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From: "Nancee\(McMurtrey\)Seifert" <>
Subject: [IADECATU] 'STUDIES IN IOWA HISTORY; The Negro In Iowa'. (Part 27)
Date: Thu, 22 Jan 2004 19:34:41 -0500


'STUDIES IN IOWA HISTORY'
The Negro In Iowa
by
Leola Nelson Bergmann
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The careers of the majority of the colored graduates of Iowa institutions have been among the members of their own race, but a few Negroes have been able to cut through the confining walls of prejudice and are carrying on their professions in the schools of the North. Until very recently few children in Iowa's public schools had been taughtt by a Negro teacher, except in the schools of the predominantly Negro town of Buxton. In l946 the Des Moines school board employed a Negro primary teacher, who met every requirement as to education, professional training, character, and experience. The reaction of the general public was favorable, but a few patrons demonstrated their disapproval. When the election of the school board members took place in March, l947, a small faction in the school district where the Negro teacher had been employed supported two candidates who opposed the hiring of Negro teachers. These candidates were defeated and in the Des Moines public school syst!
em there were in l947 three full-time and four substitute Negro teachers. Later, in a public discussion before a colored audience, these teachers agreed that parents, pupils, and faculty accepted them without discrimination.

During the school elections in Davenport in March, l947, Charles W. Toney, a Negro employee of a local iron and machine company and former president of the local branch of the N.A.A.C.P. was an unsuccessful candidate for the school board, the first Negro to seek election to a public office of any kind in Davenport, according to a local newspaper. In Iowa City, where the Negro population consists of about sixty people, a Negro woman was elected president of the Parent-Teacher Association in one of the grade schools in l943, serving for two years.

Negro students in the public schools are also being given a chance to serve their schools and classmates. Don Clayter, a Cedar Rapids high school student, was elected president of the freshman class at Roosevelt High School in l943 and during his senior year in l947 he was one of the 720 boys in the State chosen to attend the annual American Legion-sponsored Hawkeye Boys' State at Camp Dodge, where he was elected "Governor", the first Negro boy to receive that honor in the Hawkeye Boys' State, or in any Boys' State anywhere.

In the area of sports, discrimination against Negroes has been less marked than in many other areas of activity. Through the years the University of Iowa has had several outstanding athletes, among them Edward Gordon who held the national intercollegiate broad jump championship and was on the American Olympic track team at the ninth Olympiad at Amsterdam in l928. In football some of the great names have been the Negro players such as Wendell Benjamin, "Duke" Slater, Emlen Tunnell, John Estes, and Earl Banks.

The Negro population in Iowa, larger than that in the neighboring States of Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Nebraska, is still but a small part of the total population of the State, less than one per cent. Yet these people have made contributions to Iowa. Some of these have been noted; others are not so easily seen because they are the contributions of "little men", men like the young Negro mail carrier in Burlington. He wanted a good education, but the depression made lean times for Negroes, so after a year at the junior college in his home town, he went to work at whatever he could find. The industrial plants in the town did not hire Negroes. No offices would hire the girls hwo had completed secretarial and business courses, no shops would hire the boys who had taken courses in mechanics and machine repairing, so his colored classmates went to Chicago to look for work. But this young man wanted to live in Burlington and he decided civil service jobs would offer him the bes!
t opportunity for economic security. After taking the examination for a postal position, it took four years before his name rose from the fourth place to the top of the list and brought him a job as a mail carrier.

He married and made arrangements to buy a house in a comfortable neighborhood where both white and colored families live, but when the war broke out, he was called into service, trained in camps in the South where he saw "white supremacy" at its worst, and at the end of World War II was glad to be able to return to Burlington and his job in the post office. He is active in the African Methodist Episcopal Church and interested in the interracial activities of the city's churches. The boy' and girls' basketball teams from his church play the teams of the other churches in town, both colored and white. Exchange services are held among the churches.

These activities have made him feel that only in the church is the barrier between the white and colored people breaking down. He is liked and respected in town, but he does not feel free to go into a restaurant and order a meal. When the district convention of his church met in Burlington and he served on the housing committee, he could not go to the hotels and reserve rooms for the delegates; so weeks in advance he began calling on his white friends -- the homes of most of the colored people were too small and inadequate -- to ask them if they could provide rooms for the colored visitors. His church work and his job as a mail carrier keep him occupied and happy. He plans to spend his life in Burlington, but he can understand, and sympathize with, the young colored girls and boys who, each year as soon as they have received their high school diplomas, leave town. Most of them are going to California now; chances are better there than in Chicago. "It doesn't seem very !
far-sighted", he said, "for the city to invest a thousand dollars in their education and then not provide a means for getting a return on its investment."

-- Leola Nelson Bergmann
Iowa City, Iowa; l947

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Copied by Nancee(McMurtrey)Seifert
January 22, 2004


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