Race Man: The Rise and Fall of the "Fighting Editor," John Mitchell Jr

2. “Colored Teachers for Colored Schools”

CHAPTER TWO “ColoredTeachersforColoredSchools” After his graduation from Richmond Normal in 1881, Mitchell taught for three years in the public schools of Virginia. These were important, formative years. His coming of age coincided with a period of intense political activity, and as a teacher he found himself at the center of disputes that altered the course of Virginia politics and changed the way blacks and whites viewed race relations. It was also a period of rapid development for him personally. He lived away from home for the first time, supervised his first classroom, and wrote his first newspaper column. By the time his career as a teacher was over, he had emerged as an ambitious and highly articulate young man, someone to be reckoned with in the black community. Mitchell’s decision to become a teacher probably came easily. He had taught in a model classroom at Richmond Normal and had absorbed from Elizabeth Knowles and R. M. Manly the idea that education was the lever that would uplift the race. Teaching was also a relatively well-paid profession given the lack of other employment opportunities. Richmond teachers—black and white— earned $42 a month in 1881, at a time when live-in servants had to settle for as little as a dollar or two a week.1 When he applied for a teaching position, however, he became embroiled in a controversy that festered in Richmond for decades and perplexed outside observers. “In one or two Southern cities,” wrote George Washington Cable in 1884, “the teachers in the colored public schools must be white. In certain others they must be colored; and in still others they may be either.” When Mitchell graduated from high school, Richmond belonged in this last category . Although black teachers were assigned to Navy Hill School, the teachers in the other black grammar schools (Valley, Baker, and Leigh) were white, as were all the principals, and only whites were allowed teach at Richmond Normal , a school run by the city for the express purpose of training teachers. “There was no stigma attached to the whites teaching in the Negro schools,” explained a later historian. On the contrary, white teachers showed a stubborn devotion to the schools of both races. By the time Mitchell graduated, Richmond had 14 black teachers and 129 white teachers; of the 129 whites, 35 taught in black schools.2 The whites who taught in Richmond’s black schools were by the 1880s seldom the “Yankee schoolmarms” who had been so familiar during Reconstruction , although a few New Englanders like Manly and Knowles remained. More often they were native-born whites eager for work. Some of them were ineffectual in the classroom and “had not the best interests of the race at heart.” A poem by O. M. Steward poked fun at one white teacher, an especially unpopular man who taught at Baker School: I am a white man of the whites. My scholars they are black. I don’t believe in civil rights, But money I do lack. I tried my luck for Central School, But I could not succeed. They said they did not want a fool To teach white boys to read. Black parents worried that even the best white teachers stifled the ambitions of their children, while the worst were lazy and incompetent.3 In contrast, the black men and women who taught at Navy Hill were a superbly gifted group, reflecting in part the lack of other employment options. Several were on the thresholds of truly distinguished careers. James H. Hayes, for example, would study law at Howard University and graduate first in his class in 1885. An accomplished orator, he was one of the few southern blacks in the twentieth century to challenge the accommodationist philosophy of Booker T. Washington. Another teacher, James Hugo Johnston Sr., left Navy Hill in 1887 to assume the presidency of Virginia Normal and Collegiate Institute in Petersburg (later Virginia State University), a position he held until his death in 1914. Daniel Barclay Williams also joined the Petersburg faculty in the 1880s. He had attended Brown University and could read French, German, Hebrew, Latin, and Greek. D. Webster Davis published several volumes of poetry , and after his death in 1913, four public schools in Virginia were named in his honor. Rosa Dixon Bowser would play a leading role in the women’s club movement, and the reading circles she established in the mid-1880s became the nucleus of the Virginia State...