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Chapter 1. Black Voices in White America: The Dayton School Case, November, 1972
- University of Michigan Press
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Chapter 1 Black Voices in White America: The Dayton School Case, November, 1972 Ella Taylor Lowrey At the age of seventy-five Ella Taylor Lowrey rose with all her considerable wit and will to testify against the segregation of the Dayton, Ohio, public schools. The courtroom was filled with the conscience and aspiring spirit of a largely black audience. Mrs. Lowrey's step was quick, her resolve firm, and her voice clear. Many others had stood up before. She was ready now. Like other blacks living in Dayton in 1900, Ella Taylor had grown up in a mixed neighborhood and attended public schools with white children. But no black teacher ever taught Taylor or her white classmates; the all-white school board assigned the only black teacher to an all-black class by the back door of the otherwise all-white Garfield Elementary School. Nevertheless, Ella Taylor determined to dedicate her life to teaching and attended Dayton Teachers Normal from 1915 to 1918. In 1916 she served as a student teacher at Weaver Elementary School. One day the regular teacher was sick, and the principal secured permission from the superintendent to allow Taylor to fill in. As she testified in federal court, I went to work that Thursday morning. That afternoon, a little white boy sitting up near the front held his hands on his arms and looked up at me.... I said to the little boy, "What's the matter?" He said, "My mother says you are a nigger and I don't have to mind you." Although the principal reprimanded the child and sent him home, this experiment in integrated education ended on an even sorrier note. As the witness told the court, opposition grew to the superintendent allowing "a Negro to teach white children in Dayton Public Schools." For the next two generations , the Dayton Board of Education responded by prohibiting black teachers from instructing white pupils. As a result, Taylor always taught in a segregated setting during her forty years of service in the Dayton public schools. "I never taught a white child in all that time," she testified. "I was always in black schools, with black children, with black teachers." Recalling her first full-time teaching assignment, Taylor told how in 1918 the Dayton school board assigned her to a west-side school, the Garfield 3 4 Beyond Busing Annex. It included "a two-story frame building with four rooms ... two rooms down, two up," containing only black students and teachers, in back of the brick and whites-only Garfield Elementary School. To accommodate the increasing black pupil population, the board added a two-room, portable building to the blacks-only annex: "that made six black teachers with six black classes. There were no black teachers or students inside the brick building. ', Taylor described the conditions in the temporary structure where she taught: This small frame [building] . . . being very fragile, was soon dilapidated , in bad condition. The walls were bad; the windows were bad and broken out, and the heating unit became bad. The [board] finally built what I would call a permanent building behind this frame house . . . [with] four rooms. Then the two-room portable was tom down. At that time, we had eight black classrooms with eight black teachers.... I had 62 children in the sixth grade room. . . . The white teacher in the brick building with all white children had 20.... There was no effort to equalize our classes. In 1926 the board threatened Taylor with the loss of her job when a black parent refused to send his two children to the blacks-only Garfield Annex and instead tried to enroll them in an east-side school. When the board refused, Taylor remembered what happened. Mr. Reese didn't like [segregation] and he said he would not send his children back to the annex. [The board] would not permit his children to go into the brick building, [so] he sued the school board. Now the school board at that time, not knowing what was going to happen, hired we eight [black] teachers on a day-to-day substitute basis in September. . . . [The board] told us that they didn't know whether we would be there after the case was settled or not. If the case was settled and they had to admit black children to the white classes in the brick building, then there would be no reason for us [the black teachers].... We were told that [we] would not be permitted...