Last week, I began series of Black History Month commentaries on black Americans who shaped West Kentucky by examining the lives of Henry E. Hall, William H. Wright, Henry H. Urquhart, and Theodore R. M. Howard. All men. But what about the roles played by black women? What are their stories? Again, time and space are limited so I will only sketch three lives.
Effie Waller was poet who published three collections of work, Songs of the Months in 1904, Rhymes from the Cumberland, and Rosemary and Pansies, both in 1909. In that busy year, Putnam’s Monthly published her three short stories: “The Tempting of Peter Stiles,” “A Son of Sorrow” and “The Judgment of Roxenie.” After a long break, her sonnet “Autumn Winds” appeared in Harper’s Monthly in 1917. Although she may have continued to write, she never published again. What is most remarkable is that she was published at all.
Waller was not from western Kentucky, however. She was born in Pike County, Kentucky, 1879, the third of four children to Sibbie and Frank Waller, both former slaves. After abolition, her father became a blacksmith and her family was one of the most prominent African American families in the community. She began writing when just sixteen in a style influenced by Tennyson and Longfellow. In 1900 she entered the Kentucky Normal School for Colored Persons (now Kentucky State University) and, in 1902, at 23, she received a teaching certificate. She taught school off and on for about 12 years until she could support herself by writing.
Her work reflected personal, often painful experiences, notably the deaths of her infant son and her husband. David Deskins, who edited her collected works and brought her to national attention, described it as “somber and subdued … sometimes delv[ing] into the mystical” as shown in these lines from her poem “Preparation”
“I have no time for those things now," we say;
“But in the future just a little way,
No longer by this ceaseless toil oppressed,
I shall have leisure then for thought and rest.
When I the debts upon my land have paid,
Or on foundations firm my business laid,
I shall take time for discourse long and sweet
With those beloved who round my hearthstone meet….”
She eventually moved to Wisconsin and there adopted and raised a deceased friend’s daughter, Ruth. She died in 1960.
Our next Black woman of note, the multitalented Osceola Aleese Dawson, was born in Roaring Springs. After her father died, she and her mother moved to her grandfather’s home in Christian County. Her intelligence and ability were recognized early on. She was high school valedictorian and immediately after graduation was hired to teach at her former school. At 23 she enrolled at West Kentucky Vocational School [now West Kentucky Community and Technical College] in Paducah and, after graduation, worked there for over 20 years.
Dawson was also a musician and author. She studied music and become a noted lyric soprano. She published a collection of short stories, Of Human Miseries, in 1941 and wrote a biography of publisher and educator Clarence Timberlake, known as the "Founder of Vocational Education in Kentucky." Dawson also served as the secretary of the Kentucky NAACP Conference and made speaking tours in northern states on its behalf. She was instrumental in securing equal employment opportunities for African Americans at the Paducah Atomic Energy Plant and is cited as one of the people who had made the greatest contribution to the improvement of race relations in Kentucky
Dawson’s social activism was grounded in her deep religious convictions which she demonstrated in her interview by Edward R. Murrow for “This I Believe”--
“I see each individual not as the member of some in or out group, but as a member of a human family—a child of God and my brother. I cannot accept the doctrine of the superiority or inferiority of racist nations or individuals. Creeds, ideas, and ideals are all useless unless translated into action. “Be what thou seemest, live thy creed. Hold up to the world the torch divine.” Therefore, I have pledged myself to help my fellow countrymen reach their goal of real democracy based on the brotherhood of man, by fighting the terrible evils of segregation and discrimination based on a denial of such brotherhood.
She died in 1963.
Alice Monyette Wilson, our final subject, was politically active from an early age. After the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education, her hometown of Mayfield in Graves County was slow to desegregate its schools. In 1956, she and a group of fellow ninth graders—the Mayfield Ten—decided rather than enroll in Dunbar, the "Colored" high school, they would integrate the “White” high school on their own.
As she later recalled: “And the more we talked about it, the more serious it became. We decided maybe we should try. And we did. And the day that we walked into the building, was a real shock, because nobody expected it. … [There were] many shocked faces [when we] announced that we were there to register to attend Mayfield High School.” They were enrolled, but when classes began, they were taunted by white students who staged protests outside the school. In class, teachers ignored them. But she and the others persisted and, ultimately, prevailed.
After graduation, Wilson then entered Hampton Institute in Virginia, where she earned a music degree while continuing to be politically active, participating in community marches and sit-ins. She went on to have a successful career teaching music in the New Jersey public schools.