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.{ 99 }. Chapter Four “Looking For better” Montgomery, Johannesburg, and the Urban Context, s–s In 1924,when Rosa McCauley left rural Pine Level without her mother for the first time, it was to continue her education in Montgomery. She would attend the Montgomery Industrial School for Girls, a private school for Black girls—known informally as Miss White’s—that was run and staffed by white women from the North.1 Rosa and her younger brother, Sylvester, had been attending a school in Spring Hill—some eight miles from their home—where their mother, Leona Edwards McCauley, taught. Despite frequent bouts of tonsillitis, young Rosa usually walked the distance with her brother. She knew, however, that if she wanted to continue beyond the sixth grade, she would have to venture to Montgomery and pay tuition for the privilege. Rosa had spent time with her mother in Montgomery during the summers when Mrs. McCauley attended Alabama State Normal to update her teacher certification. The decision to send Rosa to school in Montgomery was eased by the fact that the McCauleys had relatives there. While she was a student at Miss White’s, Rosa lived with her mother’s sister, Fannie Williamson, and her four children. In order to help defray the cost of tuition, Rosa worked at the school cleaning classrooms. She also assisted her aunt Fannie, who had a job cleaning at the Jewish Country Club.2 No stranger to work, Rosa had helped in the fields, milked cows, cooked, washed, quilted, and performed general housekeeping chores on the Pine Level farm from a young age.3 Rosa’s acceptance at Miss White’s at the age of eleven had been contingent upon her repeating the fifth grade there, but by midyear, she had already been promoted to the sixth. At Miss White’s Rosa enjoyed the “usual classroom subjects,like English and science and geography.”4 She also enjoyed the domestic science courses, including cooking,sewing,and caring for the ill.As it turned out,she would .{ 100 }. Chapter Four soon put these skills to use, nursing her mother and grandmother back home at Pine Level and running the household, until she married at the age of nineteen. Traditionally, however, this kind of training was provided to young girls by the women in their communities. Certainly, this fact contributed to the opposition of many Black people to the Hampton-Tuskegee model of education,which they believed prepared their young people for no more than subservience.5 In contrast, what Rosa liked best about her time at Miss White’s was the way her teachers emphasized self-respect: “What I learned best at Miss White’s school,” Mrs. Parks recalled, “was that I was a person with dignity and self-respect, and I should not set my sights lower than anybody else just because I was black. We were taught to be ambitious and to believe that we could do what we wanted in life.This was not something I learned just at Miss White’s school. I had learned it from my grandparents and my mother too.But what I had learned at home was reinforced by the teachers I had at Miss White’s school.”6 During the period of the boycott,the sense of dignity and self-respect that Rosa McCauley Parks carried throughout her lifetime was apparent to many. Early in life, she had demonstrated an inner strength and sense of fair play. As a young girl, she had assertively defended herself and her younger brother against bullying by neighborhood white boys in Montgomery. “The habit of protecting my little brother helped me learn to protect myself,” she recalled. “I had a very strong sense of what was fair.”7 Rosa McCauley finished the eighth grade at Miss White’s before it closed in 1928.She attended ninth grade at the BookerT.Washington Junior High School and then completed the tenth grade and part of the eleventh at the Alabama State Normal laboratory school before leaving to take care of her ailing grandmother.During the early 1930s,when Rosa was studying at the laboratory school,a public high school education was not available to Black students in Montgomery. As the educator and writer Horace Mann Bond put it, in 1930,“the Capital City, with a Negro population in excess of 30,000, maintained no public senior high school for Negroes.”8 After Rosa Parks returned to Montgomery as a married woman in 1932, she finally had...

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