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Sibling Rivalries
- Brookings Institution Press
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30 six Sibling Rivalries A ministering angel shall my sister be. —William Shakespeare, Hamlet “Don’t you ever forget it, Bill. When you were buried in books in the school library, I was out on the front lines, fighting for civil rights in the old South.” My sister Emma, who passed away at the age of ninety-three, was right. I learned a lot from her example. The immediate Coleman family of five was close knit, but we siblings were always competitive. My sister’s practical wisdom and my brother’s practical jokes enlivened many dinner table conversations and family outings. Whether in the classroom or in the family, Emma was a born teacher. She taught me the most important lesson of my life: how to live meaningfully with the opposite sex. Several of her experiences also had a substantial effect on shaping my career, increasing my awareness of the evils of racial discrimination and fortifying my resolve to see it end. During the 1920s and 1930s, the Philadelphia school board had implemented a secret and, in my judgment, unlawful policy of giving lip service to racial integration while forcing most children of color in Germantown to attend predominantly colored and manifestly inferior schools. As a result, Emma was sent to the mostly black Gillespie Junior High and Gratz High schools, which were well outside our school district and more distant from our home. Although Emma’s high school preparation was inferior, she did very well. In her junior year, she decided that she wanted to teach home economics in high school. She applied to Temple University in Philadelphia, which offered a strong home economics curriculum, but she was informed that during their junior year, home economics majors had to live in a particular dormitory. Colored students were not allowed in that dormitory or in any other dormitory on the Temple campus at that time. Trying to be helpful, the admissions folks suggested that she spend her junior year at Cheney State 01-0488-1 part1.indd 30 9/9/10 8:27 PM Sibling Rivalries / 31 Teachers College, then a Negro school at least sixty miles outside of Philadelphia that had a markedly inferior academic reputation. Emma and our parents rejected that suggestion. Instead, she enrolled at the Hampton Institute, my father’s alma mater. After graduation she was home manager in a segregated federal housing project in Virginia. Shortly thereafter she began teaching at St. Paul’s, a private religious high school in Virginia, where she met and married a fellow teacher, Wilburn Dooley. They both left in 1944 to teach in the public high schools of Atlantic City, from which she retired at the age of sixty-five. While teaching at St. Paul’s, Emma and her husband engaged in a civil rights struggle that, she would often remind me with her competitive smile, preceded any efforts of my own by many years. The “redneck” mayor (as she called him) of the Virginia town in which they lived had a long history of discriminating against the large colored population, denying them city employment , access to public facilities, and even the vote. The Negro leadership decided the mayor must be replaced. However, the commonwealth of Virginia and its political subdivisions had active, willful programs to deter people of color from registering and voting. Consequently, few Negroes were registered to vote. Emma and Wilburn registered.To do so, they had to pay three years of back poll taxes and then take a written exam.The white examiner gave each of them a blank sheet of paper, on which they had to write down—word for word, from memory—the question, which he gave them orally, and an answer that satisfied the examiner. Many years later, in 1992, Emma recalled that her answer included the statement that she had never fought in a duel. Afterward, Emma and Wilburn worked hard to get other people of color to register. It took two years of evening meetings in schools, homes, apartments, and churches, but finally, the people of that Virginia town, including a large number of people of color, were able to vote the mayor out of office. Not only did Emma inspire me to work against racial discrimination, she also inadvertently may have affected my choice of law as a career. In midNovember of each year, my mother and father would begin a lengthy discussion about how much they could afford to spend on family presents for Christmas. Since my parents...