While visiting her public library as a child during the Great Depression, Dorothy might have seen Federal Art Project posters such as this one encouraging children to join the “Vacation Reading Club.”
Dorothy’s parents placed a high value on education, and their daughter became passionate about reading and learning. She remembers, “I used to run, not walk, down High Street hill to get to Classical Junior and Classical Senior, where I went to school, and I, I loved to enter the library. I went down to the main library, and I was always so glad when I got out of the children’s division and could go upstairs and could get to the big folk’s books.” Dorothy remained in school for most of her life, first as an avid student, and then as a devoted teacher. She believes that, as a teacher, “…you don’t teach anybody what you know. You teach people who you are and where you’ve been.”
Former Kentucky slave Sarah Graves was photographed at the time she was interviewed for the WPA Federal Writers’ Project, a New Deal program which supported the work of writers during the Depression.
Dorothy’s mother was intensely supportive of her daughter’s educational pursuits because, as Dorothy believes, “I was the…the recipient of my mother’s dreams that, that had been dashed.” Dorothy’s mother had been prevented from entering high school by her Aunt Jane. Great Aunt Jane, Dorothy explains, was a former a slave who had been given her freedom as a wedding present. Aunt Jane “was so grateful to be free, she didn’t think that education – higher education – had anything to do with what you did as a black person.” Instead, she arranged for her niece to work in a laundry. Faced with the pressures of survival, it is perhaps understandable that many former slaves found little room for education. Sarah Allen, who was interviewed in Texas for the WPA Federal Writers’ project, recalls:
I was birthed in time of bondage. You know, some people are ashamed to tell it, but I thank God I was ‘llowed to see them times as well as now….I think I was about twelve when dey freed us and we stayed with marster ‘bout a year, then went to John Ecole’ place and rented some lan’. We made two bales of cotton and it was the first money we ever saw….De worst thing, we didn’ never have no schoolin’ till after I married. Den I went to school two weeks. My husban’ was a teacher. He never was a slave.
Another former slave, Sarah Graves, told her interviewer, “When we was freed all the money my mama had was 50 cents. I never went to school till after I was freed. I went two winters and a little more to school near Burlington Junction. I never went a full term cause I had to work….I have lived in this place ever since I was married…We first bought 40 acres for $10.00, then two years later we bought the back 80 acres for $15.00. Things is changed. We workin’ for ourselves now an’ what we get is our’n, an’ no more whippin’s. I worked in the fields and helped pay for this land.”
Jubilee Hall was one of the first buildings erected on the Nashville, Tennessee, campus of Fisk University.
Dorothy’s hard work in high school paid off. “I got a chance…when I graduated from high school, Dr. DeBerry saw to it that I got a small scholarship to go to Fisk. And…I didn’t have any money. I was top of my class, but there wasn’t any money. But I had…encouragement from my parents, particularly from my mama, and help from Dr. DeBerry, …the senior minister.” Dorothy studied diligently at Fisk University, and was at the top of her class by the end of her first semester. Fisk University has an important place in the history of American higher education. Founded just a few months following the Civil War, it played a role in the larger post-war initiative to ensure that former slaves (freedmen) had access to education. Fisk became a normal school dedicated to training teachers. W.E.B. Du Bois, who was himself a Fisk University graduate, believes that the most important work done during post-Civil-War reconstruction was in the arena of education:
The greatest success of the Freedmen’s Bureau lay in the planting of the free school among Negroes, and the idea of free elementary education among all classes in the South…. The opposition to Negro education in the South was at first bitter, and showed itself in ashes, insult, and blood; for the South believed an educated Negro to be a dangerous Negro. And the South was not wholly wrong; for education among all kinds of men always has had, and always will have, an element of danger and revolution, of dissatisfaction and discontent. Nevertheless, men strive to know…. Fisk, Atlanta, Howard, and Hampton were founded in these days, and six million dollars were expended for educational work, seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars of which the freedmen themselves gave of their poverty.