by Molly Hoffman –
“If we want to talk about race in America and we want to be frank, we are going to have to be uncomfortable.”
Dr. Olusoji Akomolafe of Norfolk State University spoke those words during a public program about race held May 19 in Mathews. The program “Learning from the Past and Shaping the Future: A Look at Racism and What We Can Do About It” was presented by CircleUp Middle Peninsula.
Education was the stepping off point, and at times the conversation was indeed uncomfortable. The program was divided into three parts, focusing on past, present, and future, and much of the program highlighted inequities along racial lines.
“Learning took place anyway,” was how Dr. Wesley Wilson, executive director of the T.C. Walker and Woodville-Rosenwald School Foundation in Gloucester, characterized the history and challenges of African- American education.
According to Wilson, Gloucester and Virginia were representative of most communities and states in the pre-Civil War period. The dominant theory was that if slaves learned to read and write in English, they would begin to think on their own. The Virginia Code of 1919 required a white sworn officer to be at all meetings or assemblages of black people. Post-Civil War improvements for African-Americans life were reversed when Abraham Lincoln died and Andrew Johnson became U.S. President. In 1871, Wilson told the audience, Virginia school systems reported only one teacher per 232 African- American children.
But some African Americans managed to learn to read anyway, said Wilson. Some learned by osmosis at church services, and some white people illegally taught them to read.
In the 1880s, Thomas C. Walker, the first African-American lawyer to practice in Gloucester County, worked to start a school that provided African American students access to a demanding curriculum, but it was a private school with tuition paid by white benefactors. So Walker approached Julius Rosenwald, a Jewish philanthropist known for helping to fund African- American schools. Rosenwald would contribute only after the people had raised funds. For Woodville School in Gloucester County, for example, the public schools gave $300, Rosenwald gave $700, and African-Americans in the county raised $2,500 for the school. In 1921, Rosenwald helped fund the Gloucester Training School for Negroes, Gloucester’s first high school for African-Americans, at the personal request of T.C. Walker.
Aretha Thomas also spoke about Rosenwald schools, saying, “We cannot erase history no matter what we do, no matter what we try to do. It happened, and we cannot change it.”
Thomas is a trustee of Antioch Baptist Church in Mathews County and is instrumental in the renovation of Antioch Rosenwald School. By 1928, said Thomas, one third of African-American children in the rural South were educated in Rosenwald schools, but some former students are embarrassed to admit they attended these schools because they had less than white schools or were not considered as good, and some feel Rosenwald schools should not be preserved because the memories of exclusion are too painful. Thomas’s response is, “Painful as it is, yes, we must tell the whole story, not just the comfortable parts we would like to deal with.”
Antioch School is the only Rosenwald school remaining in Mathews County, which had five. Among the architectural features distinctive to Rosenwald schools were tall windows, and Thomas said that once Antioch’s windows are restored, it can be officially recognized by the state as a Historic Rosenwald School.
Next on the program was the Gloucester Institute, which focuses on the present, but educator and historian Brian McGovern, who is writing a biography of Dr. Robert Russa Moton, provided historical context. The Gloucester Institute owns Moton’s retirement home, Holly Knoll, and holds conferences and retreats there of particular interest to the African-American community.
But Holly Knoll’s importance began with Dr. Moton. A graduate of Hampton Institute and protégé of Booker T. Washington, Moton succeeded Washington as head of the Tuskegee Institute but went beyond Washington’s emphasis on vocational training, transforming the Tuskegee institute into a four-year college and paving the way to the creation of the United Negro Fund. Moton invited African-American leaders and thinkers to Holly Knoll to work on solutions, and that work continues today with the Gloucester Institute. Among the leaders who have visited Holly Knoll was Martin Luther King Jr.
C.J. Sailor, program director of the Gloucester Institute, told the audience the Institute keeps the legacy of Moton and Holly Knoll alive with the institute’s Emerging Leaders Program, which recruits African-American college students to come to Holly Knoll to learn leadership skills. Sailor says that students may be seen as leaders because they are popular but may not actually have the skills necessary to lead effectively. The Gloucester Institute hopes to be the conduit to those skills. Additionally, for the first time this February, the Gloucester Institute offered a structured conversation between races for students who might not have had much contact outside their own race.
“These are hard conversations to have,” said Sailor, “but we’ve got to have them if we are going to move our country forward.”
Dr. Olusoji Akomolafe, chair of the Political Science Department at Norfolk State University (NSU) and executive director of NSU’s new Center for African American Public Policy, led the conversation into the future by saying that he is not comfortable with the word “racism.” He cited similar conflicts that have occurred within a single race as in his native Nigeria and in Nazi Germany, and he pointed out that not all white people do the horrible things we call racism. And yet, he said, if someone lynches based on race, how do we dare not call it racism? The real issue, he said, is hate, so we need to find out why some people hate and others do not. He likened the problem to a disease, saying that if you want to heal it, you have to identify the right disease.
Dr. Akomolafe acknowledged white guilt, but added, “With healing, you have to talk about atonement, too.” Then he raised this question: “Why don’t we look at this in another way? It does not take the guilt away, but what it does is help us diagnose the problem in such a way that we can find a solution that will actually work for everybody.”
But Pastor MarQuita Carmichael of Antioch Baptist Church in Mathews County pointed out to Dr. Akomolafe the difference in cultural perspective between Africans from the Continent and the descendants of Africans brought here in chattel slavery. She talked about the Confederate flags that greet her when she drives into Mathews County, that flew over May Faire, and that encircle the monument at the courthouse, and she drew applause with this conclusion: “And so,” she asked, “where are the advocates, where are the people of good will who may not look like me, who may not come from the Continent, who will say, ‘This is not who we are? And because it’s not who we are, sir or madam, I respectfully ask you, take it down. It does not represent us.’ Unless, of course, it does.”
Melissa Mason, also of Antioch Church, followed with this story. She had read to a mixed-race but majority white class at Lee-Jackson Elementary School. Every child, regardless of race, wanted to sit beside her, and every child participated in a group hug at the end. She said behavior is learned, and she challenged all present to search themselves to see what they as individuals can do to make a difference.
The final comment came from Dianne Carter de Mayo, an African-American social studies teacher who lives in Gloucester. She talked about a common exercise used by social studies teachers to teach about prejudice, in which kids are divided by eye color and told that one color is better. She knew of one class, though, that refused. They said it was wrong, and they wouldn’t do it.
Mayo concluded by saying, “The work we are doing is making a difference. Don’t despair.”
