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9. The Burgers of Hattiesburg
- University Press of Mississippi
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Z 86 Z chapter 9 The Burgers Of haTTIesBurg As a lawyer, if you are pleased with your first witness, you want to avoid a letdown with the second. If the leadoff witness was mediocre, you can’t wait to get your case on track. Regardless of how one had viewed Jesse Stegall’s testimony, Addie Burger, wife of the respected principal of the black high school, was a solid follow up and unafraid to create waves.1 Addie Burger was born in 1914 at Alcorn College in Lorman in ClaiZ borne County. Her father, William S. Nelson, was superintendent of the laundry, and also taught laundrying because Alcorn was then a mechaniZ cal college where various trades were taught. Her parents were natives of Nashville where her father had owned a laundry. My father met President Martin of Alcorn at Tuskegee, Alabama, where my father worked for three years and installed the early laundry . President Martin just insisted that he come to Alcorn. My father was about fifteen years older than my mother. I was 14 when he died. My mother, Addie Rutherford, died in 1940. They are buried on the campus behind one of the dormitories. My half-brother, Carol L. Cannon, took over as superintendent of the Alcorn laundry. He had been at A&T College in North Carolina. Instead of moving us to him when my father died, he came to Alcorn and remained until all of us went on to college. His holding that job helped support my going through college. There’s no other way that I would have gone through. We maintained the same home provided by the school. We didn’t even have to pay rent. Addie went straight through from first grade through college right on the Alcorn campus. She felt she had a strong religious life, though Alcorn was nondenominational, and enjoyed the chaplain, Reverend Craig, who also taught shoemaking. The Burgers of hattiesburg Z 87 Z When my husband was principal of Hattiesburg’s black high school, he pushed for it to be named for the Alcorn president who followed President Martin, Leroy J. Rowan. I didn’t have any sense then as to whether Alcorn had the resources that it needed to do a good job. I thought we were getting a good education, and I still think so, because the teachers were just good dedicated teachers. Addie’s husbandZtoZbe, Nathaniel R. Burger, was born in Brookhaven, Mississippi, in 1909. His family moved to Hattiesburg when he was six. In 1928, Nathaniel Burger came to Alcorn. By Christmas, they had met and had started to court. She was just a fourteenZyearZold in the tenth grade, and he was a college freshman. “He just started picking at me,” Addie says. Nathaniel Burger described the Hattiesburg of his youth this way: There were no paved streets in the black community . . . You had dirt roads . . . when [an automobile] did go through, you knew it because of the big . . . cloud of dust. So that’s in the black community. The town proper had paved streets . . . going north you had curbs and gutters, and I don’t think anything east of Main Street had. That’s where the black community started, just across the Illinois Central tracks.2 He had different jobs at Alcorn. Keeping the auditorium clean was one. Later on he drove for President Rowan. Just about everyone at Alcorn worked.3 The flooding of the Mississippi River in 1927 had wiped out the state’s cotton crop, and the Depression also set in. Alcorn students were affected like everyone else. As Burger put it: “The Depression got me.” He went home to Hattiesburg for two years, chauffeured for a wealthy man he worked for in high school, and did construction. Addie caught up a little bit in school at that time. Because of his twoZ year break, they were only a year apart when they got their degrees. In the 1934–1935 academic year, Addie taught at a high school up in Covington County, then came back, spent the last quarter at school, and marched with the class at graduation. Nathaniel taught math and coached football at Pike County training school in Magnolia. His team had “an almost perfect record, at the zero end.”4 They married just after she graduated in 1935. Addie and Nathaniel’s three sons all attended college. Leroy, the youngZ est, attended Morehouse College for one year and then was graduated from the University of Southern Mississippi...