The Small and the Mighty: Twelve Unsung Americans Who Changed the Course of History

by Sharon McMahon

From our vantage point, this is ludicrous. Booker T. Washington has long been criticized for engaging in respectability politics—that if Blacks just acted the way that white people wanted them to, then there could be racial harmony. Washington, some feel, was participating in the system of white supremacy. I get it. I really do. And if this is your view, you’re not wrong. But I’ll also add an AND to these sentiments. The system was inherently racist, AND Booker and Anna were doing what they thought was best at the time.

Money from Anna’s fund underwrote all of Virginia Randolph’s work as a Jeanes teacher in Henrico County, Virginia. Soon, many other school districts had their own Jeanes supervising teachers traversing the rutted country roads, bettering the communities

The Jeanes Story, published by former Jeanes Teachers in 1979, has a complete list of all of the teachers, including pictures of some of them. The overwhelming majority are African American women, but a tiny handful are men.

They knew their work was important. But they had no way of knowing the true, lasting impact they had on generations of students, on the American South at large, and, consequently, on America as a whole. In one of his reports fourteen years into the existence of the Jeanes teacher program, William Dillard, the president of the Jeanes Fund, wrote, “There have been no nobler pioneers and missionaries than these humble teachers. They have literally gone about doing good.”[17]

The working environment for Jeanes teachers began to change in the 1950s. Many did not feel safe taking public transportation and instead drove their own cars. Teachers who traveled by train sometimes found themselves subject to arrest or beatings. One scorching August day, a Jeanes Supervisor embarked on a journey from Florida to Louisiana. To reach her destination, she had to switch from a plane to a bus. Opting for a more comfortable ride on the last leg of her homeward trip, she settled into a seat around the middle of the bus. Her comfort was short-lived, as she was forced off the bus in a small town more than a dozen miles from her final destination.

Progress is usually born out of struggle. But struggle doesn’t always mean progress, does it? What do we need to add to struggle to create progress? The answer is hope. Hope, which attorney and author Bryan Stevenson told me is not a feeling but an orientation of the spirit. Hope is a choice that we make each morning, and we do not have the luxury of hopelessness if we want to see progress. The United States itself was born out of struggle. The Quaker migration was born out of struggle. The incredible achievements of the Jeanes teachers were born out of struggle.

Within six months, the young Richard Sears had made $5,000.[3] He realized he was onto something, so he left his job at the railroad, moved to the big city of Saint Paul, Minnesota, and hung out a shingle advertising his watch company. He was twenty-eight years old, and this moment in retail history was only possible because of trains. Railroads clipped across the continent with enough speed to make purchasing things via mail order practical for the first time, and along with the rail lines went many miles of telegraph cable, which facilitated sending orders far faster than waiting for mailed letters to be carried by horse.[4] Sears eventually realized that if he really wanted to make a go of things—selling watches and more via mail-order catalog—he would need to be where the action was.

It’s a humble origin story for an Amazon before Amazon existed, for a founder before founders blasted to space in bizarrely shaped rockets. But it’s how a young railroad worker started what would become Sears, Roebuck & Co., the largest retailer that had ever existed on the planet.

JR was like, “I am interested. They owe me a bunch of money anyway.” And it was true: Sears owed JR money for a shipment of men’s suits they had ordered and sold in their catalog. This decision, y’all. This decision to invest $37,500 in a young company with potential but an organization problem? That was one of the best decisions made in the history of business.

The company figured that the average American had several competing catalogs at their house, and they purposely made the trim size of theirs just a little smaller than their competitors. Logic said that when Edith in rural Kansas neatly stacked the catalogs in her home, the smallest one would go on top. They wanted the first catalog under your hand to be Sears.

Sears, says historian Louis Hyman, was unintentionally undermining white supremacy with its catalog business. While larger cities might have had a wider selection of stores, rural communities often had one general store, and the owner often doubled as the postmaster.

Mail order was changing everything, brought on by federally mandated rural postal delivery, trains, and catalogs. White shopkeepers began to refuse to sell stamps to Black families, or they threw away letters addressed to Sears, aware that the catalog gave Black shoppers options they otherwise didn’t have.

JR made many bequests to various Jewish charities and causes. He was highly instrumental in the development of YMCAs around the country (yes, despite the YMCA being a Christian organization).

Armstrong came to the United States to attend college, and left college to enlist in the Union Army, where he commanded all-Black regiments of troops. He saw that, despite being excellent soldiers who fought valiantly and trained rigorously, few of them could read. Lack of literacy was not because of a lack of ability, it was because generations of enslavers greatly feared what could happen if Black people became educated.

Armstrong believed strongly in the vocational model of schooling, reasoning that after hundreds of years of enslavement, white people should be responsible to help guide the formerly enslaved, to help them find employment, and to assist in the development of their moral character.

In The Education of Blacks in the South, historian James D. Anderson recounts how Armstrong felt that “the votes of Negroes have enabled some of the worst men who ever figured in American politics to hold high places of honor and trust.”[7] Armstrong encouraged Black leaders to refuse elected office, at least for a few generations, until whites could steer them into the kind of moral framework they believed would benefit them.

Washington’s autobiography was originally published in installments in The Outlook, a weekly Christian magazine. The ensuing book sold thirty thousand copies in two years. Since its publication, Up from Slavery has never been out of print. A friend recommended the book to Julius Rosenwald, and after JR read it, he found himself inspired in unexpected ways.

Two months before the luncheon with JR, Booker had been assaulted on the streets of New York, beaten with a walking stick by a man who said he was alarmed by the sight of a Black man near his apartment. When the police arrived, they didn’t believe that the man who had been attacked, whose face was now dripping blood, was the famous Booker T. Washington.

Back in Chicago, race relations began to occupy more of JR’s thoughts and conversations. He said, “A harelip is a misfortune, a club foot is a deformity, but side whiskers are a man’s own fault. And race prejudices are side whiskers that are a man’s own fault.”[15] JR was invited to join the newly formed National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which he did, even arranging for the Chicago chapter to meet at his temple. He served on its board and gave speeches on its behalf. Booker T. Washington wrote to Teddy Roosevelt, who was also on the board of Tuskegee, saying that he was excited JR had agreed to sit on the board, and that JR was among the strongest men who had ever joined it.[16]

White northern philanthropists had made inroads with Black education, he explained, describing the work of women like Anna Jeanes. But it was difficult to do good work when students had to hold an umbrella over the teacher when it rained. JR was aghast. Many of the places in the South where school was taught were worse than stables that housed farm animals.

By the time JR turned fifty, he was richer than any child of a working-class immigrant could ever have imagined. How should I celebrate this milestone? JR wondered to himself. In the quiet of the evenings, he talked with Gussie about taking a special trip. And he would vacation, but JR was envisioning something even more grand. He decided instead to do what Oprah and Ellen would later become well-known for. But instead of YOU GET A CAR AND YOU GET A CAR, he decided on a version of YOU GET A CHECK AND YOU GET A CHECK. He and his family had everything they could ever want in life, and what good were vast piles of wealth doing locked up in a bank?

Y’all, please sit down, and remain seated for the rest of our journey, because I am about to tell you about something that has never happened anywhere else in the world, before or since. Over the next nearly two decades, Julius Rosenwald, in partnership with the Tuskegee Institute and thousands of Black communities, built nearly five thousand schools in the United States.

He took states to task, reminding them how stupid they looked if they walked away from free money.

JR may be out here getting maximum credit, but those small gifts mattered. That fifty cents was a sacrifice for some. The widow who pushed five dollars into the collection basket deserves just as much respect as the millionaire.

One examination of the historic impact of the Rosenwald schools found that nearly 90 percent of Black students in Alabama were educated in Rosenwald schools from the time they were built, beginning in 1917, until schools were legally integrated—for some, not until the 1960s. Across the entire American South, more than six hundred thousand African American children attended a Rosenwald school.[21]

“You were expected to grow up and be a credit to your race.” Her cousin Corinthia Boone said, “Oh yes, you were expected to be somebody. Our teachers wanted us to be contributors to society.” Maya Angelou recalled that the Rosenwald school she attended was “grand.”

JR later established the Rosenwald Fund Fellowship, which awarded grants to talented African Americans. Winners include W. E. B. Du Bois, Ralph Bunche, James Baldwin, Marian Anderson, Langston Hughes, Maya Angelou, and John Hope Franklin. He also provided the major funding for Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry, conceived of during the time when Inez Milholland was kicking off her speaking tour for the National Woman’s Party.

A man once asked JR, “Why are you doing so much to help the Negro?” “I am interested in America,” he said. “I do not see how America can go ahead if part of its people are left behind.”[23]

When Virginia Randolph, the first Jeanes teacher, saw her life’s work go up in flames in 1929, it was the Julius Rosenwald Fund that gave some of the money to construct the new and bigger school out of brick.

Technically, the public schools were open to all and weren’t segregated by race, but instead, children were weeded out by language. These “English Standard” schools had admissions requirements, and children were expected to speak near-perfect English in order to attend.[7]

To shed the language that your brain naturally thinks and dreams in requires Herculean effort, especially when surrounded by mostly Japanese speakers.

The moment Daniel saw the incredulity and relief on his mother’s face, everything changed. He felt what it was like for her to be released from a debt it would take forever to pay, the shock and gratitude washing over her from head to foot.

Over the years, Hyotaro and Kame sent Daniel to bring baskets of garden produce, a freshly plucked chicken, and other small tokens of their appreciation to Dr. Craig. And when Dan entered the doctor’s office, bearing the fruit of his parents’ labor, he saw other baskets lined up. We won’t forget what you did for us, the many tokens said. He realized exactly what kind of person the doctor was, and he wanted to be that kind of person too.

“You fools!” his father screamed at the planes. “FOOLS!”[14] The singular pain of the country of his ancestry attacking the country of his heart twisted his face. In a world where many Americans already hated the Japanese, it was like watching a slow-motion nightmare play out before his eyes.

He had only been seventeen for a few months, but Daniel felt the collective anguish of Hawaii’s 158,000 residents of Japanese ancestry.

This Japanese Exclusion League, later called the Asiatic Exclusion League, pressured state and federal government leaders to create policies like the Alien Land Law, which was advertised as a way to “Save California from the Japs” and prevent them from buying land.[20] Why? Fear is the simple and all-encompassing answer.

Soldiers were taught “how to spot a Jap” via manuals printed by the United States Army. The manuals described how Japanese people shuffle, have buck teeth, and have a wide space in between their first and second toes.

Life magazine printed an article on how to distinguish between a Japanese and Chinese person. The magazine said the Japanese have “blob” noses and wear the expressions of “ruthless mystics.” The Japanese were depicted in nationwide propaganda as literal snakes wearing Japanese flags or as frightening killers with pointy teeth, wielding knives in the dead of night behind the backs of white women.[22] I wish I were kidding.

It started with curfews for people of Japanese ancestry. Soon, it blossomed into exclusion and removal orders. Those living in Military Zone One, which meant people within seventy-five miles of the Pacific coast, would be rounded up and forced from their homes.

The federal government began to hastily construct incarceration camps, where they would send men, women, and children who had been accused of no crime. Maybe you’ve heard them called internment camps, but FDR initially called them concentration camps, because that’s what they were doing—concentrating people into one confined place.[24] But as word of the German concentration camps spread, the U.S. government stopped using the term publicly. They changed the term to internment, but today, members of the Japanese American community largely resist this name. “Internment” is what happens to citizens of the enemy you are fighting.

They, by definition, could not be interned. They were imprisoned. Incarcerated without due process. While you may still hear people call them internment camps, every person I have interviewed prefers incarceration or concentration camp, because the term more accurately describes what was happening.

Posters rustled on every telephone pole and street corner, reading: “Instructions to all persons of Japanese ancestry… Pursuant to the provisions of the Civilian Exclusion Order…all persons of Japanese ancestry, both alien and non-alien…will be evacuated by 12:00 noon on May 7, 1942.” Anyone whose face looked Japanese would be forced to leave their home and report to a civil control station for “evacuation.”

Evacuation has an air of “you must leave for your own good, a hurricane is coming,” doesn’t it? It feels like “a wildfire threatens your home, get out now so you will be saved.” In that sense, this wasn’t an evacuation, then. It wasn’t removing people for their own safety, it was imprisoning them so that white people would be less afraid.

Scholars like Lorraine Bannai say that because traditional Japanese society is collective and group identity is important, standing out was not valued.[4] To be singled out for exclusion was experienced as shame. Saddled with that weight, many families accepted prices for their belongings that were far lower than what they were worth.

If they were being forced to stay here for their own protection, as they were told, why were the guns pointed at them?

in the windows of Cody businesses read, “No Japs allowed. You sons of bitches killed my son at Iwo Jima.”[11]

The Heart Mountain camp operated like a small city that people of Japanese ancestry were not permitted to leave. Able-bodied adults were assigned jobs like farming, teaching, or providing medical care. Incarcerated Japanese doctors were paid $19 per month, while white nurses from the outside were paid $150 per month.[12]

One of the Wyoming scoutmasters wanted his local Boy Scout troop to visit the children inside the barbed wire for activities, but the white families refused, certain their kids would be harmed or killed, either by the people who were incarcerated or by the men in the watchtowers.

Now bonded over their shared peskiness, they saw each other again every time a Boy Scout activity occurred. Norm’s new friend felt it was unfair that American boys should be imprisoned behind barbed wire. They wrote letters back and forth, keeping up their correspondence for years, even after Norm’s family was allowed to leave the camp near the end of the war. The Minetas moved to Illinois, where Kay taught Japanese to members of the military.[14]

Daniel was shocked to receive a piece of mail that showed his draft status had been changed: no longer a 1A, fit and ready to serve, but 4C: an enemy alien. Japanese Americans were to be excluded from military service.