Colored School Teachers...

My teachers were like those Toni Morrison writes about in The Bluest Eye who hailed from Mobile, Aiken, Newport News, Marietta, and Meridian, attend land-grant colleges, normal schools, and learned teacher education in order to instruct black children in obedience. The obedience they passed down to me and scores of other colored children who passed through the doors of their classrooms was in mastering the gift each one of us possessed. They were educators in the old fashioned sense. Teaching was their mission, their calling, their vocation, even for those who chose teaching because there were few other career choices available to them. It was the way to educate not just their students, but the way to uplift the race.

"You are going to stay after school and help me grade these papers, young lady, since you don't know how to sit in class and behave."

"Shelve these books, maybe that'll keep you quiet."

"Take these forms to the principal's office, and while you're there use some of that wicked charm of yours to get the secretary to get the heat turned up in this room."

There's an organization up in Vermont looking to give black students money to go to Africa for the summer. Why not apply since you insist upon wearing your hair all over your head?"

"Quick, sit down over here. A college admissions officer is in my office from Massachusetts and no one has signed up to speak with her. You'll have to do."

I am forever grateful to those colored school teachers. Because they cared and took the time to mentor me I was able to escape the script that had been laid out for my southern, colored, working-class female existence. They made a way for me to escape. And I did go away, thanks to Mr. Smith, Mrs. Doanes, (and even my high school counselor, Miss Flowers, who was anglo). The only problem is that they did their job so well that it's taken me over thirty years to find my way back. Today in my work at Spelman College as a visiting professor I have the chance to do for my students what my colored teachers from elementary and high school did for me and others like me. Every semester I step into the classroom armed with books, class roll, syllabi, and the hope that maybe this will be the semester when I will be able to convince some girl starved for purpose to not settle for a backseat promise.

Renita J. Weems, Ph.D.