Megan Glover

Segregation in Schools During the New Deal in Marietta, Georgia: The Effects of Separate But Equal in The Nineteen Thirties and Beyond

Marietta, Georgia is a very large suburb of Atlanta today. However, in 1833, when the founders of Cobb County arrived there, the city began as a small square that is still intact. Thus the outward expansion depended greatly on the growth of the city of Atlanta and the success of Lockheed Air Force Base, a military base that was not only used as a military airport, but also as the manufacturer of military planes. The base provided jobs for people of varying levels of education, and was essential to the growth of Marietta and Cobb County. However, Lockheed was not fully functional until the nineteen-fifties; thus, more than one hundred years existed between the founding of the city and county and the growth that created the city that exists today.

As the city began, education was not an issue. Furthermore, when it became an issue, it was not an issue for children of all races. The Great Depression and the New Deal were detrimental and vital to the country, respectively, and for the first time in Marietta’s history, whites and blacks both suffered. (Although of course they did not suffer equally.) In fact, perhaps the Great Depression was the influence that began the end to separate but equal.

In order to understand the effects of Plessy vs. Ferguson in the American South, it is necessary to understand the causes of and repercussions of separate but equal. The problems in the education systems in the southern states began with their formation and with the ideals of the founders. However, it is important to look at the entire United States in order to clearly picture the social and economic forces at work against Negroes.^¹ The domination of racist fear in the minds of all Americans caused the inequality that still exists in many social structures today. As historian Peter Kolchin says,

As far back as 1780, Thomas Jefferson had expressed the conviction that there was no place for fee blacks in a white America; in the antebellum years, . . . , the triumph of political democracy-and the accompanying notion of political equality for free males-heightened the perception that freedom for blacks meant trouble for whites.^²

The fear of the implications of racial equality in the North is noteworthy before and after the Civil War. The difference between abolitionism and racism can sometimes be a subtle one. The idea that black and white men could be treated equally awoke some of the “ugliest fears in the American mind.”^³ The Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution came just after the end to a bitter war. The North was ready to get rid of the institution of slavery, (an institution that had caused such a bloody war and massive loss of American lives), but was not as anxious to conform to abolitionist theory.^⁴ Thus, racism ran deep in the North as well as the South. This is important as a basis for understanding the completely unequal ground southern blacks had to stand on at the end of the Civil War. In the southern states, education was not the top priority. An agricultural economy provided the need for labor instead of a need for formal training. The South was far behind the North in railroad construction and literacy, and that was true for whites and blacks. The North “established vigorous public school systems in the antebellum years, [and] the southern states made only perfunctory stabs at educating the population at large, and it was not until after the Civil War that most southern children, white or black, had even limited access to school.”^⁵ The lack of urbanization was not what struck many northerners first about the South when first visiting it during these years, Frederick Law Olmsted wrote articles on the South for the New York Times and said the South was “a degraded land of poverty, illiteracy, ignorance, inefficiency, and lethargy in which slavery impeded economic development while corroding

every one’s manners and morals.”^⁶ Due to the fact that the South was not interested in education until it became necessary to be and that they lost a brutal war in defense of slavery, they were certainly in no hurry to create a public school system benefitting Negroes.

Yet, although the slave system was the downfall of the South to the North, their economy began to recover soon after the end of the Civil War. As Reconstruction began across the country, cities around the South began implementing free schools. The small school system before mentioned in Marietta, Georgia began in 1892. It consisted of an academy for white children that opened immediately and became too small for the number of children attending, and a school for black children on Lemon Street that existed as their only school until desegregation.^⁷ The Marietta School System was thus developed, and in the years that followed the Cobb County School System was developed and began forming schools.^⁸ Demographic maps of the area from the turn of the century indicate that the dispersal of blacks in Cobb County was centered in an area around Lemon Street School. Thus, it is likely that it was for many years the only school necessary.^⁹ In 1907, however, in the Cobb County School District, there were “53 of these [schools] for whites and 22 for Negroes, with an enrollment of 2,078 white boys and 1,745 white girls, 665 Negro boys and 672 Negro girls.^¹⁰ The county was beginning to grow rapidly, unaware of the stunt that would stop the progression of the entire country.

In 1934 there were 1500 miles in the public road system of Cobb County. Libraries were successful and the Cobb County and Marietta School Systems were doing well. Annie Lack remembers her first days as a young teacher in the Lemon Street School then. The classes were large, although not just because the school was for grades kindergarten through twelfth grade, but also because at the time there were too few teachers at the school. Mrs. Lack was one of the first black women in Marietta to go to school in order to teach. Her salary was quite low, she says now that she “can’t remember what it was, because it wasn’t worth remembering.”^¹¹ Mrs. Lack considered herself lucky at the time to be able to contribute something to her family. Her mother was illiterate, and her father worked on a farm his entire life. Thus, Mrs. Lack did believe that education was the way for Negroes to become truly equal. The rural South was a difficult place to live during the Great Depression, although black movement to the North subsided once the entire country was in the depression.

Two forces tended to stabilize the foreign-born [meaning born in a state other than the one your parents came from, this does not reflect that some Negroes at this point may have been born in Africa] population during the depression . . . In comparison with the general family population, Negroes were underrepresented among migrant families but overrepresented among families on urban resident relief. The overrepresentation of Negro families on urban resident relief is evidence that they were less able to withstand the rigors of a depression. Yet, even though subject to greater economic distress, Negro families were much less likely to migrate than white families.^¹²

During the Great Depression, the school for blacks in Marietta did not change, although the statistics for the entire school system, indeed for the entire South, for literacy dropped drastically during those years. In 1930, the percent illiteracy of persons ten years and over in Georgia was 9.4%, which put the state at 41^st in the nation. Of those, 3.3% of whites were illiterate; 19.9% of blacks were illiterate; 10.6% of males, and 8.3% of females. The percentage of Negroes who were illiterate ranked Georgia at number 43 in the nation.^¹³ These figures are astounding; however, when considering that Georgia was a huge slaveholding state, and that slave owners did not allow literacy in their slaves, it is not as shocking. Thus, from the point of their arrival in Georgia, blacks were at an educational disadvantage forever. The effects of this are far reaching and permanent. In 1995 in during an internship, ten second grade students out of sixty were barely reading at the kindergarten level. Upon research, tutoring, and close evaluation, it became apparent that eight of those ten students lived in homes with at least one adult who was illiterate. These figures are incredible, and show the all-inclusive grasp that the Jim Crow South had on literacy.^¹⁴

While the New Deal and President Roosevelt sought to remedy some of these problems, the first order was to repair the economy through Southern agriculture, which did not encourage the pursuit of improving the quality of education for black Southerners. The economic “disaster” left the agricultural areas collapsed, and early New Deal efforts tried raising farm prices. “Tenants and sharecroppers, white and black, frequently found themselves deprived of benefits, of income, even of the land itself.”^¹⁵ Thus in Marietta, education was again put aside

particularly for blacks. The grandparents of children in school today quite possibly had to work to provide income during the Great Depression, and in the Jim Crow South, separate was not equal. Black workers received less pay than white and often had trouble finding jobs at all. Before the Depression, the private economy provided jobs for youth leaving high school without a diploma. However, unemployment among blacks aged sixteen to twenty-four surged in the early nineteen thirties. “The Civilian Conservation Corps was the first New Deal’s response to these concerns, but it only helped young men and did very little to encourage development of marketable job skills.”^¹⁶ The other New Deal response to unemployment was the Works Progress Administration, (WPA), which was intended to help poor workers feed their families and improve their morale. The work relief was granted to blacks and whites, and thus blacks received valuable training and pay at the same time. The unemployment rate of blacks to whites in the nineteen thirties was two to one, and by the end of nineteen thirty-nine one in three blacks was employed by the WPA. “‘Roosevelt came to be a god, African-American sociologist Horace Cayton remembered, ‘It was really great. You worked, you got a paycheck and you had some dignity.”^¹⁷ While white supremacy existed in the WPA as well, and issues such as hiring practices and assignments were of concern to many black workers, the project provided a much needed incentive for blacks in the South and in Marietta specifically to try to get skilled work. Negroes became interested in politics and their own welfare in the South.^¹⁸

Another program of huge importance to blacks in Marietta and across the South was the National Youth Administration (NYA).^¹⁹ It provided economic assistance for education and work relief assistance to poor young people. “FDR placed the NYA under the Works Progress Administration’s umbrella.”^²⁰ By the 1939 school year, the NYA’s work-study program distributed checks to students at twenty-eight thousand high schools and one thousand seven-hundred colleges.^²¹ This type of encouragement, particularly for black students, was incredibly effective. Mrs. Lack remembers the tale end of the Depression as a time of joy for her in the school system. “Many children were able to attend school who had never been able to stop working long enough to even worry about an education before.”^²² Mrs. Lack began teaching at Hickory Hills Elementary School when desegregation occurred and the Lemon Street School closed. However, she holds dear those first years teaching through such a difficult time because of the light that came at the end of the tunnel for blacks in the small town of Marietta.

As President Roosevelt created these jobs for the poor, he also protected their children from being forced to work in times of great hardship, which of course had a huge impact on the attendance in the school systems. “Franklin Roosevelt clearly believed government had a duty to put a floor under wages, as well as regulate hours, and child labor . . . And the Fair Labor Standards Act that set national minimum wage, maximum hours, and child labor standards finally secured national approval in 1938."^²³ All of these factors played important roles in forming the school system that is in place today.

While Plessy vs. Ferguson established “separate, but equal” rights for blacks in America, it was acceptable to them at the time to have separate, but unequal as long as they got something. The hatred that existed caused finding work at all difficult for blacks in the South, much less work with equal pay to white workers. When did this segregation occur? Of course, from the beginning of Africans being brought to the New World. In school systems, segregation was the system under which they were developed. What is unequal about the separation is the quality of the schools. The books provided to the Lemon Street School were the outdated and used books from the white schools. Every student did not have a book, and even the books they had were often completely illegible.^²⁴ Furthermore, “municipal libraries were reserved for the exclusive use of whites.”^²⁵ Thus, even when they began going to school, black students were at a significant disadvantage to whites until they could attend the same schools. As mentioned before, there was also the disadvantage (and it still exists today) of black students due to the fact that there was often no one at home to help them with their studies. This is a disadvantage on many levels; there is the possibility that the student will be unmotivated because the adults in their home are unable to read, and the possibility that the child could not succeed without more help than teachers could give. Particularly in the Lemon Street School and schools like it, there were too many students on too many different educational levels to allow much time for individual attention. As if these disadvantages were not enough then, even after black children were allowed to attend school with whites, the statistics of their disadvantage today are staggering.

By the time they are nine years old, black and Hispanic children are about 25 percent behind majority white students in reading, science and math. These disparities continue to grow, so that by age 17 black students are over 30 percent behind white students in measured performance . . . While 85 percent of white students now graduate from high school, less than 80 percent of black students graduate.^²⁶

Upon further investigation, it is interesting to note that educational disadvantage is not the only area where such significant gaps in equality exist. Marietta High School is now the only high school in the Marietta City School District. It has a population of forty-six percent black, thirty-eight percent white, twelve percent Hispanic, and four percent other ethnicity. The Lemon Street School is now the school for middle school and high school age children with behavioral disorders. It has a population of seventy-eight percent black, sixteen percent Hispanic, and six percent white.^²⁷ The implications of the formerly all black school now being used for children with behavioral and mental disorders need not be discussed further than to be brought to attention. Furthermore, the location of the predominantly black area of Marietta has not changed since the turn of the century. The area formed by the triangle of Roosevelt Circle, Church Street, and Park Street is a large, economically depressed area. This has been the central location of black residence in Marietta since the end of the Civil War. Now the Marietta Police Station has been moved from the square to the corner of Church Street and Roosevelt Circle, a clear sign of the danger area as perceived by the Marietta Police Department. In the Marietta City School District, out of seven elementary schools, Park Street Elementary School has the most minorities and the worst reading levels in the district.^²⁸

This is a clear indication that it is not only historically speaking that blacks in Marietta and in the South were at a disadvantage educationally speaking. This educational disadvantage continues today and is the primary reason for all other inequalities still existing between African-Americans and White Americans. It is necessary to understand what happened during the Reconstruction to blacks in Marietta, and the South, in order to provide an accurate depiction of the school system that existed until desegregation. The illiteracy rate is of huge importance; this investigation of the inequalities of the past may be the key to understanding Georgia’s rank in standardized testing today. Perhaps the first change should be to the demographics of the city of Marietta in order to encourage a rebirth of the enthusiasm in school that existed in blacks and whites after the Great Depression.