This photograph of a one-teacher [African American] schoolhouse in Newberry County, South Carolina was taken in 1941.
While Dorothy attended desegregated schools in Springfield, Mass., school segregation remained legal in the South. When it came to education, southern black children received less than white children. They were crowded into substandard buildings, had access to fewer books and were taught by teachers who had not received the same caliber of training as those who taught white children. In contrast, by 1855 Massachusetts had become the first state in the nation to pass a law prohibiting school segregation. Dorothy remembers attending, “Classical High School, which was about number three in the nation on college prep…. I had marvelous teachers. I had a marvelous education.” This is not to say that discrimination was absent from Dorothy’s educational life:
I had all…the mental equipment and…and the support from my teachers, so that, you know, I did well. I was, in my class, top…top of my class. And it was interesting….apparently there was one female teacher, whose name I don’t really recall, who couldn’t believe that this black child, African-American, Negro – whatever they were calling me – could be that smart. She said, wait’ll she gets in my class. Well guess what? There were a couple of male, white teachers – well there weren’t any black teachers, anyway – …who used to be sure, at the beginning of the school year, that I was never in any of her classes. So when I graduated top of my class, there it was. It was interesting. You get angels all the most unexpected places. And I…one of the things I know about my life is that I’ve been blessed by angels in various and sundry places….I was blessed. I had good parents, I had good friends, I had good teachers, and the good Lord gave me a brain and I was able to use it.
In 1961, twenty years after Dorothy Pryor graduated at the top of her class from Classical High School in Springfield, Mass., and seven years after the United States Supreme Court had decided that “separate but equal” in education was just not possible, Time magazine reported that things had changed little in the South. In an article titled, “Dying Resistance,” Time reported that, “So far, only token compliance with the school desegregation law prevails. In the public schools of Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi and South Carolina, integration is nonexistent. In Louisiana, it consists of four little Negro girls in two New Orleans schools.”1
1“Education: The Education of the South,” Time, April 7, 1961. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,874325,00.html retrieved November 27, 2009.
During the late 1930s, the socially mandated segregation to be found in the North was more ambiguous and thus, in some ways, harder to navigate than the system of legal segregation in the South. This poster, made for the City of New York by the WPA Art Project, advertises a “Learn to Swim” campaign. Despite the confusing combination of light and dark skin tones on the central diving figure, the image as a whole suggests that the Department of Parks maintains separate swimming pools for black people and white people.
Dorothy experienced a combination of spoken and unspoken discrimination in Springfield, Massachusetts. As she expresses it, “you knew where you weren’t welcome, and so you didn’t go, you know? …they might not even have let you in. But I didn’t have the money anyway.” On the other hand, she believes that she had freedoms in the North that she would not have had in the South. She asserts, “I wasn’t aware as much of…much discrimination in the north, because, you know, we could go to…to the Arcade Theater that was on State Street for, for fifteen cents.” As a Fisk student, she observed that discrimination was much more formalized in Nashville, Tennessee. At Woolworth’s, one of a national chain of discount stores, “there were…two…water fountains…one said ‘White only’ and the other said, ‘Colored’ and it was off to the side somewhere.” She also experienced segregation on public transportation: “you were supposed to ride in the back of the bus if you got on one of the buses or street car[s].” But the times were changing, and Dorothy also observed how some people her age, both black and white, challenged legal segregation in the South. She remembers that at Woolworth’s her “girlfriend carefully peeled off her gloves, and took a drink from the white fountain and when someone looked at her, she said, ‘I don’t like colored water.’” and that, “there were white students from Vanderbilt University… who didn’t believe in the segregation, either. And they would get on with cans of…black paint and paint…over the sign that said for colored only and they would get off before…the trolley car driver understood what was going on.”
World War II united Americans across races and walks of life. As Dorothy puts it, “race and gender became much less important than, ‘What should we do…for the war effort?’” The federal government’s Office of War Information posters like “United We Win,” urged Americans to place the war effort over social and political differences, and above their personal needs. Individuals were encouraged to “use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without.” Labor unions and business managers were advised to set aside their differences, and factory workers were asked to focus on production rather than on racial animosities. In some cases, war factory work provided an opportunity for white and black Americans to work in close proximity for the very first time. This was not the case for Dorothy, however. While attending Fisk University, Dorothy worked at the Springfield Armory during the summers. Dorothy recalls of this experience, “I liked people and I wasn’t…uncomfortable about people of different races,” explaining that “having been at Classical Junior and Senior where I was very often the only black student in my class, and having learned…how to be appreciative to people. [I did] not worry about race particularly.”
Office of War Information artist Charles Alston applauds the War Labor Board’s support for the cause of to “Equal Pay for Equal Work.” In Alston’s “Right Between the Eyes,” a David-like War Labor Board delivers a death blow to the Goliath-like “Wage differentials based on RACE” which threatened to dominate the livelihoods and dignity of African American workers.
Dorothy only ever saw her father cry twice. One of those times was when he lost his job at a Springfield electrotype company after learning that he earned lower wages than white coworkers performing the same job. She remembers, “He didn’t realize it, but he was working for much less than the other workers were making. And of course, once they became unionized…he would find out what he wasn’t making and so they made him angry—and daddy had a temper—he used some curse words and they fired him on the spot.” In 1941, for the first time in American history, an American president signed an executive order prohibiting companies with government contracts from employment discrimination based upon “Race, Creed, Color or National Origin.” In 1945 the War Labor Board reaffirmed in stirring language its commitment to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s order:
Economic and political discrimination on account of race or creed is in line with the Nazi program. America, in the days of its infant weakness, the haven of heretics and the oppressed of all races, must not in the days of its power become the stronghold of bigots. The world has given America the vigor and variety of its differences. America should protect and enrich its differences for the sake of America and the world. Understanding religious and racial differences make for a better understanding of other differences and for an appreciation of the sacredness of human personality, as a basic to human freedom. The American answer to differences in color and creed is not a concentration camp but cooperation. The answer to human error is not terror but light and liberty under the moral law. By this light and liberty, the Negro has made a contribution in work and faith, song and story, laughter and struggle which are an enduring part of the spiritual heritage of America.2
Dorothy’s father worked at the Springfield Armory during the Second World War She asserts, “the Armory was important in my life for another reason, too, because when I was there… my daddy got a job there as a… janitor. And it was the first job where he was paid equal pay for… equal work…his status wasn’t determined by a prejudiced…foreman or whatever, as it happened to him when he was at…the electrotype company.”
2Source: Opinion by Frank P. Graham, National War Labor Board, Case No. 771 (2898-CS-D), In the Matter of Southport Petroleum Company (Texas City, Texas) and Oil Workers’ International Union, Local 449, CIO, June 5, 1943. Reprinted in The Termination Report of the National War Labor Board: Industrial Disputes and Wage Stabilization in Wartime, January 12, 1942-December 31, 1945, vol. II, Appendix G, 339–340. http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5145/ Retrieved November 27, 2009.