In the summer of 1943, Dorothy jumped at the chance to head to Camp Pickett and earn extra money during the school break. Though teaching offered prestige, the compensation was modest. Nationally, Virginia’s white teachers ranked in the bottom quarter in public school salaries, and their black counterparts might earn almost 50 percent less. Many black teachers in the South gave lessons in one-or two-room schools that barely qualified as buildings. Teachers were called upon to do whatever was necessary to keep the schoolhouses clean, safe, and comfortable for pupils. They shoveled coal in winters, fixed broken windows, scrubbed dirty floors, and prepared lunch. They reached into their own threadbare purses when the schoolroom kitty fell short.
Another woman in Dorothy’s situation might have seen the laundry job as unthinkable, regardless of the economics. Wasn’t the purpose of a college degree to get away from the need to work dirty and difficult jobs? And the location of the camp, thirty miles southeast of Farmville, meant that she lived in worker housing during the week and got back home only on weekends. But the 40 cents an hour Dorothy earned as a laundry sorter bested what she earned as a teacher, and with four children, a summer of extra income would be put to good and immediate use.
And Dorothy was of an unusually independent mind, impatient with the pretensions that sometimes accompanied the upwardly mobile members of the race. She did nothing to draw attention to herself at Camp Pickett, nor did she make any distinctions between herself and the other women. There was something in her bearing that transcended her soft voice and diminutive stature. Her eyes dominated her lovely, caramel-hued face—almond-shaped, wide-set, intense eyes that seemed to see everything. Education topped her list of ideals; it was the surest hedge against a world that would require more of her children than white children, and attempt to give them less in return. The Negro’s ladder to the American dream was missing rungs, with even the most outwardly successful blacks worried that at any moment the forces of discrimination could lay waste to their economic security. Ideals without practical solutions were empty promises. Standing on her feet all day in the sweltering laundry was an opportunity if the tumbled military uniforms bought new school clothes, if each sock made a down payment on her children’s college educations.
At night in the bunk of the workers’ housing, as she willed a breeze to cut through the motionless night air, Dorothy thought of Ann, age eight, Maida, six, Leonard, three, and Kenneth, just eight months old. Their lives and futures informed every decision she made. Like virtually every Negro woman she knew, she struggled to find the balance between spending time with her children at home and spending time for them, for her family, at a job.
Dorothy was born in 1910 in Kansas City, Missouri. Her own mother died when Dorothy was just two years old, and less than a year later, her father, Leonard Johnson, a waiter, remarried. Her stepmother, Susie Peeler Johnson, worked as a charwoman at the grand Union Station train depot to help support the family. She took Dorothy as her own daughter and pushed her to succeed, teaching the precocious girl to read before she entered school, which vaulted her ahead two grades. She also encouraged her daughter’s natural musical talent by enrolling her in piano lessons. When Dorothy was eight, the family relocated to Morgantown, West Virginia, where her father accepted a job working for a successful Negro restaurateur. There she attended the Beechhurst School, a consolidated Negro school located around the corner from West Virginia University, the state’s flagship white college. Seven years later, Dorothy reaped the reward for her hard work in the form of the valedictorian’s spot and a full-tuition scholarship to Wilberforce University, the country’s oldest private Negro college, in Xenia, Ohio. The African Methodist Episcopal Sunday School Convention of West Virginia, which underwrote the scholarship, celebrated fifteen-year-old Dorothy in an eight-page pamphlet that it published and distributed to church members, lauding her intelligence, her work ethic, her naturally kind disposition, and her humility. “This is the dawn of a life, a promise held forth. We who have been fortunate enough to guide that genius and help mold it, even for a little while, will look on with interest during the coming years,” wrote Dewey Fox, the organization’s vice president. Dorothy was the kind of young person who filled the Negro race with hope that its future in America would be more propitious than its past.
At Wilberforce, Dorothy earned “splendid grades” and chose math as her major. When she was an upperclassman, one of Dorothy’s professors at Wilberforce recommended her for graduate study in mathematics at Howard University, in what would be the inaugural class for a master’s degree in the subject. Howard, based in Washington, DC, was the summit of Negro scholarship. Elbert Frank Cox and Dudley Weldon Woodard, the first two Negroes to earn doctorates in mathematics, with degrees from Cornell and the University of Pennsylvania, respectively, ran the department. The white schools’ prejudice was the black schools’ windfall: with almost no possibility of securing a faculty position at a white college, brilliant black scholars like Cox and Woodard and W. E. B. Du Bois, the sociologist and historian who was the first Negro to receive a doctorate from Harvard, taught almost exclusively at Negro schools, bringing students like Dorothy into close contact with some of the finest minds in the world.
Howard University represented a singular opportunity for Dorothy, in line with the AME scholarship committee’s lofty expectations. Possessed of an inner confidence that attributed no shortcoming either to her race or to her gender, Dorothy welcomed the chance to prove herself in a competitive academic arena. But the economic reality that confronted Dorothy when she came out of college made graduate study seem like an irresponsible extravagance. With the onset of the Great Depression, Dorothy’s parents, like a third of all Americans, found steady work hard to come by. An extra income would help keep the household above water and improve the odds that Dorothy’s sister might be able to follow her path to college. Dorothy, though only nineteen years old, felt it was her responsibility to ensure that the family could make its way through the hard times, even though it meant closing the door on her own ambitions, at least for the moment. She opted to earn a degree in education and pursue teaching, the most stable career for a black woman with a college degree.
Through an extensive grapevine, black colleges received calls from schools around the country requesting teachers, then dispatched their alumni to fill open positions in everything from tar paper shacks in the rural cotton belt to Washington, DC’s elite Dunbar High School. New educators hoped to teach in their major subject, of course, but would be expected to assume whatever duties were necessary. After graduation in 1929, Dorothy was sent forth like a secular missionary to join the Negro teaching force.
Her first job, teaching math and English at a Negro school in rural Tamms, Illinois, ended after her first school year. The Depression-fueled collapse in cotton prices hit the area hard, and the school system simply shut its doors, leaving no public education for the rural county’s Negro students. She fared no better in her next posting in coastal North Carolina, where, in the middle of the school year, the school ran out of money and simply stopped paying her. Dorothy supported herself and contributed to the family by working as a waitress at a hotel in Richmond, Virginia, until 1931, when she got word of a job at the school in Farmville.