Because, Mr. History Teacher, No One Ever Taught You

 Our stories are timeless and tested. They are about us, a people of tremendous strength. Our songs are full of love and life— and the ups and downs of both. They are soulful with the rhythms of a heart that is in sync with nature and wonderment. Our struggles are real and rugged. They beckon our memory to the highest callings of the spirit, to help us rejoice and to overcome.”

Deborah L. Parker

He had the looks of a scruffy middle-aged Sidney Poitier but his swag was all Fred Sanford, with just the right mixture of Falstaffian character qualities: robust, bawdy and brazen. He was working the night shift as the front desk clerk of a rundown motel on the seedy side of Biloxi, Mississippi. Even before releasing my right hand after the obligatory first meeting handshake, he had informed me, “The name is Marvin M. Harris. The M is for Marvelous.”

Biloxi is a seaport city with a colorful past steeped in the now long-ago antebellum glory days of the Old South. Unfortunately, to a first-time visitor, the city’s present is a mere one step ahead of urban decay. In Biloxi’s case, big city eastern seaboard problems have found their way onto the Gulf Coast of Mississippi. Stately southern mansions still dot several well preserved and protected inland subdivisions, majestic Magnolia trees bordering wide boulevards. But the tourist industry has all but dried up and left town, a concession to the rapid development of what the locales refer to as “the Redneck Rivera,” the Gulf Shores, AL area, about 60 miles up the coast.

The Jimmy Buffet parrot head types spend little time in modern day Biloxi, it being no Margaritaville. It is instead as blue collar as a beach front community can get, still a sailor’s town, ripe with a full supply of all the shady enmities that sailors enjoy.

The evening shift on this particular winter weekday, Marvelous informed me, had been slow. He was on the 4 pm to midnight shift. He preferred the midnight to 8 am schedule. It paid a dollar an hour more. “Not as busy, either,” he told me, “but there are still a few more problems on the graveyard shift.” Such as, I asked? “No custodian on duty after midnight, so I got to clean up the puke in the lobby myself.”

I guessed his age to have been between 65 to 70 years. But he also appeared to have lived a hard life, the sort that can make a man appear older than he really is. Manners did not allow for me to inquire, but even if my estimate is off by a decade either way, he would still have been of the last of a generation of blacks to have lived in the south under the Jim Crow laws of segregation. I asked about coming of age in Mississippi under such discriminatory laws, when separate but equal was the law of the land, strictly keeping the races separate.

“You assuming a lot, my friend, what makes you think I grew up in the south?” The accent, maybe, I responded? “I went to an all-black school,” he answered with a head nod to my inquiry about growing up in the Mississippi of segregationist laws. “Terrible schools. Teachers, most of them, couldn’t even read themselves. Back then all of our teachers were black, and most were poorly educated because the college’s blacks could go to in those days were not good colleges. The books, the few we had, were the ones sent down from the white schools when they were done with them. Most didn’t have the covers even left on them, but I guess they were good enough for us black  kids. But tell you what, we behaved, or they would beat our little black asses until we couldn’t sit down. My, oh my how those teachers could swing that paddle. Today, the schools are still segregated, but not by law, but instead by choice. The white kids all go to the private academies, but we do have lots of well-educated white teachers in the local public schools. They teach my grand babies.”

“We couldn’t even go to school in Biloxi, not for high school, anyway,” Marvelous remembered. “They sent us up to Gulf Port to what was known as the 33rd Avenue High School. It is where all the ‘colored’ children, as they referred to us in polite society back then, went. It was the law up until the early 70’s. School building still there, but when Katrina blew through, it darn near took it down. Not much left. It is named after the address of the street it sits on. Think about that? You ever hear of a school named for its address? Guess the white people in charge back then figured there was not one black from the area, going back 100 years, that was worth naming the school after,” he said with a laugh. “And no self-respecting white back then wanted their name on the front door of the town’s black  school.”

Marvelous asked me what I did for a living. I told him I was now a professional vagabond pretending to be retired, but I had previously spent 30+ years in public education. “You was a teacher,” he said, in a tone that told me I was now sitting dead in his sights, I just wasn’t yet sure why. It would not take long for me to understand. “Yes,” I confirmed, “15 years in a classroom and 15 years as a building administrator.” What did you teach, he asked? “American History,” I told him.

“Well, let me tell you about history, Mr. History teacher, our true history, not that stuff they want kids to learn in schools, but the truth, how it really was,” Marvelous responded with a condescending tone in his voice. “See, I like history, it’s kind of a hobby of mine.  I love to read. Pretty much self-taught. I quit school in 8th grade when I turned 16. But I always knew if I was to make anything in this life I had to know how to read. Black kids today just don’t understand how important education is. So many good people a long time ago sacrificed so much, just so black kids today can sit in a classroom. Some even gave their lives, and these dumb punks today throw it away. Throw way the opportunity we were denied for so long, the right to an education. It makes me just sick to see the waste. And you know the real shame; it’s the black community allowing it to happen, a self-inflicted wound.”

It was time, Marvelous told me, for a quiz and he was now the one at the head of the class. “Now tell me what you know about Woodrow Wilson,” Marvelous asked, leaning across the front lobby desk, the gleam in his eyes now matching the shine on his gold front tooth, oblivious to the two young ladies of the evening who had just entered the lobby. Attired in four-inch heels and two-inch skirts; they loudly argued about who did or did not hold seniority on the street corner outside the front door.

Later, when the bickering between the two began anew, interrupting our conversation, Marvelous quickly and decisively ran both out of the lobby. “Dumb ass crack whores are the only whores that are left to work on the street anymore. The hookers with any class at all, now days, they all use Craig’s List,” Marvelous said.

Woodrow Wilson, I responded, drawing out the pronunciation in a way that showed I was calling up from my well-educated history teaching brain a plethora of information that would prove overwhelming by sheer volume for this night shift desk clerk wannabe historian.

Woodrow Wilson: “President of the United States, highly educated, served as President of Princeton University, created the League of Nations after WWI, considered the most educated president ever,” and I added, after a long pause to draw out the drama of the knockout punch of knowledge I was about to unload, “probably had a nervous breakdown the last three months of his final term. Most historians agree now that his wife really ran the nation during that time, with Wilson sequestered in the White House 24 hours a day in his bedroom. Sequestered, that means hid out,” I clarified for my new friend.

“You left out the most important part,” Marvelous said, ignoring my condescending addendum to the end of my lecture. “Wilson was the biggest racist in the history of the American Presidency. Even worse than some before the (civil war) who had owned slaves.” Taken aback slightly by this tidbit of trivia, I recovered quickly. “I do know that was rumored, the racism,” was my retort. “Rumored,” Marvelous answered. “Rumored, your white ass. It is a fact, but I bet you never taught it to those kids in your class, now did you?”

Marvelous was now in full control of this conversation. “All this Princeton stuff, the League of Nations and its 14 Points (damn, I thought, I forgot to mention the 14 Points), all bull shit. Wilson came from the South. He came to the presidency in 1912 with considerable help from the black vote. Back in that time, blacks were very much aligned with the Republican Party, the party of Lincoln. Teddy Roosevelt had been the progressive leader of the Party and had served seven years in the White House, but the Democrats made a big push to win over the black vote in 1912 and it worked, get Taft out. When TR couldn’t get the nomination away from Taft and (he) formed a third party, the Bull Moose Party. That is what we need today, a man of action, like Teddy, but that is another story, so back to Wilson. They (black voters) got Wilson elected. And you know what the first thing he did when he got to Washington to pay back blacks for their loyalty? Wilson segregated everything, both in the city and in the government agencies buildings. Made it the law. Blacks and whites now had to work in separate buildings, if they worked for the government. If circumstances made it so it was not possible to separate whites from blacks by buildings, then Wilson ordered that curtains be hung between white and black workers, to discourage association. Bet you never taught that to your students, now did you, Mr. History teacher?”

Later when I researched Wilson’s race segregating history, I found that Marvelous was extremely accurate in his rendition of a very sad chapter in our nation’s past, one, as Marvelous had predicted, I had never taught to my students.

“Now listen to this, it should be a very important part of our history and should be taught to every school kid in America, but it’s not.” Marvelous was rolling now. “The worst domestic riots in the history of this nation were racial riots and came in the later years of Wilson’s (tenure) and the year’s immediately after his terms in office. He set the tone for the 1920’s, the worst decade in our history for intimidation and the denial of civil rights to black citizens in the South.”

“I will give you an interesting fact, the first example of air bombing of civilians, anywhere in the recorded history of the world happened right here in this country, came during the race riots in Tulsa, OK in 1921. Our military bombed black neighborhoods in Tulsa. They, our military, understand, dropped dynamite on the black neighborhoods of Tulsa and killed at least 70 innocently random people. We are not talking now about Syria or Iran, mind you, we are talking about Oklahoma, OKLAHOMA, and nobody remembers. Did you ever teach that to your students?”

Back on my heels now, Marvelous smelled blood in the water and moved in for the intellectual kill. “Tell me about the Reconstruction Era, the year’s right after the Civil War,” he asked? I once again gave him the standard textbook rendition: The defeated southern states were treated as a conquered nation by the northern victors. Blacks in the southern states were put into positions of governmental authority by northern forces. Although noble in intent, the complexity of governing a nation by a group of just freed and uneducated slaves proved to be too much and was a dismal failure. Eventually, the north out of frustration, withdrew its troops and thus the enforcement of the reconstruction mandates it had put in place. With no agency of power to enforce the laws of equality, whites took back all local and state power in the southern states and a Jim Crow segregated society became deeply entrenched for the next 100 years.

Once again, Marvelous was neither impressed nor in agreement with my assessment. “Bullshit, more bullshit,” was his evaluation of my knowledge of Reconstruction. “You know less about Reconstruction than you do about Wilson, and that my friend is limited,” he said.

“Did you know that Reconstruction in Mississippi worked just fine,” he stated, “as long as the federal troops were there to enforce the law that all men are equal? Once they (the Feds) pulled out, then fear took over and terror was used to take back all the gains of Reconstruction. The Klan rose to power and the darkest chapter in the history of this country, even worse that slavery itself, came about. Jim Crow and segregation was released upon my people, my ancestors, and eventually upon me.”

He was not yet through; he had one better and strong volley of academia ammunition to fire across the bow of my sinking ship. “Here is a fact you will not find in the history books,” Marvelous announced. “Did you know that the first public school mandatory laws for school attendance in Mississippi; and the first laws that obligated the state to support compulsory education for white children (were) passed in 1870 by an almost all black state legislature?”

“How ironic that it was black politicians who made the laws that for the first time allowed white kids in Mississippi the right to go and get a free public-school education. Right here in good old boy Jim Crow Magnolia state Mississippi. Did you ever teach your students that fact when you talked to them about how Reconstruction failed because blacks were not ready to lead,” he asked, with no attempt to try and hide the triumph in the tone of his voice? I remained silent, defenseless to the onslaught. Marvelous answered for me, “No.”

“And you know why you didn’t,” he prodded, rhetorically? “Because, Mr. History teacher, no one ever taught you.”

They have now.

Obsolete Racial Paradigms of Limitations.

Without deliberate malice intent, we still today cryogenically freeze young athletes, of all races, into worn out obsolete racial paradigms of limitations. "Racial stereotypes" is a nice politically correct term that when broken down becomes a squalid and dirty indictment of all racist preconceptions: that blacks are not cerebral enough to take on “leadership roles.” as players, coaches or in positions of management. 

Athletics remain today in America a great social benchmark for measuring racial trends. Listen between the lines of any athletic based conversation and immediately one can seize on the obvious catch words of racial athletic stereotyping. For example, if a basketball player is described as” very athletic,” or if a team has “great athleticism,” rest assured, it is a team of predominantly African Americans. If a player or team is labeled as “smart” or “disciplined,” the labels are assigned dutifully to white players or a white team.

Today, if a quarterback is listed as a "dual-threat, run or pass," the chance this athlete is African American is very high. If a quarterback is judged as a "pocket passer of limited mobility," then you have a safe bet he is white and in the eyes of coaches cannot outrun a dead black man.

In 2014, I agreed to take on a one-year assignment to coach the girls’ basketball team at St Louis Metro High School. I had coached boys for 30+ years but had always wanted to coach girls and had always wanted to coach in the St. Louis Public High League. I could mark off two items on my professional “to-do” list with one stroke, so I took the job.

Metro High is an anomaly for the St. Louis Public Schools, a high academic performing building. Metro is consistently ranked in the top ten list of the nation’s public high schools, once rising to number 1 on the prestigious US News and World Report’s list of the nation’s top public high schools.

All Metro students are required to perform 300 hours of community service prior to graduation. For the 2003–2004 school year, Metro was named a Missouri Gold Star school and a national Blue-Ribbon school. It was again named a Missouri Gold Star school and Blue-Ribbon school in 2007–2008. In 2012, Newsweek ranked the school as 12 out of the top 1,000 public high schools in the United States. In 2016, the school earned the top scores for Missouri’s public high schools for end-of-course exams in english, science, and social studies.  In May 2018, Metro again earned the top ranking in the state. You get the point: Metro kids are smart.

The academic demands and pressure to perform in the classroom placed upon its students are off the chart. Half of the entering freshmen will not be around in four years for graduation, academic casualties, transferred to a less challenging city high school. It is the one magnet school in the SLPS that has done what it is supposed to do - draw non-black students from the county. The high academics at Metro and the college opportunities it provides its graduates is a very effective “magnet” to entice students and their parents to come back to the city schools. Metro is the pride of the city’s educational leaders, a fair-haired favorite child within the midst of a field of red headed stepchildren.

My basketball team was all black. We were pretty good. We had early in the season beaten East St. Louis, IL, a powerhouse with ten times our enrollment. Metro had never beaten East Side in any athletic event, so around school, it was a big deal. But it got us no respect from the establishment powerhouses in the suburbs. The Public High League was viewed as a circuit void of talent (the private schools and the county public schools had siphoned it all off), undisciplined and poorly coached teams of underachieving black kids. We were entered in the 16-team field for the Visitation Academy Christmas Tournament, the only black city school entered. The “Viz” tournament is the oldest and most prestigious event of its kind in the Midwest.

Despite our 5-1 record, we knew we would get little respect from the suburban schools at the seed meeting. I had told our girls we wanted to be seeded 15^th and draw the second seed in the opening round. We did not want to be 16^th and forced to play the number 1 seed, Incarnate Word Academy, who would finish the season as the number 2 ranked team in the nation. We could not beat them, but I felt we could best any of the other 14 teams in the field. I sandbagged as best I could at the Saturday morning coaches’ seed meeting. Bingo, we were seeded 15^th and drew the number two seed, a large county school ranked third in the state.

Our first-round opponent’s coach made the statement in the local media that it was an honor to be chosen second in such a strong field, but she and her team knew they would be in for “a strong test AFTER the first round.” AFTER? Oh, my! The ambush was set, the perfect overconfident foil in place. We won by 9 points and it really was not that close.

I had two young ladies at Metro in 2014 who were very athletic: excellent quickness and jumping ability. The rest of the roster - nice girls, very hard workers and very smart- but slow and flat footed. We learned to play to our strengths: work ethic and intelligence.

After the game, I was interviewed by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and their reporter’s first comments were, “this has to be one of the biggest upsets in history of the area’s girls’ basketball.” Not really, I thought, but I let him go on uninterrupted. He then said, “your team is so athletic.” I looked at him like he had two heads. “Did you watch the game,” I asked? “We are not athletic, what you mean is we are very black.” We are also, I told him, “very smart.” So much for stereotypes.

It became a running joke amongst our team that white teams were smart and black teams were athletic. We played late in the season, Lutheran North, a north side team that played one white girl.  The rest of their rotation was black. Late in the game we were nursing a lead and wanted to make sure we took away the three-point shot by putting a lot of pressure on their best shooter, who just happened to be their only white player. I told my girls as we broke the timeout huddle, “be sure and know where Klotzer is.” One of our girls asked, “which one is Klotzer?” Before I could answer, one of our senior players, without missing a beat said, “the smart one.”

The End of Jim Crow Education in a Small Town

We never know how high we are

Till we are called to rise;

And then, if we are true to plan,
  Our statures touch the skies— Emily Dickinson

By Dave Almany

1969 MC Football

Think of it this way: the Monroe City, MO Washington school has been dead more years than it lived, and here you have Howard Pruitt with a monk like resolve pouring over old newspapers and yearbooks. His determination is rooted in documentation. Get it written down! When he is called home by his Lord, Pruitt intends to leave this earth a gift; the eternal flame of the Washington School that for 40 years educated the “colored” students of Monroe City. The school was finally closed sometime in the mid 1960’s. Even the exact date of complete racial desegregation of the Monroe City Public Schools is open to debate. 

Monroe City’s Washington School is a story of eventual triumph, but still, the reality is it was a flower grown from poisonous soil—the segregation laws of 20th-century America. "People need to know that it was the law back then," says Pruitt. And there is a modern burden to bear, “woke” culture be damned. "A lot of good people back then didn't question.” 

Searching for ghosts is not easy but there's a spiritually uplifting Dickensian touch to all this - what Pruitt is attempting - but there's also a sense of immense pressure he battles. He is nearing 70 years of age and as he says, “we are passing fast.” An old African proverb states that when an old man dies, a library dies with him. “So many stories I have not heard,” Pruitt says with a sad shake of his head, “and they need to not only be heard but recorded. That keeps me up at night.” If you have ever called Monroe City home, regardless of your racial makeup, you owe Howard Pruitt a big thank you.

But that anonymity - out of sight, out of mind - was, and still is, the essence of Monroe City's ignored “Colored” school; the nameless faces of a school without even a yearbook to record their mere existence. They were neighbors and boyfriends and sons and nephews, and they had dads and moms and sisters and brothers and teachers and that special girl, and the link that bonded it all still pulsates through the heart and in the blood of now aging alums like Howard Pruitt. It is a unique confluence of dignity and history, and Pruitt sells it all to me with the wry smile of a prophet. 

Until the fall of 1965, Pruitt attended the Washington School. “I started school at Washington in 1958 and went through the 6th grade. Then I moved over to the White school.”  1958 - the tail years of the Eisenhower administration, as Martin Luther King Jr. was marching in the South and an inchoate and aborning civil rights movement was beginning to spread across America.

The landmark Supreme Court decision of 1954, Brown v Topeka Board of Education made segregated schools based on race unconstitutional. Pruitt entered the 7th grade, for the first time sitting in a classroom next to white students, 11 years after Brown v Board.

The Monroe City Public School District began providing high school level education for its Black students in 1938. As required by the State law of the day, Black and White students were taught in separate buildings. Beginning in 1948, Monroe City Black high school aged students were bussed to the all-Black Douglas High School in Hannibal, MO. In 1955, the Hannibal Public Schools made the decision to abide by the Brown v Board ruling and completely integrate its schools, thus closing Douglas High. 

Many districts in Missouri ignored and/or challenged the Brown v Board ruling in court. Monroe City chose a hybrid path. The high school was integrated, as the law required, but the district’s Black elementary students were still, until 1965, segregated at Washington. 

In 1956, Monroe City High School graduated its first Black students, four in total. Donald Scott was one. He played on the varsity basketball team. He became the first in his family to graduate from college. He earned his degree in 1960 from Lincoln University and joined the US Army. Thirty-one years later he retired with the rank of Brigadier General. 

Upon retiring from active duty in 1992, Scott served as the chief operating officer and chief of staff for the mayor of Atlanta. He later became the founding director and chief executive officer of the AmeriCorps National Civilian Corp. He was in 1997 appointed by President Bill Clinton to the role of the Deputy Librarian of Congress. He retired for good in 2006.

I taught in Monroe City for five years and never heard the story of Donald Scott. And we question why we need a black history month. “And tell him about how you led the protest at the high school for a black history class, Howard. 1970 and Howard is protesting and demanding a black history class at Monroe City High School,” teases classmate and lifelong friend Brenda Wilkerson Harris. “You were something, even back then, Howard Pruitt.”

Harris has joined us for a lunch meeting in Columbia, MO. Both she and Pruitt have called the host city for the University of Missouri home for over 40 years.  Harris is now retired after a career as an office administrative assistant. She has raised two adult children and has been single since her second husband passed away in 1984.

Howard Pruitt and Brenda Harris

Black children’s lives all too often become a cliché of criminal pathology: absentee father, mother struggling with mental health issues and drug addiction, no food in the fridge, neighborhoods of casual violence - a spiderweb capable of ensnaring the most innocent. Pruitt says Monroe City was different. “This was a good place to grow up. When we integrated, sure we had our share of knuckleheads who didn’t want us there, would do the drive-by insults. But we got things straight, in time. They learned we would only take so much. A lot of people were good to us. I remember our junior high principal, Mr. Minor, that first year went well out of his way to make us feel welcome, to check on us, see how we were doing. We loved our football coach, Coach Welker. Not one teacher in all the years I was in the White school treated me unfairly because of my skin (color)."

"My grandfather, Jesse Robinson, was a strong disciplinarian," says Pruitt. “They lived right across the railroad tracks form us. I also had a stepfather and a mother who took a strong role in raising me. In those days, in the black community of Monroe City, there were plenty of eyes to keep watch on us." Any youthful transgressions that were not within the norms of the family standards were dealt with swiftly. "We all had a time schedule, curfews” says Pruitt. “We had lunch at the same time. We had dinner at the same time. Don't be late or you didn't eat. We all ate at a big table and talked about school and what was happening in world events. We all dressed up neat—my grandfather father was a clean, neat dresser and a proud man—and we all went to church on Sunday together. We were a family."

Harris has similar memories of a childhood that was long on both structure and discipline, but also love and support. “The black community of Monroe City took care of its own,” she recalls. Your children were your purpose in life, she says. “We would have been terrified to ever do anything that would bring disrespect or shame to our family, to our parents.”  She initially attended college at Northeast Missouri State University in nearby Kirksville, MO but then dropped out to follow a boyfriend to first Iowa and then Chicago. In 1974 she moved to her current home of Columbia.

Like in many small towns in the 1960’s, athletics played a key role in successfully integrating Monroe City High School. Think, “Remember the Panthers.” Howard Pruitt says with noticeable pride that the 1969 Panther football team started multiple Blacks on defense, sometimes as many as nine, Pruitt being one. They spent that summer before his junior year preparing, did enough pushups to power a steam engine. They were ready. “We came within one game of playing for state.” The following year Pruitt was team’s captain and the school’s homecoming king.

"When Holy Rosary was still open," Pruitt recalls, "we had to walk past their school as we went from the south side to Washington school. Some of them would taunt us with slurs and insults. There were a group of brothers who were the leaders and one of them was my age. We were outnumbered so we just kept walking. When we got to high school Washington and Holy Rosary are both now closed and the first day of high school football practice, we are teammates. The first day we run the "Hamburger" drill and I make sure I am opposite him. We got things straight really quick."

The Hamburger drill is legendary amongst any male who played high school football in the 1950s, 1960 or 1970s. Sometimes also called the "Oklahoma" drill, it was simple and brutal. Two blocking dummies 15 feet or so apart, one blocker one tackler and a ball carrier. The battle was up front between the blocker and the tackler. No rules. Man on Man. Nowhere to hide. It was as macho as it got and often coaches would use it on the first day of the pre-season to measure toughness and shame those lacking it. 

"I wouldn't say after that day that all was forgotten, but we now knew we were teammates and eventually we became friends."

Still, Pruitt does not shy away from pointing out that such obvious discrimination was the root of Jim Crow and we Caucasian baby boomers, bless our pastoral soul, are quick to offer a tidy and reassuring narrative to distance the pure evil of Jim Crow. It's a tale that reflects how we like to think of our current selves, as a society forever progressive if not yet perfect, and we conveniently conjure up ennobling roles for whites as well as blacks. It serves the purpose of validating our self-righteous indignation - but not much else. Pruitt says, such a spin ignores one undeniable fact - color it as we might, there will always be pain at the heart of the story of those who endured Jim Crow.  You learn to smile while your lip is bleeding. 

"No grave can hold this body down," said Jesse Jackson at the funeral of Jackie Robinson. "It belongs to the ages." Ed Talton is the son of a Washington graduate. His father, Cliff, became the first African American police officer in the town’s history. A decade ago, Ed became the first African American full time male teacher in the Monroe City school district. Five years before that he became the first elected school board member of color. Today Talton is the district’s high school principal. He has trailblazed a lot of paths. Talton tells Pruitt, Pruitt says, it is a worthy battle he is waging, fighting to keep the spirit of Washington alive, but also one that does not resonate with the offspring of those who never suffered the indignity of segregation. “They do not know what it was like to be forced to sit in the balcony at the movies or to not be allowed in certain parts of town after sunset,” Pruitt states. He remembers. So does Alice Smith.

Alice Jones Smith is a 1975 graduate of Monroe City High School. She attended the Washington School through the third grade. In 1966, Washington School was closed, and Smith was assigned for 4th grade to the previously all white Monroe City Elementary School.

The 1954 landmark Brown v. Topeka Board of Education US Supreme Court decision was not fully implemented in Monroe City until 1966, twelve years after the fact. In my research I found the only other school district in Missouri in 1966, besides Monroe City, that was still defying the federal law was Charleston, a small southeast Missouri town a rock's throw away from Mississippi.

Why did Monroe City hold out for so long? The high school accepted its first black students in 1956. The district had no choice. The Hannibal School District had in 1956 immediately implemented the federal law set forth by Brown v Board by closing its segregated all-black Douglas High School, to where Monroe City had for a decade bussed its Black high school aged students. So why did Monroe City keep Washington school open for Black elementary students for over a decade?

I heard from several whites in Monroe City that the district had given black families a choice and most wanted to keep Washington open and segregated. Ms. Smith was adamant and irritated in that this story is patently false and has been told for too long. "That is not true," she told me. "Maybe that makes some (whites) feel good today," she theorizes on what she sees as an attempt at historical revisionism. "We were never given a choice. We were told we had to go to Washington," recalls Smith.

Alice Smith

The School Board had its hand played for them, Smith says, pursuant to its black high school students when Douglas shut down. "There were not enough high school age students for Monroe to have its own high school, so they had to integrate (the high school) in '56. But with Washington, they made a conscious decision to keep the elementary black and white kids from sitting in class together. That is not something people in Monroe City like today to hear, but it is true."

After her graduation, Smith moved to Springfield, IL. She was hired by the State of Illinois in May 1976 as an entry level clerk typist. She retired in May 2012 as a department supervisor. Over the years she took as many classes and received as much advanced training as was made available to her, as she moved up the state bureaucratic ladder.

Harris, like her friends and classmates Pruitt and Smith also remembers the slights. “There was a restaurant in town that it was well known they did not serve blacks. Our parents were always on the outlook for trouble, didn’t want us causing any. 'Stay away from there,’ they would warn us. But you know how young people are.  A group of us in high school one day just went in a set down. We were told we would not be served but we said we are not leaving until you do. Finally, they did and that was the end of it. Crumbled that quickly.” By that time, the early 70’s, most to the town, Harris recalls, had accepted that the old ways were done. “The physical barriers may have fell,” she recalls, “but the social separation remained. In many ways, still does.”

Today, Pruitt is retired from the University of Missouri and has lived in Columbia, MO since 1979. He stays busy, as he approaches his 70th year, working three days a week as a life coach through the federal program Job Point. He is also the driving force behind the Washington School Alumni Association. “Too many have no idea that there ever was a Washington School. It is part of who we are. It needs to be remembered,” he says. The Alumni Association allows Pruitt to honor an institution he loved. "We need this," he says. 

This is what segregation looked like, Pruitt says. “A part of me is sad to see it. I think about our people born after segregation ended and how the things, they take for granted, and I get upset, because I never want to forget what our people went through. It's sad, but lifts me up in determination to keep working, keep asking and keep recording."

To borrow from the teachings of racial activist W. E. B. Du Bois, the memory of Washington School and its alum deserve, Pruitt says, "respect, redemption and recognition." Many were solid citizens who made Monroe City a thriving community, but they were born too soon to be appreciated.  

“Ed (Talton) knows his dad’s legacy, how he changed Monroe City for the better. But it came with a price. There are many good white people in Monroe City, people who have been friends my entire life, who do not want to be reminded of segregation. Who just want it to be forgotten and buried. But if we do that, then we also bury Washington school, and I cannot let that happen. Pretty or not, it is part of who we are today.”

Alice Smith at various times, due to her race, was denied a toilet, a hotel room, an education, a living, her very humanity. Smith says those who didn't suffer the indignity of Jim Crow, both black and white, just don't get it. "Even many of our younger blacks in Monroe City don't understand the deep symbolic hurt of Jim Crow that those of us who lived it still feel. We need to keep the memory of Washington School, the good and the bad, alive (because) we don’t ever want to go back there.”

Is it fair to expect today's younger black leaders, those who were not even born before 1954, to carry a torch for a memory that is seen by many whites as unnecessarily upsetting and destabilizing? Do the leaders of black society carry an unfair burden not placed on white leaders? Michael Jordan was intentionally non-political and many black leaders, Jim Brown one of the most vocal, criticized him as too greedy and lacking social responsibility. Why didn't he spend more time in the inner cities fighting for a better life for the people of color trapped there, spread some of his Nike largesse around? Maybe fair, maybe not, but I recall no one ever ripping into Larry Bird for not spending his hours away from basketball demonstrating against the poverty and disfunction in his native white Appalachia.

Monroe City recently commissioned the painting of a downtown outdoor mural. Pruitt says that a consistent criticism he heard from the town’s black community was that Washington school was not recognized. His response was if you want a seat at the table and one is not offered, then bring your own silverware and set it yourself. "A lot of people come to me with great ideas, but most of them don't follow through," he says. That is not Pruitt. He vows to never lose his passion, “for making sure these men and women of Washington school receive their due." For Pruitt, this is a very personal mission.

Howard Pruitt is not afraid to voice his opinion. Outspoken men like Pruitt would be horribly naive to think everyone is going to agree with them. And if you voice that opinion with any degree of strength, your opposition will most often respond in kind.

Newsman Lester Holt had a line about politician and civil right activist John Lewis and how he attacked racism the way the great ones did, out of pure hate. I don't feel that Pruitt's obsession with the legacy of Washington school is powered with hate, but there is, I sense, quiet anger in him. His research is an act of integrity to sooth the anger. To think anything else would be as wrong as to assume he resents his hometown and his upbringing. He does not. I know because I asked him. If you want memories to last, he says, "you bring them out of the dark."

Emmitt Till

This town is absurdly misnamed.

Money, Mississippi is a dying place, a hamlet of poverty years past any concern about self-worth. Where we stand in Money should be an American shrine, a historical tourist must-see. But it is not.

I seek out non-descript locations that have momentous historical significance but are somehow relegated and folded into the small print of history, tucked away in the weeds of social neglect, unnoted and forgotten.  Money, MS is just such a place. We sanitize our well-known historical markers. The horror of the hand-to-hand combat on the fields at Shiloh, for example, is artificially softened by the immaculately gardened landscapes trampled by selfie snappers. It is different here. A raw evil resonates, absorbs and sticks to me. It makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up. I have never before had this unsettling sensation of repugnant awe.

Nearly every tentacle of the post-World War II Civil Rights movement somehow touches this tumbledown building we stand in front of. Made of cinder block, wood and brick, we are here today to peer through its broken glass windows in a search for understanding of a brutal and senseless murder. A short and fat just turned 14-year-old black kid from Chicago affectionately known to his family as “Bobo,” 68 years ago lost his life for a simple miscalculation he made in this building.  We stare directly into eyes of the ghosts of past evil, Mississippi style. Bobo to history is known as Emmett Till.

Like the crumbling exterior shells of its few still standing structures, Money is a community on life support. This is a town that by condoning evil has forever encapsulated its legacy in dishonor as much as if the town’s residents had collectively and actively participated in the horrific event itself.

1955

Antiphrasis is the use of a word or phrase in a way that is opposite of what it really means, like nicknaming a fat man “Tiny,” or naming this stricken town “Money” - the more humorous the stretch the better.  Antiphrasis is suitable for both sarcasm and irony. When something does not register, it surprises people, making them stop and think about what is really meant.  My wife, Shawna, and I have followed this morning a parallel route of back road asphalt along the old Illinois Central railroad tracks to a point about 90 minutes south of Memphis. This rotting structure once housed the Bryant Grocery and Meat Market where local cotton field workers, both white and black, could purchase the popular staples of the 1950’s: Lucky Strike Cigarettes, Moon Pies, lye soap and Goode’s headache powder were sold here. In its heyday four Coca-Cola signs adorned the outside front of the building, alongside benches for daytime loafers and checker players.

Emmitt Till was lynched because here where I gaze at the counter of what remains of the Bryant Grocery and Meat Market, he bought two cents worth of bubble gum and then wolf whistled at the 21-year-old white woman who had sold Till his snack. She clerked for the business owned by her and her 24-year-old husband. They lived in three rooms off the back of the store with their two small sons.

Till walked through these doors on August 24, 1955. He had been in Mississippi all of three days, visiting    a great uncle, Moses Wright, a cotton sharecropper and a part time preacher. In a few weeks he would return back to Chicago and enter the 9th grade. Till did not understand the ways of the 1955 Jim Crow South, the bone-numbing racism - an unending string of degradation: “keep your eyes down, your mouth shut and your pride in your pocket.” He would pay dearly for committing a Dixieland cultural taboo.

Today

Till had accompanied several of his cousins to Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market to buy some candy. According to accounts, Emmett allegedly whistled at Carolyn Bryant, the white woman who owned the store.

Maurie Wright, 16, Emmett’s cousin, told the United Press in a report published Sept. 1, 1955: “Emmett went into the store and asked for some bubble gum and left after telling the women ‘Goodbye.’ Outside, Emmett gave a ‘wolf call.’ I told Emmett to be careful of what he said in the store.”

On Aug. 28, 1955, Carolyn Bryant’s husband, Roy, and his half-brother, J.W. Milam, paid a middle of the night visit to Emmett’s great-uncle’s home and demanded the boy. Neither local man made any attempt to conceal their identity. Milam had in his possession a five-cell flashlight and a Colt 45 handgun.

“Moses pleaded with the men to leave Emmett alone,” according to an online story in 2007 posted by PBS. "He's only 14, he’s from up North. Why not give the boy a whipping, and leave it at that?’” His wife, Elizabeth Wright, “offered money to the intruders, but they ordered her to go back to bed.”

Emmett’s uncle “led the men throughout his home with flashlights until they found Emmett in a bed, sleeping,” according to the PBS report. “They woke him up and told him to get dressed.”

Four days later, Emmett Till, Jr.’s nude body was pulled from the slime green waters of the Tallahatchie River, 12 miles upstream from Money at Pecan Point.

Emmett Till

Not only had Till been murdered, but he had also been forced to undress, had the side of his face caved in by the blunt end of an axe, then was shot twice in the back of the head with a Colt 45. His lifeless body was bound to a 75-pound cotton gin wheel with barbed wire and tossed into the river. The lesson taught Till in southern chivalry was a harsh one.

The murder of Emmett Till has not historically registered with the nation’s concessions and sense of guilt like other more well-known civil rights clashes. Within the Mississippi and Alabama Delta cotton regions, it is probable not even in the top 10. The March on Selma, Bloody Sunday, the bombing of the Birmingham church and the three little girls who died, the attack dogs of Sherriff Bull Conner, the murder of the Freedom Riders in Philadelphia, MS, the Scottsboro Boys, James Meredith and Ole Miss, the Birmingham Bus Boycott, Rosa Parks and Governor George Wallace blocking the schoolhouse door; all Mississippi Delta region events recorded in the nation’s archives ahead of the murder of Emmett Till. But, due to a heroic and brave decision by Till’s mother, no event more galvanized the noble cause of equality in mainstream white America like the murder of this 14-year-old boy. It was the key turning point in shifting the tide of the nation’s view of civil rights from denial to outrage.

When Mamie Elizabeth Till-Mobley heard the news that her only child had been murdered, she insisted that authorities send his body home to Chicago. When she went to the train station to see the body of her son, she collapsed. “Lord, take my soul,” she cried. Emmett Till’s body was bloated beyond recognition. His teeth were missing. His ear was severed. His eyes were hanging out.

Unexpectedly, Till-Mobley demanded an open casket at his funeral. “I want the world to see what they did to my boy,” she explained. More than 50,000 people filed through a south side Chicago church to view the corpse. “Negro Boy Was Killed for ‘Wolf Whistle,’” a headline in Jet Magazine read. When the magazine printed photos of Emmett’s mangled corpse, it created national outrage, shocking America across color lines. Till’s death became a rallying cry for the movement like no atrocity before. And it was simply because a mother made the heart wrenching decision to open a casket so the world, “can see what they did to my son.”  

The Accused and Wives

The grotesque image of the mutilated boy was a light in the dark to a nation in denial of the horrors of the racism of the day, then, now and for all time. The world had no choice but to take notice, could not ignore the rawness of the image and to recoil in collective outrage. It was a singular symbolic gesture that exploded and dwarfed previous years of less graphic mundane protests expressed in damnation of Jim Crow. A grieving nation asked how could any man think it was ok to do this to a 14-year-old boy who, maybe, made a passing kid-like come on to a woman?  

Till’s mother had been born and raised in rural Mississippi, moving to Chicago as a teenager in search of life away from the boiling toil in the sun of a Mississippi cotton field. Emmett was born in 1941, her only child with a local small time crook named Emmett Till. The senior Till joined the Army in 1943 and was sent to Europe. In 1945, he was court-martialed for the rape of a young German girl. The military hung him. Emmett Till, Sr. was buried and his remains today are still interred in Germany. Till, Jr. had no memories of his father.

Till-Mobley warned her son that Mississippi was a land dominated by the type of racism he had never experienced in his all-black Chicago south side neighborhood. She admonished him to obey his relatives.

“She told him ‘to be very careful … to humble himself to the extent of getting down on his knees,“  the media in 1955 was told by a relative. “Living in Chicago,” his mother testified at the trial of his murderers, "he didn’t know.”

Bryant and Milam were charged with murder and brought to trial on Sept. 19, 1955, in the county seat of Sumner, Mississippi.

Trial Jury - Not Guilty

After five lackluster days of prosecution and a wink to the jury by the defense, Bryant and Milam were acquitted by an all-white, all-male jury. The jury later reported they had taken about five minutes to agree on a unanimous not guilty verdict and then for appearance-sake spent about an hour discussing the weather and the upcoming World Series. One juror told the Jackson Chronicle, “We have to live here.” Today, their relatives have to live with the stigma of their infamous vote. The acquittal shocked the world.

Bryant and Miller, after their trial and with double jeopardy protection from any future prosecution, sold their stories to Look Magazine.  In its January 24, 1956, Look published their confessions.

In the magazine story, titled ‘The Shocking Story of Approved Killing in Mississippi,’  “the men detailed how they beat Till with a gun, shot him and threw his body in the Tallahatchie River with a heavy cotton-gin fan attached with barbed wire to his neck to weigh him down,” according to the website of the History Channel. “The two killers were paid a reported $4,000 for their participation in the article.”

Nearly 70 years later, the woman in the center of the controversy, now known as Carolyn Donham, revealed she lied about her interaction with Emmett. Timothy B. Tyson, a professor at Duke University who published the book “The Blood of Emmett Till” in 2017, wrote that in an interview, Donham told him that the boy did not make a sexual advance toward her. Her statement perjured her testimony decades before, when she told a grand jury looking to indict her husband and brother-in-law for the capital offense of murder, that Emmett had grabbed her waist and said crude things to her. She had made the charge, she now claimed, to appease her husband, who she said had abused her throughout their dysfunctional marriage.

Peering in the back Window

In 2004, the Justice Department reopened the case. In 2005, Emmett’s body was exhumed by the FBI and an autopsy was performed. But a grand jury decided not to seek indictments. No one was ever convicted in Emmett Till’s slaying.

“You’re looking at Mississippi. I guess it’s about the same way it was 50 years ago,” Emmett’s cousin Simeon Wright told the Associated Press in 2007. “We had overwhelming evidence, and they came back with the same decision. Some of the people haven’t changed from 50 years ago. Same attitude. The evidence speaks for itself. I don’t know how many years I have left on this Earth. We can leave this world and say: ‘Hey, we tried. We tried to get some justice in this, and we failed.’”

Hiawatha Crow: Kindness and Flint

Hiawatha Crow was a well-known and respected African American teacher and political influencer when she passed away in April 1999 at the age of 91, of that there is no doubt. Yet in a sadder but more significant bent, she was just a survivor - her life a quiet but inspiring portrayal of a grassroots racial struggle - a woman of stamina and strong will who simply stayed on her feet while others fell.  

Hiawatha Crow

Her friend and colleague, Dorothy Kemp, said Hiawatha once vowed to her, in a voice equal parts pride and simmering anger, that she would in due time teach white students. The time was coming. At age 58 when she finally stood in front of - and in charge of - an integrated classroom, it should have been an” I got my cake and can eat it, too!” situation, but it wasn’t. Her transition to integrated education was far from seamless. In small towns in 1965 America, skin color still mattered. As all black Missouri citizens did in the Jim Crow era, Hiawatha learned race relations in America looking from the bottom up. 

When she was young and sharp and her classroom delivery was as fluid as any found over across town at the white’s only school, she knew all about the Jim Crow era Caucasian-only clause of the day. It is why she labored for half the salary of what less talented but skin color appropriate for the time teachers made. In 1954 the US Supreme Court ruled racially segregated schools to be unconstitutional. But the locals claimed the right to maintain control and she returned to her “colored only” classroom for nearly another decade. Those who knew her best heard her complaints, but she never made a scene. She never shortchanged her students. She valued education over activism.

They say she resisted less when she finally got in the front door of the white school, more of a team player. Or maybe she stayed the same and just bridled her resentment. We will never know, doubtful now, if the subtle layers and often cryptic shrouded roles of her impacting life will ever become clear. She never had children of her own.

Hiawatha Crow was the principal and taught the 7th and 8th grades at Monroe City, MO’s Washington School from 1960-1965, a segregated school for black children. When in the spring of 1965 the small farming community finally closed Washington School, Crow was one of two black teachers absorbed into the newly integrated public district. She retired in 1974.  Later Mrs. Crow became nearby Hannibal, Missouri’s first and still to this day its only black City Council member. In all the varied and sporadic memories that former students, colleagues, and friends recall, they all can agree - she possessed the most delightful personality. The impression she made on three generations of students – white and black – is palatable across the years. Mrs. Crow loved poetry and she brought the classics and Black History to her classroom. With no legacy of their own, she drove the students at Washington school to create one. Many still are.

Hers was a life marked by extreme irony.  Her longtime friend Rhonda Hall says Crow’s life, “didn’t have to be this way, but it was just the way it was.” No single stroke of fate made Hiawatha Crow the trailblazer she was. She years ago, told Kemp it was okay not to worry about shadows or ghosts from the past. Every day was a new day, one day closer to a fairer world. And she also told her to learn patience: “It's going to take time.”

 Dorthy Kemp

In fact, it took a whole constellation of happenings to forge this woman who refused to take no for an answer, or to allow those children in her charge to have their dreams boxed in by their skin color. She was a force who changed lives. Crow was a loud martinet, first a public educator and then an elected politician, a veritable fanatic about fairness and decorum, but she was also a shy, reticent, and private lady when away from her professional duties. "Mrs. Crow was always a stickler for detail, the proper way," says Howard Pruitt, a former Washington School student of Crow’s. "To Mrs. Crow, the right way was the only way."

She is viewed more today, by the few who know of her as less a trendsetter than a forgotten fossil. But in the end, she was out there, overcoming her shy nature, by choice - honest, hardworking, creative - all bound together by her relentless energy. 

******  

She was born with an English teacher’s dream name, Hiawatha - straight from Central Casting; an Indian brave in a Henry W. Longfellow poem, “The Song of Hiawatha.”  For reasons unknown, throughout her life she answered to the pronunciation of "hee-awatha" not the standard hi-awatha.

Hiawatha Moore entered this world on July 19, 1907, in Columbia, Missouri. Her parents were Curtis Leon Moore and Rosie Elizabeth Johnson Moore.  Her father was a sometime Baptist minister. The family moved to the northeast Missouri town of Hannibal when Crow was an infant. Her parents divorced, then both died before Crow reached her teen years. She then went to live with her maternal grandparents. 

Hannibal was the only hometown Crow ever knew. It shaped who she was.

Faye Dant

Rhonda Hall is a well-established and respected historian/genealogist and lifelong resident of Hannibal. Her family has owned and operated the successful Brown and Sons Moving Company since 1909. A community fixture, it is the oldest Black owned business in Northeast Missouri, currently employing a 5th generation of Hall's extended family. "I know what it’s like," says the personable Hall, "to live as a minority in a small town. Over the years, we have established a good relationship in the community. You have to in the business we are in. But that doesn’t mean it was always easy." 

The 65-year-old Hall notes that her birthdate in the late 1950's landed her in the first generation in the black population of Hannibal not to go through a segregated school system. "When I entered school, the schools had just been integrated. I have a brother 20 years older than me that got all his schooling, until his last two years, when he attended Hannibal High School, at the segregated Douglas school. The black kids at the time did not want to switch schools and the whites didn’t want the blacks in their school, either. So, it was a tough time. He and I had totally different experiences, and thus we were given totally different opportunities."

Hall’s delivery is both passionate and demonstrative. She sits during a late summer afternoon in a Hannibal coffee shop discussing the life of Hiawatha Crow. For added emphasis to her thoughts, she taps the table with her right hand while her left punctuates her words with random and erratic stabs. A new acquaintance immediately knows where they stand with the outgoing, well researched and opinionated Hall. She responds multiple times to inquires of the past with a pragmatic summation of, “that is just the way it was.” 

“You should not even mention racial prejudice when you discuss her life,” she says of Mrs. Crow. “It takes away from who she was. She didn’t even recognize racism. To her, she saw no limitations as to what she could do.” 

Hall says that her late friend held a certain self-confidence that would not allow for self-pity. “When her husband passed away (in 1977), she had him buried in what was known as the black cemetery. Just the way it was done in this town. But that cemetery was not kept up as well as the white one, on the other side of town, and oh, that bothered Mrs. Crow (no end.) She had him dug up and reburied in the white cemetery. Cost her a lot of money to do that. But that was how Mrs. Crow looked at things. She didn’t see black and white. She saw one better than the other and she always went for the best, always.”

 Hall's appreciation for the life of Hiawatha Crow knows no bounds. As their relationship bloomed and despite their difference in age, Hall says she would in time defer to Crow – instinctually and without hesitation - as a wise and seasoned public servant. "Mrs. Crow was an activist," Hall states. "She was also my mentor. I trusted her and readily listened to her. I did not know her as a teacher, I knew her as a leading citizen of Hannibal. I have no first-hand information on her teaching experience in Monroe City, I will leave the comments on specifics to those who were there firsthand. But I will say in general that black teachers who entered the (just) integrated schools, did not have it easy. As with almost all professions that suddenly now had blacks in (integrated) positions of leadership and authority, such as teachers or policemen, they had the burden of being twice as good as their white (colleagues) just to show they belonged. That’s just the way it was."

Rhonda Hall

"Mrs. Crow," Hall emphasizes, "was somebody who got things done, in her own unique way. She always stressed that people need to learn to talk, to communicate. She did an (unmeasurable) amount of good for the citizens of this small town, both white and Black. She taught people how to talk to each other. She was a woman of high character and high moral standing. She always, in everything she did put God first and her community second. By the time I knew her, she was a widow, and she never had any children. This town became her family. She was immensely respected and left a solid legacy as a public servant."

"Hannibal was definitely a segregated community during her early life," states Faye Dant, director of The Jim’s Journey Museum. Located in Hannibal, the hometown of author Mark Twain, Dant heads this small but significant historical site with a tidy thought-provoking collection of photographs and newspaper articles. 

If you understand Twain’s Hannibal, you understand the town that shaped Hiawatha Crow. Dant’s museum has a mission statement that declares it is, “dedicated to commemorating the history of people of color in the city made famous by Mark Twain.”

Opened in 2013, the museum is upfront in promoting the important role its Black citizens played in the Hannibal story. Jim was a character invented by Twain. Local legend is that the character’s life is in part based on a real-life slave from Hannibal named Daniel Quarles. Dant emphasizes that Twain’s character Jim is a vital cog to understanding Twain’s writings and has huge historical significance. "It is the first African American character portrayed by a white person as a full-fledged human being, no longer a caricature, but a human, a husband and a father," says Dant. “It is also the story of how from the 19th to the 21st centuries, both African American slaves and free (Black) people lived in Hannibal and the surrounding area. It's also an example of Twain's deep connection with all peoples, lifestyles, and socioeconomic conditions of the day, which have garnered his writings so much international appeal.”

A quirky but horrifyingly tragic sidebar to the story of Quarles, documented in Dant’s museum, is that his son in law was a victim in the infamous Springfield, IL 1908 lynching. Furious that two black rape suspects had been removed from the city jail and snuck out of town to an unannounced safe location, a white mob invaded the city’s black neighborhood, known as the Badlands. In the middle of the night the mob randomly entered the house of 56-year-old barber Scott Burton, drug him out of his home and lynched him; his body mutilated as it hung from a tree.

******

After her parents’ death, Crow was raised by her maternal grandparents, Tom and Eliza Johnson. She noted later in life that her grandparents had unwavering faith in her. They always knew what she could do. They put pressure on her, but they would not allow her to shortchange herself. 

Mrs. Crow graduated from Hannibal’s colored Douglas High School in May 1925. Raised in Hannibal in the 1920’s, Crow would only have been allowed to in school read the 'safe' Black literature of the day. Uncle Tom's Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe, for example. Or Native Son, by Richard Wright. The more radical element of Black literature of the 1920’s, such as works by Marcus Garvey, would not have been part of the curriculum. The difficult but rewarding reading like the writings of W.E.B. Du Bois was surely off limits, as well.

Uncle Tom's Cabin must have been a haunting story for a young black girl like Hiawatha Crow, trying to fit into a mid-20th century American white society. It addresses racism posited as a daunting and formidable obstacle, all too easy to say, 'the hell with it.' The hero in Uncle Tom's Cabin had to go through life hat in hand, but ultimately, he survived, and succeeded. He was the embodiment of the “good colored.” It was a standard mid-20th century contemporary white society would encourage blacks to emulate.

"If in the south before Brown v Board, you're born black," said the late black newspaper executive Sam Lacy, "you knew when you wake up in the morning that the day ahead can't be any worse than the one before. So, you take a positive attitude from there. All blacks of the time developed a birthmark of optimism."

******

No one on either side of her family had gone to college and for two decades, neither did she. Crow married, twice, having been widowed at the age of 22, remarried at 24 and settled into the life of a domestic, taking over the next 20 years sporadic side and odd jobs. But she always knew college was part of God's plan and she left no doubt she would someday earn her degree. 

After World War II and after several years of substitute teaching in the Hannibal segregated Douglas schools, Crow attended Culver Stockton College in Canton, MO, an integrated institution of higher learning.  But she didn't merely “attend” Culver-Stockton, she went as a now middle-aged women with a passion. She told her friend Dorothy Kemp she would not allow this chance at change to slip away. She earned a bachelor’s degree from the small northeast Missouri school and later a master’s degree from Truman State University in Kirksville, MO, then known as Northeast Missouri Teachers College.

Howard Pruitt

Without the support of the small but fiercely proud Hannibal Black community, Crow told her long time Washington teaching partner, Dorothy Kemp, her uplifting life’s story would've been impossible. Kemp wrote an autobiography, published in 1995, titled “Lingering Impressions.” The prose was clear and direct. There was never any hesitancy as Kemp tackled such issues as church values, education, and racism. Kemp’s book is a valuable resource when attempting to dig through the multiple layers of Crow’s life.

Mrs. Crow and Mrs. Kemp, two dignified professional women, each with a Dustbowl-dry sense of humor, were inseparable. For five years, between 1955 and 1960, they carpooled the 20-mile drive to Washington School from Hannibal each day and together two evenings a week for several years made the three hours round trip to attend graduate level classes at Northeast Missouri Teachers College. Each eventually earned master’s degrees, Crow’s in School Administration. When Kemp was not offered a position with the Monroe City school district after the closing of Washington School, she secured employment with the Hannibal Public Schools. The two remained friends for the rest of their lives.

Howard Pruitt went to school at Washington, completing grades one through six before Monroe City ended school segregation in the fall of 1965 and Pruitt entered the seventh grade, “over at the white school.” Mrs. Crow went along. “She was one of only two teachers from Washington that was retained,” Pruitt recalls. Pruitt grew up in the 1960’s as a typical small-town kid, with an enthusiasm for school, a hearty respect for authority, and a deep interest in athletics. He was the kind of eager young mind Crow loved to mold. Pruitt appreciated and respected her immensely. Still does.

Pruitt remembers, “Mrs. Crow was strong on etiquette - chew your food 26 times before swallowing, setup straight, walk like you have somewhere to be. She was very professional in her approach to any situation. She was a strong disciplinarian. Everyone liked and admired her. Mrs. Crow was a force to be reckoned with,” Pruitt says. “She was a problem solver willing to go toe to toe with the superintendent about the needs of the (Washington) students."

Mrs. Kemp states in “Lingering Impressions” that hot lunches were being served at the white school while Washington School students carried cold lunches from home. Pruitt picks up the story. "Mrs. Crow negotiated with the superintendent until hot lunches were delivered and a cook was hired to serve and clean up. She also got the heating system first repaired and then replaced. I remember those radiators. We all would crowd around trying to get unthawed from that long cold walk to Washington School. Mrs. Kemp and Mrs. Crow drove from Hannibal each day. When researching old Board of Education Meeting minutes, I found a (notation) that both had been docked when they missed school at Washington due to bad weather.”  

“Mrs. Crow taught fifth and sixth grades at the white school, when she first went over, so I never had her as a teacher after we went over to Monroe,” Pruitt recalls. “But I would see her in the hallway, and she would always ask how I was doing.” 

Pruitt has no insight to give as to why Mrs. Crow was one of only two Washington teachers to be retained in 1965 by the Monroe City District. No idea why she was chosen, or the process deployed by the school board of the time that gave a Black teacher control of a classroom full of mostly white students. “Being young, we never thought about that stuff,” reminisces the now 71-year-old Pruitt. “But it would be interesting to know. Mrs. Crow had a way about her that just brought respect. I know when she got over to Monroe school, the students didn’t always show her the respect we did at Washington.” 

In the fall of 1965, Hiawatha Crow finally had her integrated classroom. She was 58 years old - an alert, erect, carefully groomed individual who was austere and dignified – and her white students threw spit balls at her. 

Was it because she was older? Was it because she was saddled as Black teacher at a place in time when most white students and their white parents were not going to support her strict discipline like the parents at Washington did? “I don’t have that answer,” Pruitt admits.

At Washington, the paddle was used often, “and she would get you with it, but you always knew you earned it,” says Pruitt. “She didn’t paddle often; she didn’t need to. I remember once she was teaching, and she saw a student chewing gum. She never missed a word in her lecture to the class, just picked up a tissue from her desk and walked over to the student, held out the tissue and he spit the gum in it. Never said a word. Never interrupted the class but she maintained control. She was always in control of her class and of her demeanor. As I look back today, that is a great example of what a fine teacher she was and how we all respected her.”

Pearl Mayfield Harris did her first four grades of schooling at Washington and then moved over to Monroe City elementary when Washington closed. Mrs. Crow went with her.

“I never had her as a teacher at Washington,” Harris says. “But when I got to seventh and eighth grade, she was our English teacher at the Monroe City Junior High. As I look back if I had to come up with one word to describe Mrs. Crow, it would be poised. At Washington, when I didn’t have her as a teacher, I would see her in the hallways and even as a young girl, I looked up to her for the way she carried herself, for the way she dressed. She always wore heels. She always wore very beautiful hats. She always dressed professionally, and she showed us what pride was. She was always in control. She was a great role model for a young Black girl at a time in my life where I didn’t have many.”

Debbie Swanegan

Harris, the oldest girl in a family of ten, confirms that the respect Crow had earned at Washington did not follow her to the integrated Monroe City school. “She didn’t get the respect like she did at Washington. To be honest, as I look back, I think a lot of it had to do with race. It was just a different time in Monroe City. My first job was when I was 14 years old, and I went to work at the Deluxe Restaurant, washing dishes in the kitchen. My mom was a cook there. It was a very popular eating establishment at the intersection of Highway 24 and 36. The building still stands today. Blacks had to enter through the back door. That was the kind of treatment that Mrs. Crow walked into when she began teaching the white kids. You think white junior high kids are going to respect a Black teacher and accept discipline when the culture they have been raised in says that teacher needs to come in the back door? As I look back now, I have a much deeper understanding of the circumstances and the challenges she faced than I did as a teenager.”

“When I was in eighth grade,” Harris says, “I started to lose my way. I was headed for trouble.” That year at Christmas, Crow made a small gesture that Harris says today was life changing. “I didn’t think at the time that she liked me, and I wouldn’t have blamed her,” Harris says. “But Mrs. Crow gave me a present. I don’t even remember what it was, I just remember that it made me feel so special. She told me that she saw something special in me, and she wanted me to see the same in myself. It really got my attention, touched something in me and I started to try again. That’s a great teacher.”

Bonnie McNeill was a white student of Mrs. Crow’s. McNeill graduated from Monroe City High School in 1975. Crow taught her English in the 7th and 8th grade. She recalls today, “We sure tried her patience. She was a good teacher, but we weren't exactly model citizens. Ashamed of that now! Our class should have been grounded for life for being brats. Several of us got a shoe whack to the bottom but we deserved a lot worse.”

“I remember her English class,” McNeil says. “I guess that would have been the school year of 1970-71. And I didn't dislike her, but it didn't stop me from laughing when others did ornery things. I think now how brave she was to keep coming back day after day to us brats. I remember one day, one of the boys brought plastic dog poop to class and of course we all thought that was hilarious.  She quietly took that poop from him and cut it into tiny pieces right in front of him. Well deserved! He never said a word.”

“When I heard she was participating in Hannibal politics.” McNeill continued, “I was impressed she had the determination to do that. As a teacher of adults during my career, my respect for her grew because she never caved to us. She was fair, and still taught us what we needed to know. I wish I had known her as an adult, it still bothers me I never apologized to her for the way our class acted.”

Pearl Mayfield Harris says that an event from over 50 years ago still haunts her memory. “Mrs. Crow wore some beautiful hats, one to school every day. It was a part of the (elegant) way she carried herself. Once, a group of boys took her hat out of her classroom and flushed it in the toilet. I can still see Mrs. Crow walking through the study hall carrying her soaking wet hat and all the students were laughing. I can still see her walking with her head up and showing no reaction, dignified as always. Thinking of it today makes me very sad.”

 ******

Hiawatha married Lester Gates in June 1930. He passed away in 1932, during the height of the Great Depression. She then married James H. Crow in November 1933. Her second husband was an employee of the Hannibal Cement Co. Mr. Crow was a deacon in their Baptist church. He died in 1977. Hiawatha would live after James’ death another 22 years. She needed to reinvent herself, give her life one final purposeful chapter.

Once again, a widow and now retired from the Monroe City schools, Crow dove into politics. In 1983, Crow ran for the Hannibal City Council. She edged out incumbent Rodger Howell by a 24-vote margin to become the city's third female and first black City Council member. She was re-elected in 1987.  

"I think she absolutely knew how meaningful it was to the black community to have someone who looked like them on the City Council," Faye Dant said. "She probably didn't think she would be the last Black person to be on the City Council. She was doing something that was a brand-new thing. She was one of the most visible women of her time; she knew how to get things done, and I think she really felt like it was up to her to look out for the Black community. She was a proud, self-driven woman, who knew her rights and knew the rights of others."

Faye Dant is a fifth generation Missourian. She returned to her hometown of Hannibal 15 years ago. Her great-great grandparents were brought from Virginia as slaves.

After her graduation from Hannibal high school, Dant’s early adult years path took her first to the Detroit area where she earned a bachelor’s degree from Oakland University, and then to Ann Arbor, Michigan, where she acquired a graduate degree in human resources. She and her husband returned 15 years ago and took up residency on a 60-acre family farm south of Hannibal. Her husband was the Athletic Director at Culver Stockton College in nearby Canton, the alma mater of Hiawatha Crow. Today, they live in semi-retirement and lease out their farmland 

“When I was little,” Dant shares, “I remember going to church with Mrs. Crow. That is the only first-hand knowledge I have of her.” Crow died a decade before Dant returned to Hannibal. “But after I returned here and began researching the Hannibal Black community,” Dant states, “I learned much about her as a driving force in the city. She was very well respected. Her behavior and her motives were always above reproach. She was very active in her church, the Eighth Street and Center Missionary Baptist Church. Today it is listed on the National Historical Register, and she was the driving force behind that honor.”

“When she retired from her teaching career over in Monroe City,” Dant continued, “Mrs. Crow got very much into community improvement here in Hannibal. Especially for the Black community. I grew up here, and I can say from experience that was not an easy task she took on. The Black community here has never been a large number, and she defeated a white incumbent council member and then won reelection before she voluntarily retired after two terms. She was only the third women to sit on the council and the first, and still only black member to serve.”

“I distinctly recall when the (Hannibal) schools were finally totally integrated in 1959,” says Dant. “And I was going into the fourth grade, 200 white kids stayed home from school the first week to protest the fact that we (Black students) were there. It was not easy. A lot of those types of prejudice run deep and they’re still here today. They’re not as open but they’re still here. This is not always a comfortable place for Black citizens, especially when you are a definite minority. But Mrs. Crow was a builder of alliances. She knew how to work across the racial lines and in due time she became very respected by both whites and Blacks.”

Deb Swanegan is today retired from teaching art at Hannibal High School. She resides in Columbia, MO. She did not meet Mrs. Crow until 1983, but immediately felt a connection to a woman who became not only a mentor to her, but also to Swanegan’s daughter., LeeAnn.  

“I grew up as an Air Force brat, living all over the world,” Swanegan shares. “So, I was used to moving and when over the years I moved due to my husband’s job, I could handle it. In 1983 I was 42 years old, and I came to Hannibal, and I was hired at the high school as an art teacher.”

Mrs. Swanegan says she was forthright when she hit town. “I made a lot of people uncomfortable because of my race (African American). Hannibal High School had few teachers of color, over the years.” But the new teacher found a soul mate of like life experiences in Crow. “I latched on to Mrs. Crow as a mentor. When she went to teach at an integrated school (in 1965), her role was like what I experienced (18) years later at Hannibal. I leaned on her, and I depended on her. We discussed what she had gone through, and I learned from her patience and grace. She had many fine (traits), but those two she said helped her stay on task, to keep working.”

Swanegan says she came to appreciate the balance that Crow had found in her life. “She was a very determined woman, but she also had a soft spot in her heart, and I think we connected because of that. I learned from her that the Black students in Hannibal in 1983 needed to see a Black face as a teacher just like her students did when she taught at the Washington School, 20 years earlier. But I also learned from her that it was important that my white students also saw that Black people could be successful in positions of leadership, such as a teacher.”

Mrs. Crow would in time also become a mentor to Swanegan’s daughter. “Mrs. Crow helped LeeAnn with academics, but she also became a role model to her. I always felt there was an inference, even if in subtle ways - the Black kids (in Hannibal) were told from an early age that they had limits. They were not encouraged to strive for professional (career paths). But Mrs. Crow never recognized limits. Not due to her race and not because she was a female. Mrs. Crow helped my daughter see that it’s important that you work for the things you want in life, but you also need to know that your hard work will pay off.  Today LeeAnn has both a medical degree and a PhD and is a very well-respected person of intellect. She works for the National Institute of Health. Mrs. Crow helped show her the way.”

In Mrs. Crow’s declining years Swanegan shares that she helped check on Crow’s wellbeing. “She really didn’t have any family. She was an only child, and she had no children. There was a niece from her husband side, but there was little contact that we knew off.”  

Swanegan says that Crow left this world like she walked it for nearly 92 years – with her pride and dignity always intact. “She never lost her desire to help other people and I think that kept her alive. But Mrs. Crow watched all that was important to her slowly die away. As her teaching friends started to pass, and the church congregation got older and older, and (they) did not replace its (deceased) members with new members, she became more and more isolated and, in many ways, it was depressing for her. But she was such a proud woman. And a strong woman. She lived alone in her little house till the day she died. She would’ve never considered going into a nursing home. That’s just the way she was. She was a survivor, and she was a great woman. We can all learn from how she lived her life.”

******

So, how should history remember Hiawatha Crow’s life’s work?  Did her willingness to work across lines cross over into appeasement of the racism of the times? “That is always a hard one to answer,” responds the introspective Dant.

Howard Pruitt, who has made keeping the memory of Washington School alive his life calling, says Crow was able to get for Washington School almost anything she wanted from the white town establishment that ran the local public schools, such as a hot lunch program that matched what the kids at the white school received. She did her power broking quietly and behind the scenes. It was her way.

Hiwatha Crow was raised and lived her adult years when skin color was the plague of the country, where racial segregation was the law, and, more or less, the invidious answer to all things social. Resistance was not well tolerated by the white power structure. “Uppity” was a dismissive term used by white society of Blacks who did stay in their lane. “But we dealt with it back then,” Rhonda Hall says. “But sometimes you have to do what you must do to get things done and there is not debate on Mrs. Crow’s ability to get things done.”

Crow, as in Jim Crow, would seem to be an inapt name for a woman who could have lived, if she chose so, in the bitter shadow of the evils of segregation. But Hiwatha Crow wasn't consumed by resentment and for certain was not bitter. Just the opposite. She took the good and left the bad. "If things are handed to you, you get lazy," she told her students. Her family, her life, had prepared her to refuse to be discouraged or frightened. She was at once sweet-tempered and strict, “kindness and flint,” which seems a fair basis on which to appreciate the impacting life of Hiawatha Crow.

“What I will always remember about Mrs. Crow,” says Pruitt, “is that white people liked her, and Black people liked her. I never thought of her in any way but with respect.” Pruitt says she had the ability to rise above some unfair circumstances that could have derailed her and define her. “But Mrs. Crow just would not let hard times or unfair treatment stop her from teaching us. It was very important to her; it was her life’s work.” Pruitt notes that Hiawatha Crow transcended the racism of the day. “Because usually you either line up on one side or the other, white, or black. But she drew on both sides. That was her essence. That was her greatness."