CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 7

Colleagues

Board

W hen I was hired in 1970, the county had recently elected three black members to the school board: Dr. P. K. Biswas, Dr. J. H. M. Henderson, and Dr. Ellis Hall, all of whom were professors at Tuskegee Institute. Mrs. Frances Rush, a white woman, was the board chair and resigned when the board voted to hire me, and Rev. Don Brown, pastor of the white United Methodist Church in Tuskegee resigned due to a transfer to another parish before I had an opportunity to work with him. The board replaced the minister with Mrs. Consuella Harper, a black woman activist from the Shorter community, and Mr. Allen Adams, a white businessman, was appointed by the board to replace Mrs. Rush. This newly constituted board also supported me in what I was attempting to do for the children of Macon County. They had the good sense to set the policies and leave the administration of daily affairs to me. Together, we were able to confront and resolve many of the problems facing the school s ystem.

   Mrs. Harper, who initially did not support my appointment, became a staunch supporter and led the board in publicly commending my work. Most board members became my good friends, especially Dr. Hall. He made his home available to me to have an eye-opening meeting with friends and supporters several years after I resigned from the Macon County Schools. It was here that I finally explained to these friends and associates what had occurred between the Wallace forces and me that led me to decline their kind offer of a four-year contract

   Over the years of my tenure, changes occurred in the composition of the board. Mr. Kenneth Young came on board in 1972, replacing Dr. Henderson. He was never a strong supporter of my vision. Then in 1976, Mrs. Ann Buchanan was elected as an outright opponent of my superintendency. It was shortly thereafter that I was asked to leave my position, and I willingly

   (In interviews conducted in 2003 with former school board members, this book’s coauthor asked Dr. Hall, Dr. Henderson, and Mrs. Harper to comment on their experiences with Dr. Byas. Dr. Hall, who said he had been appointed to the board in 1969, said he was impressed with Byas’s concerns for fiscal accountability at the time he was being interviewed. Hall, then a professor in the School of Veterinary Medicine, strongly supported Byas’s policies. He said that when a problem arose, the superintendent would come to board meetings with plans and proposals to deal with the problem and that the board usually approved those plans and left him to carry out the necessary steps to accomplish the goals the board had set. As he looked back on Dr. Byas’s tenure, he said he most regretted that the visionary plans for a vocational-technical school had never been carried forward after Byas left the area. He felt that was a truly shortsighted decision by the new board that deprived the children of Macon County of many opportunities. He also regretted that the board had not confronted the critics more directly when the first attacks were made on Dr. Byas’s

   Dr. Henderson, who served on the board from 1968 to 1972, was initially impressed with Byas’s positive attitude, his background, and personality, making him an ideal candidate for the position and needs of the county. He remembered that Byas was very professional, always did his homework before coming to board meetings, and already had plans before they asked him questions. He had been particularly fond of the parenthood program, as well as the parenting aspect of the Title VIII program. In Dr. Henderson’s words, the Macon County school system never recovered from the loss of Dr. Byas.

   Mrs. Harper, the youngest board member during Byas’s tenure, had very vivid and detailed memories of his work and the time period. Her own story is dramatic, having won a Ford Fellowship in Community Leadership as a leader in the West Macon Improvement Association, before starting a childhood-development program in Montgomery, Alabama. She reported on her confrontation with the previous superintendent, Joe Wilson, about the way the schools were failing the children of the county. This confrontation and her overall dissatisfaction with board policies led to her campaign to be elected to the school board. Elected in 1968, she served one term.

   Initially she opposed Byas’s hiring because she thought the board should hire someone from Macon County or at least from Alabama rather than someone from outside the area. A great concern of hers was the inequality between the opportunities for children in Tuskegee and the children in the rural areas. One of the things that helped win her over was his immediate understanding of the need to treat all areas of the county fairly. He was, she noted, “a tremendous visionary, a genius in his own right.” She told him, “Go get your doctorate while I’m on this board. You already are one; you just need the papers.” She described Byas as an innovator and an

   According to Harper, many native Tuskegeeans saw Byas as being “outside their caste system,” and these people were led by Ann Buchanan and Clara Walker. She noted that Buchanan threatened all of the board because she was uneducated and had no exposure to wider issues. They sensed that she was being paid because she had no job but suddenly had a new car. It was very

   Harper believes that the board failed the community by not educating the public better about the board’s plans and need for visionary leadership. In this regard, she echoed words of Dr. Ellis. She said that she was not surprised when Dr. Byas decided to leave Macon County, and she was pleased that he found a more supportive environment in which to work.)

Staff Members I

Many of the staff members that were already working in Macon County when I arrived were excellent workers and outstanding supporters of my policies. These men and women had a thirst for progress and a strong desire to help the young people of their communities. They helped to make me look good in the eyes of the public with little or no recognition for their efforts. It gives me pleasure to acknowledge them in this manner, and while I am going to mention many names, I am confident that I will miss some persons who are equally deserving of

   Special acknowledgment is due to my secretary, Mrs. Bernice Nobles (now deceased). Some people wanted me to fire her because she was white. I did not. I said, “Let me see how well she does the job rather than to fire her because of her race and family members who support the segregation academy.” I’m glad I made that decision, not only because it was the right and ethical thing to do but because she was an outstanding secretary. She would always be out of the office by four thirty, but everything I asked her to do would be completed and on my desk before she left. Since there was so much suspicion of some employees related to their support of the segregation academy, I instituted some policies to keep control of the mail, billing, and accounting, but she stepped right up and accepted the changes

   Several people deserve a lot of the credit for the writing of successful grant proposals. One key person was Martha Redhead. We would sit in my office and talk about the things we’d like to accomplish, and she and her staff were able to take my ideas and put them into a format that could be sold to governmental and nongovernmental agencies. As a result, Macon County Schools won several grants that helped to provide opportunities for our students that would otherwise have been impossible. Among their successful proposals were the Drop-Out Prevention Project (Title VIII) and the parenting

   Mrs. Wilhelmina Baldwin, a veteran teacher and principal who initially opposed my appointment, became one of my greatest supporters and assets. I appointed her to head the curriculum and instruction department, and she did a tremendous job with it. Included in her work was the creation and supervision of a novel teacher/staff in-service program of mini-courses for all members of the staff, from the lunchroom workers and bus drivers to the school principals. She also helped to coordinate the observation and evaluation of teachers and the collection of information about curriculum improvement based on test

   Our public relations messages were coordinated by Ernestine Sapp, who also wrote for the local newspaper. Walter Evans, principal of Tuskegee Public School, a property located in the heart of Tuskegee and adjacent to the office, was one of my first supporters. He took a lot of grief for doing so, and I looked upon him as a friend. In fact, I spoke about him at his funeral in 2006. Guy Crawford was willing to take on the challenge of serving as principal at the D. C. Wolfe High School and brought new programs to the students in Shorter. His talented wife, Jessie Crawford, took on the innovative piano-reading program, in which she took a bus loaded with electronic pianos around to the elementary schools and introduced music and reading concepts to primary school students. James Carter, a young and alert administrator, became the coordinator of the Title VIII program and showed much potential, going on to work with the Alabama Education Association after I left Macon

Staff That I Brought

One very creative gentleman who came to Macon County at my invitation was Jerry Hollingsworth. Jerry was a young white male who had worked with me when I was principal in Gainesville, Georgia. One of the things he supervised in Macon County was the school bus survey. He designed it, hired the students, and collated the resulting data, helping to make the decisions about bus stops, etc. He did this for two or three years before he moved out west with his new bride.

   JoAnn Wright (now Haysbert) was probably the most persuasive young person I ever met. JoAnn was a bright attractive black woman who came to my office looking for a job right out of college. I asked her if she had a degree in education and she acknowledged that she did not. But she convinced me that she could do anything I needed that didn’t require a teaching certificate. She became one of a cadre of young professionals in the research and development office, leaving our employ only to pursue a master’s degree and doctorate in education. Ultimately, she came to her present position as president of Langston University. I made a good decision when I her.

Joann Wright, fall 1975.

   Like Jerry Hollingsworth, Marilyn Pajot (now Robinson) came to Macon County after working with me in another capacity. She was director of research and publications with the Georgia Teachers and Education Association while I was associate executive secretary. We had worked together on several projects during the two years preceding the merger with the white Georgia Education Association. Marilyn was not averse to using her status as a white person and newcomer to Georgia to help the GTEA track down instances of discrimination against black educators. She also helped to document the loss of jobs when school desegregation led to jobs being offered to white band directors, principals, etc. and blacks being

   In Macon County, Marilyn worked with federal programs, starting as the parent counselor aid supervisor with the Drop-Out Prevention Project, then later as director of the piano-reading project and Title I parent coordinator. She also assisted with the research that led to my dissertation and was my first choice to cowrite this retrospective of my

   Finally, I hired an assistant superintendent, Mr. Lucious Jefferson, who helped to supervise many of the projects we

Civic

Among the civic supporters, I have to place Mayor Johnny Ford as number 1. He and the city council of Tuskegee, Alabama, worked with the school board on many projects. Through the Model Cities of Tuskegee organization, we were able to fund the construction of the Parenting Education center at Tuskegee Institute High School, for

NABSS

When the black teachers associations merged with their white counterparts across the South, black educators gained access to the mainstream organizations, but they lost the unique voice that the black associations had provided. In the vacuum left by the mergers, I conceived of the need for a new organization to speak for black

   Almost simultaneous to my tenure at Macon County Schools, Chuck Moody, then a student at Northwestern University who was working on a doctoral degree, asked Dr. Kenneth Clark, a nationally known black psychologist, to assist in getting funding to hold a meeting of several black school superintendents so he could do a survey for his dissertation. With Dr. Clark’s support, a meeting was held at a motel near Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, and it drew about fifteen of us, followed by a series of meetings four to five months apart. I was the only person in the group who came from the Deep South and, as such, was the only one who had had experience working with voluntary professional organizations, such as the Georgia Teachers and Education Association. I said to the others that while I was segregated in, they had been integrated out of leadership. Coming as they did from the Northeast, Midwest, and California, they had, at best, been on a committee. Almost none had even been chair of a committee, while I had been president and later assistant executive secretary of the GTEA. In fact, some of the members were afraid of speaking up and they advocated our group becoming an adjunct to the American Association of School Administrators rather than creating an independent organization. I made a speech which seems to have carried the day. It was titled “Me Speak for Me,” and my goal was to convince them of the need for our own organization where we could set our own priorities and hold our own press conferences rather than holding a caucus and then going to a larger organization crying to hear our voice acknowledged. So the idea carried and the National Association of Black School Superintendents (NABSS) was formed. When we elected officers under the first charter, I was elected president, because I was the only one with prior

   It’s ironic that at a time when Stokely Carmichael was preaching black power that the black teacher organizations were giving up power by merging with the larger white organizations. I had begun to think we made a mistake doing that. Now we had a new organization to fill that void.

   Once we were organized, we wrote to the US commissioner of education within the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) that we wanted to meet with him. (The US Department of Education was formed later.) By the time we met in New Orleans, we were still only thirty in number, but we got the commissioner to attend our meeting. I told the group, “Surely, he didn’t come because of the number in the organization but because of the potential we had to grow. If we want to keep this potential going and keep the AASA from co-opting us, we need to increase our membership base.” So for the whole of my tenure as president, I argued for the change in our name from NABSS to the NABSE (National Association of Black School Educators), which led to the change in our charter to include all classes of black educators, except teachers, as eligible for

   There was an additional clause that opened the membership to black teachers two years later. With these changes, the organization now has eight or nine thousand members. In my opinion, it should be more like 30,000 members, but some people were afraid that the organization would be run by the superintendents. I fought to have the organization democratized. I wanted to make sure the presidency did not fall only to superintendents, so our third president was not a superintendent and was a woman: Dr. Deborah C. Wolfe, formerly of

   Over the years, the organization has had its ups and downs, and I have been in and out and back in. Today, Chuck Moody is the recognized founder of the organization, but I believe I should be recognized as the cofounder and all of my efforts and documentation prove that. Nevertheless, I have decided to stay inactive rather than keep things up.

   All this organizing and meeting with colleagues around the country put me in touch with some people who have remained friends and supporters to this day, both members and others in national positions on the Education Commission: Hugh Scott, Sid Marlin, Dr. Townsel, and others. In fact, when I was struggling with my decision about testifying for the plaintiffs in the educational television case, it was a fellow superintendent and member of NABSS that I turned to for advice. And it was this organization that enabled me to build relationships that helped Macon County Schools to get some of the national grant money we so desperately

   I hope it’s clear from this brief list that I had many supporters and helpers in tackling the problems of the Macon County School System, without whom my job would have been infinitely harder and much less successful. Those I’ve mentioned here are but examples of the many workers in the vineyard to whom I owe my