Among the most powerful forces fighting racial injustice and exclusion in mid-20th Century America, according to Warren County High School junior Jacqueline Becerra, was education. But access to education was a struggle itself, she emphasized to Rotary Club of McMinnville members during their regular Thursday lunch.
Because education always begins with basic literacy, custom, culture — and laws — conspired to keep books out of the hands of young African-Americans. It took two heroic women, a teacher at the segregated Bernard High School in McMinnville and the first librarian at Magness Memorial Library, to bring meaningful and inspiring literature to minority youngsters.
“Miss Bessie Gwynn smuggled books out of the whites-only library,” Becerra said, creating the only access black children and teens in McMinnville would have to examples of great writing. One notable result of that clandestine collaboration, the student speaker said, was the career of nationally honored journalist and newspaper columnist Carl T. Rowan.
McMinnville Mayor Jimmy Haley, who is also the official Warren County historian, explained Magness librarian Mary Cunningham “would meet Miss Bessie at the back door” of the library to hand off the books to the long-serving teacher.
After escaping slavery, Frederick Douglass mastered literacy and a broad education, and rose to become a pivotal figure as an abolitionist and human rights leader, Becerra told the Rotarians. The electrifying oratory and writing skills of Douglass overthrew racial prejudices which suggested blacks were genetically incapable of higher-order learning. Douglass represented the 19th Century “breakthrough” in the long struggle for racial equality and tolerance.
Joining Becerra at the Rotary podium were fellow WCHS juniors Caroline Brooks, Megan Biles and Rachel Stewart.
WCHS history teacher and mock trial sponsor Brandon Eldridge introduced the student speakers in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. Day this Monday, Jan. 15.
Biles focused on African-American performing artists who enriched and enlarged that nation’s culture in music, drama and dance. Lorraine Hansberry’s play “A Raisin in the Sun,” which debuted on Broadway in 1959, stirred the conscience of the nation as it portrayed the challenges of a black family trying to move into a white, middle-class neighborhood.
Journalist Rowan, rising to national prominence from the former Bernard High School, was often the only black journalist reporting on major civil rights actions in the 1950s and ’60s, Brooks told the Rotary audience. President John F. Kennedy appointed him as assistant deputy Secretary of State, she added, and he was later named director of the U.S. Information Agency, an important bulwark against Soviet communist propaganda during the Cold War.
The “systematic oppression” institutionalized in customs and laws, Stewart argued, changes shape over time but the content is always the same. She pointed to large poster displays of civil rights demonstrators hoisting up “I am a man” posters in the 1960s, followed a half-century by “Black lives matter” banners in the most recent street protests.
“Extreme sentencing” laws, Stewart observed, have the effect of “disrupting black families,” a result that contradicts the stated positions of social conservatives who plead for “family values.”
Jim Crow laws in many states perpetuated the racial intolerance of the antebellum era by criminalizing “drinking out of the wrong water fountain,” she told the hushed audience in the fellowship hall of First Presbyterian Church. But the courage and determination of social-justice crusaders like King, future Congressman John Lewis, and human rights icon Rosa Park helped topple the fortress of injustice, exclusion and prejudice.
The WCHS student speakers, who maintain an average high school GPA of 4.5, will join Eldridge in WCPI’s FOCUS interview series this week. The half-hour conversation will air on public radio 91.3 Tuesday at 5 p.m.; Wednesday at 5:05 a.m.; Tuesday at 1 p.m.; and Friday at 1:05 a.m.
Ben Lomand Connect subscribers can see the complete Rotary program in a WCS-TV Channel 180 presentation at various times over the next several days.
