And the other part of me was angry. I was mad that Henrico County allowed a teacher, who they paid far less than white teachers, or even Black male teachers, to spend her own money on the land she deeded to them. They just accepted it as a gift without compensation. If the land was for sale and the school needed to be expanded, Henrico County could have purchased it. They could have offered to pay Virginia Randolph the fair market value for the property. Virginia could have leased it to them and made income on the property while continuing to build equity. She could have sold that property to pay for her retirement. But they took advantage of her. They would never have expected a white teacher to buy land to further the educational opportunities of their communities. Even the dormitories were funded by Virginia and the other teachers at the school, who pooled their money in 1924 to see them built.
The worst day of Virginia’s life came in 1929. By then, her little Mountain Road School had been renamed the Virginia Randolph Training Academy, and it had expanded to include multiple buildings. A kitchen was added to serve the children fresh meals, and the school now enrolled 235 students, 75 of whom were in high school.[8] Virginia had no way of knowing that the stock market would soon crash—all she knew is that her world crashed on a February day when she received word that her primary school building, the gardens, the memories, the sweat of her brow, the callus of her hands: everything was on fire.
Virginia collapsed when she glimpsed the fire consuming her life’s work, the flames slowly growing in intensity, eating a hole in the roof of the wooden structure, devouring the grass and the arbor, snaking its way through everything she had sacrificed for.
She shouted at the fire, screamed at it. “How dare you! I won’t let you take it!” Women gathered around her, circling her like a wagon train, enclosing what was precious in their midst, safeguarding her from having to watch everything go up in flames.
“No!” she sobbed. “Please don’t take this from me…please.”
Soon, it was gone. A newspaper report in the Richmond Times-Dispatch said that no “inmates” at the school were hurt, but that there was nothing the fire department could do.[9] Her school. Her namesake. Years—decades—of her life, reduced to a pile of smoldering ash.
One of the women yelled for a child standing nearby: “Go get the doctor.”
For a week, Virginia was so distraught that she was under a physician’s care, likely given a barbiturate to help her sleep. Each time she opened her eyes, images of the fire roared before them. She saw the men running for water, heard the fire engine, envisioned the children trying in vain to help, their little limbs straining under the weight of a single bucket. She gasped for air as the vise of grief gripped her small and mighty body. “Give her one of these when she wakes up,” the doctor had instructed one of Virginia’s friends.[10]
“No,” Virginia whispered as she roused from her sleep, “please don’t take this from me…”
“Here, mama. Here.” She heard the voice of her friend nearby. “Drink this.” Virginia tried to swallow what was offered, but she spluttered. There seemed to be no space in her throat for water. “You’re okay,” her friend said. “Take some deep breaths.” Each day swallowing the pills got a little easier, each day Virginia welcomed the sweet relief of sleep that they brought. After seven days, the doctor advised that she stop taking them, but that she still needed time to take it easy.
With her mind cleared, Virginia realized there was not time to rest, because things needed doing. There were children to be taught, and she wasn’t going to lose the rest of the school year. She rose from bed in the cool of the morning, the dew dampening her feet as she approached the site of her beloved school. Tears pooled in her eyes when she smelled the char of the wood that used to be her students’ desks, their books, worn from wear, the papers where they practiced forming the letter Q with the perfect flourish, where they learned how to divide twelve by four. But on that morning, Virginia didn’t linger. What was the next needed thing? To finish the school year so her students wouldn’t fall behind. To support the teachers she guided in their important work. They had lost a lot too.
Virginia, who had for several years been the Supervisor of Negro Education in Henrico County, asked herself every day, “What is the next needed thing?” And soon, the answer came: make plans to rebuild the school. Some of the money came from the families themselves, collections taken up in offering plates at school and in the churches, bake sales bringing in nickels and dimes, exhibits of household goods the children made, with all proceeds benefiting the school rebuilding fund.
Some of the money was kicked in by Henrico County, and some came from a wealthy northern philanthropist. The new school building went up, brick by brick. This one would have a library and an auditorium. The construction was finished by 1930, but it would never replace what was lost. “I worked so hard, and just to think I could not save either building. God knows what I feel. I will never get over it,” Virginia lamented.[11]
I would be remiss if I failed to mention that Virginia not only created a thriving educational community for African Americans in Henrico County; she also took in children. The 1930 census says she had fourteen adopted children, and at various times she had as many as twenty.[12] To be sure, adoption in 1930 often meant something different, and possibly less permanent, than it does now. It’s quite likely that she either took in children who couldn’t stay with their own families because of abuse or poverty, or that families gave Virginia temporary custody of their child so they could attend school. Adoption in 1930 most often did not mean the complete severing of ties with a child’s birth family. It meant that someone was caring for a child not their own, either in the short term or for the long. One of Virginia’s former pupils, Mildred Holley, counted eighty-seven children, including herself, who lived with Virginia at one time or another. In recalling it, her voice cracks: “I don’t think I would have finished school or anything else if it hadn’t been for her.”[13]
Some children came from as far away as New York to attend the Virginia Randolph Training Academy, and Virginia didn’t just teach them to multiply and write their names, she mothered them. She worked with the court system to create a program for youth who were in trouble with the law, setting them on the straight and narrow and ensuring they attended school. She boarded teachers who didn’t have anywhere to live, and she appears to have permanently adopted one daughter.
How did she support all of them, when she herself admitted to never having any money? One way was selling bread. She got up at 4:30 a.m. to bake, kneading dough and pulling steaming loaves out of the oven before the sun rose, but by her fifty-fifth year as a teacher, she had cut back to baking and selling bread only two days a week—Saturday and Sunday.[14]
In 1938, Virginia made a move to buy a fifty-acre farm and farmhouse adjacent to the school. She intended to use the farmhouse as a boy’s dormitory, and the fields to teach the boys how to farm. The Great Migration had sent hundreds of thousands of African Americans to the North and the West, to cities like New York and Chicago, where they sought economic opportunity and to leave behind the discrimination they faced under oppressive Jim Crow laws. Farming had understandably been discarded by the vast majority of Black Americans, in part because they were denied the opportunity to purchase property, but Virginia wanted to show her rural students how to be self-sufficient.
Dr. Samuel Chiles Mitchell, a professor of history at the University of Richmond, wrote an article in the Richmond Times-Dispatch in 1938 encouraging the county to help Virginia pay off the mortgage on the farm. He wrote, “She has paid, so far, about $14,000 on this farm, and as yet, owes about $6,000, covered by a mortgage. It would be a gracious act if the supervisors of Henrico County, Manager Day, and the Board of Education, could see their way clear to lift this mortgage, which is breaking the back of Virginia Randolph. Mark you, all the property she buys, she deeds to the county. It is ours.”[15]
Dr. Mitchell wasn’t even advocating for Henrico County to pay the fair market value for the farm, he was merely advocating for them to cover little more than a quarter of the cost, and then the land would be theirs. Two years later, the newspaper reported that the county agreed to pay the remaining $5,000 of the mortgage (by that point, she had paid $15,000), and that Virginia “embraced” County Manager Day when he gave her the money to pay off the mortgage.
I gather Virginia likely saw this differently than I do, but…the audacity. The audacity of Henrico County to take the money of an elderly woman and then act like they were doing her some kind of giant favor by helping her pay off one quarter of the mortgage on the land that was soon to be theirs.
So often stories like Virginia Randolph’s point out the incredibly selfless act of an individual, and make no mistake, I can think of few people more selfless than Miss Randolph. We are taught to admire the impact they had on their community, and we should, because her impact cannot be measured. But we ignore the racist systems that led to Virginia turning over what should have been her life savings back to the county, and for them to willingly take it from her, without compensation. Henrico County didn’t give Virginia $5,000, they paid $5,000 for a fifty-acre farm and a house, and she, an underpaid teacher who had to bake bread to cover her living expenses, paid the rest.
There is still a Virginia Randolph educational campus in Henrico County today. And it was conceived of, worked for, and paid for by a woman whose name deserves to be in the pantheon of great American educators. Samuel Mitchell wrote in 1938, “Her work ranks with that of Booker T. Washington. It has lacked the spectacular element that attaches to the great principal of Tuskegee; but in significance, it surpasses, in some ways, even his achievements. Virginia Randolph has done the common thing in an uncommon way…. The work of a single woman is a focal point in the social history of the South.”[16]
Virginia was so beloved that her methods and philosophy of schooling spread far and wide. She traveled and trained other teachers on how to approach education as something that must address the whole child, their family, and the community at large. She viewed schools not merely as a place to gain literacy but as tools to fight systemic poverty.
In the reports that she wrote about the schools she visited, she outlined her philosophy:
This work should begin in the primary grades and continue as long as the children remain in school. The destiny of our race depends, largely, upon the training the children receive in the schoolroom, and how careful we should be. The great majority of the children in the country schools will never reach a high school, therefore we must meet the demands of the schools in the Rural Districts by introducing this phase of training in every schoolroom.
It must be impressed upon the minds of the pupils that “Cleanliness is next to Godliness” and when this law of Hygiene is obeyed, they have conquered a great giant. They must also see that their schoolroom is neat and attractive with curtains at their windows, pictures on the walls, stoves kept neatly polished, and the grounds neat and clean, have a book on the “Laws of Health” hung in the schoolroom and each child be made to make himself familiar with it. The teacher should also give instructions along these lines which will be of great benefit because the teachers are models for the school-room.[17]
Virginia didn’t retire from teaching until 1949, after nearly sixty years of devoted service, each day doing the next needed thing. She was born during Reconstruction, after the Union was nearly wrenched in two, but held. She lived through World War I and the worldwide flu pandemic—the two events killing seventy million people across the globe in a few short years. She watched the Great Depression whisk livelihoods and homes out from under the feet of millions of Americans.
She worked as Hitler invaded the Sudetenland, as the United States was attacked at Pearl Harbor, as millions of Jews were killed across Europe, as the United States dropped atomic weapons on Japan. She saw her Black friends and neighbors get drafted into a military that was segregated, and she saw them come home changed men.
Virginia heard the news of the 1954 Supreme Court order that required schools to be integrated, and saw neighboring Prince Edward County, a mere seventy-five miles away, close their public schools for five years, paying for private religious school tuition for white students, and none for Black students.
By the time Virginia’s frail body gave out in March 1958, she had seen Rosa Parks refuse to give up her seat and a bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, that lasted far longer and achieved far more than anyone imagined was possible. Her namesake elementary school and high school had seven hundred students. More buildings were added, including a home economics cottage that is now a small tribute museum. As one of her students, Louise Cunningham, said when the new brick building was dedicated: “The story of the growth of a one room school on a red clay hill…is truly as fascinating as an old medieval legend.
“A modern architect can present, upon request, the plans for the building, but the master copy was drafted in the heart of a quiet, determined…girl, who had a vision of today.”[18]
Virginia was later reinterred at the site of the campus that still bears her name. Her headstone reads: “She helped people of all races. A pioneer educator, a humanitarian, and a creative leader in the field of education. Her influence throughout the world will continue to live.”
Though this story conjures long-ago times when buggies crossed the dirt roads of segregated Virginia, history is alive. Some of Miss Randolph’s former students now play with their own grandchildren, enjoying the verdant spring and the muggy summer weather. One of them, Richard Harris, said, “Miss Randolph was a warrior for what she believed in. Miss Randolph was a warrior for Black boys and girls. She would get on the stage and she would give us a pep talk, ‘You can do it, you can be somebody. Education is your way out.’ You could hear a pin drop. And even as kids, we knew that was wisdom we should listen to.”[19]
And history professor Samuel Mitchell wanted the public to know this: in 1908, when Photographer/Superintendent Jackson Davis wrote about the accomplishments of Miss Randolph and created the Henrico Plan, he began with a sentence that Mitchell says has become part of the history of America.
“I have secured Miss Virginia Randolph as the teacher.”[20]
That single act did more for tens of thousands of children and teachers all over the South, more for justice, more for peace, more for goodness, and more for the liberation of Americans than anyone could have imagined.
America the Beautiful
Six
Katharine Lee BatesCape Cod, 1859
As one of his final acts, Katharine’s father baptized her. Though he didn’t know it in 1859, there was a tumor growing on his spine, a malady that caused excruciating pain for which there was little remedy. By the time baby Katie was four weeks old, he was dead. Left behind was his wife, Cornelia, the four children she would now have to provide for on her own, and the Congregationalist Church he had pastored on Cape Cod.[1]
