When Aunt Gert took in a boarder, she became our family away from home. She cooked our meals and introduced us to the community. This was my first time living on my own, so I focused all of my energy and attention on preparing for my students. My wardrobe was already set. I’d used some of Mamà’s best patterns over the summer to make a few pretty, new dresses for work. I wanted to look like a teacher. Each morning, after putting on my dress and heels, I always dabbed on some lipstick. The girls and boys in my class seemed so enamored by their new teacher. I sometimes caught them gazing up at me and giggling in their cute, childish way. I wouldn’t realize until many years later that a big part of their fascination was the lipstick. In this small town, my students were not accustomed to seeing a woman wear lipstick, and in their innocent eyes, painted pink lips made me seem a bit daring. I had no idea. More than anything, I wanted to do a good job for my students. I realized that most of them would not be able to extend their education beyond the Carnegie school.
Carnegie was a two-story, redbrick building perched atop a hill. The main entrance was at the top of a flight of stairs on the second level. There were four classrooms, two on each side, divided by a long hall. The elementary grades were on one side (one through three in one room and four through six in the other), and the upper grades were on the other side (seventh, eighth, and ninth in one room and tenth and eleventh in the other). Each grade had an average of fifteen students. The lunchroom and bathrooms were in the basement. The Carnegie school was the pride of the Negro community. It had been named in honor of the Reverend Amos Carnegie, who had come to Marion by 1927 as pastor of Mount Pleasant Methodist Church. When the local school board did not respond to complaints that the school for Negro children was “hardly fit for a stable,” Rev. Carnegie took matters into his own hands. He raised money in the Negro community and secured a grant from the Julius Rosenwald Fund, a major supporter of more than five thousand Negro schools across the South. Many of the neighborhood men donated their time and talents to build the school, which opened in 1931. The teachers mostly came from Negro colleges hundreds of miles away, and they brought with them a wealth of talents and culture, such as various languages and musical gifts. They poured their knowledge into children who were thirsty for such information and experiences. A few determined families in the community also found ways to make higher education possible for their children, as my parents had done. Their choice most often was a teacher’s training college in Petersburg, Virginia, about 270 miles away.
As a teacher, I made fifty dollars a month, about fifteen dollars less a month than new white teachers with similar training. I had to juggle three different grades, and it was quite a challenge to keep the students all engaged, especially when I was working individually with a particular group. But I worked hard at it. I wanted all of my students to feel smart and special. Whether I was teaching them multiplication and division, French words, or the notes on a piano, I used songs, games, and other fun activities to interest the students in learning. I’ve always loved to learn, and I believe that if students love learning, no one will have to push them to do well. They will want to learn and perform well. A good teacher helps students want to learn. So while my students learned, they also had lots of fun.
Sometimes the school had programs or plays and invited the community to attend. During my second year of teaching at Carnegie, I agreed to direct and play the piano for an all-male comedy as a school fundraiser. The production was a womanless wedding. Some of the parts included men playing women’s roles, and they had to wear wigs. This kind of comedy was popular at the time, and for a key role, I needed a man with a good sense of humor and the voice to match. Someone at the school mentioned that Charles and Anna Goble had a musical family and that their son, James, who was home from college for Christmas break, might fit the bill. The Gobles’ younger daughter, Patricia, was in my class. Another of the older Goble siblings, Evelyn, taught first through third grades at the school, so I knew of the family. I decided to give this young man, whom everybody in the community called Jimmie, a call. He sounded very pleasant over the telephone when I introduced myself and told him that I was looking for a man to play a particular role in the play.
I asked, “Do you know ‘I Love You Truly’?”
He was quite the jokester and said something like, “Why, Miss Coleman, you don’t know me well enough to say that to me.”
We both laughed. He agreed to play the part in my production, and I was more than a little intrigued by this college man with such a likable personality. When I met him later, at the first rehearsal, he was just as handsome as he was funny and sweet. He was taller than I, but medium height for a man. He also had a medium to small frame, a receding hairline, and the most beautiful brown eyes. We were both pretty smitten right away, and Jimmie and I soon became a couple. His family called him Snook. He was five years older than I and about to graduate from Lincoln University in Jefferson City, Missouri, with a major in science. Jimmie’s brother-in-law, Eric Epps (the husband of an older sister, Margaret), was a football coach at the university and had helped Jimmie and two other Goble siblings get jobs on campus and stipends to attend the school. Eric also had served as principal of the Carnegie school before leaving to work at Lincoln. Eventually at least seven of Jimmie’s brothers and sisters would graduate from college. The older ones worked and helped their parents send the younger ones to school. That’s the kind of loving, helpful family they were.
Charles and Anna Goble had been just teenagers (she was just sixteen) when they married and began having children. The babies kept coming, and the older ones played an active role in helping to raise their younger siblings. They babysat, fed, combed hair, and soothed the cries of the babies while their mother cooked and cleaned. Jimmie was number seven, almost in the middle of the bunch, but to his younger siblings, he was like another parent. While he was away at college, Anna could get the younger ones to straighten up in a hurry with one threat, “Just wait until Snook gets home. He’s going to take care of you!” Jimmie adored his family, and the younger ones were so cute and respectful around him. I spent good time getting to know them. The entire family indeed was musical. They entertained themselves by singing in unison many evenings at home when there was little else to do. Several of them could sing and play musical instruments. Jimmie had a lovely bass voice and played trumpet and trombone as well as the tuba and flute. I, of course, played piano and sang soprano. In addition to spending time with his family, Jimmie and I enjoyed taking long walks up and down the Marion hills. We’d walk from church together and hike through the woods. He also enjoyed meeting my family when they visited, and they thought he was a nice young man.
By the end of the school year, I had received a job offer that proposed to take me back to West Virginia. The high school, in Morgantown, offered me $110 per month in salary, more than twice what I was making in Marion. West Virginia already had equalized pay for Negro and white teachers, but that wouldn’t happen in Virginia for another year in a battle that would end with a ruling from the US Supreme Court. I was excited about returning home to West Virginia, but I didn’t want to leave Jimmie. We were in love, and our relationship was getting pretty serious. One day, he looked into my eyes and asked me to marry him. “Yes,” I said, happier than I’d ever been.
My parents liked Jimmie, and I was certain they would give their blessings. But when I called and shared my news, the response was shocking. Daddy did not approve. Crushed and confused, I pleaded for an explanation, but Daddy was not one to explain himself. He could not give his blessing, and that was it. Maybe he just isn’t ready for his younger daughter to get married, I thought. He’d always wanted me to achieve as much as possible, and maybe he figured I would give up my education to become a wife and mother, as most women did during that time. Whatever the case, he and I had never been on opposite sides before, and his rejection hurt. But he had raised me to think for myself, and my heart was telling me that Jimmie was the one and that this was
the time.
In the summer of 1939, I sat down and wrote Daddy a heartfelt letter, telling him how much I respected his opinion but that I was marrying Jimmie anyway. The following November, Jimmie and I had a small ceremony, where we stood before God and our families at the Big House in White Sulphur Springs and pledged to love and cherish one another for the rest of our lives. We celebrated afterward with a reception, where we cut the traditional three-tier, white wedding cake. Despite Daddy’s objections, he and Mamà both attended and posed afterward for pictures with us. Many years would pass before Daddy would reveal why he had opposed our marriage.
Although the times were slowly changing for women, Jimmie and I knew that many school systems still did not look too kindly on married female teachers choosing work over family. Unsure whether I would lose my job in Morgantown if we revealed our marriage, the two of us decided to keep our union quiet for a while. Jimmie returned to Marion to teach at the Carnegie School. Then, in the spring of 1940, before we could even live together properly as husband and wife, an unexpected opportunity opened to me.
I was surprised one day after school when I looked up and saw two of my favorite people standing outside my high school classroom in Morgantown. President Davis and Mr. Evans from West Virginia State had come to see me. They had traveled 165 miles or so just to see me? My eyes searched their faces for clues. Was this bad news? Good? They were smiling, so I smiled and calmly invited them inside my room. After a few pleasantries, they explained that they had driven from Institute to talk to me about an important matter. West Virginia University, in Morgantown, was about to become one of the first white universities in the South to begin allowing Negroes to attend its graduate programs, the men explained. The university had been sued by a Negro football player who qualified to attend its law school but had been denied admission. The university could either fight the lawsuit or find a way to comply with the US Supreme Court’s decision in a 1938 case (Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada) ordering states with schools for whites to provide the same in-state education for Negro students. According to the ruling, states could accomplish this by allowing students of both races to attend the same school or by creating a separate school within the state for Negro students. The case stemmed from a lawsuit that had been filed by Lloyd Gaines, a Negro man who had been denied admission to the University of Missouri’s Law School because of his race. The state of Missouri had offered to pay for Gaines to attend law school in a neighboring state. This practice had become common in southern states that did not permit Negroes to attend their graduate schools and did not offer a similar graduate program for Negro students within the state. But Gaines, backed by the NAACP’s legal defense team, rejected the State of Missouri’s offer and filed a lawsuit, saying the state had violated the “equal protection clause” of the Fourteenth Amendment by providing only white students the opportunity to attend law school inside the state. The case had worked its way up the legal system to the US Supreme Court, which upheld Gaines’s claim. The case did not go so far as to overturn the “separate but equal” mandate of the high court’s 1896 ruling in the landmark Plessy v. Ferguson decision. But legal scholars decades later would come to see the Gaines case as the precursor to the historic Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, which outlawed segregation of public schools.
I didn’t know at the time that Dr. Davis, who served on the board of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, had long awaited the day when the State of West Virginia would have to confront this issue. In 1937 he had talked state officials out of approving legislation that would have granted West Virginia State two million dollars a year over two years to create a graduate program. In a private meeting at the time with West Virginia governor Homer Holt, Dr. Davis told the governor that two separate graduate programs in the state were unnecessary and that the planned four million dollars would be better spent to strengthen the graduate program at the all-white West Virginia University. Dr. Davis said further during his conversation with the governor that the state should make West Virginia State the best undergraduate program it could be so that Negro students then would be prepared to pursue graduate studies at West Virginia University. Governor Holt ultimately agreed. Dr. Davis’s strategy, a full year before the Supreme Court ruling in the Gaines case, was about to pay off.
Dr. Davis said that that he had received a call from Dr. Charles Elmer Lawal, president of West Virginia University, who guaranteed that the football player who had filed the lawsuit would be admitted to the law school in the fall without trouble if Dr. Davis could get the young man to drop the suit. Additionally, the state had agreed to desegregate the university’s graduate programs without trouble during the upcoming summer session with three of West Virginia State’s best graduates. Then Dr. Davis finally got to his point: he had chosen me to be one of the three Negro students to integrate West Virginia University. The other two students were men who were working at the time as principals.
“We’ve got somebody to pay your tuition,” Dr. Davis added.
I was stunned. This was quite an honor and a huge responsibility. I didn’t want to let down these two men, who obviously believed in me and were investing so much in my future. Just three Negroes in all of West Virginia were being offered this opportunity. And just one Negro woman: me. I was thrilled, honored, and torn at the same time. This also would mean that Jimmie and I would have to delay further the day when we could live together finally as husband and wife. Jimmie was teaching, and there was no guarantee he would be able to find a job so quickly in Morgantown. But I couldn’t say no. I just couldn’t. I’d be honored to accept the honor, I told the men.
At least we will not have to move again to another community, I told myself. When I shared the news with my principal, he invited me to stay in his home for the summer. He and his wife would be traveling to Arizona, he said, and their home would be otherwise vacant. I couldn’t thank him enough for such a generous offer. My parents, especially Daddy, also were ecstatic that their youngest child would be studying for an advanced degree, perhaps even a doctorate. But they had seen enough in their lives to know that some white residents might not approve. I would be the only Negro woman on the entire campus of West Virginia University. Would I be nervous? How would the other students treat me? Would there be any trouble? This was nearly two decades before the Little Rock Nine, when federal troops would have to be brought in to protect those teenagers from frightening mobs as they integrated the high school there. So Jimmie, my parents, and I didn’t really know what to expect. Dr. Lawal had assured Dr. Davis that there would not be any trouble, and we put our confidence in that. Still, my parents agreed that Mamà would come from White Sulphur Springs to stay with me and support me during that first summer. On my final day at the high school, my principal, who also worked as an adjunct instructor in West Virginia State’s Mathematics Department, had one more thing to offer me, some math reference books that could be helpful, just in case I experienced any problems using the university’s library.
Ever in the back of my mind was Dr. Claytor’s question of how to become a research mathematician. Perhaps this was the path.
The campus of West Virginia University sat in the Monongahela River Valley on the edges of downtown Morgantown, and it was as beautiful as I had imagined. With its green, hilly landscape and old-style redbrick buildings, the university reminded me a bit of West Virginia State. But the likeness ended there. In the town of Institute, I’d never felt like I stood out. The entire town around our college had been full of Negroes of every hue, from beige to black. That had provided a kind of insulation from the daily indignities associated with race. On the campus of West Virginia University, my insulation was gone. Everybody was white, except the servants, and I rarely even saw them. I met the other two Negro students on the first day during registration. But they went to the law school, as I headed to the Mathematics Department. I don’t recall seeing either of them on campus again.
Once I made it to the Mathematics Department, I fo
und my adviser, a white man whose name I’ve forgotten. He wasn’t welcoming, and he didn’t seem so happy to see me. After the cursory introductions, he peered at me over the top of his eyeglasses and asked, “What are you going to do with this advanced degree?”
“I’m going to be a research mathematician,” I responded.
He seemed amused and asked, “What’s that?”
When I explained that I was still trying to figure that out, he asked what job I planned to get in the meantime.
“I’m probably going to do the same thing you do, teach,” I said.
He didn’t say a word, but his face turned bright red and seemed to say, How dare you compare yourself to me!
I hadn’t intended to insult him, but it didn’t bother me either that he seemed insulted. I hadn’t said I was any better than he was, but I knew for sure I was just as good. The white students that I encountered at West Virginia University didn’t appear to be bothered by my presence. Many didn’t seem to notice me, and some even offered a welcoming smile or nod. There were none of the kind of violent protests that would come in the years ahead with school desegregation efforts throughout the South. I was both relieved and surprised. Jim Crow laws had forced the separation of Negroes and whites with a vengeance for Negroes who dared to challenge the boundaries. My parents had been concerned enough about what might happen that Mamà had come to spend the summer with me. We never talked in any detail about why she had come. But her mere presence and the look of relief on her face each evening when I arrived home spoke silently to me about the potential danger that I faced. I don’t know if the other students knew who I was or, given the light complexion of my skin, that I was a Negro. But no one ever called me a nasty name. If anyone had any objection to my presence, they seethed to themselves. I’ve never been bothered much by what other people thought of me, so I may not have even noticed those in the latter category. What I did notice was that the teachers were fair. They treated me as they did every other student, which is exactly what I wanted. The academic work was never a problem for me, and I met or exceeded the teachers’ expectations.
My Remarkable Journey Page 7