An Eternal Flame

 

1969 MC Football

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

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."