The lives of the 27 second-graders in Mrs. Viola Johnson’s class were more difficult than their school picture can show: These children did grueling field work, often alongside their parents. They faced the segregation and racism in the Jim Crow South.
They lived with the whispers about lynchings in the back fields. They used segregated bathrooms and swimming areas. They remember sitting in the back of the Greyhound bus for a trip through Florida. They attended a blacks-only school where they sat at chipped desks and read from second-hand books with the names of the white children who used them first written on the inside covers.
Yet they were hopeful.
These children attended the segregated Braithwaite School for elementary and junior high school black students, in Broward’s most northeastern city.
It was 1936, the days of the Depression, and times were tough. Most of these youngsters picked beans, celery, berries – anything for nickels to help their families survive.
These children grew up to become soldiers, educators, assistants to ministers. Others had blue-collar jobs: maids, plumbers, construction workers. None went into farming.
Twelve of the students from Mrs. Johnson’s class still live year-round in Deerfield Beach. Others died here.
The Sun-Sentinel interviewed 19 of the students and family members of five who died. Two students’ whereabouts are unknown, including one girl whose name no one could remember, and no family of a sixth student who died could be located.
The school is gone and officially forgotten. The Broward School Board has few records of the school or its students. But for those children in Mrs. Johnson’s second-grade class – and the generations of African Americans who attended the school from 1929 until integration closed it in the 1960s –Braithwaite remains an important piece of history.
It was the heart of a small black agricultural community that is long gone, swallowed up by a city of suburban houses and huge retirement complexes and a population that became more than 80 percent white.
The members of that class are now 68 to 71 years old. The ties that bind them exist mostly in their memories. The classmates have scattered from Dania to New York, and even among those who remain in Deerfield Beach, few have stayed in touch with more than one classmate. These are their stories.
School was hard, but it paid off
No one remembers when the doors to Braithwaite opened or exactly when they closed. But history experts think the first class may have been in 1929.
The school was named after William Stanley Braithwaite, a black poet. According to a 1958 parent handbook, the school motto was “To educate, to elevate and to cultivate.”The school colors were purple and gold, and the school flower was the yellow carnation.
Although the School Board paid most of the $9,000 cost to buy the land and build the school, part of the money came from Julius Rosenwald, the CEO of Sears, Roebuck and Co., who helped pay for construction of more than 5,000 schools for black students in 15 southern states.
The School Board’s only records of Braithwaite are a 1969 teacher directory on microfilm and a legal description of the property that says the land was purchased for $500 in 1928. The Broward County Historical Commission has a few records and the Deerfield Beach Historical Society has the parent handbook and several class pictures.
Vera Knowles Cox remembers the second-grade classroom. It had “two blackboards, a cloak room, nice seats and varnished floors.”On the walls were pictures to remind students about hygiene – pictures of toothbrushes, soap and combs.
The teachers were strict and demanding taskmasters. One teacher sternly ordered the children to conjugate the verb “to be,” another drilled them on their spelling, the students remember.
Emanuel Sams says he spells well today because of those drills. Younger folks, “like 45 years old, I have to spell certain things [for them). They say, `How you know that, you didn’t even finish high school?’ “But that’s because in Braithwaite you sat right there until you got it. Then the next day, you got it right. The teachers, they wanted you to learn. They came up the hard way, too.”
Fun at Braithwaite was a matter of ingenuity. Dennis Williams remembers baseballs made of rags rolled up inside their mothers’ stockings. A branch broken off a tree served as a bat. The bases were old burlap bags, placed just so on the sand.
“We made a baseball or a football out of anything,” says Warren Scott. “We didn’t have the money to buy one.”
And those who had shoes took them off for the game.
“Shoot, not while you’re playing,” Williams says. “You might get them scarred up.”
Winter was spent picking beans
The school closed in the winter so children could pick. They typically made up the school time in sweltering classrooms during the summer.
“This was a poor, poor town,” says Margaret “Dump” Heath Andrews, staring at her image in the black-and-white class photo. “They had no money here. If you didn’t pick beans, you didn’t live.”
Andrews went to the fields with her brother, Richard Heath, who was in that second-grade class. Sometimes she was so hungry that she stopped in the fields to eat what she had picked. She didn’t always have shoes to wear, and on those days she would run home so her feet weren’t burned by hot sand.
Richard continued on to Delray Beach High School, but Andrews quit school after Braithwaite to get a job.
“I quit cause I didn’t have the money. I should have kept going,” Andrews says, recalling a girl in a different class who picked beans but went back to school. “She went on to become a teacher. I wish I could have did that, but I had no mind to do it.”
Alfred Beal remembers the day in 1936 when he swore his own children would never pick beans. Roused in the wee morning hours, he donned an old blue denim shirt rolled at the sleeves and overalls with patches that were too numerous to count. “On the tush, on the knees,” he remembers. And then it was off to the fields.
“I didn’t like to pick beans,” Beal says. “Hard on your back, your knees. You have to crawl or bend over. And you can’t bend over too long. And if it’s raining [and you crawled), you were in the mud.”
The 15 cents a bushel he earned helped pay the rent. His parents counted his pay every night. “If you didn’t get what they thought you should have gotten, you get a paddling.
“As long as I can remember I thought, `My kids won’t do this.”’ But he also wanted money for himself. He picked berries and sold them door-to-door to white people for 15 cents a quart. But disgusted with their insistence that black children knock on the back door, Beal switched to selling berries on the street corner. With his earnings, he’d buy a soda or candy or a piece of cake – something his mother wouldn’t spend money on. And he ate it before he got home so she wouldn’t know how he squandered the cash.
“No sandwiches,” Beal says. “I wanted something sweet that I wasn’t getting.”
Donald Poitier, of Deerfield, picked beans and peppers on weekends and after school. But the work didn’t bother him as much as the lack of money for clothes. Looking at himself in a fancy suit in the front row of the class picture, he said it was the only one he owned.
Pearl Ferguson was lucky. He didn’t have to pick.
Many of the children brag about Ferguson, proud that one of Braithwaite’sfinest graduated from Dillard High School and Florida A&M University. After college, he joined the army and rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel, then got a job as an elementary school guidance counselor in Broward’s school system. He is retired, but still gets called back to Dillard Elementary School to work with children.
Ferguson’s eyes well with tears when he talks of his school days, of the woman who raised her children against the grain of the community because she wanted him to have a better life. He has to catch his breath and wipe his eyes.
Like many of the children, he was poor. But the aunt who raised him after his mother died didn’t want him to sacrifice his education to work in the fields.
“People said to her, “They’re not even your children. Why not send them into the fields?'” Ferguson remembers. “But she believed in education. I never dreamed of dropping out of school.”
He points to a girl in the middle of the front row in the class picture. “Hazel was the smartest, she was smarter than me,” he says. “But a lot of kids would copy off me.”
“So I’d write one answer. After they copied it, I’d change it to the correct answer,” Ferguson says. Then he grins and chuckles. “Just to be mean.”
Children had respect for authority
In some ways, Ferguson says, the 1930s were better for children than the 1990s. The sense of family was priceless. Their community had no drugs and little alcoholism. Most children came from two-parent homes and had to be inside the house when the sun came down. A wrong word or bad behavior in front of an adult – especially a teacher – would lead to punishment with a branch from the nearest tree.
Today, he laments, children don’t have the same respect for authority. Now when he works with children, he tries to teach them the passion for learning that his mother passed down to him.
“I tell them,`you have to study, you have to do better.’ They look at me like I’m strange,” Ferguson says. “The world will teach them.”
Sally Lee Sharp Stubbs’ father forbid her to work regularly in the fields.
Stubbs’ family was more well-off than most. Often, Stubbs would waltz into the grocery store on Dixie Highway and buy grapes, candy, cookies for her friends. “Put it on Daddy’s bill,” she told the clerks. They obeyed. “It wasn’t fair that I had so much and my friends had so little. We were Jim Sharp’s children. We were spoiled brats.”
Deerfield was a predominantly black city in 1930. It had 1,199 black residents, more than triple the white population.
Stubbs remembers her best friend, Virginia Gaskin – a white child and the daughter of the woman that Stubbs’ mother cooked for.
They were like sisters, Stubbs says, whispering secrets and holding hands.
One sunny day, her mother sent her to the store to buy three onions for a nickel. On her way out, she spotted Virgina walking with one of her white friends. As the two girls chatted and skipped along, Stubbs called out a greeting.
“I said, `Hi, Virginia,’ ” Stubbs says. “She acted like she didn’t know me! Then she called me a nigger.”
Her pride was shattered. Her ego hurt. But only for a matter of seconds. “So I said, “Well, you’re a cracker!” Then bam. I beat her up, bloodied her. I watched the blood pour out of her nose. The white girl, she fought back. She scratched my face.”
It was Virginia’s father who pulled them apart. “And then her daddy beat both of us. He took his belt off and he gave me the same amount of licks he gave her. I counted.”
She shakes her head at the memory. “I was shocked. I thought I was never going to talk to her again. But at 5 o’clock we were holding hands, playing again in the mulberry tree.”
Others have memories that sting.
Thomas “Pug” Fullins, who died in 1995, was four years old the day there was a lynching in Deerfield, says his older brother, Walter Fullins. He was 10.
The man was accused of wrongdoing after a white woman was heard screaming in the area. Fullins remembers a white grocer showing him and a buddy a picture of the man hanging from a tree.
“How you boys like that?” he asked, shoving the picture in their faces.
“To punish him, we used to take things out of his store,” says Fullins, who used to pull Pug down Dixie Highway in a homemade wagon. “Oranges, anything. We used to roll it out the door. Anything we could get out of there without getting caught.”
Blacks barely had a spot on the ocean
There were rules in 1936 Deerfield – blacks and whites would keep to themselves in the ocean. In the 1950s, the rules became more pronounced – John U. Lloyd State Park was once the only place in Broward County where blacks were allowed to swim. The barrier island just south of Port Everglades was known as Negro Beach.
But some of the children – white and black – broke the rules in those early years.
Joe Dean, whose diabetes rendered him paraplegic, sits in his wheelchair at a Deerfield Beach public housing project with his back to the television set so he can rest his limbs on the sofa.
Dean remembers swimming with the white children who lived in Deerfield. “Some were the best friends I ever had,” he says. “I came along all right.”
Hazel Poitier Moye remembers separate water fountains for whites and blacks. And she remembers never wanting a drink of water. “I didn’t want to stoop to that lowness. I don’t know whether I was thirsty or not. If I was, the thirst went away.
“I thought `Do they think they’re better than I am?’ My father always told us, `We’re as good as they are. And if you do good, God will take care of you.”’ Education was important to Beal’s family, so he thumbed rides to Dillard High School each morning – the county didn’t provide buses to black schools.
“We didn’t have no equal opportunity, no opportunity I should say,” Beal says. “There were things we couldn’t do. We had a spot in the ocean for colored only. You couldn’t picnic where you wanted. Now, you stay in school and get an education. Then you have a chance. You won’t have to go through all this stuff. Now black kids can do anything they want.”
Many stayed, saw Deerfield change
The once plentiful wild deer in Deerfield are gone now. So are the endless fields and farms, replaced with subdivisions and strip shopping centers and a city of 50,000 people. The 1990 census put the town’s population at 46,325, 81 percent white.
Where 139 farms provided the town’s economic underpinnings in the 1930s, the only agricultural land left in the city is a 40-acre plant nursery on Powerline Road.
As adults, the former Braithwaite students say they’re not sure why they spent their lives in Deerfield Beach. Some stayed because their children are here. Others say they have no place to go.
Joe Dean, who picked beans with his 10 siblings, says as a child he had planned to be a farmer “for the rest of my life.”But he wasn’t.
“I didn’t have my own land,” he explained.
Moye was visiting her brother in New York when she met the man she would marry. Although she moved to New York, she wants to be buried in Deerfield Beach. “I bought my plot,” she says.
Andrews never left her childhood home. For 70 years she lived in the same house, raised her children there. She moved out recently to have it bulldozed and rebuilt. She expects to move back into a new house on the same plot of land next month.
“It was falling apart,” Andrews says. “It was kind of raggedy.”
Andrews isn’t sentimental about the 1930s – she’s glad they’re over. Glad that she’s getting a new house. Glad that the pervasive uneasiness between the races is easing.
Andrews has diabetes, and the toes on her right foot have been amputated. But she wants to enjoy life in 1990s Deerfield.
“I want to go out and eat in all different kind of places,” Andrews says. “If you didn’t get it while you were young, you might as well get it while you’re old.”
As soon as she graduated from Braithwaite, Blanche Knowles Cooper left Deerfield for Key West, where she found work as a nurse’s assistant. “There was no work in Deerfield at all,” Cooper says. “No work but farmwork. I definitely didn’t want that for my children.”
She came back to Deerfield to retire.
The farm where Samuel Poitier’s father worked is now someone else’s backyard. Poitier died in November. His sister, Edris “Mae” Cox, walks by occasionally, remembering. “There’s no place like here,” Cox says. “There was a close connection with the people. Everybody knew everybody at one point. Then all these people started moving in.”
Braithwaite a key to black community
Braithwaite closed around 1969, after integration opened other schools to black students. Broward County bought the property in 1974 for $25,800 for use as a health center and office space. Part of the building burned in a fire, and the rest was later torn down. Today the Northeast Focal Point Senior Center sits on the site. Alumni would like to put a plaque on a ficus tree there – the only remnant of the schoolyard.
Braithwaite was such an integral part of the black community that many of the children say they were sorry to see the old school go.
Essie Mae Taft Kirksey, who lives with one of her children in Margate but still attends church in Deerfield, sent both her daughters to Braithwaite. And they say they miss that little school.
“It was history, a piece of Deerfield,” says daughter Annette Harvey. “I hated it when they took it away. It was a memory there from generation to generation to generation. It was a starting point. It was all we had at the time. And we [the black community) built it up like an old house.”
Cox agrees. She says watching the school be torn down was like watching a piece of her past disappear.
“I really didn’t want that to happen – I wanted it to stay for history,” she says. “But they said they didn’t need another elementary school right there. [I felt) very bad. We were thinking it should have stayed there.”
But while were sorry to see the building go, they were pleased that legal segregation died with it.
Andrews pats the back of her 2-year-old great-grandson, sleeping in her lap. “I’m glad he didn’t go to no Braithwaite,” she says.
Her memories of the fields – her terror of the snakes that slithered through the mud where she knelt to pick beans – were dreadful enough that she wasn’t sorry when the fields were plowed under.
When her own children went to Braithwaite, she wouldn’t let them pick beans.
“I said `No way,'” she says. “I said to them `Go about your business.’ And I worked two jobs, at night babysitting neighbors and during the day, maid at a hotel in Boca. ‘Cause with beans, you don’t make nothing.”
Cooper remembers parents teaching their children to walk in the back door at restaurants. “It makes you feel like you’re nobody,” she remembers.
She’s glad the difficult days of her childhood are gone, but Cooper hasn’t forgotten them. She has her mother’s mangoes to remind her.
After school and on weekends, Cooper worked in the fields with her mother on her grandmother’s farm on Federal Highway. Each year her mother canned the string beans, tomatoes and other vegetables they picked and stored the jars for the summer months – for her own five children and for the motherless children that lived in 1936 Deerfield.
After a bad season on the family farm, the bank foreclosed. But Cooper’s mother, who died six years ago, still picked mangoes from the backyard tree for her friends and family. In Cooper’s china cabinet, among her most beloved possessions, is the last jar of mangoes her mother preserved.
“I’m just blessed,” Cooper says. “I am one of the blessed persons God has ever made. I couldn’t ask for better children. They check on me every day.”
She marvels that so many of her former classmates found a measure of success. Even though they didn’t become wealthy, they were all good, Cooper says. “And it’s not because they had it so good, it’s because they wanted to.”
And that small community remains in their hearts.
David “Boo” Hill took a job in a small Virginia town, then retired there. He chose a house where there were no street lights nearby because it reminded him of old Deerfield.
“I think about it a lot of times,” Hill says. “About the kids and things, going to Boca Raton. You had a lot of fun coming up.”
He quietly sings parts of the Braithwaite song as he thinks of 1936 Deerfield: Dear old Braithwaite, how we loved thee You are the flower of my heart Dear old Braithwaite He stops – he doesn’t remember all the words.
It’s all long gone.
Editorial Researcher Magaly Morales contributed to this report.
Where are they now?
Mrs. Johnson’s second-grade class in 1936 turned out pretty typical. No one became famous, and no one became notorious.
1. Thomas “Pug” Fullins died of cancer in 1995 after spending most of his days in Deerfield. He was a maintenance worker on Broward golf courses.
2. Viola Johnson, a teacher for 45 years, died of a heart attack in her house near Ocala in 1977 at age 80. She had remarried and her name was Viola Ray. She told her nieces, “The children must love me cause they hug me when they see me in the streets.”
3. Richard Heath died last year in Connecticut after a long battle with leukemia. He sold television sets for a living. He was married and had four children.
4. Essie Mae Taft Kirksey of Margate still attends church every Sunday in Deerfield. Her children went to Braithwaite.
5. Joe Dean still lives in Deerfield Beach. He worked with roofing tiles and later cleaned beaches for condominiums. A widower, he has eight children.
6. Bertha Brooks, of Deerfield Beach, graduated from Dillard High School and landed worked at a funeral home. She raised three children here.
7. Margaret “Dump” Heath Andrews, of Deerfield Beach, raised eight children. Richard Heath was her brother.
8. David Hill, who lives in Hampton, Va., traveled the country working in such jobs as hotel pot washer and maintenance man at a Ford plant.
9. C.J. Johnson, whereabouts unknown
10. Dennis Williams, of Deerfield Beach, married and had two children. His job was running errands for a Boca Raton bank.
11. Carrol Stubbs of Deerfield Beach married a classmate, Sally Lee Sharp. At age 69, he still works in construction.
12. Frank Williams and family members could not be located. Several of his classmates say he died in Deerfield Beach several years ago. He had not married or had children.
13. Fannie Mae Lockett James, of Deerfield Beach, married and raised 14 children here.
14. Unidentified. Some classmates say this might be Frances Williams or Connie Jones, both of whom left Deerfield Beach at an early age. Their whereabouts are unknown.
15. Samuel Poitier lived in Deerfield Beach most of his life. He died in November at a Boca Raton rehabilitation center. He had served in the U.S. Army and was a plumber. He left behind three sons.
16. Nathaniel Powell splits his time between Deerfield Beach and Glenham, N.Y. He’s married with 13 children. He retired as a maintenance worker for a Veteran’s Administration hospital in New York.
17. Mary Etta Brooks Baker, of Deerfield Beach, became a housewife, raising 16 children.
18. Blanche Knowles Cooper, of Deerfield Beach, is married with eight children. She was a nurse’s aide for most of her working life.
19. Sally Lee Sharp Stubbs, who lives in Deerfield Beach, married the little boy standing behind her and had six children. She worked as a maid for homeowners before she retired.
20. Vera Knowles Cox, of Deerfield Beach, married and had four children. She worked as a maid for homeowners before she retired. 21. Emanuel Sams, of Deerfield Beach, worked in construction as a young man. Today he’s a school crossing guard on Dixie Highway. He married and has two children.
22. Alfred Beal, of Dania, graduated from Dillard High and worked as a custodian in the Broward school system until retirement.
23. Warren Scott, of Pompano Beach, graduated from Dillard High School, then joined the Army. He’s a retired construction worker. He married and has four children.
24. Hazel Poitier Moye, of Buffalo, N.Y. Moye, grew up to marry a minister and have five children.
25. Pearl Ferguson, of Fort Lauderdale, earned a degree in elementary education from Florida A & M University and a masters degree from Louisiana Tech University. He had a career in the Army, then worked as a guidance school counselor in the Broward school system. He is married with three children.
26. Solomon Gilchrist died from a heart attack in 1997 in Springfield, Mass. He was divorced and had 2 children.
27. Donald Poitier, of Deerfield Beach, is a widower. He worked in the laundromat of a northeastern hotel.
28. Frederick Ferguson joined the Army, then moved to New Jersey where he worked in the kitchen of a hotel. He married and had nine children. He died in 1993 of colon cancer.
– LISA J. HURIASH
