Here's Where It Gets Interesting - 95. Virginia: The Women Who Did The Next Needed Thing with Sharon McMahon

Episode Date: February 23, 2022

In this solo state episode, Sharon returns us to a tumultuous time in US history: Reconstruction. After the Civil War, rebuilding the country was a messy task, but Black Americans knew that creating educational opportunities for their children was highly important. What started in rural Virginia as the success of one teacher–Virginia Randolph–who put love, care, and oftentimes her own salary into her one-room school, grew into an unstoppable educational evolution for Black students. Learn about Randolph’s philosophies, the creation of the Jeanes Foundation, and the teachers who continuously pushed themselves to do the next needed thing for their students and their communities. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey friends, thank you so much for being here today. Oh my goodness, I have got a fantastic story for you. You are going to love this one so much. Virginia has just an incredible amount of history to dive into. I could have taken this episode in about 500 different ways, but I really think you're going to love these brain tingles about people maybe you're not familiar with, but you should be. So let's dive in. I'm Sharon McMahon, and welcome to the Sharon Says So podcast. All right, so let's return to the time

after the Civil War has concluded. The southern portion of the United States tried to secede and failed. The Confederacy has fallen, and we are now left with a period of reconstruction. And there's a lot to be said about reconstruction, the way it was done, and the after effects of the way reconstruction took place in the United States, Reconstruction being the term of sort of rebuilding the United States from this fractured Union versus Confederacy to being one nation again. And one of the after effects of Reconstruction was the continued systematic segregation and discrimination that many enslaved people who had now been freed continued to face. And one of the most challenging issues was surrounding the topic of education.

Remember that a lot of the American South was rural. It was agrarian. And that made education even a little bit more challenging because we're dealing with the communities that are very far apart, they're spread out, and they're small. So Reconstruction-era rural education for Black Americans in the South was something that was a very difficult, large undertaking. And yet it was such an important aspect of Reconstruction, an important aspect of what was necessary to help build America past what it had devolved into and looking forward into what it needed to become. One of the first things that many freed people wanted to do was look for educational opportunities.

Remember that educational opportunities were largely denied or forbidden. Many people who had previously been enslaved, it was forbidden to learn how to read or forbidden even to teach somebody how to read. You could receive consequences for that. So many people who had previously been enslaved hoped that education would improve their economic circumstances and would offer them some protection in life with some education, some skills. They could seek employment and support their families. And they also viewed education as an important part of preparing for involvement in civic life. If you want to become

elected to office, you want to represent people in government, you need to have a degree of education. And a number of things really stood in the way. Some of those things were a shortage of qualified teachers in that area. Black communities had sometimes a difficult time paying a teacher's wages. The insistence that schools remain segregated meant that communities had to support two separate school systems. And I'll give you one guess which school system usually got the short end of the stick if money was short, which it often was. And so schools that served Black communities were often poorly supported, poorly funded, and often students were forced to leave school or did not receive anywhere near the type of education that white students were receiving at the time. But it was

African-American teachers and parents who were some of the loudest voices in campaigning for universal public education. Universal public education as we know it certainly did not exist during the 1860s, 1870s. Some of the people who were working for this large-scale change in educational opportunities worked with the Freedmen's Bureau, and they worked with white charities and missionary societies, and they worked with Quaker communities from northern states. The Freedmen's Bureau, by the way, if you're not familiar, also known by its more formal title of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, it was established by Congress in 1865 after the Civil War to help millions of people who had been previously enslaved cope with the aftermath of the

Civil War. It gave food and housing and medical aid, and it helped establish schools, and it offered legal assistance, and it attempted to help settle formerly enslaved people on land that was either confiscated or abandoned during the war. And so the Freedmen's Bureau also was at the forefront of this push for rural education in the South. So fun little fact about the Freedmen's Bureau, you've heard of Howard University, which is a historically black college in Washington, DC. It was established in 1867, and it was named after Oliver Howard, who was one of the university's founders, and he was the head of the Freedmen's Bureau. He was Howard's president from 1869 to 1874, and he was the commissioner of the Freedmen's

Bureau during that time period, even a little bit before then. Oliver Howard was a Union general. He was from Maine. He was going to become a minister. That was his plan before the Civil War broke out. And so people during the Civil War referred to him as the Christian general. And he fought in a bunch of major battles like Antietam and Gettysburg. He ended up losing an arm in 1862. And in the 1870s, he grew really frustrated with this opposition to land and resource distribution. And he poured a lot of the Freedmen's Bureau's resources into education, which he called the true relief from dependence. And so Black communities also dug deep into their own resources to help build and maintain schools that met their needs and the hopes and aspirations of their communities.

So that brings me to a woman that I'm going to introduce many of you to. Her name is Virginia Randolph, and she was born in 1870. During this time, a very messy and evolving landscape of Southern education, she was born in the city of Richmond, Virginia, and she was a daughter of parents who were formerly enslaved. Once they were emancipated, her parents worked as a bricklayer and a domestic servant, and her father died when she was young and left her mother to remarry a number of times. And they attended a church that she attended throughout her entire life, the Moore Street Missionary Baptist Church in Richmond, which also operated a school. And the school

taught Black children academics, but also things like printmaking and carpentry and sewing. And it was in that environment that many of Virginia's ideas became established. Many of her ideas about what education should look like for black children in the South. So Virginia, after she went to primary school, also attended secondary school that had been established by the Freedmen's Bureau. And the school's curriculum included things like government, geography, map drawing, and it prepared interested students for teaching jobs. And Virginia graduated at age 16 and began her career as a teacher. And her career as a teacher would change the landscape of Virginia education.

So she started out her teaching career and eventually got a job in a one-room school in 1894. And the school was called the Mountain Road School. The school building was in horrible disrepair. She wrote in her journals on the first day at the job, pair. She wrote in her journals on the first day at the job, I enrolled 14 pupils. The school is old and the grounds are nothing but a red clay hill. And side note, I would like to highlight the importance of journal writing to record things that are later used by historians. We don't know about what history is going to deem important in the future. I guarantee you that Virginia Randolph was like, someday there will be a podcast about this, and I better make notes in

my journal. I guarantee you she didn't do that, but because she did, because she took the time to do that, we now have primary sources about what her experience was like working in a one-room school in rural Virginia. So she decided, I'm just going to get to work. I'm just going to do what needs to be done. And so she was out there whitewashing the building, planting flowers. She purchased gravel for the driveway from her own salary. And she personally began traveling to people's homes throughout the county to recruit children to attend school. Remember, many families perhaps didn't have the education to know what their child was entitled to, or perhaps they didn't feel that it was going to be worth sending their child to school, and she

aimed to change that. It is worth it for your child to attend. I will teach them well. And getting an education will give them a better future. One of the things that Virginia believed to be important was learning both academics and vocations in school. And she created these clubs called Willing Worker Clubs. And they did school improvement projects and did projects in the community to help improve the community as a whole. And she also taught, in addition to teaching all the academic subjects, she taught things like woodworking and sewing and gardening. And she believed that teaching those things gave students an opportunity for employment that they maybe

wouldn't have had if they had only learned the academic subjects. She also felt like learning those skills was important to somebody's self-worth and it contributed to your healthy mind, your healthy spirit, your healthy heart. It gave them confidence. It gave children agency over their abilities. So to her, it was important to not just learn about things like the anatomy of a cell, but also to learn how to use your hands to do good work in the world. And some people opposed that at the beginning. They felt like that's not rigorous enough. That's not what our children need to learn.

But she was steadfast in this belief that you needed to have both. So she began planning fundraisers where children were put to work acting as entertainers because money was always in such short supply. And some families were suspicious about this. They didn't want their children to be exploited. They saw any amount of labor like fundraising as a step backwards for their children. But she ultimately was persuasive. She spent so much of her own money on supplies and teachers and parents could see how dedicated she was to the school. So she was able to find this balance and convince the members of her community that there was a balance to be had between academics and vocational education. She often would tell her students, there is no need for a mind if you

can't use your hands. And she even once dismantled her neighbor's stove so she could take the stove to school and teach the children how to cook. They didn't have the money to buy a stove for her to teach cooking. So the school really thrived under her leadership. And we've now reached the turn of the century. Teddy Roosevelt is in office. And Teddy Roosevelt, of course, I have mentioned him many times in the past. You probably know that he was very, very attached to the natural world. He believed in national parks and the wonder of nature. And it was Teddy Roosevelt who established Arbor Day, which is talking about the importance of trees as our national heritage. And so he had in 1907, a letter called an Arbor Day proclamation to the school children of the United States,

which was about the importance of trees. And this letter said, a people without children would face a hopeless future, and a country without trees is almost as hopeless. When you help to preserve our forests or plant new trees, you are acting the part of good citizens. So Virginia Randolph took this proclamation to heart and founded the first Arbor Day program in Virginia. She and her elementary students planted 12 sycamore trees and named them after the biblical disciples. And while a few of the trees were lost to disease, by the 1970s, the remaining ones were named Notable Virginia Trees by the National Park Service. She had the forethought to know that these trees were going to live a long time. I'm Jenna Fisher. And I'm Angela Kinsey.

We are best friends. And together, we have the podcast Office Ladies, where we rewatched every single episode of The Office with insane behind-the-scenes stories stories, hilarious guests and lots of laughs. Guess who's sitting next to me? Steve! It's my girl in the studio! Every Wednesday, we'll be sharing even more exclusive stories from The Office and our friendship with brand new guests. And we'll be digging into our mailbag to answer your questions and comments.

So join us for brand new Office Lady 6.0 episodes every Wednesday. Plus, on Mondays, we are taking a second drink. You can revisit all the Office Ladies rewatch episodes every Monday with new bonus tidbits before every episode. Well, we can't wait to see you there. Follow and listen to Office Ladies on the free Odyssey app and wherever you get your podcasts. Her programs continued to gain support. They gained the support of the faculty of other colleges.

And she began collaborating with universities to teach afternoon vocational classes at different universities for people who needed to learn vocations. And that led to private funding for more prominent Virginia families. Her success built into a movement because plans were afoot to start supporting rural Black primary schools. And those plans were being drawn up by a Quaker philanthropist named Anna Jeans. And one of the things that Anna wanted to do was improve the educational opportunities of rural African Americans. So let me tell you a little bit about Anna Jeans, because she's another person worth knowing. So she was born in Philadelphia. She was one of 10 children in a Quaker household. So her siblings became doctors. Another sibling was an abolitionist, and all of

her siblings died childless. So when she was 72 and inherited the whole of the family's fortune, she decided, I am going to give this away for the betterment of humanity. And that became her focus during the last years of her life. So some of the areas of concern that Anna really wanted to help with were people who had been historically marginalized in the United States. People like immigrants, widows. She began or funded things like the Penn Asylum for widows and single children, the homes for destitute children, homes for the aged and infirm, pension funds, programs for the blind, the Pennsylvania Society to Prevent Cruelty to Children, the Sanitarium Association of Philadelphia. And again, some of these terms are a little

outdated, but that was just a way of talking about a group that benefited sick children and lots of children's nurseries and soup kitchens. And she decided to fund an endowment fund called the Jeans Fund that was going to assist rural schools for Black Americans in the Southern States. And she just said, I should like to help the little country schools. That was something that she felt was an important contribution to America. So Anna was friends with people like Booker T. Washington and Hollis Frizzell, and they began to set up this infrastructure for her new foundation. And Booker T. Washington and Hollis Frizzell traveled to Philadelphia. They got a $1 million check from Anna Jeans. And the goal of that was to create this endowment to be put to use educating and hiring Black teachers and traveling

supervisors for rural schools and school facilities in Black communities. And Anna died before the board had been formally established, but her will specified that the following people should be on the board of her endowment fund. Booker T. Washington, Hollis Frizzell, William Howard Taft, who would later become the president of the United States, and Andrew Carnegie. And at the time, they were the only educational foundation in the country to have Black members on the board. educational foundation in the country to have Black members on the board. By 1908, the Jeans Foundation had their first few meetings, and they began opening up requests for funding from county superintendents of Black schools in the South. And they were thrilled with the success that Virginia Randolph had had at the Mountain Road School. And Jackson Davis, the superintendent, requested money to use for a supervisor who would teach both vocational and academic skills throughout his

rural district. And I mean, more specifically, if we're being specific, what he wanted this money for was to go to pay Virginia's salary and to give her a promotion. He didn't just want her to stay where she was. He wanted her to teach other teachers so that the movement that she had sparked could grow. So in October of 1908, Virginia became the very first jeans supervising industrial teacher in the United States. And again, this was a position that was created really with Virginia Randolph in mind and funded by Anna Jeans. So county had 23 black elementary schools and it became Virginia Randolph's job to travel to each one of those 23 schools on a weekly basis to assist teachers with curriculum and to help gain the support of the community.

This was 1908, okay? And it is rural Virginia. Do we have superhighways? No. Do we have cars? No. She had to get there with horse and buggy on dirt roads. And she had to travel to 23 different schools. And by the way, she ended up having to hire a horse and buggy with her own salary. She was later saved up enough money to purchase her own, but the money to travel amongst the schools came out of her own pocket. And her goal was to improve not just education in general, but also the industrial skills of every single one of the county's rural schools for Black students. And because she was the pioneer of this movement, she was a first. She had the freedom to design her own educational curriculum. And so she shaped the curriculum to meet the specific needs of schools. Well,

really kind of keeping her philosophy alive that the combination of vocational arts and academics and community involvement, that that was what needed to be the guiding principles of schools in her region. She also took impeccable records and submitted them at her year-end reports. And by the end of her first year as the Jeans Supervising Teacher, the Funds Board was so impressed with her accomplishments that they printed a thousand copies of her year-end report and mailed it to county superintendents all over the American South. Like, this woman is a model for what the rest of y'all should be doing. And it became a reference book for all of the schools that received assistance teachers and galvanize the community. And so by 1914, this is just a few short years later, there were 118 genes supervising teachers operating in counties in 13 southern states of the United States. This is the impact of one woman. So often these gene supervising teachers began with

little more to work with than just one teacher or one school, but they had a missionary mentality that they were going to endlessly crusade to improve conditions for their communities. And most of these supervising teachers were young African-American women who not only functioned as the superintendent of the school, but they also worked to improve public health and living conditions. And they worked to train more teachers in their communities. And they started self-improvement events and taught people to do things like canning, things that were important for the health and well-being of not just school children, but the community as a whole. So they did things like invite nurses to talk at parent-teacher associations, and they organized

medical examinations for students, and they held preschool clinics with nurses or doctors to check students' tonsils and eyesight, and they visited homes to make sure that parents felt safe bringing their children, that they could trust the intentions of the teachers. And they also organized things like clean tooth campaigns so children could learn to take care of their physical well-being in addition to their mental well-being. Sometimes they were out there carrying out building maintenance and fumigating schools to make sure that they weren't full of pests. And their informal motto, I love this so much, the Jeans Foundation's informal motto was to do the next needed thing.

And rather than getting bogged down in this mentality of there's just so much to do, we could never possibly do it all. Just do the next needed thing of what is in front of you. What does your community need? And the supervising teachers throughout the South, throughout the decades, often said it to each other as a way to bolster each other's spirits. Don't get overwhelmed. Just do the next needed thing. As if what Virginia Randolph had done wasn't enough already, by 1915, they decided to build a new school next to the old rundown one-room school on a pile of dirt. They built a new school called the Virginia Randolph Training School. And it was the county's first step in providing a high school for black students. And students enrolled from all over the county, but the school did not have the money to provide transportation.

So Virginia Randolph, who is now in her mid-40s, would keep children at her Richmond home so they could attend the high school. Over the years, she personally housed over 60 children and provided them with a stable home so they could attend high school. So then seeing the needs, the incredible needs of her community, she began to raise money to build dormitories and students began to attend the school from as far away as New York. people who had been enslaved, who was creating this level of impact in her community. And truly, the impact cannot even be measured because what then were those students who were able to receive an education? What then were they able to do in their own communities? It's impossible to measure the impact of this one teacher who was in part funded by this one woman. The truly tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, potentially millions of lives that these women impacted. Sadly, in 1929, a fire destroyed her high school and also the one-room schoolhouse that sat next to it and Virginia literally had to sit and watch her life's work go up in flames and for over a week

she was under a doctor's care and it was just beyond devastating as you can imagine. But her community rallied around her. And later that year, in a time when the entire country, remember 1929 is when the stock market crash happened. So we see the Great Depression beginning. So the entire country is experiencing tremendous economic uncertainty, built a larger school building to replace the one that burned down. And this time they built it with bricks. And it was named the Virginia Randolph High School. And today it's called the Virginia Randolph Education Center. And it provides academic and behavioral educational services for students with disabilities. And she eventually, in 1949, Virginia Randolph retired from her position after she had had a 57-year career there.

And at the time of her retirement, the Mountain Road School, where she had started with 14 students, had grown to an enrollment of over 400 students annually. And the Jeans Foundation continued its work into the 1960s as segregated schools begin to merge following the Brown versus the Board of Education decision from the Supreme Court in 1954, and segregated schools became unconstitutional. And it was this intricate and necessary public schoolwork that was done in the South between the Reconstruction and Jim Crow era, that during this time period, in between Reconstruction and Jim Crow, when almost any action that was taken by the Black community to better itself was met with suspicion or often violence, it is a testament

to these men and women who gave selflessly of themselves to better their communities. And those ripple effects continue today. And I just love this story so much, brought tears to my eyes reading about it. We often don't know what kind of impact we're going to have on our communities until long after we're gone. And it is easy for me to look at Virginia Randolph and Anna Jeans and see how the actions of two people have impacted so many. Don't you just love them? Don't you just love that so much? I do. It's the importance of education, the importance of public schools, the importance of caring for your community,

the importance of using your money to make the world a better place. So thank you so much for being here. I'll see you soon. Thank you so much for listening to the Sharon Says So podcast. I am truly grateful for you. And I'm wondering if you could do me a quick favor. Would you be willing to follow or subscribe to this podcast or maybe leave me a rating or review? Or if you're feeling

extra generous, would you share this episode on your Instagram stories or with a friend? All of those things help podcasters out so much. This podcast was written and researched by Sharon McMahon and Heather Jackson. It was produced by Heather Jackson, edited and mixed by our audio producer Jenny Snyder, and hosted by me, Sharon McMahon. I'll see you next time.