Black Philosopher, White Academy: The Career of William Fontaine

Chapter One: A Cultured Education

  A Cultured Education Chester F’   from Chester, Pennsylvania, an industrial town on the Delaware River, just southwest of Philadelphia. Europeans first settled the area in the seventeenth century. When the Quaker William Penn arrived in  to oversee his ‘‘Holy Experiment’’ in the English colony of Penn’s Woods (Pennsylvania), he had hoped to make Chester the capital. But Penn moved thirteen miles upstream to Philadelphia, and in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the hamlet of Chester grew very slowly. It nonetheless remained important to the Quaker farmers who spread into the Delaware Valley. The Society of Friends gave a special character to what became Delaware County, Pennsylvania, split between the town of Chester and its farming backcountry. The Dutch had brought slaves to the area by the s, but Pennsylvania had passed a gradual emancipation act in . The free black population steadily increased as migrants and runaways came north from nearby Delaware and Maryland, where slavery existed. The Quakers accepted the small communities of free African Americans scattered over the large rural areas of the county. The largest nucleus of blacks was established in Bethel Court, the southeast corner of Chester. Still a small town in , Chester had  blacks,  percent of its citizens, but Bethel Court soon had the reputation as Chester’s vice den.1 African American inhabitants multiplied from the time of the Civil War, –, but stayed constant as a proportion of Chester’s population. By    , however, the percentage of African Americans living in the city had jumped to  percent, just over ,. Black enclaves spread. Most blacks populated the West End, close to the water and some twenty blocks from Bethel Court. Although recognized for its gambling and drinking, the West End had homes and legitimate businesses. African Americans who valued respectability resided there. Black Bethel Court now had a notorious standing as the red light district, and African American families seeking to better themselves moved to the more reputable western ghetto. Pennsylvania’s southern border, the Mason-Dixon Line, had separated the old slave South from the antebellum North. After the Civil War, blacks in Chester and in other cities north of this border still usually survived in marginal circumstances. While African Americans in the North had more latitude than those in the South, segregation ordered racial affairs. White society cut itself off from the black social world of shopping, church going, schooling, leisure-time activities, and often employment. Some women in the West End had positions as domestics in sections of Chester distant from where they lived, and brought back tales of how the white folk lived. Men worked as unskilled laborers, often on the waterfront, but they had all the menial jobs and were divided from the white working class. The hierarchical African American social order itself mimicked that of the whites, and skin color played a role: the lighter did better. The black community also found Protestant religiosity a key to propriety. Finally, steady employment as a craftsman or tradesman, or as a policeman, barber, or porter, advanced one into the black middle class. Even for those of darker color—such as Fontaine —education proved the cornerstone to real improvement in life, perhaps as a minister or a teacher. But the residents of the West End also valued its gritty side. Its amusements on the social edge attracted even white people, who frequently had their only contact with black America there. Growing Up William Thomas Fontaine was born on December , , at  Central Avenue, an important thoroughfare in the middle of the West End. William Thomas was the son of William Charles Fontaine and Mary Elizabeth Boyer, who often went by Ballard, the name of the grandparents who had raised her.2 The first son and second child in a family of fourteen siblings, ‘‘Billy,’’ or later ‘‘Bill,’’ also lived with his father’s mother, Cornelia Wilson Smith A Cultured Education  Fontaine. As Fontaine wrote, ‘‘she had been a slave when Lee surrendered’’ at the end of the Civil War in . The Fontaines, the Ballards and Boyers, and other members of his father’s family all had houses within shouting distance of each other. Fontaine’s father had uncertain work in the steel mills on the Delaware River and later fired the furnaces at General Chemical Company in nearby Marcus Hook. Young Billy described his father’s occupation as that of a ‘‘laborer.’’ The son said that the older man did the most...