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Chapter 11. Judge Duncan's Trial of the Columbus School Case, April, 1976, to October, 1977
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Chapter 11 Judge Duncan's Trial of the Columbus School Case, April, 1976, to October, 1977 The First Witness On April 20, 1976, district judge Robert Duncan instructed plaintiffs to call their first witness. Helen Jenkins Davis stepped forward to take the stand in the Columbus, Ohio, school case. She was eighty-one years old. Davis was the first witness in the trial that would, eventually, test the Supreme Court's view of segregation yet one more time before the end of the decade. As a child, Helen Jenkins heard tales from her parents of "hiding if they ever saw a covered wagon on the road to avoid drivers looking for black children to sell into slavery. " They had fled to Ohio before the Civil War in the hope of avoiding that legacy. As Helen Jenkins grew up in Columbus, however, a caste system of segregation still surrounded her. She attended Garfield Elementary in grades one through eight. As the' 'only colored girl in the class," she said that she "hated school because [she] was so mistreated." For example, her eighth grade teacher put her in the back of the class behind even the "bad white boys" and refused to allow her to mingle with the white girls. When she went home, her mother said, "You sit right there, show that teacher you can learn no matter where she puts you." At East High, Jenkins was one of forty black students, but one of four who graduated. "The rest just couldn't take that racism," she said as she described her classmates' exclusion from the school's extracurricular and social activities, ostracism in class, and discrimination in teaching and grading. "If it hadn't been for my mother, I would have quit. ... She was behind me all the time. She told me, 'You stick in there and do your work and show them you can learn no matter what they do to you. ' " It seemed as if the color line that she experienced in school spread throughout community life as more blacks and southern whites moved to Columbus. She remembered fondly her first experiences in a racially mixed neighborhood. She went in and out of the homes of playmates of many races and creeds freely and without racial slurs. By the time Helen Jenkins was in high school, however, the racial discrimination she had come to know in school had spread to the theater where blacks had to sit together in the "chicken roost" and to the dime stores where blacks had to sit at one end of the counter and drink their soda pop out of glasses with red bottoms. As one contemporary reporter of race relations in Columbus noted, "nothing is more 229 230 Beyond Busing repulsive to the white man than the idea of amalgamation of the races." In 1912 the city shifted from ward elections that provided black representation to at-large elections that would exclude all blacks from the city council for decades. Before she graduated from high school, Helen Jenkins joined the NAACP to fight such discrimination. After high school, she attended the school district's teacher's college and graduated in 1916 with a 98.6 grade point average out of 100. Of the sixtyeight white graduates, all received teaching jobs immediately; Jenkins and her two black classmates did not. She worked for eighteen months as a store clerk to support her widowed mother and waited for a teaching job. When Jenkins applied for an elementary school position with the Columbus public schools for a third time, the assistant superintendent of schools, Miss Gugle, told her, "There's no place in Columbus for you. We're not putting any [more] colored girls in [our] school[s], but I will help get a school down South." Helen Jenkins Davis bristled on the witness stand as she remembered her response: I said my parents were taxpayers here, and they didn't educate me to go down South and I had never been farther south than fifty-five miles from Columbus, and I said, "My three generations ... to my mother lived in central Ohio before, and I repeat, before the Civil War, and my father was a businessman downtown, had a big restaurant on Long Street between Third and High before I was born, and three or four years after I was born, before he passed," and I said, "my father and my mother paid taxes and they didn't educate me to go down South...