You Learn to Smile While Your Lip is Bleeding

 

Every student at Monroe City, MO High School should know the story of Washington School.

Until the fall of 1965, Howard Pruitt attended the Washington School for Monroe City “Colored” children. “I started school at Washington in 1958 and went through the 6th grade. Then I moved over to the White school.” 

Washington School

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.

Pruitt, Class of 1971, would in his senior year Captain the integrated Monroe City football team. Today, he 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. 

Washington School 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. "A lot of good people back then didn't question Jim Crow." 

And a lot of good people today do not want to be reminded. 

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, MC 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.

Howard Pruitt

What a story of a man who teed it up during a difficult era, against odds that few of us can ever know! I am sure he endured painful slights I can only imagine. But, more than most of us, he cherished the nation, his nation, that in his youth so dishonored him. Yet in the end he chose a life to serve America. 

I taught in Monroe City for five years and never heard the story of Donald Scott.

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)."

Donald Scott

Still there were some social taboos in small town 1970 America that were steadfast, contact limits that were not to be traversed. "So, we didn’t push things," says Pruitt. "When I was captain of the football team, it was a tradition at homecoming that the captain, when the homecoming queen was announced at halftime, he would give her a kiss. I just gave her a hug.”

Like in many small towns in the 1960’s, athletics played a key role in successfully integrating Monroe City High School. Pruitt says with noticeable pride that the 1969 Panther football team started multiple Blacks on defense, sometimes as many as nine. They spent the summer before their senior year preparing, did enough pushups to power a steam engine. They were ready. “We came within one game of playing for state.”

Once Black athletes were allowed to compete on the same playing field, Jim Crow was doomed. The 1957 Little Rock, AR Central football team was still an all-White squad and the pride of the White segregated community. In the throes of a 35-game winning streak that spanned parts of four seasons, the Tigers finished the 1957 season with a 12-0 record. Little Rock Central was named by the Sporting News as the best high school football team in the nation. They outscored their opponents by a whopping 444-64 margin. 

But the winds of change were now blowing - destined to soon reach gale force levels. Legendary Little Rock Central coach Wilson Matthews was gruff and crude, but also perceptive and pragmatic; he had glimpsed the future. Soon, he'd told his all-White team, "There'll be Black boys here so tall they can stand flat-footed and piss in a wagon bed, and you White boys won't even be team managers."

Within five years of the desegregation of Little Rock Central High School, the football team was by majority Black.

The names of the diverse Panther stars of the hardwood today are Talton, White, Robertson, Countrymen, Holland, and Campbell. Thirty years ago, in my day, they were named Jackson, Minter, Talton, Holland, Robinson, White, Washington, Stark and Holiday. Would it not seem logical that there were others before them, Monroe City young men of color who could run just as fast and jump just as high, but were never allowed to play based on the color of their skin? 

“I am sure there were,” says Pruitt, “but we will never know their names. I bet there were some pretty fierce tackle football games during recess at Washington school.”

But that 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 them still pulsates through the heart and in the blood of now aging alums like Howard Pruitt. 

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.

For it 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. 

It is good a generous man such as Mr. Pruitt is able to keep the burning spirit of Washington School alive. He is of a generation of our African American neighbors who had the bad luck to be born too soon and, therefore, in many ways, Washington School has faded away, largely unappreciated. It doesn't have to be that way. We all share in the blame that it is.