"Ellie J. Dahmer – Widow of Slain Civil Rights Leader, Rosenwald School Former Student and Teacher" by Andrew Feiler

Archival Pigment Print

16”x24”x1”

Ellie J. Dahmer, widow of slain civil rights leader Vernon Dahmer, Sr., attended a Rosenwald school in Jasper County, Mississippi. She is portrayed here inside the Bay Springs School (Forrest County, Mississippi 1925-1958) where she taught home economics from the early 1950s until it closed in 1958. That year, African American students were sent to a new consolidated, but still segregated, school. Refused a position at the new school because of her husband’s activism, she got a job teaching elementary school 30 miles away in Jasper County. She taught there for 21 years.

Teachers during the civil rights era played several important, but often underappreciated, roles. As historian Vanessa Siddle Walker has documented in The Lost Education of Horace Tate, black teachers in segregated schools taught their students about equality and democracy. In doing so, they helped set expectations and aspirations that were foundational for the civil rights movement.

Walker also illuminates how black teachers played another critical role: supporting the work of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund (LDF). While Thurgood Marshall and his team were the face of the legal fight to end school segregation, it was associations of black teachers that funneled school-level data to the LDF. That data was invaluable in helping the LDF make the case that separate but equal was inherently unequal.