Elbert Parr Tuttle: Chief Jurist of the Civil Rights Revolution

3. Life Was a Breeze

14 chapter three Life Was a Breeze The physical isolation of the Hawaiian Islands, the way their small surfaces sit surrounded by the vast ocean, made young Elbert Tuttle acutely aware of geography. Having the deposed queen of Hawaii, a woman of color, live around the corner made him acutely aware of politics.1 When the Tuttles arrived on Oahu, the public schools educated mostly Hawaiian children and the children of Asian laborers. For their sons, Guy and Margie chose the Punahou School, founded to educate the children of missionaries and already something of an elite academy. More than six decades later, Madelyn and Stanley Dunham would choose Punahou for their grandson, Barack Obama. By the time Malcolm and Elbert Tuttle enrolled, the school population included native Hawaiians and students of Philippine, Japanese, and Chinese ancestry. The admission of nonwhite students had not been accomplished without controversy, and students classified as “white” remained a substantial majority.2 Still, Elbert Tuttle would grow up and be educated in the most racially integrated society in America.3 In both Nogales and Hawaii Tuttle’s parents eschewed the public schools. The irony of the situation did not escape Tuttle. In 1974 he wrote his colleague on the bench, Judge Bryan Simpson, who had been vilified for his courage and integrity in overseeing the desegregation of public schools in Florida: You will be interested to know that when my brother and I arrived in Honolulu at the ages of 9 and 10 years our established friends in Honolulu convinced my mother that her boys should not go to the public schools of Honolulu because there were so many natives and Chinese and Japanese kids there. Fortunately, we did not miss any of the richness of school life by reason of this fact, because Punahou School from which I graduated in 1914 Life Was a Breeze » 15 had a graduating class of which less than a third of us were Anglo-Saxon white. I guess we just mixed with the third generation orientals there instead of the second generation.4 Like many private schools on the mainland, Punahou Academy had been founded to provide a segregated haven for the Caucasian children of missionaries. The pioneer missionaries had recognized at once the need for schools for Hawaiian children, “particularly for the children of the chiefs . . . that are soon to sway the nation,” and in 1839 a mission school called the Chiefs’ Children’s School opened.5 It was strictly for Hawaiian children; “any notion of sending their [the missionaries’] children to school with Hawaiian students was out of the question.”6 For two decades, the missionaries persisted in sending their children back to the United States for schooling. The Congregationalists who first arrived had by and large been educated in the finest schools in New England, and they were committed to providing the same education to their children. When the children reached school age, either the entire family returned home or the children were sent back, across the Pacific Ocean and then across the continent, entrusted to family and friends half a world away. Communication between the islands and the continent was difficult at best; some children reportedly never saw their parents again. The distress caused to both parents and children by this practice was severe. It was exceeded only by the contemplation of the alternative: Reports on the experience of the English missionaries in Tahiti reached Hawai’i as early as 1823, increasing already inflated fears of integrated schools. The reports included tales of unsupervised young girls “entertaining ” native friends and using intoxicating beverages; two of the mission offspring were even said to be walking the streets of London. Clearly Tahitians and Hawaiians had a quite different approach to biological urges than properly educated and chaperoned New Englanders!7 In 1840, as the ship carrying the missionaries’ offspring pulled away from the dock, a distraught seven-year-old girl captured everyone’s attention . Stretching her arms out over the rails, she shrieked in a piercing cry, “Oh father, dear father, do take me back.” Caroline Armstrong’s plea echoed in the hearts of the community, and that June the mission voted to establish a school at Punahou. The next spring, the Reverend 16 « chapter three Daniel Dole and his wife arrived at the mission; he was designated the first principal. His wife worked by his side at the small school, and their son...