C is for Colored

By Dr. Larry James Ford

   Dr. Larry James Ford was born September 1, 1951, in Albany, Georgia. In 1956 at the age of four, his family moved to Aberdeen, Maryland, and later to Havre de Grace, Maryland, where he grew up and attended the Havre de Grace Consolidated School, C1, a legally, racially segregated school, from 1957 to 1964. He attended Havre de

• Language: English
• Publisher: Go To Publish
• Release date: Sep 18, 2023
• ISBN: 9781647498313

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C is for Colored

Copyright © 2023 by Dr. Larry James Ford

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher or author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Although every precaution has been taken to verify the accuracy of the information contained herein, the author and publisher assume no responsibility for any errors or omissions. No liability is assumed for damages that may result from the use of information contained within.

ISBN-ePub: 978-1-64749-831-3

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Contents

Acknowledgments:

BOOK I

CHAPTER 1 The World After Brown

CHAPTER 2 About C1

CHAPTER 3 When I Grow Up

CHAPTER 4 I’ve Got Mine

CHAPTER 5 Thinking about Lumumba

CHAPTER 6 Mr. Lisby: 6th Grade

CHAPTER 7 In the Streets of Annapolis

CHAPTER 8 Leaving C1

BOOK II

CHAPTER 9 Trying to Understand White People

CHAPTER 10 Enter To Learn

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12 Slave Day

CHAPTER 13 Parallax View

CHAPTER 14 Coatesville and Mr. Bill Taylor

CHAPTER 15 Glossy White Rocks

CHAPTER 16 The Pinning

CHAPTER 17 Breathing Again

CHAPTER 18 1968: A Very Bad Year

CHAPTER 19 Dry Corn Bread

CHAPTER 20 Senior Year

CHAPTER 21 After the Game

CHAPTER 22 The Road to Colquitt

CHAPTER 23 Mach I and Mom

CHAPTER 24 Hello Out There

CHAPTER 25 A Fine Colored School

CHAPTER 26 Old Black Joe

CHAPTER 27 A Warm Hug

This book is dedicated to the memory of Mercy D. Robinson Griffin, my mother; to Miss Isabel, Mister Elias and Miss Karina; and to the wonderful teachers of the Havre de Grace Colored and Consolidated Schools.

And a special thank you to the science mavens of The National Institutes of Health.

Acknowledgments:

The heroic women in my life: from family members, teachers, to family and personal friends, they have influenced or provided my perspective on most things of importance and substance. They showed me that I have a foundation, why it was built, and what it is for.

Mom: for being you, which was more than enough, and smarter than I could ever be.

Patricia: for being the consummate scholar, protective big sister, and academic beacon

Mrs. Addie Lee Haley: my grandmother and spiritual center of our family

Mrs. Susie Dean Haley: my great grandmother, for the Cherokee handy fearlessness and guile.

Mrs. Margaret Cason: my official other Mom, and brilliant mathematician next door.

Miss Carrie McWhite: my 1st grade teacher, who taught me personal responsibility and shoeing.

Miss Cora Fleming: my 2nd grade teacher and family friend for decades.

Miss Martha McWhite: for teaching kindness, humanity and preparing me for better days.

Mrs. Elizabeth Davage: for showing me how a difficult environment looked and how to survive it.

Miss Marie McGreevy: drama coach and teacher, who wanted to cast me as God in the play J.B.

Mrs. Arlene Golbin Burns: one of a kind friend, conversationalist and life saver without peer.

Acknowledgments:

National Institutes of Health: this book would not have been finished without the medical and spiritual assistance given by these extraordinary people. From remembering the expectant joy on their faces, behind their masks, before the first bone marrow biopsy, to their utter delight and surprise when they saw what their treatment had allowed me to write, and now share. You were my family during some very dark days, and you remain so, in these much lighter times.

Mrs Mabel Hart: for making me bring my A game always and getting me started with a solid understanding of the people around the times of the book. You are everybody's favorite 2nd grade teacher, whether we were actually in in your class or not

Havre de Grace Colored High School Museum Foundation: for being the keeper of the flame of the history and the academic foundation and anchor for an entire community, now spanning five generations of Old School and Consolidated families.

Patrick Spicer, Esq: the former counsel for the Harford County Board of Education, who wrote the eloquent and piercing history of segregated education in the Harford Historical Bulletin, numbers 105 and 107. The work provided a scholarly assessment of the period and confirmed the assumptions many in the Black community had concerning the Board of Education and Dr. Charles Willis.

Mrs. Gladys Allison: for assuring that the work of my beloved Consolidated School teachers was not in vain. And, for being on Gilman Quad on college graduation day.

BOOK I

The Harford County Board of Education, politicians, and White citizens of the county had never supported adequate elementary or secondary education for Negro students, despite claims to the contrary. It was difficult, frustrating, and time consuming to receive consistent support, or money, for colored schools in the county. The first Harford County Colored School was built in 1930 in Havre de Grace, after many years of battle between the Negro PTA association and the Board of Education and the conservative citizens it served. Before 1930, if a Negro student wanted to go to high school, he would have to go out of the county to a place that would accept students of his race. Students would have to go to school in Baltimore, Wilmington, or, curiously, Cecil County, a train ride across the Susquehanna River from Havre de Grace. A few Negro students, determined to get an education, undertook the daily train ride to obtain it.

Mr. Leon S. Roye was the first principal of the new, small Colored School in the city, and it was the only high school for Negroes in the entire rural county of Harford. This was a situation that had been in place comfortably for decades. When the Colored School was built, the courses taught were limited, and no academic diplomas were awarded to its graduates. In fact, the Board of Education explicitly prohibited the teaching of algebra, geometry, and other academic courses, but Mr. Roye did teach it anyway. The legendary Dr. Percy Williams took the daily 20-mile train ride to Cecil County to Elkton Colored High School. Education for Negro children stopped at age 13 in Harford County, until 1930.

After his secondary education, Dr. Williams went to college at Bowie Teachers College, a state school for Negroes in Maryland, and graduate school at both Temple and New York University. Since the state of Maryland did not admit in-state, or out-of-state Negro students to the University of Maryland, the state paid the tuition of the students to graduate school in other states. Dr. Williams returned to Harford County after obtaining his doctorate and became an essential person in the battle against school segregation. It was how things were done in the state in the early and mid-1900s. In those times, equality was not openly considered, or accepted as a debatable issue.

The Board of Education had only one county Colored High School until 1952 when Central and Havre de Grace Consolidated were both suddenly built. The years of efforts by Negro citizens to soften the thick, historical White opposition, and lack of concern about Negro education, were largely unsuccessful. But something else happened to alert them to the scary, changing times ahead. If it wasn’t the hand of God that moved White people to build the new Colored Schools, they so triumphantly touted, then it may have been a federal court case that came out of Westminster, California, in 1946.

The case of Mendez vs. the City of Westminster was sending an alert in certain political circles and setting the table for the landmark Brown vs the Topeka Board Of Education case, the 1954 Supreme Court ruling that outlawed public school segregation by race. The Mendez case affirmed that denying Mexican children the same education as White children, in the same school, was unconstitutional and detrimental to minority children. Not by accident, the young attorney for the plaintiff, Sylvia Mendez, was Thurgood Marshall. The God-fearing Christian White people of the county seemed to find more reasons to build the new Colored Schools after the Mendez court ruling, than from what they had heard in their churches before it. Sometimes, fears move things when faith won’t. Harford County would meet and face Thurgood Marshall in court, in the coming years.

The powers in Harford County didn’t want to integrate, and they thought the two new schools would give them a little breathing room, and some cover, in the coming conflict, to continue and prolong segregation in schools. The Board argued they should have local control over the schools, and they should be free to use the desires of White county citizens to decide how to proceed, despite the Supreme Court ruling. They argued this in court, over and over again, in lawsuits, with considerable success in delaying the integration process. In 1956, a local newspaper editorial proclaimed that since a few Negro students already had been admitted to white schools, segregation is no longer the problem, and they were concentrating on continuing the process in their own way.

Before I started school in 1957, that was the state of play, in what truly was a game of control to limit the expectations, and aspirations, of Negro students in the Harford County schools. The county was willing to use extraordinary arguments in court, and display beliefs bordering on racial delusions, to keep things the same in the schools, for as long as possible. But the pliant little colored boy the Board of Education had planned and hoped for never showed up. Instead, they got me and my family, which was a problem for them.

Artist’s aerial view of Havre de Grace Consolidated School in 1957. It replaced the original Havre de Grace

Colored School in 1952.

(From the 1959 Havre de Grace Consolidated School,

Eagle Yearbook)

Image: Courtesy of Harford County Board of Education

This is a copy of the 1938 Colored School Commencement Program, which was held at Havre de Grace City Hall.

Image: Courtesy of HDG Colored School Museum collection.

The Class 0f 1932 had 12 graduates. Mr. Roye is seen standing center of the back row.

Courtesy of HDG Colored School Museum collection.

CHAPTER 1

The World After Brown

It was 1958, four years after the Supreme Court ruled, in the Brown vs Topeka Board of Education, that education based on race in the United States was illegal. Very little had changed in Maryland since that time in regard to advancing school integration. We were beginning to see how slow the all deliberate speed, prescribed by the Court, was going to be in reality. The South was being rocked by forced integration and forced busing, with poor results so far. It seemed that Harford County, and much of Maryland, were in no hurry to comply with the federal courts or the Supreme Court, and no one seemed urgently interested in forcing their compliance. Baltimore City had integrated their schools in 1952, but advancement in Maryland school integration stopped there. In Harford County, it seemed like it was s till 1952.

In Maryland, there had been no federal troops in the streets, or schools, holding bayoneted rifles, like in Little Rock. There were no irate White parents standing along the path to school, throwing objects at Black school students protected by United States Marshals, like in New Orleans. The fears and hopes were present in equal amounts in much of the country, as it once more fought against doing the right thing on race. That was the state of play across much of the country, as I started elementary school, at the Havre de Grace Consolidated School. It was referred to as the "Colored School’’ by the school board and many White people of the county, but we seldom used the term. A consolidated school contained grades 1 through 12, and they had not been used for White students since the 1930s.

The Board of Education had been locked in a series of legal disputes and lawsuits with the NAACP as to what all deliberate speed actually meant in regard to the integration of public schools. The school superintendent, Dr. Charles Willis, was dearly loved by many White citizens, and he was equally despised by Negroes, for his unyielding and unapologetic racist bent on things. He could never imagine Black and White students sitting together in the same classroom in Harford County. His plan for integration was to delay it as long as possible, sandbagging the federal courts with the old Okie-doke for as long as Judge Thomsen would let them.

My big sister, Patricia, who we all called Pat, would have to shove me into the door of my first grade classroom every day for the first month of school. I had always been her shadow, but I couldn’t follow her around all day like I wanted. I missed my very first day of public education in September 1957. Mom was talked into letting me stay home with her one more day, as I pretended not to feel well, with some imaginary, minor ailment. Besides, if I had been born a day later on September 2nd, and not on September 1st, I couldn’t have gone to school until the following year, 1958. It seemed like delaying going to school by an extra day wouldn’t hurt anybody, especially myself.

Pat liked school, and she always had. She went to a private kindergarten when we lived in Georgia. She was ahead before starting her first day of school in Albany. She was in school in Georgia for only the first-grade. Then we moved to Aberdeen, Maryland, just below the Mason-Dixon line. There was no kindergarten program for Negro children in the state of Maryland. Starting school was to be my first exposure to formal education and forced socialization.

Every morning was a challenge for me to find enough enthusiasm and courage to survive another day and to suppress my fears of the tough boys from the Hamilton Court projects. My greatest concern was getting on the wrong bus going home and ending up there, in the projects, with no idea of how to get back to my family. It was another day to practice containment of numerous fears, real and imagined, and focus on learning how to be around other people, and getting used to the idea of eating food prepared by complete strangers. While still in bed, I could smell the cafeteria food already, like stewed tomatoes, beets, kale, and stuffed peppers every single day. I never had these foods at home or in Georgia. It was difficult to completely awaken, and then hurry to get ready to catch the bus for school. Many times I would be in bed, already thinking about school, having heard the morning sounds of the crowing roosters and the irritable, clucking brown hens next door in Miss Leona’s yard. They announced that another unsettling day was here.

Our old two-story, red shingle house was drafty and without a source of heat upstairs, making the winter mornings particularly uninviting. I would get out of bed and scurry down the creaking, old narrow stairs to the bathroom, and wash up as quickly as possible, with the tepid water from the spigot. I would then greet my Mom, eat a little cereal, and try to soak up the heat from the ancient, groaning black kitchen stove, full of dangerous glowing coals. I would get my book bag, full lunch box, and head for the back door, right behind Pat.

We would walk down the narrow, pocked street that ran through our neighborhood of small bungalow houses. Only Negro families resided in our neighborhood, and the housing pattern was similar to other areas across the country, where Negroes lived in proximity to White people. It was the natural order of things at that time, just like graveyards being segregated by custom, if not by law. It seemed everything was, or could be, segregated by the law, short of reinstating slavery.

The school bus stop was only a quarter mile away. Depending on the season, the short walk might greet you with a bracing, windy slap in the face, or a soul-numbing, cold, drenching rain. Later in the year, the oppressive Maryland heat, and the unforgiving humidity of late spring, may make you yearn briefly for winter. If the weather was especially inclement, wet, freezing, or snowy, Pat and I would leave home a little early, and go to Miss Lily’s house, right across the street from the bus stop, at Bill Harris’ beer garden.

Miss Lily was always glad to see Pat and me. She welcomed us to enjoy the warmth of her little home and get out of the damp. She had a soft and soothing voice, with a light, pleasing touch in her hands that made you feel special, even if you were not her kin. She reminded me a lot of my grandmother, Addie, in Georgia. Pat and I would warm away our chill, watch TV for a little while and talk to Miss Lily about school. She liked watching Dave Garroway, and various baby animals that would show up on the Today Show from time to time. Or, sometimes, we would just watch the news out of Baltimore.

Miss Lily had a teenage son, Larry. He went to a Catholic school all the way in Wilmington, Delaware, and not with the other neighborhood children. I always thought he must be very smart to go to a Catholic school completely in another state, with White kids too. We hardly ever saw him, except on holidays and in the summertime. It must have been a very different experience to legally go to school with White children, but you had to leave the state of Maryland to do it. Larry was in a short historical line of other Negro students who had to leave the county, or the state, to get an education. The state of Maryland loved the principle of segregation so much that they paid for Dr. Percy Williams, the principal of Central Consolidated School, and several other teachers to go out of the state for graduate education, including Ph.Ds. Graduate degrees were not available at the state’s Negro colleges, and the University of Maryland, generally, did not accept Negro students, even from their own state.

When Pat saw the bus out of Miss Lily’s frosty front window, we would dash out the door into the cold, across Edmund Street to the bus stop. I would always hope that the driver wasn’t the predictably unpleasant White man we had sometimes, Mr. Foote. We called him Foots, and nobody liked him. He was big with a scruffy, stubble face and a foul attitude to go with it, so early in the morning. He clearly didn’t like his job. And, I was pretty sure he didn’t like any Negroes who were unfortunate enough to cross paths with him. He would just sit there in the driver’s seat and glare at us boarding his bus. When he got tired of that, he’d stare out the side window until the bus was fully loaded.

One of the big high school boys wrote in ink on the back of a seat, Foots is a Dog! He was usually the only actual White person I had contact with all day. You could always tell when it was going to be Foots driving us because it wouldn’t be a regular yellow school bus pulling into the stop. Instead, it would be the old-fashioned bus coming to pick us up. It looked like it was straight out of the 1940s like you might see in the Fun with Dick and Jane books. It was streamlined, silver in color, and with a torpedo back, shaped like an old man’s fat stogie. It was the kind of bus you might take on a summer trip to Hershey Park, but not to regular school. The front of the bus seemed to be leaning forward, and it’s diverging lines made the old heap look like it was speeding, even at a dead stop. The bus was definitely long in miles, and smelled well used inside, with a musty, dank organic note.

Our regular bus was a standard issue Yellow Bluebird. When the White kids had a bus out of service, this one was most likely resurrected for the day and given to us. It was always hard to tell what White people thought about Negroes. In their minds, maybe they thought we were used to things being in disrepair, spoiled or well used. They couldn’t expect their White kids to ride in this antiquated spore and mole preserve.

Foots put the ancient bus into its grinding first gear, and we launched out of Aberdeen proper, passing White students walking to their white schools. Our bus passed one Catholic elementary school, another county elementary school, and the big Aberdeen High School on Route 40, on the way out of town. I thought we were lucky to be riding, instead of walking in the cold and cutting wind. Watching a small group of White kids fighting the elements to get to school, I would think— boy, this bus is just what we needed, and how fortunate we were to be riding to school every day. I did not understand that, in our case, we were being forcibly bused to maintain segregation, which was fine with the Board of Education and most White people. The bus passed the city limits of Aberdeen, past the brown, barren shoe-peg corn fields along the Pennsylvania Railroad tracks. The trip to school was only about 3 miles and it took only 10 minutes.

The midway point between Aberdeen and Havre de Grace was a Sinclair gas station situated on a small hill at the turn off to our school. Mr. Foots turned onto Oakington Road, and the old bus slowly plodded up a small bridge over the railroad tracks, where you could first gain sight of our nearly new, nearly hidden Havre de Grace Consolidated School. It looked natural in its pastoral setting, framed by maple, aspen, and dogwood trees. It was still looking new, though it was built five years earlier, and then only after many years of battle between the Negro community and the notoriously niggardly, all-White Board of Education. Save for a few old wood framed houses with screened in porches and a couple of newer brick homes, the school stood alone as a monument to one of the most anti-democratic of notions. It was out of sight, out of mind, down a pretty two-lane country road. It was built to keep school children in the county separated by race for the foreseeable future, or for as long as segregation was still possible in the country.

The crescent road, in front of the Consolidated School, was already filling up with yellow school buses. Groups of students disembarked from the buses quickly, to escape the raw weather, and headed straight for their classrooms. Every day I would pass the office where Mr. Roye, the principal, was often seen sitting head down, working at his desk. A little way down the hall of the old school wing, or elementary side of the school, was my favorite place, the athletic trophy case. There were medals, ribbons, and plaques from track and field, cross-country, and the venerated trophies from the Maryland State Basketball Championships for Colored Schools, which were won by Consolidated recently. There were other older trophies won from times before the new school was built. Maybe the best part of going to the Consolidated School was that, even in the first grade, you already had a basketball and track team. The White kids didn’t have that.

Now, I was in the 2nd grade, which must have been a relief for my 1st grade teacher, Miss Carrie McWhite. She no longer had to risk the breakage of one of her long, pretty, polished fingernails, helping me to put on my rubber shoes on rainy days. Big sister Pat, no longer had to force me, and my fears, angst, and insecurities, into the classroom. Mrs. Cora Fleming was my 2nd grade teacher and childhood friend of my stepfather, Emerson Griffin. Mrs. Fleming also had previously taught Pat. School was easy for my sister because she was so very smart, popular, and nothing ever seemed to get to her. Pat was tough, fearless and she didn’t mind fighting either. But she was a girl, and the world came at me in a different way. I followed Pat’s lead on just about everything to do with school, and there was some added protection that came along with being Patricia Ann Ford’s little brother. I figured that one day, I would stop being intimidated by the tough Hamilton Court boys. Until then, I always wanted to know where Pat was on the playground at recess, just in case. Recess was when the worst things would happen in elementary school.

This was going to be a school morning like no other so far for me. My teacher, Mrs. Fleming, had selected me and a classmate, Margaret, to be part of the school’s official morning program, given over the often shrill and scratchy loudspeakers. Every room had one on both the elementary and high school sides of the building. Our principal, Mr. Leon S. Roye, would be master of ceremonies this early morning, and he always closed with his famous, and much anticipated, remarks about the school day, a particular event or whatever was on his mind that morning. He had been the principal of Havre de Grace Colored School, and now the Havre de Grace Consolidated School since it started in 1930. He was Emerson’s, my stepfather’s, school principal, as well as the principal for several of the present teachers at the school. Mr. Roye was concerned, colorful, sincere, protective, enigmatic, abrupt, mercurial, and abrasive, sometimes all at once. He appeared to be a very stressed and busy cherub, with his prominent red cheeks and mustachioed smile, running about the school halls as if he had wings. It seemed everybody had a story about Mr. Roye, since he had been the school chief at the Old School, and now Consolidated, for almost two generations.

My favorite Mr. Roye story showed his willingness to do the right thing, even in the face of the utter pettiness, spleen, and paternalism exhibited by the Harford County Board of Education. For many years, the Colored School gave out only general diplomas to its graduates. Mr. Roye, on his own, taught his students algebra when it was not part of the general curriculum for the Colored School. An administrator (a White man, C. Milton Wright) from the Board of Education visited the Old School in the early 1940s one school day to observe. He noticed that Mr. Roye was teaching an unauthorized and illegal subject—algebra. He was ordered to stop teaching it and not to teach it in the future. The Board and the county’s White citizens didn’t need Negroes who knew algebra; they