Making Dreams Come True — Parental and Community Involvement in the Rural African American Schools in Burke County, Georgia Between 1930 and 1955

3 Making Dreams Come True — Parental and Community Involvement in the Rural African American Schools in Burke County, Georgia Between 1930 and 1955 Eugenia M. Fulcher Swainsboro Technical Institute I have a deeply felt sense that important values were conveyed to me in my colored childhood...As a child I was not only protected but also nourished, encouraged, taught, and loved by people who, with no land, little money, and few resources, displayed the strength of a love which knew no measure. I have come to believe that this love is the true value, the legitimate measure of a people's worth (Taulbert, 1989, p. 6). Dreams are personal desires and wishes based on one's background of information. To dream is to look toward the future with expectations of achieving a goal - a goal set through fond hopes and vague notions of reality. The aspirations of dreams may exceed any real expectations, but these aspirations remain in the sub-conscious with hopes that the dream may come true in some way. Dreams for children are based on the immediate surroundings and circumstances associated through the limited knowledge base that we find in young minds. As children mature, their dreams becomes less fantasy but remain illusionary to meet the needs of anticipation to advancement and prosperity found with expectations. For a child to reach for the stars and dreams, parents must realize these dreams are possible and must be willing to provide the support to make these dreams an actuality. Dreams for the African American child in rural areas of the South between 1930 and 1955 were often short-lived and were tied to the agrarian culture of the time. Cotton was KING and the African Americans were tied to the farm and its products. Crops, with their plantings, cultivations, and gatherings, were the subsistence for the rural African American family. The entire family, parents and children were dependent on the agrarian calendar and its income for support and existence. Children from an early age were required to share the workload in the fields, and they were considered as much a part of the workforce as were their parents. From sun-up to sundown, parents and children worked the red clay furrows of Burke County, Georgia, to find a meager means of livelihood. As sharecroppers or as manual laborers, African Americans were dependent on the landowners (who were white in more cases) for their standard of living. These landowners had African American families tied to the land. Following the Great Depression and the fall of King Cotton caused by the boll weevil, education for African American children was not a realizable dream for most children. In the Black Belt of the South, with its African American population varying, but always over 50 percent, the rural areas were where the African American children were found. The small urban centers could provide a living for only a minority of African American parents as household workers or as laborers in the urban businesses. The plantation system of the Old South had left large farms with the African American family many miles from any urban settlements where schools were available. Most counties had only one African American high school in the county seat and public transportation to that school was not an option something of that magnitude had not even been a dream during the 1930s. Burke County, Georgia, was in the Black Belt and was the county with the largest usable landmass of any county east of the Mississippi River, about the size of the state of New Hampshire. The African American population varied between 75 percent in the 1930s to 68 percent in the midcentury with the agrarian base being the background for the large rural populations that were shown to be 80 percent even into the 1950s. Because most African Americans were tied to the farmlands and most had minimal or no education, education only seemed an inaccessible dream for most African American children. These children were the labor force and they could not be allowed to be away from the fields during the important times of the agrarian calendar. For a child to attend school would be a hardship for...