Better Living by Their Own Bootstraps

Black Women's Activism in Rural Arkansas, 1914-1965

Cherisse Jones-Branch

• Publisher: University of Arkansas Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781682261675, 9781682261668
• eBook ISBN: 9781610757447
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African American History
• Index: History

The first major study to consider Black women's activism in rural Arkansas, Better Living by Their Own Bootstraps foregrounds activists' quest to improve Black communities through language and foodways as well as politics and community organizing. In reexamining these efforts, Cherisse Jones-Branch lifts many important figures out of obscurity, positioning them squarely within Arkansas's agrarian history.

The Black women activists highlighted here include home demonstration agents employed by the Arkansas Agricultural Cooperative Extension Service and Jeanes Supervising Industrial Teachers, all of whom possessed an acute understanding of the difficulties that African Americans faced in rural spaces. Examining these activists through a historical lens, Jones-Branch reveals how educated, middle-class Black women worked with their less-educated rural sisters to create all-female spaces where they confronted economic, educational, public health, political, and theological concerns free from white regulation and interference.

Centered on the period between 1914 and 1965, Better Living by Their Own Bootstraps brings long-overdue attention to an important chapter in Arkansas history, spotlighting a group of Black women activists who uplifted their communities while subverting the formidable structures of white supremacy.

1

Arkansas Jeanes Supervising Industrial Teachers

BUENA VISTA, MISSISSIPPI, native Ila Upchurch was a well-known Arkansas Jeanes Supervisor. A graduate of Shorter College in Little Rock, with a master’s degree from Tennessee State College, she had lived and worked in Nevada County in southwestern Arkansas since 1925. Upchurch was a member of the Arkansas Congress of Colored Parents and Teachers (ACCPT), founded in 1928, and was elected its vice president in 1936 and 1940 and president in 1942.¹ The Upchurch Training School in Prescott was named in her honor.² Indeed, Upchurch was so greatly esteemed in Prescott that she was described thusly in a 1942 Arkansas State Press article: “Nevada County, with Miss Ila Upchurch as Jeanes Supervisor, as always, has been a ‘pace-setter.’”³ Also a civil rights advocate, Upchurch became a Prescott and Nevada County NAACP member when the chapter was established in 1945.⁴ She attended the NAACP district council meeting in 1946 and was also the NAACP Youth Council state chairperson.⁵ Upchurch clearly understood the importance of teaching African American children about their civil rights. Informed by the democratic rhetoric of World War II, she was intimately involved in raising children’s political consciousness. In 1946, she hosted the youth council’s “lawn social” at her home in Prescott to underscore her efforts.⁶ Upchurch remained a Nevada County Jeanes Supervisor until she was fired in 1949 for failing to “discharge her duties properly.” It is more likely, however, that she was terminated because of her membership in the Prescott branch of the NAACP.⁷

Ila Upchurch’s story reveals much about what has been overlooked in the silences surrounding Black women’s labor and leadership in rural communities. Their overt, and more often covert, activism is symbolic of what bell hooks called “homeplace,” a praxis through which Black women leaders like Jeanes Supervisors navigated and at times created spaces that not only provided a temporary refuge from southern racism but also allowed African Americans to care for their communities.⁸

Jeanes Supervising Industrial Teachers, or Jeanes Supervisors, active in Arkansas from approximately 1909 until 1950, were valued and revered for their educational and community activism.⁹ Despite this or perhaps because of it, they provided much-needed guidance and educational assistance to impoverished rural Black communities throughout the state. They, like the people they assisted, were concerned about obtaining basic educational skills, but they also deliberately engaged in rural community health work and political activism through such organizations as the NAACP in the years before the modern civil rights movement. Like their counterparts throughout the South, Arkansas Jeanes Supervisors improved educational quality and access and reformed domestic habits. They accomplished this despite having to navigate a fraught racial terrain that was intentionally engineered to ensure African Americans’ educational, political, and economic subordination.

In the late nineteenth century, southern states often lacked the resources to provide adequate education for what one scholar called the “sophisticated work and civic demands of the twentieth century.”¹⁰ State governments spent pathetically little on public education. By 1900, 15 percent of southern whites and 50 percent of southern African Americans were functionally illiterate. Southern educational efforts were supported by funding from the General Education Board (GEB), chartered in 1903 by the Rockefeller family. With a public mission to help “the needs of the people of our Southern states,” the GEB, initially endowed with $1 million which grew to $53 million by 1909, was led by New York Baptist ministers Frederick T. Gates and Wallace Buttrick, both of whom were descended from families with abolitionist roots. Gates and Wallace were particularly, though paternalistically, concerned about southern African Americans because their condition presented a “peculiar and special obligation.” Yet, while they recognized that exploitative economic conditions and unyielding racism marginalized the South, they were unwilling to challenge deeply rooted Jim Crow laws and the region’s commitment to maintaining white supremacy.¹¹

During the early years of the twentieth century, the GEB’s efforts largely centered on supporting schools and universities throughout the South. Its leaders were particularly focused on African American educational and economic opportunities, even as they increasingly turned their attention to the region’s agricultural devastation.¹² By 1929, the Rockefeller family had contributed over $129 million to the GEB to establish rural one-room county training, urban, and public high schools throughout the South.¹³

These efforts in rural African American communities were also assisted by the Jeanes Fund teacher supervision program (1907), the Slater Fund (1910), and the Julius Rosenwald Fund (1914). As a result of these funding sources and educators’ efforts, between 1900 and 1920 illiteracy rates in the South dropped to 5.9 percent for whites and 25.8 percent for African Americans.¹⁴ Despite this dramatic improvement, southern educational rates continued to lag behind those nationwide. And, unfortunately, the situation remained far worse for African Americans. As one historian has argued, “great economic expenditures and reform crusades for black industrial education” resulted in educational “underdevelopment” because these rarely provided African Americans with a quality education.¹⁵ That is, the education they received was largely designed to keep them from migrating out of rural areas and to force them to accept their subordinate status.¹⁶

Educational and school reform was most often women’s domain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Women, regardless of race, recognized that their activism was critical, because they were frequently and dramatically impacted by the disadvantages of poor educational access. But educational activism was particularly important to African American women who experienced firsthand chronically and deliberately underfunded community schools, teacher shortages, and some southern whites’ reluctance to provide Blacks with even basic education.¹⁷ Educational activism was largely the province of Black women in the twentieth-century South and was supported by increased advocacy for more university and teacher training opportunities that allowed them to go into and, in some cases, return to rural southern communities to ameliorate the problems they found there. Helping African Americans was more often than not a cooperative venture. Arkansas home demonstration agents—employed by the Arkansas Agricultural Cooperative Extension Service (AACES) and the Arkansas Association of Colored Women (AACW), and about whom more will be said later—were often assisted by local Jeanes Supervisors.

Jeanes Supervising Industrial Teachers were funded by an endowment known as the Negro Rural School Fund, which had been created in 1907 by Pennsylvania Quaker Anna T. Jeanes to support rural Black education in cooperation with white state and county school officials. White county superintendents hired industrial supervising teachers to work in rural Black schools. Most Black educators were appointed by and depended upon financial support from southern white school boards.¹⁸ This was the case for Jeanes Supervisors, at least in part. While the Jeanes Fund initially provided all the monies for industrial teachers’ activities, county school boards and quorum courts eventually paid at least part of their salaries and traveling expenses for the resources they required to perform their jobs.¹⁹ For instance, in 1916 the Hempstead County quorum court appropriated $150 to pay its Jeanes Supervisor—a $100 increase from the previous year. In 1935, it appropriated $300 for a salary, although it did not list any such appropriations for 1934 or 1936, largely because funds were unavailable during the Depression years.²⁰

Jeanes Supervisors assisted Black teachers in rural communities throughout the South who were often untrained in addition to being poorly paid. Black educators in Arkansas were responsible for improving the quality of education in rural schools and reforming domestic habits in the community. Their efforts were supported by the Arkansas Department of Education (ADE), which in the early years of the twentieth century organized five industrial summer normal schools for Black teachers in Little Rock, Pine Bluff, and other locations in Arkansas with significant African American populations. White officials, however, were only interested in providing teachers with “such training as will fit them for their work.” That is, their mandate was to educate rural Blacks to become a more “industrious,” “sanitary,” “moral,” and tractable agricultural labor force. The summer institutes’ special objectives then were to train Black teachers to “teach children to use their hands as well as their brains,” “spread knowledge of how to avoid disease,” and “to raise standards among the Negroes.”²¹ This was also as part of Jeanes Supervisors’ responsibilities in rural Black Arkansas schools and communities.

At other times, training was available to Jeanes Supervisors at ADE-sponsored “Negro Education Conferences.” In December 1909 for instance, rural schools supervisor Leo Favrot organized a conference for “negro teachers and county agents” employed by the Jeanes Fund, the extension service, and the Arkansas Colored Teachers Association (ACTA) at Pine Bluff’s Arkansas Agricultural, Mechanical, and Normal (AM&N) College.²² Indeed, even Favrot’s wife benefited from the Jeanes Fund’s resources. In 1915, her work was highlighted at a Little Rock Art League meeting during which she was commended for providing “domestic sciences training among the Negroes in the rural districts, this work being made possible through the Anne Jeanes Fund.”²³ Despite white school officials’ objectives, Black educators assumed the lead in creating better education opportunities for the African Americans among whom they lived and worked. During 1915, Jeanes Supervisors gathered at a meeting with the ACTA and Slater industrial teachers to discuss such important issues as creating a “school improvement league,” “better schoolhouses and grounds,” and obtaining school equipment.²⁴

While Black educators were invested in quality education for African Americans, white school officials wanted rural Black youth educated to perform agricultural labor. This occurred through the establishment of corn clubs, which were the precursor of the more commonly known 4-H club, a rural youth program established in the early twentieth century and operated by the US Department of Agriculture.²⁵ Corn clubs were the most effective way to reach rural youth, who then influenced adult farmers to embrace innovative agricultural methods.²⁶ In southern Black communities, Jeanes Supervisors were tasked with providing agricultural education before the passage of the Smith-Lever Act of 1914, which led to the establishment of state agricultural extension services. In fact, Jeanes Supervisors were required to be trained in domestic arts that they were then expected to teach in rural communities. This included sewing, cooking, and gardening for females, and repairing harnesses, furniture, and fences for males. This list was not exhaustive, and the gender norms mapped on these activities did not always hold up in real life. Most members of agricultural families were expected to labor in whatever capacity was necessary for their farm’s optimal operation.

Jeanes Supervisors were further tasked with engaging rural Black communities and encouraging them to adopt better health, home, and farming practices.²⁷ Much of this work began with young people, who were more easily influenced. In 1913, Jeanes Supervisor Samuel Johnson obtained the names of “200 negro boys and girls who desire to plant corn and tomatoes under government instruction.” Arkansas Jeanes Fund agent C. W. Watson then enrolled them in agricultural clubs and provided them with information from the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). Arkansas rural school supervisor Leo M. Favrot also cooperated with the USDA to encourage the cultivation of corn and tomatoes among rural Black Arkansas youth.²⁸

By 1913, Jeanes Supervisors were present in Arkansas, Ashley, Chicot, Dallas, Desha, Jefferson, Lafayette, and Pulaski Counties.²⁹ They were so successful that in this same year Favrot received permission to secure additional Jeanes Supervisors for Hempstead, Jackson, and Monroe Counties.³⁰ Jeanes Supervisors had also been employed as local agricultural club agents and promoted rural reform before the Smith-Lever Act’s passage. Jeanes Supervisors Mary D. Sims (for Lafayette County) and Della Edith Vance (for Monroe and Clark Counties), for instance, were hired as club agents in April and December 1913 to promote agricultural and domestic training among girls and boys.³¹ Della Vance, who had been born in South Carolina in 1885, was a farm laborer before she became a Jeanes Supervisor in Monroe County in 1913. The fact that she was born in South Carolina but was living in Arkansas was not unusual. Between 1870 and 1910, one in every ten Black southerners migrated to another southern locale. Vance and her family were among the 200,000 African Americans who migrated to Arkansas in search of increased economic opportunities in the late nineteenth century.³² Their concentration, particularly in the Arkansas Delta, contributed to heightened demands for Jeanes Supervisors’ services.

Because they were so desperate for the training Jeanes Supervisors provided, white school superintendents scrambled to secure yearly funding to hire them in their districts. In 1915, the Jefferson County superintendent directly contacted Favrot to ensure that monies were available to retain Jeanes Supervisor Genie Curtis, who taught domestic science. He was assured that $350 would be donated from the Jeanes Fund if the school district supplied the balance. This was added to the $40 monthly pay Curtis was already earning.³³ It was not at all unusual th...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Arkansas Jeanes Supervising Industrial Teachers
• 2. Home Demonstration Agents in Rural Black Arkansas Communities
• 3. African American Women’s Activism in Rural Black Communities during and following World War I
• 4. The Mississippi River Flood of 1927 and Agrarian Activism in 1930s Arkansas
• 5. The State Council of Home Demonstration Clubs
• 6. The Arkansas Association of Colored Women
• 7. World War II
• 8. The Arkansas Farm Bureau Federation Negro Division and the Spirit of Cotton Pageant
• 9. Rural Activism in 1950s Arkansas
• 10. Ethel B. Dawson and the National Council of Churches of Christ Home Missions Division
• 11. The National Negro Home Demonstration Agents’ Association
• 12. Annie Zachary Pike: Arkansas Homemaker, Farmer, and Politician
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author