Pocahontas schoolhouse recalls days of inequality
Posted on Sunday, October 26, 2008
POCAHONTAS — Pat Johnson doesn’t remember the day she first stepped into the one-room Pocahontas Colored School, but she’ll never forget the teacher she met there — Eddie Mae Herron, who taught grades 1-8.
“I just can’t say enough about what she [Herron ] did for me,” Johnson said while she sat inside the same classroom she entered almost 57 years ago. “She taught us to read. She taught us to talk. I can’t believe she taught eight grades.”
In 2000, Johnson helped to start a project that is now the Eddie Mae Herron Center, a museum dedicated to black culture and history in Randolph County. About 2 percent of the population in the county is black, and Johnson feared the community would lose that heritage.
The nonprofit museum is supported primarily by donations, fundraisers, some grants and an endowment of $ 35, 000 from Pocahontas.
The classroom has been reconstructed with mismatched desks, chairs and books. A portrait of George Washington hangs where the blackboard once hung, and a portrait of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. sits at the front of the room.
“We didn’t have a flag so we said the Pledge of Allegiance to George Washington’s picture each morning,” Johnson said.
Barbara Wyatt works in the museum, which about 100 people visit each week. Both women grew up in Pocahontas and lived through the civil-rights movement.
Wyatt, who is white, said she knew about the black school but as a child she wasn’t allowed to go near it.
“It was in what we called ‘shantytown,’ and most of the white kids didn’t go there,” she said.
As a child, Johnson said, she was aware of the discrimination. In one part of the museum there is a sign that reads “colored only” above doors leading into bathrooms. It’s a reminder of how far society has come, Johnson said.
“I grew up being rejected by signs that said colored or white only,” Johnson said. “I could be mad, but I’m not bitter about it.”
Every aspect of Pocahontas was segregated in the 1950 s, Johnson said.
“Some of the poorer white kids would come over and play in the [black ] neighborhood, but when we would all go to the Dairy Freeze there was a line [for the whites ] to go inside, and we had to stay outside,” Johnson said.
The people in Pocahontas always have been nice and courteous to her, Johnson said, even at the height of the movement.
She remembers plays, cakewalks and school programs. During the renovation of the old schoolhouse, she noticed the handwritten numbers on the subflooring that were left from the Friday-night cakewalks that Herron, her teacher, held.
“Families would make cakes and bring them up to the schoolhouse,” Johnson said. “You stood on a number and if it was called you won the cake. When I saw those numbers it made me cry. I helped put them on the floor.”
Money collected from the cakewalks paid for pencils, scissors and other classroom supplies.
David McDonald has written a book detailing how his father, Charles McDonald, a white minister, met Herron in 1959.
Herron approached Charles after she and her pupils were kicked out of the Memphis Zoo because it wasn’t “colored day” when they went.
In his book McDonald chronicles how this changed his father’s perceptions of segregation and race relations.
Jan Ziegler of Black River Technical College wrote a comprehensive history of the building and the people who have occupied it.
Pictures of former pupils dot the walls. Quilting classes are held in the museum each Monday and Wednesday.
In November, Johnson will become the first black president of the Randolph County Chamber of Commerce.
“I’m a little bit scared,” she said with a smile.
A lifelong resident of Pocahontas, Johnson, who will turn 60 in December, said she has no regrets about staying in the town she loves.
“I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else,” she said.
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