Though Justice Sleeps by Bair Barbara;Kelley Robin D. G.;

Author:Bair, Barbara;Kelley, Robin D. G.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, Incorporated
Published: 1997-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

George Washington Carver (second from right) with his students in the soil science laboratory at Tuskegee University.

CHAPTER 4

SELF-HELP: “TO HEW OUT HIS OWN PATH”

There is still doubt in many quarters as to the ability of the Negro … to hew out his own path … Our pathway must be up through the soil … up through commerce, education, and religion!

—Booker T. Washington in the Montgomery (Alabama) Advertiser, February 21, 1895

Johanna Bowen Redgrey was a midwife and healer who lived on a small farm on the outskirts of Tuskegee, Alabama, in the 1880s. She had been born into slavery near Richmond, Virginia, the daughter of an African-American mother and her mother s Irish-American master. When she was a teenager, her father sold her and her brothers to a white family who had a plantation in Macon County, Alabama. Johanna was a striking woman, six feet tall. She was muscular and strong from the field work she did, with a head of fiery reddish hair and a determined disposition to match her appearance. When the Civil War came, Johanna’s brothers joined other young men who escaped from the plantation to try to fight for the North. She assumed they died in the attempt, because she never saw them again nor learned of their fate. She spent the latter part of the war and the early years after war’s end working for wages for her former master. Then she met and married Lewis Redgrey.

Lewis Redgrey was a Native American who had spent part of his life in Mexico and spoke Spanish as well as English. He had a 55-acre farm outside Tuskegee, and Johanna went to live with him there. Together they raised hogs and corn and grew a cash crop of cotton. They were both important people in the community. Johanna Bowen Redgrey had gone to school and worked with doctors, and she knew a great deal about plants and herbs and how to make medicines. She delivered babies and nursed both black and white families in times of illness or accident. She was deeply religious. She taught Sunday School and was very active with other women in the neighborhood in her own African Methodist Episcopal Zion church and in the Baptist church located on a nearby hill.

She and her husband were determined to provide good educations for their son and the other African-American children of Tuskegee. For them, making education available was the key to improving the lives of all African Americans. They were members of a committee of Tuskegee residents who worked to start a school in the town. They supported those who sent to Hampton Institute, a school in Virginia that trained African Americans for careers in nursing, teaching, farming, and trades, to find a schoolmaster to run it. They were among the group of black townspeople who gathered to greet the young teacher who came from Hampton. His name was Booker T. Washington and he arrived in Tuskegee in June 1881. “The place has a healthy and pleasant

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