Up from poverty

Harold A Black

March 13, 2024

Go back in your history and you will find poverty. I am not poor. Neither is anyone in my family. I have a Phd. Both my children have MBAs. My late borther had a Phd as do his two children. My parents both had masters degrees. Their siblings all had college degrees. Dad’s parents did not finish high school. His father drove a coal truck. His mother was a maid. They had seven children that lived (two others died in infancy). His mother refused to let her daughters do housework saying that she was not raising the next generation of maids. The boys did the housework but apparently my father did not do any of the cooking. All seven children went to HBCUs. His sisters all were school teachers. One brother was career Air Force. Another brother was an independent businessman. Another became a lawyer and later a municipal judge. Dad was initially the black agricultural extension agent in south Georgia – in those days there were enough black farmers to merit their own extension agent. Of course there was a white extension agent for the white farmers. Dad later morphed into an elementary principal where he met and married my mother. Dad and his brothers worked seasonally as migrant workers to pay for their schooling. He and his brothers also worked to help pay for their sisters’ education.

Mother’s father was a farmer with a primary school education. Her mother was a high school graduate who had to go to a private boarding school in Macon because there was no high school for blacks in her hometown of Gray, GA. With that high school degree granted from Ballard Boarding School for Girls in 1906, she was certified as being qualified to teach “Negro children in the state of Georgia”. I asked my mother how could her grandfather (Milous Towles) afford to send his daughter Mary to boarding school. Mother said “He was an entrepreneur.” I asked, “What does that mean?” Mother replied, “He was a bootlegger.” Pop Milous was illiterate. I have a deed with his “X” on it saying that it was his mark. However, he wanted a different future for his children. My grandmother became the one room schoolmarm for black children in Gray. Mother went to Fort Valley State College (now university). Fort Valley was then a two year school and mother got her degree which was what was now necessary to teach school. Two years later, when Fort Valley became a four year school Mother went back to get another degree. She only had enough money for one year but Fort Valley let her work in the registrar’s office her senior year and waived all her tuition and fees. Mother then received the very first 4 year degree awarded by Fort Valley. She was forever grateful and made a significant donation to the university every year until she died at 101. She is considered the mother of the university which created the Harriet Barfield Black Society in her honor.

I do not know anything about Dad’s family prior to his parents. However, I know much of my mother’s history on her mother’s side. Her maternal grandmother lived with them at the farm in Gray. Ma Mat was born a slave and said she was “picking cotton on Bonners’ Hill when Sherman marched up it.” She marveled at my grandparent’s status and loved their house, even though at that time it had an outhouse. She was proud of how far she had traveled from slavery to the farmhouse in Gray.

I have great admiration for those who came before me. By growing up in an educated household, both my brother and I could read before we went to school. In fact we both skipped the first grade. I graduated from high school at 16, from the University of Georgia at 20 and received a Phd from Ohio State at 25. Both my brother and I never had a thought about not going to college. The only question was where. I think my parents wanted us to go to an HBCU but they were not insistent. Although we both received early admission scholarships to Morehouse out of the 10^th an 11^th grades, neither one of us had a desire to graduate early. My brother wanted to be an engineer. Since he could not go to Georgia Tech because of segregation, he went to Purdue. The state of Georgia paid his out of state tuition since he was majoring in a subject not offered at one of the state’s three black HBCUs. I had thought I wanted to be a physicist. Fortunately, I received a National Foundation Grant to spend part of the summer between my junior and senior high school years to study physics at Norfolk State University. I quickly learned that college physics was light years different from high school physics and I had better rethink my career path. I decided to follow my brother to Purdue, saying that I would major in engineering. However, the University of Georgia was ordered to desegregate in my junior year. The state took away the tuition grant to black students. My father told me he did not have enough to send both of us to Purdue and I would have to find someplace else. Although I got several scholarships to HBCUs and a band scholarship to Ohio State (ironically). I found the University of Georgia.

My parents paid for our college and gave us a stipend so we wouldn’t have to work – just concentrate on your studies we were told. We knew our history and knew we had it easy. We did not have to leave school to be migrant workers to pay for our education like our Dad. We did not have to fear that the money would run out and we would have to leave school without the degree like my mother. We were not destined to do manual labor or clean house for white people. We did not use “X” as our signature. We did not have to pick cotton under the sweltering Georgia sun and be fed in the fields from hog troughs like Ma Mat. Yet because of all those and the others who went before them, we are forever in their debt. There may be educated poor black folk. But I do not know any. The surest way out of poverty is through education. That is obvious. Yet most black politicians and civil rights organizations are against school choice. This simply means that they have created an industry out of poor black folk and the end of poverty would cut off the money flowing from guilty white people. I am ashamed of the NAACP, Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Ibram X. Kendi and all the antiracism race hustlers. They do us all a disservice.