Already a veteran of the civil rights movement by virtue of having spent the summer of 1963 as a member of a race and religion workshop at Tougaloo College, in the summer of 1964 the writer embarked upon a career as a civil rights advocate wearing the hat of an educator. That summer he walked onto the campus of Immaculate Conception Catholic School as a 22-year-old social studies teacher.
There he would spend four years, two of which he was paid less than the minimum wage of $40 dollars a week. (That meager salary was supplemented by free meals and subsidized room rent.) In that position, he developed into what he felt was a first-rate high school social studies teacher, teaching Mississippi history, U.S. history, world history, American government, civics, economics, sociology, geography, and at the request of the principal Sister Mary Janelle, developed and taught a course in Negro history. In the course of teaching at Immaculate Conception, he met and taught some of the most gifted students in the world – Wendell Jones, Robert Burton, Betty Golden, Ann Ying, Elizabeth Singletary, Claudette Romious, Arthur Skipper, William Miller, Jackie Tucker, and Austin Jones; and some of the most helpful and appreciative students – Sam Davis, Nathan Harris, Rebecca Henry, Lula Orsby, Sam Erby, and Susan Jackson.
We mention the pay, the range of curricular expectations, and the quality and character of the students because they say a great deal about the era that we should not allow to be forgotten. Yes, Immaculate Conception Catholic School represents a group of schools and a group of educators who flourished throughout Mississippi and across America. Furthermore, what we have said about Immaculate Conception could be said about the other Catholic high schools existing between 1906 and 1986.
Beginning in the early 1900s and expanding into the 1950s, the Catholic Church, usually led by a few courageous priests and nuns, established and maintained eight high schools for Black children in Mississippi. These were in Vicksburg (St. Mary), Jackson (Holy Ghost), Greenville (Sacred Heart), Natchez (St. Francis), Meridian (St. Joseph), Clarksdale (Immaculate Conception), Canton (Holy Child Jesus), and Yazoo City (St. Francis). On the one hand, those actions represented an avoidance of a fight against the newly re-empowered forces of segregation in the state opposed to Black people being educated. On the other hand, the actions took advantage of an opportunity to provide an education to many Black students who would have otherwise been without one. In most of the cases where the eight high schools were established, they were established prior to the local municipalities establishing public high schools for Black students.
Because the Catholic high schools were operated without public funds, there was not much money to pay those who taught in them. (The nuns, who made up most of the teaching force, had already taken vows of poverty. The lay teachers accepted the fact that they, too, were sacrificing in order to provide a group of capable and deserving students a quality high school education.) Low tuition and modest donations from the community, the diocese, and the religious congregations made up the schools’ small budgets.
Because the teaching staffs were small and because the teachers were literally married to their job of teaching, each one spent an inordinate amount of time preparing themselves in one of the broad academic domains – language arts, the social sciences, the natural sciences or mathematics. They became experts and were very demanding of their students in those basic subject areas. That academic rigor also helps explain why so many of the graduates of the schools like Holy Ghost, Sacred Heart, and St. Mary were such standouts in college and in the professional world. The fact that the students and/or their parents had to pay hard earned money meant that they were grateful for the opportunity.
As an added bonus, in many ways the schools were meeting and organizing places, supporting of the developing civil rights movement. Several schools were sanctuaries for the children of the civil rights leaders. Finally, it is safe to say that all the schools were incubators for future lawyers, politicians, teachers, and other types of community leaders.
The collective story of these schools shows them as more than heroic. Some of the individual stories are also unbelievable. Because of that and because much of it is unrecorded, the descendants of these students, teachers, and sponsors need to be busy recording these stories of their ancestors. This is more than a hint. It is a strong recommendation as we conclude this discussion.
On this the 60th anniversary of his initial involvement in Catholic teaching, because many of the beneficiaries of Holy Child Jesus, St. Francis, Immaculate Conception, and the other high schools are now senior citizens, and because all eight high schools now are closed, the writer felt it important and necessary to raise a salute to those students, teachers, and sponsors who rose up in an era when Jim Crow was chokingly strong and determined to reign forever. These eight high schools contributed to a movement that lives on in all who caught its spirit from the teachers, students, and sponsors in towns as separate and united as Canton, Clarksdale, Greenville, Greenwood, Jackson, Meridian, Mound Bayou, Natchez, Vicksburg, and Yazoo City.
