Depression

Miss Esther Nichols, arrived in 1929. The crash on Wall Street was heard in Marion as it was heard all over the United States. Lincoln School suffered and struggled to stay afloat. She presided over the demise of the short-lived junior college department. The boarding department ceased operation in 1932 in the depths of the depression, but students hungry for education continued to come from rural areas and elsewhere in large numbers. Many took up walking several miles from the countryside, again, a traditional method of getting to school by Blacks. Others boarded with families.

Even though Lincoln got its first black teachers around 1908, they did not live on campus until the early 1930s. Early on the following Lincoln Normal graduates returned to work at their Alma Mater: J.W. Beverly, '92, and Bessie Davis, '99, as teachers; John Mickle, '99 (or George Mickle '02), as an administrative assistant. Carlee Watters, '17 and '21, may have been the first hall matron in the 1920s. Non-Lincoln graduate, the Rev. Thomas Routt, Minister of the First Congregational Church, taught Latin in the mid-20s on a part-time basis. Teachers were mostly white for many years.

The reasons why are not altogether clear, since it is known that many black teachers were available and prepared to teach at that time. One can make some intelligent guesses. It is a fact that some black instructors were already in AMA schools elsewhere. Black Francis L. Cardozo was principal of Avery Institute, an AMA institution in Charleston, South Carolina, at about the time that Lincoln School was founded in 1867. My guess is that all of the teachers at Avery were probably African American at the time.

One can only surmise that the primary reasons Lincoln existed for sixty years or so without black teachers had to do with the location of the school in the heart of Alabama's Black Belt; that there was a smaller black pool of teachers to draw from in the immediate vicinity. Certainly when Woolworth Hall, the teachers' residence was completed in 1921, local sociological patterns of Marion would have made integrated living extremely difficult, if not impossible. The AMA was no doubt aware of this, and school life went on, often including cultural events.

I recall several humorous comments, told to me by my mother about Lincoln School. A traveling musi-comedy troupe, headed by one Stovepipe, stopped by and performed when she was a student. The raucous-voiced Stovepipe sang about his "mama":

Ef I can't see my mama tonight,

I don't wanna see mama at all..

Ef I can't see my mama to night,

don't wanna see mama at all.

Not understanding the blues, sly irreverent inferences, and the secular pathos of Southern Black culture, one prim New England school teacher at Lincoln School proclaimed at the conclusion of the act, "It is wonderful that he feels that way about his mother! He has been well-trained." The teacher had the right string, but her yo-yo was very much the wrong color!

Langston Hughes was invited to visit Lincoln School in the 1930s- sometime around 1932, he stopped by and read some of his poems. My late mother recalled Hughes visit, and that he read several poems. She remembered this particular one word for word:

Me and my baby's

Got two mo' ways

Two mo' ways to do de Charleston!

Da da.

Da, da, da!

Two mo' ways to do de Charleston!