The Sand Hill Incident by CDS.Duke

The Sand Hill Incident

What many in this country and elsewhere believe about the rural South during the first half of the twentieth century – the rampant discrimination and economic suppression of blacks, Jim Crow and the Klan – is not the whole story. Historian Danny Collum writes “ … for anyone prone to stereotypes about the racial attitudes of Southerners or workingclass whites in general, the inconvenient truth remains that even among the whites of a former Southern slave state, important voices were speaking out for freedom and equality.” This is the story of one of those voices. It takes place in Carrollton, a small town in rural Georgia in the spring of 1944, ten years before the Brown v Board of Education decision and more than twenty years before the passage of the Civil Rights Act.

And in the interest of full disclosure, the young teacher at the center of this story was my mother’s older sister. I first heard of this incident at my aunt’s memorial service, nearly fifty years after it occurred.

By the mid 1940’s the teacher training program at West Georgia College was gaining recognition outside the local area and reports of the successes of the educational initiatives there generated widespread interest. The college and the Rosenwald Fund, which subsidized the progressive faculty recruited for this initiative, decided to hold a major conference, the Southern Conference on Community Planning and Education, in late March1944. Educators came from twelve states and as far away as Ohio and Texas to participate in the 5-day program. On Friday morning conference delegates asked to observe a classroom in action at one of the college’s laboratory schools. The participants traveled to Sand Hill School where a combined session of eighth and ninth grade social studies classes taught by a young teacher named Edith Caudill had been selected for the demonstration. About 30 conference attendees filed into the classroom and arranged themselves around the walls. Before Edith could explain to her class why all the visitors were there, one young boy came rushing up to her, brandishing a copy of The New York Times he’d grabbed from one of the side tables. “What does this mean?” he demanded, pointing to an article on the front page. The classroom began to buzz as other voices added to the clamor. Evidently all the students had seen the article and were greatly concerned. Edith followed the boy’s finger to read the headline: “Army Drops Race Equality Book.” She took the paper and quickly scanned the article. The Times reported that the USO had refused to distribute the pamphlet “The Races of Mankind”, a public affairs leaflet written by renowned anthropologist Ruth Benedict. Government and military leaders thought the message in

the tract, i.e., that no one race was superior to another, would help prepare U.S. troops to stand up to Hitler’s Aryan nation claims of natural superiority. But some Southern congressmen, upset by the science and statistics in the pamphlet that demonstrated that Northern blacks scored higher on military IQ tests than did Southern whites, concluded that the purpose of the pamphlet was to teach racial equality. They forced the Army to suspend its distribution. Edith never hesitated. She pulled a chair into the circle of students and picked up the class’s own copy of the controversial pamphlet. The students had all read it and studied the science in it and were pretty convinced that it was important and accurate. But now the newspaper article had raised doubts in their young minds. Forgetting she had an audience, Edith did what any good teacher would do. She taught. She led the students through the newspaper article and the group read aloud a number of assertions from the pamphlet, focusing on the sections dealing with intelligence and the test results that had so upset the politicians. Echoing the pamphlet, Edith explained, “No matter whether a man is round-headed or long-headed, whether his hair is kinky or straight, any head can house a good brain.” The discussion that followed was lively and at times heated. At the end, most students decided that the pamphlet ought to be released to the troops. An uninvited reporter from The Atlanta Journal was among the group scattered around the classroom. The evening paper that Friday featured an article whose headline proclaimed in large type, “Modern Race Teachings Tried on Georgia Pupils,” and the lead paragraph made clear the spin the Journal wanted its readers to grasp: “In a small bare classroom in Sand Hill School, 20 boys and girls, whip-smart and eager heard their teacher Miss Edith Caudill read the following controversial words: ‘All peoples of the

earth are of a single family and have a common origin.” Explaining that these words came from Races of Mankind, a book banned because of its “disputed content”, the Journal article went on to explain that the lesson actually being taught was thinking and reasoning, as part of the progressive curriculum West Georgia College was experimenting with. After the story appeared in the Journal, Eugene Talmadge, white supremacist and former governor of Georgia, generated a major furor, claiming that his worst fears had been realized. Talmadge alleged that the Sand Hill incident proved that the university system was “infested with teachers intent on mongrelizing the white race.” The furor reached the Board of Regents of the Georgia University System and its Chancellor wasted no time in summoning the West Georgia College president and Edith to Atlanta. On Saturday afternoon Edith and two members of the county school board made the 60mile drive to Atlanta to the home of the chairman of the Board of Regents. When the Regents demanded that the president either deny the story or fire the teacher, he informed them that he had no power to hire or fire teachers in the public schools – that could be done only by the local School Committee. In the background phones rang constantly as the regents fielded reactions from across the state and board members took stands of varying levels of condemnation. In the end they agreed on the damage Edith had done to the university system and to the state. The only solution, they decided, was that she be fired immediately. The Chancellor then turned to S.K Ayers, chair of the Sand Hill School Committee. The Chancellor tried to persuade Ayers that the reputation of the university

system depended on his actions and encouraged him to either repudiate the story or fire the teacher. Instead Ayers spoke up from his seat on the side of the room. “What do you pay her?” There was silence. Finally Edith was asked her salary, her first opportunity to speak in an ordeal that was now approaching six hours. When she told them, Ayers consulted with the other board member. Then he addressed the group again. “I just wanted to know how much Miss Caudill gets paid because if you don’t want to keep paying your part of her salary, then we need to figure out how we’re going to come up with the money because we have no intention of firing her.” He went on, “I was in that classroom yesterday morning when those boys and girls were asking all those questions. Now I’m just a cotton farmer and I may not know a whole lot about anthropology or science or teaching social equality and I don’t know anything about those statistics in that book they were reading from. But I will tell you … I learned something in that classroom myself and I didn’t see anything wrong in what the young lady said and nothing that went on there offended me a bit.” And suddenly it was over. The regents were silent. Someone suggested that Ayers make a statement for the paper. Ralph McGill, editor of the Atlanta Constitution helped craft Mr. Ayers’s carefully worded statement, which would appear in Sunday’s paper under a headline that read “Trustee Denies School Teaches Race Equality”. The article made clear that the teacher involved was employed by the Sand Hill School under the unanimous authority of the school’s trustees, all of whom were named in the short article. Also, to get the university system off the hook, the statement allowed that while some

students from West Georgia College served as practice teachers at Sand Hill, none of them were in attendance or involved in the discussion that took place in the classroom. In the days following the incident, however, Edith continued to worry about being fired. The matter was not dying down, fueled by talk among certain townspeople and she feared that community sentiment was growing to the point that the local trustees would not be able to hold out. But the children in her classes encouraged her not to worry, telling her that they would “raise a howl” if she were fired. Recognizing the volatile environment in Talmadge’s Georgia, the Rosenwald staff offered Edith a fellowship to continue her education and she returned home to Tennessee as soon as the Sand Hill school term ended. While she was there, the head of the Rosenwald Fund wrote her a personal note that he included with the check for her scholarship. He told her “We have all followed your work at Carrollton with interest and admiration. You have done a splendid job in making education mean something in the lives of the children and the parents. And this seems to me the best way of conditioning prospective teachers.” The minds Edith opened in her time in Carrollton, and especially in that crowded classroom on that day in March 1944, had been stretched in new directions and old ideas and prejudices would no longer fit comfortably in the value systems of her students and their parents. The promise of the progressive education movement to teach children to find out truths for themselves, sowed seeds that would bear fruit, not only in the future citizens of Carrollton, but across the rural South. The power of education to change children and their communities, envisioned by the college president and nurtured by the Rosenwald program faculty and their New Deal social conscience, created an

environment at West Georgia College where students and teachers could explore together thorny issues of race and science. Finally, the example of a young teacher, willing to lead a frank discussion, and, just as importantly, that of a simple cotton farmer to listen and then take a stand on principle, provides clear evidence of a South in which progress toward racial harmony could occur. It would be nearly twenty years before West Georgia College admitted its first black student. In spite of the Brown decision the state of Georgia openly resisted any moves toward integration and as late as 1961 still had laws on the books requiring the governor to shut down any integrated schools. But in 1963 the new president of West Georgia College invited Lillian Williams, a black woman, to enroll and in 1967 she received her BS degree in education. She began her career as a teacher in a first grade classroom at Sand Hill School.