Black Huntington by Cicero M Fain III

Author:Cicero M Fain III
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: 2019-03-21T16:00:00+00:00

Figure 6.1. Douglass High School Orchestra, Revella Hughes (left front), director. Notan Studios Collection, West Virginia State Archives, West Virginia Division of Culture and History, Charleston, W.V.

Black men suffered constraints as well in their professional aspirations. One important aspect of Douglass High, and doubtless other black high schools around the nation, was the employment of high proportion of African American male teachers. In 1903, building upon the accomplishments of the previous generations, Walter A. Smith and Lloyd G. Smith, members of the “Traveler” Smith family, acquired jobs at Douglass. For many, teaching (and preaching) was the only available profession, despite their schooling and credentials. In 1903, Huntington’s public schools employed 59 teachers and principals. Of the 52 white teachers, the only males listed were a high school principal and one of his assistants. However, of the seven teachers at Douglass, three were male.46 After graduating with an architecture degree from Ohio State University in 1918, Carl Barnett became a teacher, waiting 30 years before being able to practice his profession. “No firm was interested in me,” Barnett states. “As soon as they saw the color of my skin they changed their minds.”47

Within black high schools, one professional avenue open to black males but denied black females was coaching athletics. In 1915 the legendary Zelma Davis assumed his post as coach and soon established football at the school. A graduate of Municipal College in Louisville, Kentucky, Davis’s coaching career is remarkable for its length and level of success. During his forty-year tenure, Douglass won eleven state championships and 234 games, including 33 straight games from 1935 to 1938. Despite playing the best African American high school teams in the state, including Charleston’s Garnet, Beckley’s Stratton, Clarksburg’s Kelly Miller, Parkersburg’s Sumner, and Bluefield’s Genoa Senior, his football teams failed to achieve a winning record only twice. In track, his team won its first state championship in 1919, before reeling off five consecutive state championships from 1921 to 1925. Four times his basketball teams advanced to the Negro National Championship Tournament.48

Black leaders reminded whites of the black historical presence in and contributions to the city’s betterment. In early 1907 Marshall College (now Marshall University) invited avowed white supremacist South Carolina Senator Ben “Pitchfolk” Tillman to speak. Due to the overwhelming demand for tickets, the university changed the venue for his lecture from a campus auditorium to a local theater. Black response to Tillman’s invitation arose shortly afterward. By early March growing animosity to his visit prompted one local newspaper to report that black residents were expressing “a threatening attitude” (through the promise of physical protest), toward Tillman’s impending arrival.49 In a 1907 petition reprinted in the Huntington Advertiser, prominent black leaders, including Douglass teachers J. W. Scott, J. B. Hatchett, Josie M. Barnett, Mina E. Stewart, George Scott, along with I. V. Bryant and S. A. Thurston, pastors of First Baptist and Sixteenth Street Baptist, respectively, called for city leaders to recognize the immorality of Senator Tillman’s platform and to deny him a venue.

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