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than twenty-five years ago Bill Moyers won an Emmy for a PBS documentary
featuring the “two worlds” of Marshall,
Texas, his home town. The film focuses on life in Marshall
during the Great Depression and World
War II, the time of Moyers’ boyhood. As a youngster, Moyers was
hardly aware of the black community in Marshall, though it made up
approximately 50% of the population. It was an autonomous community
with churches, a variety of businesses, and two colleges: Wiley and
Bishop. |
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he was a boy, Moyers occasionally saw black people when they shopped
in department stores. He also observed that some black women came
daily to work as domestics in the homes of whites, and black men often
came to the white section to do yard work. Moyers realized that these
black people were ignored as “real” people who had lives of their
own beyond their duties as workers. In a sense, the blacks were invisible,
as Ralph Ellison portrays his narrator in the novel Invisible Man.
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after Moyers left Marshall,
he became interested in learning all he could about the black community
in his home town. For example, he learned that Melvin Tolson, a black
poet whose work he admired, taught English literature at Wiley College
during the time Moyers was a student at the all-white Marshall High
School. Tolson gave readings and lectures at black colleges churches
in Texas and Oklahoma. Tolson also organized a debate team at Wiley
that won a national debating contest against the Harvard University
team in 1935. Moyers began a collection of materials that he used
in writing a biography of Tolson. Denzel Washington produced a film,
The Great Debaters, based on the Wiley-Harvard debate. |
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Marshall High
School
Postcard courtesy www.rootsweb.com/ %7Etxpstcrd/ |
Wiley College
Postcard courtesy www.rootsweb.com/ %7Etxpstcrd/ |
In
1954 I began my teaching career in Big
Sandy, a town thirty miles from Marshall.
The two worlds depicted in Moyers’ film also existed in that small
town at the juncture of the Texas and Pacific and the St. Louis Southwestern
Railways. The blacks lived south of the tracks, an area where we whites
seldom had occasion to visit. Occasionally, I would meet a black man
or woman coming out of the post office as I entered, but I hardly
considered ever becoming acquainted with them. Once during the two
years I lived in Big
Sandy I drove past the frame building that housed the three-teacher
school for blacks. Another time, I drove past a black church on a
Sunday evening specifically because a colleague told me that I should
hear the choir. I drove slowly past the church absorbing the sounds
of a hymn interspersed with the sounds of “Amen.” With my car window
rolled down, I could also hear the shuffling of feet on the bare wooden
floor of the church.
On the day before classes began at Big
Sandy the first year I taught there, the three black teachers
came to a general faculty meeting at the school for whites, a two-storey
red brick building set on the highest hill in town. The superintendent
introduced the black teachers. Though I spent two years there, I never
saw the black teachers again, nor did I inquire about them. Now, I
wonder in what ways my experience at Big
Sandy would have been different if I had become acquainted with
these colleagues. |
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In the spring
of 1955, not long after the Supreme Court decision that found segregation
in the schools illegal, a student in my ninth-grade English class
asked me whether I would teach a Negro. “Yes,” I told the student,
“I would. I’m hired by the School Board to teach the students sent
to me.” Clearly, he was disappointed by my answer. In 1957 I began
teaching at The Victoria College, where I first taught black students,
only a few in number.
©
Robert Cowser May
28, 2008 Column
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