In the 1930s, only six percent of African Americans held high school diplomas. In the American southeast, where most of us lived, the percentage was lower. My mother and my father, second generation, post-slavery, had earned high school diplomas at Roanoke, Virginia’s Lucy Addison High School when they married. At that time, nearly all of Roanoke’s Black residents were descendants of slaves as opposed to so-called “Free Blacks.” Education and Democracy are inextricably bound and directly correlated.
A nation is Democratic when the humblest and weakest and the
biggest and most powerful citizens enjoy the same rights.
– A. Phillip Randolph
The evolution of Lucy Addison High School began in 1916 when Harrison Elementary School was allowed to develop high school-level courses. Harrison completed the curriculum and conveyed diplomas on at least six individuals before transferring the courses to the first Lucy Addison High School.
I began first grade at Harrison Elementary School, although I was there for only the first semester. We moved back to Northeast Roanoke where I finished the second semester through sixth grade at Gilmer Elementary School. My “formal” education had begun about three years earlier in northeast, where we lived then, at Gregory Nursery School, which had very high admission standards – toilet-trained, good manners, and self-control.
The importance of my parents’ education level is reflected in these facts: All five of their children who survived infancy – five of nine – earned high school diplomas. And from their five children and their children’s offspring, their grandchildren, there were 18 post high school degrees earned, including several master’s degrees, an ABD, a law degree, and a doctorate.
I am Earnestine and David Hackley Senior’s Number Two Son, and as Avis famously said in 1962, when you are number two, you have to try harder.
I had learned somewhere that you should always overestimate the power of your enemies as you prepare to compete — on battle fields, in athletic arenas, and in schools (especially when the highest test score sets the grading curve) — and hope they under-estimate your capabilities.
The first and second African American post-slavery generations had values, skills and specific lessons about surviving, thriving, and achieving an increasing level of freedom in America that were infused into my generation, the third, that equipped a large percentage of even the poorest children of parents with little or no formal education to achieve great things for themselves, their families and the world.
In June 1958, when I stepped onto the airplane headed for basic training, I left essentially a 100 percent Black environment. When I stepped off that airplane onto Lackland Air Force Base, I was thrown against what was a nearly 100 percent white background. Just like Zora Neale Hurston, I became my Blackest against that white background and my ancestors’ assignment instantly came clear to me.
Blackness – the capacity to excel despite one’s starting point, seemingly overwhelming odds and immense opposition – had been infused into me by Roanoke, Virginia’s comprehensive Black community. I had been in direct contact on a daily basis with members of the first two post-slavery generations – my parents, relatives, teachers, neighbors, mentors and coaches. A principal factor to success was that the entire community was the educational entity, with no demarcation for life lessons among home, neighborhood, school and church.
My genetic make-up and my pre-K through high school education were fixed in 1958; so, I changed the things I could: my use of time, my diligence, and my perseverance. I strove mightily to fulfill the Black Cultural Tenet on education – educational superiority. Although my Addison GPA was a mere 2.5, my “comprehensive education” empowered my work and study to earn a 4.0 freshman year GPA; quick promotion to non-commissioned officer; a “free” college education — BA to PhD; commissioned officer status; and professorship and coach at the Air Force Academy.
Early on, I profited from racial stereotyping – in schools and out — because so many of my earliest white peers assumed I was intellectually inferior genetically, as they had been miseducated to believe about Black people. But while THEY were sleeping, partying, and watching sports, I was studying, practicing, or working. By the time they figured out how wrong they were, I was so far ahead that there was nothing the racists among them could do to thwart my advancement – although some tried.
Racism prevailed in the USAF from my first day to my last; but that made me even Blacker.
To borrow from DuBois, our success experiences during the first three generations after slavery should have been used as THE model for the uplift and enlightenment of humankind; not just African-Americans, which is still valid for success even in today’s horrendous political, educational and social milieu.
