“And now children, we shall sing.” Virginia launched into the first verse of “I Need Thee Ev’ry Hour.” She hit the chorus like she was pleading for her life:
I need Thee, oh, I need Thee;
Ev’ry hour I need Thee;
Oh bless me now, my Savior,
I come to Thee
The children thought they were done, but no. Virginia began the second verse. And then she motioned for them to join her in singing the chorus again. Desperate to fill up the time, Virginia had them sing the third verse, and then again, the chorus, and by the time they reached verse four, the children were side-eyeing each other with What the heck is going on? glances.
Virginia drew out the fourth version of the chorus, singing the last line slowly and with great emphasis, the clock ticking away the seconds: I commmmmmmme toooooooooo Theeeeeeeeeeee.
Finally, she could read no more verses and say no more prayers. The hymn had been milked beyond its useful life. Virginia perked up her voice, as though she were going to share the most wonderful news with her class. “Now children, I know you all feel proud that this is the first mother that has been to school. She is a mother with two lovely children, and you know the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world. Children, don’t you feel proud? I am going to ask her to speak to us.”
Virginia gestured for the mother to come to the front of the class, hoping to distract her from her mission of rage. The mother moved slowly. As she approached, Virginia saw tears in her eyes. “I came for one thing,” she said quietly. “And found quite another.”[9]
When the mother left the schoolroom, she leaned the switch against the gate as she closed it.
And here is the part where you might roll your eyes, because you will probably think this is too syrupy to be realistic. But sometimes real things are worse than you can imagine, and sometimes they are far sweeter. Later, the mother hung a picture of Virginia in her house, bestowing upon the young teacher a place of honor on the wall. And then she began to volunteer at the school.
One by one, Virginia began to win parents over.
When Virginia first arrived at the tiny Mountain Road School, it was little more than a shack stuck in a pit of red mud. State spending on Black education across the southern United States, especially in rural areas, was sometimes less than one-third of what was spent on white children, if they spent money at all.[10] The school year was far shorter for Black children, averaging only four months a year. Enrollment and literacy rates were low. Black parents were eager for their children to become educated, but rightfully distrustful of the government’s intentions in the Jim Crow South. Transportation was more than an inconvenience—it was often an arduous task, with children sometimes being forced to walk six to ten miles to and from school. Many children couldn’t be spared from helping the family subsist.
From as far back as she could remember, Virginia had been taught to do the next needed thing. Don’t worry about tomorrow, her mother reminded her, tomorrow will worry about itself. Virginia was always focused on the task at hand. What I could do next, Virginia thought as she arrived at school one morning, is fix this godforsaken driveway. The approach to the school was deeply rutted, the thick clay mud forming canyons that could twist an ankle if you stepped wrong. When it rained, as it did with regularity in the humid state of Virginia, it became nearly impassable.
Virginia decided to invest one quarter of her meager month’s salary on gravel to keep wheels—and the children’s shoes—from getting stuck in the mud. She hauled it herself, spreading it smoothly with a rake.[11]
The next needed thing was whitewashing the building, which she did, thoroughly. She planted flowers, borrowing clippings from neighbors that eventually grew into a profusion of climbing vines that covered the front wall of the school. She asked around for grass seed to create a place for children to sit and eat their lunches in the sun.
With each passing month, she did what she could with what she had. With scrap lumber, she taught the children how to build a fence around the front garden. They moved on to a more complicated arbor, planting flowers for color and vegetables for food. She held an Arbor Day celebration, purchasing twelve sycamore trees with her own money and planting them behind the school. They named the trees for the twelve apostles. (Years later, one tree had to be cut down when they were making room for a new building. Guess which one of the twelve apostle trees had to be axed. You’re right. It was Judas.)[12]
And yet, despite all of her beautification efforts, some of the parents continued to grumble that her methods of teaching Black children to be “industrious” and to learn useful skills that she felt would help them find employment later was not rigorous enough. They wanted learning based on books and intellectual pursuits, exactly like white children received, and Miss Randolph wanted to educate “the hands, the eyes, the feet, and the soul.”[13] To some Black parents, this was code for a second-class education for second-class citizens.
“Did you hear that she brought a cooking stove to school and taught the girls how to serve coffee and tea?” Mothers whispered to each other. It wasn’t a lie: Virginia had arrived at a neighbor’s house early one morning and together they loaded the still-warm-from-breakfast cooking stove into a wagon. Girls sewed themselves white aprons that covered their dresses from shoulder to near hem, washing, ironing, and starching them into crisp perfection.
We know some of these things that Virginia did thanks to her school superintendent, Jackson Davis, who was an amateur photographer. More than six thousand of his photographs are now in the library collection at the University of Virginia. In fact, many of the images we have of education in the rural South during the turn of the century were taken by Jack Davis, obviously a man who was well-off enough to travel around with a camera, taking and developing thousands of unique images. Photography has never been an inexpensive hobby. Through his eye, we see Virginia and her small charges, doing the hard work of inventing Black education for a new century.
Five
Henrico CountyVirginia, 1907
Jackson Davis—like other whites in Henrico County—was eating what Virginia Randolph was cooking. (And let me save you the trouble: it’s pronounced hen-RYE-co.) She represented the Booker T. Washington method of education, and Washington was by far the most famous Black educator of the time period. He was the head of the Tuskegee Institute, a premier institution for industrial education, and he advocated for Black self-help. His was not the Black empowerment of rattling protests and fiery-tongued messages decrying white supremacy. He didn’t serve messages of full equality and integration, but of good citizenship, literacy, and job skills, which, over time, he believed would help the economic status of Black people.
Davis reached out to a philanthropic fund that had recently been established, called the Jeanes Fund. The fund, which counted among its officers people like Booker T. Washington and William Howard Taft, was founded by a northerner who wanted to assist small country schools that served Black children in the South. In his inquiry, Jackson Davis said that if the fund would provide the money, he should like to use it for the salary of a supervising teacher, someone who would travel all over Henrico County and assist other Black teachers.
Jackson Davis already had a supervising teacher in mind, someone who was doing the kind of work he wanted to see replicated throughout Henrico County: Virginia Randolph. And when the Jeanes Fund agreed to allocate the money for what would become known as a Jeanes Supervising Teacher, this “yes” changed the course of history.
Virginia Randolph said:
Maybe I was chosen [as the first supervising Jeanes teacher] because of desire and interest in helping my people learn how to become good and productive citizens. Maybe I was chosen because I could do things with my hands. Maybe I was a good Christian. Maybe I was chosen because I did not mind traveling in the country under the circumstances that existed during the second decade of the twentieth century.
However, I would like to think I was chosen because I was a good teacher, and needed to share my knowledge and skills with others. I believe this because after my appointment, I came to realize how very different my school and community were from others in Henrico County, Virginia…. When Mr. Jackson Davis appointed me to look after his Negro schools…he started a trend never to be abandoned; namely, the trend that there will always be someone caring and looking out for the education of Negro boys and girls. I leave the convictions of my parents as the heritage—a genuine belief in the power and glory of education.[1]
Randolph was so successful in her role as a supervising teacher that Jackson Davis documented her work and sent what he called the “Henrico Plan” to thousands of other districts across the South. Requests began to pour into the Jeanes Fund: “How do we apply for funding to get our own Jeanes teacher?” (And if you’re wondering why they were called Jeanes teachers, just you wait. It’s a good story.)
Perhaps Miss Randolph quoted Booker T. Washington to her students: “The world cares very little about what you or I know, but it cares a great deal about what you or I do.”[2] And so, when Virginia or Booker or the thousands of other teachers like them said to Black parents, “This is how our community will uplift itself. We will create our own economic opportunities,” some parents agreed. They could see the wisdom in this approach, that the best way to advance in society was through hard work, and soon, that would lead to equality of opportunity.
But other thinkers at the time, like W. E. B. Du Bois, vehemently disagreed. They criticized Booker T. Washington for accommodating white supremacy, for begging for money from robber barons, for refusing to fight for civil rights, and for sacrificing true equality on the altar of industrial education and job opportunities. “The slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery,” Du Bois wrote. “Children learn more from what you are than from what you teach.”[3]
Early twentieth-century thinkers like Du Bois saw people like Virginia as double agents: scraping and bowing to whites to get things they wanted, like books for schools, while simultaneously saying to Black communities that they stood in solidarity with them. “No man can serve two masters,” the preachers quoted from Matthew 6:24, “for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other.”
Virginia didn’t have time to settle this debate. Her focus was on the children before her, the eager bodies perched on rickety chairs, their families barely eking out a meager living. What did they need, right now? To learn to read, so they could get better jobs and raise their standards of living. To have skills that people would pay for. And if she had to act nice to some rich folks in town to get her families what was necessary, then she was not above it.
But if she was going to be successful at Mountain Road School, people were going to have to get to know her. They say it’s hard to hate someone up close, and so each Sunday, Virginia began showing up at the country churches, sometimes steering her little buggy more than an hour each way to say, “Hello, good morning,” to each parishioner. When the preacher would call for announcements, she would plead her case to the congregation: “Good morning, y’all. It’s so nice to be with you. I am Miss Randolph over at the Mountain Road School.” Sometimes there were groans. “I am here to show you what the children have been working on this week.” Often, she would bring a chair that they had recaned or a platter of rolls they had baked to share. “And while we’re learning the virtue of hard work, we’re also learning how to read and do sums. The children like coming to school, and they need to learn. I am here after the service if you have any questions.”
She showed up at every community event she could, and when I tell you that she spent years gaining the trust of the community, I mean years. Years it took, putting the miles on her feet and on the buggy wheels. Years of visibility, years of effort. Years of dropping off a loaf of bread at a sick woman’s house, years of teaching the children to sew sheets, only to secretly leave them on the porch of a family who had none, refusing to embarrass them. Years of organizing a Willing Workers Club to plant flowers, whitewash the houses of the elderly, and perform other tasks for money that would go directly back to the school.[4]
Slowly, parents began to warm to her, so she expanded her programs. She formed a Sunday School at the schoolhouse and brought in a preacher. The preacher taught the Bible while the teacher helped the parents learn to read. When she realized most of her students received no medical care, she brought nurses to the school to do health checks. She arranged for a dentist to see people who needed it, paid for mostly with money the students raised by selling baked goods, produce, or handcrafts. She taught classes for parents in the evening on cooking and public-health topics. She paid home visits to anyone who caught her attention. New baby? Leg wound? Lost job? You could count on Miss Randolph to show up at your house as soon as she could.
Methodist minister John Wesley may have coined the phrase “Cleanliness is next to godliness,” but the concepts of personal hygiene and spiritual purification existed for many thousands of years before Protestantism came on the scene. Virginia believed in it wholeheartedly. She told her students, “When I was growing up, we struggled. We lived in one room only. We couldn’t afford fuel for the fire, but the man at the wood yard would let us kids gather buckets of wood chips off the ground and carry them home to burn. Even then, cleanliness was next to godliness.”[5] The subtext of what she was telling her students was, “No excuses. If I can do it, so can you.”
Virginia, who never married, saved her money. And with her money, she began to buy land, using her savings as a down payment. To cover the rest, she took out loans: “I was always in debt,” she recalled years later, and as parcels of land near the school became available, an acre here, five acres there, she bought them, ultimately accruing 13.5 acres.[6] When the land was paid for, she deeded it back to the county so it would belong to the school.
By 1915, the single-room school was bursting at the seams with children wanting to learn, and they had to tear it down to build a four-room school in its place. Most of the money for the new school was raised by the school community, not provided by Henrico County. The community milled the lumber, volunteered their time, held fundraisers, sacrificed, and saved to make it happen.[7] More teachers came on board, with Virginia acting as principal as well as classroom educator.
When I learned about Virginia’s property acquisitions in a Richmond newspaper article, I have to tell you, I had a mixed reaction. Part of me was deeply moved at Virginia’s contribution and that she was always in personal debt so that her students would have better opportunities, so that the school could be expanded and dormitories built for children who lived far away. Virginia didn’t want the barrier of distance to keep them from receiving an education.
