The Story of Alice Linfield White

This is the text of a talk I gave at the Melrose Human Rights Commission’s Martin Luther King, Jr., Day Dinner on January 20, 2014.

We’re all familiar with Rosa Parks, the black woman who wouldn’t give up her seat on the bus, and thus sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Tonight, I’m going to tell you about someone who inspired Rosa Parks: Alice Linfield White, the principal of the school she attended as a child. Here’s what Rosa Parks said in her autobiography:

What I learned best at Miss White’s School was that I was a person with dignity and self-respect and I should not set my sights lower than anybody just because I was black. We were taught to be ambitious and to believe that we could do what we wanted in life.

Alice White spent the last years of her life in Melrose. She lived at 314 Main Street, at the corner of Main and West Wyoming. She volunteered for Melrose-Wakefield Hospital. And she was a member of this very church, First Congregational Church.

Many of you know Amy Spollett. When she was a little girl, Amy not only saw Alice White speak at this church, she met her and talked to her. So many of you in this room tonight are only two degrees of separation from a remarkable civil rights pioneer.

We don’t know too much about Alice White’s early life. She was born in Boston in 1854, the only one of seven children to live past the age of three. Her mother died when she was 18, and her father remarried and moved to Framingham.

There are no records that Alice attended a teaching school, so it’s fair to assume she attended a girls’ school, what was called a “female seminary” at the time. As a young woman, she lived at home, with her father, stepmother, and the household help. The only clue we have to her activities during this time is a program from a presentation of “Miscellaneous and dramatic readings by Alice Linfield White,” which was presented on Dec. 14th, 1876, when Alice was 22. So apparently she did a little writing.

Alice’s father died when she was 28. Here’s how her obituary in the Melrose Free Press put it: “When a young woman, she was left an orphan, and realizing that no one had a claim on her, she felt she must have an interest in doing for others.”

That interest, and no doubt her strong involvement in the Congregational Church, led her to the American Missionary Association, which established and ran schools for black children in the South after the Civil War.

In 1882 at the age of 28, Alice White left Massachusetts for Macon, Georgia, where she taught for two years at Lewis High School. While there, she met Margaret Beard, who was to become her lifelong friend and colleague.

In 1885, Alice and Margaret moved to Quitman, Georgia, to teach in a new school the AMA was starting in a hotel that had been donated by a wealthy benefactor. The school opened in October 1885 with 45 students, and enrollment quickly grew to over 150. An article in the American Missionary magazine described what happened next:

The colored people of the town, happy that a good school had been opened for their improvement, could not help expressing their joy and hope. This gave offense. One of the teachers, accompanied by a colored youth to show her the way, went to a colored church to get an insight into the religious life of the colored people of the town. This gave offense. It was construed to mean social equality. Some of the teachers appeared on the streets attended by colored girls of the boarding department. This gave offense. It was also construed to mean “social equality.”

The locals spread rumors that the “lady teachers” were of dubious morality, and the teachers were insulted on the street. Bullets were fired through the window of the school, and the gates were stolen. Then, at 1 a.m. on the morning of November 17, 1885, an arsonist set fire to the school. The staff and boarders were sleeping inside. “The inmates were awakened by the crackling of the flames,” according to the report in the American Missionary magazine. “They had time only to snatch a portion of their clothing, and reached the sidewalk but a few minutes before the floors of the rooms they occupied fell in.” The local fire department was just a block away, and a pumper arrived promptly—and hosed down all the surrounding buildings, allowing the school to continue burning.

Despite this heinous act, it seems that opinions in Quitman were quite mixed, and the Mayor was on the side of the school. As the staff stood in the cold, watching the building burn, the Mayor arrived and offered to put them up at the local hotel as his guests. (The students were put up in a vacant store and sent back to their homes the next day.) The next day, he offered a reward for the arrest and conviction of the arsonist, and four days after the fire, the citizens of Quitman met and adopted a series of resolutions denouncing the arson and asking the AMA to establish another school for black children. This was done, but the AMA chose to locate the new school in the nearby town of Thomasville.

Alice White did not go to Thomasville, however. Instead, she and Margaret Beard moved to Montgomery, Alabama, and established the Montgomery Industrial School for Girls in Centennial Hill, a historically black neighborhood. They started out in three rooms, but with donations from many sources, they soon built a school building and a staff dormitory for the eight teachers, all white women from the North.

The Montgomery Industrial School for Girls, popularly known as “Miss White’s School,” followed Booker T. Washington’s philosophy of providing a practical education for black youth, and he endorsed the school in one of its fund-raising brochures. The school offered both academic subjects and vocational classes in cooking, sewing, and home nursing. Students were encouraged to work hard, to read, and to continue their education at Fisk University. Former students described the teachers as strict but kind.

As for money, students paid a modest tuition, and those who could not afford it could work to pay their bills, but the majority of the budget came from outside donors, both private foundations and individuals. In 1916, for example, the total school budget was $7,500, of which $6,000 came from donations and $1,500 was tuition.

In an unpublished paper, historian David Harmon draws on interviews with several graduates of the school, including civil rights activist Johnnie Carr, to draw a picture of the school and its students. Miss White was fond of the saying “Cleanliness is next to godliness,” and students were required to be neat and clean at all times. They wore a blue uniform with white collar and cuffs that was to be pressed daily. Cosmetics and jewelry were discouraged, as was the use of hair straighteners. Dancing and alcohol were forbidden.

The day began with a devotional service, and Miss White often used this time to speak on equality. David Harmon writes, “Miss White would often hold up sweet peas of different colors and tell her students that these flowers were all part of God’s flower garden and God loved, watered, and took care of them all equally. Miss White would tell her students that looks did not reflect the content of one’s heart.”

These were radical sentiments to be expressing in the Deep South in the late 19th and early 20th century, and they did not sit well with some people. Alice White and her staff were not welcome in white circles in Montgomery. The white churches did not invite them to worship services, but the black churches did. Alice often visited the mothers of her students and maintained strong personal relationships with her alumnae even after the school was closed. Rosa Parks always cherished a letter she got from Alice White before she died.

We can get a bit of insight into Alice White’s personality from the comments of Wallace Butrick, a field agent for the Peabody Foundation, which was one of the institutions that provided financial support for Miss White’s School. He had high praise for the school, especially the vocational classes, and said that Alice White “has been opened to criticism, exacting the suspicion and dislike of white people.” He thought this might be due in part to her personality and the fact that she was a woman, saying she was “an intense person, calculated, I should judge, to go it alone rather than in corporation with anyone else.” Indeed, it would have taken a certain level of intensity to put up with the sort of hostility Alice White encountered. The Ku Klux Klan targeted the school, and a fire at the school in 1923 is generally assumed to have been arson.

The school remained in operation for 42 years, from 1886 to 1928, when Alice White stepped down as principal due to age and poor health. The Board of Trustees voted to close the school, citing both optimism that blacks would soon be better served by public education and the difficulty of finding another principal of Miss White’s caliber.

It’s not clear why Alice White chose to move to Melrose when she retired, but we can make some educated guesses. She had been here before, for one thing. All the teachers from her school returned to the north for their summer vacation, from June to September, and with no living family, she may have visited friends in the area. In November 1923, she was mentioned in a Melrose Free Press article about the Melrose Highlands Woman’s Club, which was celebrating its 25th anniversary; Alice and another member had written a pageant about the history of the club. She must have already been a part of this social circle to be taking such a leading role. Also, note that this was the same year that her school burned down, so she may have been staying here while it was being rebuilt.

Ten years ago, when I was writing an article about Alice White for the Free Press, I talked to Amy Spollett, who had seen Alice White and another missionary, Gertrude Nason, speak about their mission work at church—this church—when she was about nine years old. “They weren’t terribly tall,” she remembered. “They were a couple of really rather plain ladies, pleasant looking—I don’t remember. All I know is they were so exciting and so inspired with their presentation that on the way home from church I started talking about these two women and how exciting they were and how I wanted to do what they did.” Amy’s father arranged for her to visit them one day for tea and to talk about their work. “I usually sat in back of them in church on Sunday, under the pulpit,” she said “and it was always exciting to me to see them there and know what they had done.” As many of you know, Amy was active in many ways herself, as a volunteer and director of the preschool here, and she was one of the directors of the Roxbury-Melrose day camp. She attributes the work she did to the inspiration she drew from these two women.

Amy wasn’t the only one. Many of Miss White’s pupils went on to become involved in the Civil Rights movement; Rosa Parks is the most famous one, but Johnnie Carr, another student, was the first female member of the Montgomery NAACP.

And here I have to stop and make an observation. The way we tell the story of Rosa Parks, it sounds almost like magic. She refused to give up her seat, she was arrested, suddenly all these people showed up and changed history. But it wasn’t that simple. Rosa Parks was the secretary of the local NAACP, and she had recently been through a training course in social activism. In her autobiography, she said, “People always say that I didn’t give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn’t true… No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.” The president of the Montgomery NAACP bailed her out, and the organization decided it was the right time, and she was the right person. They brought in several other organizations and began the Montgomery Bus Boycott the next day.

Things don’t happen in a vacuum. We look at history as the work of a few individuals, but there are countless other individuals and organizations who stand behind them. Alice White had the American Missionary Association, Rosa Parks had the NAACP—and Alice White.

Alice White lived in Melrose for seven years. Her health was poor, and she didn’t get out much, but she did go to church services and she folded bandages for Melrose-Wakefield Hospital; it’s a measure of her industry that she folded 16,000 dressings in four years. She died in 1935, and her obituary in the Free Press was eerily prescient; the last line was, “She lives again in lives made better by her presence.”

(Photo of Alice White and Margaret Beard from the Times Gone By Facebook page.)