Don’t Fuss ... Let’s Discuss
The African-American Community Forum

(continued from last week)

To all my readers, responders and The News-Reporter: thank you.

My greatest appreciation and thanks goes to the Editor and Publisher if The News-Reporter, Sparky Newsome, who has given me this opportunity to write about AfricanAmericans in Wilkes County.

This is my birthplace and my roots go deep. To write about African American history in Wilkes County is to write about my own history, and the history of my foreparents, beginning with enslaved paternal great-great-grandparents, William Bill Danner and Sinia Micken-Danner, and George Sutton and Marahia McClenon. They were all born into slavery in Wilkes County prior to 1865. They became the first generation of married couples and gave birth to 12 children to begin the Danner family tree branches to grow for generations to come from which I am descended.

My grandparents, Alex Danner and Lillie E. Sutton-Danner, the sharecroppers who raised me, were offsprings of the children of those first two families. My paternal grandmother, Lillie E. Sutton-Danner, who lived to be 89 years old, was the family tree historian and had a personal relationship and verbal knowledge of her grandparents, George Sutton and Marahia McClenon, who had been born into slavery.

Therefore, the historical account of the experiences of AfricanAmericans living in Wilkes County that I have had the privilege to write about in recent weeks is a part of my own personal history. As my forebears’ descendant, I can personally feel the pain of slavery, their suffering and exploitation; and their endurance and instinct for survival because of the stories that were told to me by my grandmother, a woman with only a third grade church school schooling and a very strong spiritual relationship with God through his son Jesus Christ and wisdom of life.

My grandma Lillie passed on to me what her grandparents and parents talked about relative to their life and living conditions in Wilkes County from the 1860s until I was born in Washington, Georgia, in 1933. And I was born and raised during the Jim Crow era and the unequal conditions of “separate but equal.” Researching and writing about the history of enslaved Africans in Wilkes County who worked for 90 years without pay but was primarily responsible for the vast amount of economic development and wealth accruing to the white society, the refusal to allow them the learning of basic survival skills of reading and writing, the classification as human property equal to a horse, disenfranchised citizenship and the economics of sharecropping with built-in cheating.

This revisit to my family and community legacy in Wilkes County has allowed me to regurgitate or vomit my unpleasant life experiences and stabilized my psyche after 72 years. I forgive those who have wrongful mistreated the African-Americans in Wilkes County and most of all, I forgive those who attempted but failed to impede my progress. If God is for you w ho can be against you.

My 11 years of schooling in Wilkes County between 1939 and 1950 occurred under the Rosenwald School Program. All of my teachers, except one college degree teacher in high school, had a mixture of eight grade schooling to high school diplomas; some spent their summer break in teacher training programs to further upgrade their teaching skills. Their monthly salary was on average $57.50 in 1939. Being a sharecropper male, the landowner only allowed me to attend school after crops were harvested by October 31, and return to the fields the next March to help cultivate the land for planting crops.

However, the landowner’s children attended school the entire nine months and were taken to school in a big yellow bus but I had to walk to school six miles roundtrip for eight years and rode my Goodyear bike that I purchased from the sales of a shared acre of cotton, to high school for three years. There was always that half-full/empty yellow school bus passing me to and from school for 11 years. I was not allowed to ride on the bus period! It was unthinkable to imagine that the white bus driver would allow me to ride in the back of the bus which could have been a great treat on rainy, cold, and icy days between November and March, but no mercy ever came my way.

Through it all I graduated from Rosenwald High School located in Tignall, Georgia, in 1950 as the valedictorian and was the first high school graduate in my family lineage from slavery after 85 years or four generations later to graduate from high school. Subsequently, I matriculated at Clark College and Atlanta University in Atlanta, Georgia, earning the B.A. and MBA degrees. Meanwhile, I was not allowed as a first choice to enroll at the University of Georgia, Athens, nor a second time in 1953 after having received the Honorable Veteran Discharge from the Korean War.

My lifetime achievements, in spite of all the unnecessary ugly inhumanity experiences I have suffered, God blessed me to be able to broke the poverty chain link between my parents and me. I also was blessed by God to be the father of seven children and adopted three. Seven have earned college and/or master’s degrees and they have stable professional jobs. The three teenagers are enrolled in their mother’s home school program.

The foundation of some of the African-American schools in Wilkes County began in 1913 of which I am a product. Julius Rosenwald was the Chief Executive Officer of Sears, Roebuck and Company (Sears mail-order “shopping mall” catalog or wishing book) and a philanthropist who provided money to build Rosenwald Schools on church property of New Ford Baptist Church and Black Rock AME Church.

According to the publication of Saving the South’s Rosenwald Schools by Tom Hanchett, Rosenwald introduced the nowcommon philanthropic tool: the matching grant. If a rural AfrcanAmerican community could scrape together a contribution, and if the white school board would agree to operate the facility, Rosenwald would contribute cash, usually about 20 percent of the total cost. The Danburg and Tignall AfricanAmerican communities and other communities throughout the South adopted a “work-a-day plan.” Cash was scarce with many sharecroppers, nevertheless, the AfricanAmerican communities’ women began to gather nickels and dimes from “box sales,” fixing boxed lunches for neighbors to bid on. Families joined to plant an extra acre of cotton or raise hogs and chickens to be sold for the effort.

The African-American local churches donated school sites on church ground, men cut trees to be sawed into boards for building material. Wilkes County School Board paid the salaries of the AfricanAmerican teachers. A November 24, 1922, Teachers Monthly Report to Wilkes County Superintendent listed $25 monthly salaries paid to African-American teachers, increased to $27.50 per month in 1931 and $57.50 in 1939 or 37.5 percent less than a white teacher. Compare those monthly salaries to the $4,725 average monthly salary paid Wilkes County’s classroom teachers for 2003-2004 and imagine the quality improvements over the learning processes back when and now, and the improvements needed for the present generation of school children to survive in a global high tech job market.

Send your responses to docdanner@nu-z.net or P.O. Box 1328, Washington, Ga. 30673.

The opinions expressed by this columnist do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of this newspaper.