Star Creek Papers

Introduction

INTRODUCTION In 1934 Horace Mann Bond was in the early years of a distinguished career as a historian, educationist, and university president. Already, at age twenty-nine, a professor at Fisk University with an armful of publications, his expertise as an authority on black education took him to Washington Parish, a corner of southeastern Louisiana bordered by Mississippi on two sides. Under the auspices of the Rosenwald Fund, he and his wife, Julia Washington Bond, lived in a small farming community and studied the operation of the local black schools. Today they would be called "participant-observers"; in 1934 they were dubbed "explorers." This experience, Horace recorded, "proved one of the most valuable of our entire lives."l For three months the Bonds, who had married in 1929 and had no children yet,lived in a wooden cabin in a district known as Star Creek. They rose before dawn to draw water, chop wood, and start a fire. They had no electricity or running water, and cooked in a kitchen where rain entered through a leaky roof. A lime-slaked hole in the ground served as a toilet. Such conditions were no worse than how most blacks—and many whites—still lived in the 19305. Besides, the Bonds enjoyed the luxury of a secondhand, if rather unreliable, Ford automobile . Julia passed most days in the company of Gabe Magee ("Miss Gabe"), who lived with her husband, Ernest Magee, on the farm where the Bonds' cabin stood. When Horace was not fixing up the cabin and talking with neighbors, he visited nearby farms, made occasional trips to the towns of Franklinton and Bogalusa, and observed xvii /iii Introduction the running of the local black schools. As "Portrait of Washington Parish" attests, Washington Parish was not that far from New Orleans in miles but very distant in terms of culture. Bond became fascinated by its peculiarities.2 Quickly befriended and accepted, the Bonds became fond of their rustic neighbors. "My wife and I found ourselves liking the people there more than any we had ever known before," wrote Horace. "Honest , self-respecting, [and] hard-working," they were "my idea of what human beings ought to be." He recorded their observations and experiences in a diary. A rich, funny, and evocative description of black life in the rural South, Bond's "Star Creek Diary" is published here for the first time.3 "Portrait of Washington Parish" and "Star Creek Diary" are not works of academic scholarship in the vein of such sociological classics of the era as Charles S. Johnson's Shadow of the Plantation (1934), John Dollard's Caste and Class in a Southern Town (1937), Hortense Powdermaker's After Freedom (1940), or Allison Davis's Deep South (1941). They are, however, superb social observations written by a black intellectual at the height of his powers. Horace Mann Bond was also a fine writer. "Portrait of Washington Parish" and "Star Creek Diary" have immediacy and literary freshness.4 Bond's Star Creek writings reflected his democratic instincts, love of the South, and, above all, deep respect for ordinary black southerners . Bond once explained his admiration for Booker T. Washington by noting Washington's immense popularity among the most illiterate blacks of the Deep South. "These people cannot be fooled, and they know the truth when they hear it—if I had not learned some time ago that instincts were no longer in good form, I should say that they have an instinct for that which is true and genuine." Aided by Julia's observations, Bond captured these qualities in his Star Creek neighbors. Listening to their conversations with a sensitive ear, he faithfully reproduced the rhythms and inflections of their rural dialect. With no hint of condescension, he produced a very human portrait of a rural black community, an account tinged with affection, understanding , and respect.5 Introduction Bond also illuminated the development of black schools in the 19305. Indeed, the study of the Rosenwald school and the study of the black community were in large part one and the same. To an extent rarely documented by historians, the "Rosenwald schools" were embedded in the fabric of rural black communities, a fact that their very name— by implying that they were outright gifts of northern white philanthropy —tended to mask. In fact, Rosenwald money furnished only a part—less than a half—of the necessary funding to build Rosenwald schools...