The Piney Woods School Cotton Blossom Singers

As a MDAH volunteer, one of my assignments was to write scripts for potential historical re-enactors based on historic documents.

Miss Doris James (Travel)
Teacher, The Piney Woods School

Time period: 1930s
Prop/pantomime options: Proper schoolmarm attire/mannerisms. 
Descriptors: White, female, 30s-40s.

My seventeen years affiliated with The Piney Woods School has provided me with some insight into a world I might not otherwise have encountered. As a white woman teaching and nurturing Negro boys and girls and their families I have learned as much as I have taught. It has been a honor and an adventure. 

How do I see the world through the eyes of those whose skin happens to be darker than mine?  Until I traveled with The Piney Woods School Cotton Blossom Singers, I had never considered the challenges to find a clean safe place to sleep or eat. Travel is avoided by Negroes as much as possible because the use of public toilets is so often forbidden them; this aside from other inconveniences.

Put yourself in a colored person’s place and realize the burden you help place on him or her. Then realize it is all for no fault of his or her own. They cannot possibly escape being black. It helps sometimes too to try to figure out what credit belongs to you, that you were not born as they were.

I bring up these subjects for no other reason than to try to help white people realize the weight of ignominy we constantly put upon Negroes. They face the danger of constant rebuffs because of their race; and which are apt to come from the most lovely of your children calling out, “Nigger,” as from yourself who registers disgust when you see one of them in the lobby of your hotel. Add to the imminence of lynching, and discrimination every time a job is applied for, and you will see that indeed a Negro is not inferior, if he or she can succeed at all under such a weight of imposed hindrances.