LCV Winter 2012 - (Page 81)

saying to us, ‘You are young. It is natural that white and Negro men will admire you. But men are men. What do you have a brain for? — To avoid embarrassing situations.’” Then the lecture would end with a laugh as someone asked, “When the supervisor passes and my car has broken down on a country road, do I just thank him and tell him to send some worker out from the garage?” Remember, that was the 1920s. McAllister continually counseled the young teachers to avoid “trouble” with men. for these women, access to white men meant access to power, to which they were dooR.” Her dissertation drew on her years of experience as an educator, a teacher trainer in rural Louisiana and as a representative for Louisiana’s department of Education. “i used every opportunity to gain more knowledge of [Louisiana] teacher[s] and their needs,” she wrote. Mr. A.C. Lewis, the state supervisor of negro education in Louisiana, “gave me access to the records of the State department [of Education], a privilege unheard of for a negro at that time.” Using an assortment of statistics from the Louisiana department of Education, McAllister carefully analyzed the problems of rural black education in her adopted state. in discussing how low standards and a shortage of qualified black teachers seriously affected the overall quality of African-American schools, she wrote: Louisiana has a number of teachers for the Negro schools, but they are not well trained. This first defect is due to a second defect of the system for training Negro teachers; namely, the teacher training requirements for Negroes are too low. This in turn discloses a third Julius Rosenwald (below) amassed a fortune as part-owner of the Sears, Roebuck and Company retailing empire. As a philanthropist, he established the Rosenwald Fund, which paid for the construction of more than 5,000 schools for rural African Americans across the South. unaccustomed. McAllister, who was known to be aloof, relied on her distance as a means of succeeding in the white world. it was far safer to remain detached, even reclusive, than to risk entanglement with supervisors, white or black. Her advice offered the women a way of circumventing the male power structure. Black women who kept their distance and stood up for their principles, refusing to allow white superintendents to intimidate them, were far more likely to gain the respect of these same men. EARNING A DOCTORAL DEGREE in the summer of 1926, McAllister took a leave of absence from Southern University and went to new York to continue her graduate studies at Columbia University’s Teachers College. By the 1920s, not only were many students receiving their undergraduate degrees from historically black colleges and universities in the South and continuing their education at major white universities in the north, but they were also choosing to venture out of the South as undergraduates. doctoral students, however, were much more rare. one estimate holds that in 1927 only 39 blacks had been awarded a Ph.d. in the entire world. working menial jobs and tutoring, McAllister studied hard and maintained a rigorous schedule. Students in her Columbia dorm would remember the sign she left on her door: “do noT diSTURB. in CASE of EMERGEnCY, STiCK A noTE UndER THE Winter 2012-13 • LoUiSiAnA CULTURAL ViSTAS 81 

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LCV Winter 2012

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