Hiawatha Crow

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."