it, and what a wonderful feeling.
Though I didn’t realize this at the time, Dr. Claytor must have been doing for me what two of his professors at Howard University had done for him. A young W. W. Schieffelin Claytor entered Howard as an undergraduate in September 1925, after attending public schools in Washington, DC. He’d been born in Norfolk, Virginia, into an educated, middle-class family. His mother, Simsie Thorne Claytor, had graduated from Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute in Hampton, Virginia, in about 1900. His father, William Oat Claytor, initially worked as a vocational arts teacher at a segregated school in Norfolk, Virginia, before relocating his family to the nation’s capital. There the elder Claytor earned a dentistry degree from Howard in 1916 and ultimately opened his own dental practice. The son followed his father’s path to Howard in 1925, majored in math, and earned a bachelor’s degree in 1929. The same year, Dr. Dudley Weldon Woodard Sr. established Howard’s first master’s degree program in math, and Schieffelin Claytor, as he was called then, became one of the first students. Dr. Woodard, who had served dual roles at Howard as a math professor and dean of the College of Liberal Arts in the early 1920s, was just returning to the university from a leave of absence in the 1927–28 school year. He had spent the time finishing his doctoral studies to earn a PhD in math from the University of Pennsylvania in 1928. He became the second Negro to earn a doctorate degree in mathematics.
The first to hold that distinction was Dr. Elbert Cox, who earned his PhD from Cornell University in 1925. Ironically, Dr. Cox spent his first four years teaching at West Virginia Collegiate Institute before joining Woodard at Howard, just as the new master’s program was beginning. So an eager, young Claytor must have seen a clear route to at least some of his aspirations as he studied under the only two Negro professors in the country with PhDs in math. In 1930 he would receive his master’s degree from Howard and follow Woodard’s advice and strong recommendation to the University of Pennsylvania. No doubt he proved himself to be a brilliant student, earning free tuition and a stipend with the Harrison Scholarship in Mathematics in his second year and the prestigious Harrison Fellowship in Mathematics in his final year. He completed the doctoral program at Penn in 1933—the third Negro in the country with a PhD in math, after his two Howard professors.
Even as Dr. Claytor accepted the teaching position at West Virginia State the same year, he had a higher ambition, the same ambition that he would spark in me: to become a research mathematician. But a relatively small, isolated college with limited resources, budget, and staff was no match for his aspirations. So as Dr. Claytor was preparing me, he was calculating his own exit.
Dr. Claytor would take a one-year leave of absence from West Virginia State in 1936 to pursue post-doctoral work at the University of Michigan. He was thrilled to join a group of mathematicians who were doing interesting work in his field of interest, topology. A Rosenwald Fellowship helped to finance his research over the next three years, but he would face heartbreaking disappointment and racism. In 1936, for example, he was invited to present his research at the annual conference of the American Mathematical Society in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, but he was not permitted to stay at the hotel with other members because of his race. He stayed with a Negro family in town. His credentials didn’t matter. At that time, in that place, his race alone determined his status. The incident so hurt him that he eventually stopped attending the society’s conferences.
The next year, Dr. Claytor’s research was published in the Annals of Mathematics, which some sources credit as the first published math research by a Negro aside from degree theses. His work would be cited by researchers for years to come, and time eventually would prove him to be a mathematics genius. But Dr. Claytor’s fellowship funds dried up in 1939. With the help of famed math professor Raymond L. Wilder of the University of Michigan, who was among his white advocates, Dr. Claytor stayed in Ann Arbor and managed to get enough temporary work to support himself a couple mo
re years. Still, he could not find a permanent teaching position at any research institution, even when one opened at the University of Michigan, where he had spent the past few years. Dr. Claytor had no desire to teach at small, black colleges in the South because the demands of teaching a full load of classes left no time for research, his true passion. But he would find, perhaps like his two predecessors, that race limited his options. At one point in 1939, Wilder received good news that the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, would find a place for Claytor. But five years earlier, while Claytor was still at West Virginia State, the same organization had been housed at Princeton University, and when Claytor applied to conduct research there under a fellowship, university administrators rejected him. White students might object to the presence of a colored scholar, they reasoned. Though the Institute for Advanced Study had by 1939 moved to an independent location in Princeton, Claytor was still stinging from the earlier rejection. Wilder would express in a letter to a colleague many years later that when he approached his young protégé about the chance to work at the research organization, Claytor “shook his head and replied, ‘There’s never been a black at Princeton, and I’m not going to be a guinea pig.’” No other opportunities were forthcoming.
Karen Hunger Parshall, a history and mathematics professor at the University of Virginia, later studied Dr. Claytor as a detailed case for a research paper titled “Mathematics and the Politics of Race,” published in the American Mathematics Monthly in March 2016. In the article she concluded, “Claytor may have had strong and influential supporters within the American mathematical community, but he understood and lived day-to-day under the social forces at work in the immediately pre- and post-war United States, social forces that had yet to allow for the integration of professional meetings much less the faculties of the nation’s research universities. . . . Claytor had been trained to do mathematical research, but de jure segregation in the South and de facto segregation elsewhere, left the research universities largely closed to him and made it hard for him even to participate in the activities of his professional societies.”
Dr. Claytor joined the US Army in April 1941, just months before the United States entered World War II. He then did short teaching stints at two black colleges in the South and married Mae Belle Pullins, an accomplished professor who earned a PhD in education and established herself as an authority on the issue of standardized testing. Dr. Claytor never returned to West Virginia State. By 1947 he wound his way back to Howard University—just as his previous two math professors had done—and spent the rest of his career there, teaching math. He died with a broken heart at age fifty-nine.
I graduated summa cum laude from West Virginia State in 1937 with degrees in both math and French and the highest grade point average of any previous student in the school’s history. Dr. Claytor had left the previous year to pursue his passion. In some ways, we both left there starry-eyed, in search of an answer to the problem he’d dropped in my lap: how to become a research mathematician as a colored person in 1930s America. In time he would draw his own complex conclusions.
For now, though, the problem was mine to solve.
Chapter 3
A Time for Everything
For everything there is a season, a time for every activity under heaven.
—Ecclesiastes 3:1
God has an appointed time for everything. That’s what the Bible says in one of my favorite verses. As my college graduation approached, I didn’t know the first thing about how to become a research mathematician, so I figured it clearly wasn’t that time. I decided to look for a job doing what felt more familiar: teaching.
The nation had not yet pulled itself out of the Great Depression, and jobs were scarce. Even in more prosperous times, Negro teachers had been limited to working in the few schools available for Negro children. But in times of such economic uncertainty, workers everywhere were hanging onto their jobs. With so many people out of work and suffering, the teachers with jobs must have felt fortunate. Plans to pursue advanced degrees or relocate to different areas were being put on hold, and eager college graduates hoping to become teachers were finding few openings.
That was on my mind in the first months of my senior year, when I realized I had enough credits with the classes I was taking to graduate in December 1936. Many seniors may have jumped at the chance to finish college early, but the more I thought about it, the less it seemed like a good idea. If I graduated early with no job offers, I would have to return home to White Sulphur Springs. That would add another mouth for Daddy to feed. As things were in my last year at West Virginia State, I had a full-tuition scholarship that also covered my room and board. If I stayed on campus an extra semester, it would not cost my parents a thing. So I dropped a class, stayed the next semester to take that same course, and bought myself a little time. Still, when I graduated in May 1937, I ended up returning to White Sulphur Springs with my college degree, every honor I could have received, and no job prospects. June and July passed, and still nothing. Then, on August 4, 1937, I received an urgent telegram that said only this:
“If you can play the piano, the job is yours.”
The name on the message wasn’t familiar. I immediately called Mr. Evans, the Mathematics Department head at West Virginia State, because Negro schools that needed teachers often reached out first to the area’s Negro colleges for recommendations.
“Did you recommend me for a job teaching piano?” I asked him.
He had not. I thought of another professor who may have referred me and called him. Yes, he had made the recommendation, he said. A school in Marion, Virginia, was looking for an elementary teacher who could teach French and piano to students in grades four through six. The professor said he remembered that I had taken piano lessons and thought I would be perfect for the position. With this new information, I called to accept my first teaching job, at Carnegie Elementary School, and began preparing to move 127 miles from home. The opening of school was just weeks away. I was nineteen years old, and soon I would be a brand-new teacher.
Just before l left, Mamà issued this warning: “Remember, you’re going to Virginia.”
In our minds, Virginia was the real South. So in other words, she meant, “Remember your place and act accordingly.”
I responded flippantly, “Well, tell them I’m coming!”
Soon I was aboard a bus and on my way. Just as Mamà had warned, it didn’t take long for me to realize that I had crossed the line into Virginia. The bus came to a stop abruptly, and the driver shouted some orders: Negroes to the back of the bus. We had been interspersed with whites on the bus, but as routinely as getting off at the appropriate stop, all of the Negroes stood and moved to the back, as a few white passengers moved closer to the front. I watched in stunned silence and followed suit. Later, when it was time to change buses, the white passengers were allowed to board a new bus, but the driver shouted my way, “All you colored folk, come over here!” I pretended not to hear him until he softened his tone. The buses did not go into the colored side of town, he said. Negro passengers then had to pay a taxi or find another way to get where we were going. Everyone seemed to know the rules, and a few Negro taxi drivers were waiting. I climbed into one of the cars and headed into my future.
Segregation certainly was not new to me, but I was not accustomed to such blatant racist and rude behavior. I refused to let it bother me, though. I just stared out the car window and watched this new town unfold before me. My first stop was the principal’s home, where I arranged to rent a room in his neighborhood from a woman named Mrs. Gert Ross, whom everybody called Aunt Gert. She lived in a rather large house that was walking distance, about a mile and a half, from the school in a hilly community known as “Up the Creek.” As the name implies, a small creek ran through the neighborhood.
Marion was a picturesque small town in the highlands of southwestern Virginia, near the borders of Tennessee and North Carolina. Named in honor of Francis Marion, an
American Revolutionary War hero, the town is the county seat of Smyth County. About five thousand people called Marion home in 1937, and the vast majority of them (at least 96 percent) were white. There were a small number of Negro families, who lived in mostly segregated areas of town, but that wasn’t the case everywhere. Charles and Anna Goble and their thirteen children were the only Negro family living on a hill in an established neighborhood about two blocks from Main Street. The younger Goble children, one of whom was in my class, often played in the neighborhood with white children, including the sons and daughters of a couple of local and state politicians. When Anna Goble sat on the porch, the white mothers usually stopped to chat. But this was the South, and segregation was the law. So while Charles, a second-generation barber, could cut white men’s hair in a whites-only barber shop on Main Street, he had to cut even his own children’s hair at home.
When I arrived, there was still much buzz around town about the new Hungry Mother State Park, which had just opened the previous summer. The park was 1,881 acres of donated land that had been transformed into a stunning playground with picnic areas, cabins, hiking trails, a pool, and a bathhouse. It had been constructed by the Civilian Conservation Corps, a national relief program that was part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “New Deal” to provide jobs throughout the country and help jump-start the depressed economy. Negro residents were happy that the park had brought more jobs. Once it was open, they could work there as servants, but their families were not allowed to visit and enjoy the festivities as guests. Another of Marion’s local treasures was the three-story, red-brick Lincoln Theatre, with its Mayan temple–inspired Art Deco theme. The movie palace had been built by the town’s wealthiest resident, Charles C. Lincoln Sr., and offered new films and vaudeville acts to a community starved of that kind of culture. The theatre opened just months before the crash of the stock market and somehow managed to survive during the Great Depression. Many Negro patrons enjoyed attending the shows, but they had to enter through a back door and climb the stairs to the balcony. Such were the degrading rules of segregation, but the Negro families in town just built their own social lives, centered mostly around their families, friends, and church.
My Remarkable Journey Page 6