LCV Winter 2012 - (Page 80)

Julius Rosenwald fund, the John Slater fund and the General Education Board of the Rockefeller foundation were providing money for supplies and the construction of new school buildings. However, Louisiana still had to rely on local support and involvement to ensure that these ventures would succeed. This meant not only recruiting and training potential black teachers but convincing the white power structure that such endeavors were worthwhile. McAllister later recalled: I was really achieving an identity, knowing who I was and where I was going. I began to know people, their needs and problems ... The State Department of Education began calling on me to travel and work [all] over the state. I began to learn [from] state agents, parish superintendents and even a few landowners … The Rosenwald Foundation was giving money for school buildings. Negro schools were slowly moving out of churches and lodge halls, and proudly moving into trim Rosenwald buildings. Negroes gave gifts of money and labor and occasionally land. White landowners gave land. … [After] one white plantation owner [listened] to my amateurish speech on the value of education to Negro children and the Negro community (and indirectly to the efficient management and work on the white man’s land), [he] abruptly said, “I’ll give 5 acres just for the speech the girl made.” He appreciated my earnestness. The same thing happened with a lumber mill owner in Bogalusa. McAllister traveled extensively, promoting programs that benefited rural education in Louisiana. She helped open the first extension course for black teachers in opelousas in 1925. The class met twice a month on Saturdays and was so successful that Southern University decided to organize an extension department the following school year. Her work brought her in close contact with local white superintendents and state agents. These white men respected her abilities and admired her commitment. However, because of the whites-only power structure of the Rosenwald Schools offered rural African American communities greatly improved facilities over the often substandard buildings provided by local school boards. time, McAllister would often have to defer to them in public on important decisions. This arrangement, as she reflected in 1954, was a standing joke with her and her colleagues: In the early days, one of the white superintendents never made a proposal without looking for me for approval. If the superintendent had not been a fine person, sincerely interested in the education of Negroes, I should have resented being forced to “use him” as a mouthpiece. Even today, in any serious trouble I would, as in Ivanhoe’s Middle Ages, get a white person to fight another white person for me. Ridiculous and humiliating, isn’t it? Yet McAllister made a strong impression on her white supervisors. She worked closely with Leo favrot, a field agent for the state’s General Education Board. in a letter of reference in 1928, favrot wrote that McAllister was “unquestionably a young woman of outstanding promise in the education field.” McAllister’s work with male supervisors occasionally brought her into tense and embarrassing situations. After it was discovered that a local white superintendent was romantically involved with one of the black Jeanes Program teachers, both were forced to leave Louisiana. Several other teachers later confessed to McAllister that they had known about the affair: The young Jeanes teachers said, “We couldn’t tell you, Miss McAllister. It happened before [you told us], ‘You are never to do anything that will prevent your effectiveness with all the people in your parish.’” One woman said, “I remember you “ ‘YOU CAME HERE TO LEARN THE THREE R’S.’ AND SHE SAID: ‘YOU MAY THINK THAT IS READING, WRITING, AND ’RITHMETIC, BUT IT IS NOT. IT IS RESPONSIBILITY.’ ” – Magnolia Dilworth Austin, recalling a lecture by professor Jane McAllister 80 LoUiSiAnA EndowMEnT foR THE HUMAniTiES • Winter 2012-13 

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