Edwards said he had “many apprehensions” in dropping by Anna’s home, but he found her very cordial, and “deeply interested in the welfare of my people.”[5] He told Anna his life story—how sick he had been as a child and how hard he had to work to become educated.
Edwards recounted to Anna how he had a vision to build a beautiful school at Snow Hill, one that could house three or four hundred students who could learn industrial education as he had. When he returned home, he found a check from Anna for $5,000. (To put this in context, this is $186,000 in modern money.) Every year for the next few years, Anna sent more, in amounts ranging from $300 to $2,000.[6]
By the early 1900s, Anna had grown frail. She had invested a large sum to build a facility for elderly Quakers so that aging people could be cared for with dignity and without living in poverty. Each apartment in the boarding home had its own bedroom, living room, and bathroom, and many large living areas were shared so people could visit each other without being lonely. Anna herself moved into the boarding home, called Stapeley after her family’s former country estate, and she lived in exactly the same type of accommodations as everyone else.
Sometime in 1905 or 1906, Edwards called on Anna at the boarding home, and the nurse on duty said she was not up to seeing anyone—she was too infirm. “Please, just take her my card,” Edwards likely implored. A few moments later, the nurse reappeared and told him he could go upstairs to see Anna.
Enfeebled by advanced age and cancer, her tiny body growing smaller by the day, Anna said to Edwards, “I have been deeply interested in what thee has been telling me all these years about the little schools. I would give largely to them if thee thinks that thee could get Dr. Washington or Dr. Frissell to come see me.”[7]
Edwards relayed the message to Booker T. Washington, and to Hollis Frissell, the president of the Hampton Institute, the school Booker T. Washington had attended. Soon, Anna had given them a check for $11,000.[8] Anna decided she wanted to help rural Black schools, and she established a fund to make it happen. Unlike many northern philanthropists who gave money to causes that benefited the Black community, Anna Jeanes did not have the motivation of preparing a workforce or keeping people in a position of subservience. She would soon be nearly penniless and dead, and she knew it.
Booker T. Washington wrote to Secretary of War William Howard Taft, saying,
My Dear Secretary Taft:
You have no doubt received notice from Dr. Frissell that the trustees of the Jeanes Fund will meet in New York June 6th. Then it is the plan to adjourn to Philadelphia, mainly as a compliment to Miss Jeanes, and for the purpose of seeing her.
When in Philadelphia a few days ago, I mentioned to her that you had accepted a place on the board and she seemed exceedingly pleased. She is an old lady over eighty-five years of age, and I am sure that nothing would better please her than for you to call, with the rest of the members of the board, if you, in your busy life can possibly spare the time to do so. And I very much hope that your plans will enable you to do this.
Very truly yours,
Booker T. Washington[9]
William Howard Taft, future president and Supreme Court justice, visited Anna at Stapeley as requested. James Dillard, who later became the president of the Jeanes Fund, was also in attendance, and said that Taft “presented the matter in the kindliest manner,” and that Anna had a “very swollen right hand,” and could not have weighed more than eighty or ninety pounds. Dillard said that Anna “talked in the brightest and most cheerful way,” delighted that this eminent man shared her enthusiasm for philanthropy and education for all.[10]
—
Anna died in 1907, a quiet end to a seemingly quiet life. She never marveled at the Rocky Mountains, never experienced the warmth of the Pacific Coast, never saw the cathedrals of Europe. She never married. She had no children. She lived alone, save for some hired help. But quiet lives can sometimes leave the loudest echoes.
Anna Jeanes left over a million dollars—over $33 million in today’s money—to be used exclusively to benefit rural schools that served the Black community. She entrusted Booker T. Washington, Hollis Frissell, and the businessmen of the General Education Board—men like Taft and Andrew Carnegie—to decide exactly how to spend it.[11]
Anna’s bequest was one of the first times that a northern philanthropist insisted that the board of governors of a fund be of mixed race, and that Black men be among the primary determiners of how the money that was to benefit their community be used. Anna believed that people could decide for themselves what their community needed, and that people of all races should have equal seats at the table.
It took a while for the board to decide how to make best use of Anna Jeanes’s money. It couldn’t be used for anything related to higher education, she insisted. Small, rural schools only. She stipulated that financial advisers help invest the money so that the fund could continue to grow. Other than that, she said, it’s up to you. Before her death, she refused press interviews about the massive donation. She didn’t want any ceremonies or hype. Again, typical Anna.[12]
After Taft was elected president, he continued to serve on the board of the Jeanes Fund, which met at the White House to discuss plans for distributing the money.[13]
Now, let’s get something out of the way: this was 1908. Anna, Booker T. Washington, William Edwards, and William Howard Taft were not talking about desegregating the schools. They were having discussions about how to help educate the children and grandchildren of formerly enslaved people, but they were not advocating for full racial equality in public life. Many believed that segregation was the nature of society, and while Booker felt that someday it might end if African Americans worked hard enough to make themselves acceptable to the white community, that someday was not 1908.
From our vantage point, this is ludicrous. Booker T. Washington has long been criticized for engaging in respectability politics—that if Blacks just acted the way that white people wanted them to, then there could be racial harmony. Washington, some feel, was participating in the system of white supremacy.
I get it. I really do. And if this is your view, you’re not wrong. But I’ll also add an AND to these sentiments. The system was inherently racist, AND Booker and Anna were doing what they thought was best at the time. The system continued to uphold white supremacy AND they thought this was the path toward changing that. From their perspective, what was the alternative? Should they not educate these children? Should children continue to be illiterate while they tried to change the minds of millions of adults who believed in the superiority of white people? How could they raise a generation of children to help change the system if the children couldn’t read because their parents couldn’t read?
So I see your concern, and I acknowledge it. I encourage you to frame these conversations not just from the present but from the past as well.
Money from Anna’s fund underwrote all of Virginia Randolph’s work as a Jeanes teacher in Henrico County, Virginia. Soon, many other school districts had their own Jeanes supervising teachers traversing the rutted country roads, bettering the communities in which they worked. Within a handful of years of the establishment of the fund, Virginia Randolph was traveling far and wide training more teachers in her methods, and soon, those 118 Jeanes teachers were teaching 1,000 more.[14]
Jeanes teachers were expected to do everything. And I do mean everything. Nearly all of them worked every single day with no days off. Activities ranged from “helped five women can 132 quarts of pears” to “served as a judge at the county fair” to “assisted at the diphtheria clinic” to “spoke at churches on the importance of school attendance” to “assisted in examination for dental clinic” to “helped with teaching arithmetic 7, language 5 and arithmetic 3” to “attended school board meeting.”[15]
In one month, a teacher might travel as many as thirteen hundred miles around the area to which they were assigned, all while developing curricula, and organizing career days, United Nations festivals, and choral groups. Driving a buggy on muddy roads to make fundraising visits so schools could purchase books; keeping careful records of the facilities they oversaw; and planning and executing graduation ceremonies, water-testing programs, community cleanup campaigns, and mobile health programs.[16]
The Jeanes Story, published by former Jeanes Teachers in 1979, has a complete list of all of the teachers, including pictures of some of them. The overwhelming majority are African American women, but a tiny handful are men. A surprising number are named Beulah, Eula, or Lula. Most of the pictures appear to have been taken in the 1950s, and many of the teachers wear cat-eye glasses. They almost all sport lipstick, earrings, and necklaces. Several wear corsages or brooches.
How much they have seen, I thought. Dr. Evelyn Sharp smiles, seated near a typewriter. She had no way of knowing that future generations of teachers would stare at her picture, wondering what she was like. Ethel Bell sports a “you have got to be kidding me” expression, which every teacher I know has honed through years of practice. Lillian Edwards’s face says “I’m not mad, I’m just disappointed,” and Clara West’s dimples make her seem like she was the fun teacher, with the easy laugh. Florida Robins most definitely knows everything but will only be sharing that information with you on a need-to-know basis, while Margaret Louise Hooks will instruct the class on the proper use of the library card catalog. If I had a secret, one I was afraid others would find out, I would find Catherine Bozeman, and I know she would never betray me.
They knew their work was important. But they had no way of knowing the true, lasting impact they had on generations of students, on the American South at large, and, consequently, on America as a whole. In one of his reports fourteen years into the existence of the Jeanes teacher program, William Dillard, the president of the Jeanes Fund, wrote, “There have been no nobler pioneers and missionaries than these humble teachers. They have literally gone about doing good.”[17]
The Jeanes teachers continued their work into the 1970s, with most counties ending their programs before then, as school integration became more widely practiced.
The working environment for Jeanes teachers began to change in the 1950s. Many did not feel safe taking public transportation and instead drove their own cars. Teachers who traveled by train sometimes found themselves subject to arrest or beatings.
One scorching August day, a Jeanes Supervisor embarked on a journey from Florida to Louisiana. To reach her destination, she had to switch from a plane to a bus. Opting for a more comfortable ride on the last leg of her homeward trip, she settled into a seat around the middle of the bus. Her comfort was short-lived, as she was forced off the bus in a small town more than a dozen miles from her final destination.
A highway patrolman stopped the bus and ordered all passengers to disembark for a luggage search. Out of all the passengers, only two were singled out to be taken to the local jail—both of them Black women, and one of them the Jeanes Supervising teacher. In jail, both women were subjected to cruel verbal abuse. Just before she was released, one white person said to the Jeanes teacher, “It’s truly disgraceful how they treated you.”
But another, influenced by hate and prejudice, tried to make it seem like the Jeanes teacher had done something egregious. They asked, “What did you do, get into in an argument on that bus with a white woman?”
In recounting her story, the teacher said, “The real lesson to be learned is that beneath the surface of remarks similar to those made by the second person lurks a psychosis capable of building or destroying a nation.”[18]
As the KKK rose for a third time in the 1950s amid violent opposition to African Americans seeking access to equal rights, many of the skilled Jeanes teachers were eliminated, and some school systems decided that instead of integrating, they would just close schools for Black children and pay for white children to attend private religious schools.
But I love what one Jeanes teacher, Mildred Williams, said on this topic: “Gloom and pessimism must not overshadow the good which has grown out of the several years of the Civil Rights laws. Optimism must prevail and persistent movements continue, using every useful weapon at hand to make the dream, as stated by one of America’s most recent forthright Black leaders [Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.] a reality. He said, ‘I have a dream that one day, on the red hills of Georgia, sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.’
“Progress is usually born out of struggle. Old doors close, but new ones will open.”[19]
Progress is usually born out of struggle. But struggle doesn’t always mean progress, does it? What do we need to add to struggle to create progress? The answer is hope. Hope, which attorney and author Bryan Stevenson told me is not a feeling but an orientation of the spirit. Hope is a choice that we make each morning, and we do not have the luxury of hopelessness if we want to see progress.
The United States itself was born out of struggle. The Quaker migration was born out of struggle. The incredible achievements of the Jeanes teachers were born out of struggle.
