I can’t say it was the case with all Black teachers of my mother’s generation, who had come of age in the South, as she did, but I know from her life and from the way her colleagues responded to me, that many of them saw themselves as on a mission. Education was about the individual students, just as it was for my teachers at Anderson, but there was an additional component; an explicit mission of race uplift. My teachers at Anderson did not have to concern themselves with that.
