Vanessa Siddle Walker knew about Penn State from the time she was born in the late 1950s, even though she grew up in North Carolina.
“I grew up hearing about the Nittany Lions,” said Siddle Walker, the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Educational Studies at Emory University in Atlanta and the immediate past-president of the American Educational Research Association. “My Mom was at Penn State and she loved it. I grew up my entire life hearing about Penn State.”
Siddle Walker’s mother, Helen Elizabeth Beasley Siddle, originally wanted to be a doctor, but having grown up in the segregated South, found that was not an option.
“While my grandparents were able to put together a beautiful life for their family, they didn’t have the economic resources to support her education, that would let her go to medical school,” Siddle Walker said.
They also didn’t have the money to send her three hours away to Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina, so she went to Elizabeth City State, which was within walking distance of her home, to become a teacher.
Upon graduation, “Miss Beasley” took her first teaching job in Milton, North Carolina, in the town’s Rosenwald School.
“Of course, we also know from the work of James Anderson and others that the black communities at the end of the day put in more money than the Rosenwald Foundation actually put in, but it was a way to get school houses for black children in the South,” said Siddle Walker, whose own research focuses on segregated schooling of African American children.
“So, my mother, I now know, was in one of those Rosenwald Schools in Milton, North Carolina, and she would have confronted all the challenges that went with being a black teacher in 1951 in Rosenwald Schools. We know it’s well documented, the inequality in facilities and resources and equipment,” Siddle Walker said. “But, as I have written about, we also know that there was not a lack of spirit among black educators during this period. They were determined to figure out how to help black children to actually be able to obtain the full citizenship rights that America owed them that they had been denied.”
Siddle Walker said that when her mother graduated from college in 1951, the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court case was looming. She said although they had to deal with the inequality in facilities and resources, there also was a sense of resilience and hope for change. “And I wonder, though she never talked about it, if she might have been part of that,” she said.
“She never talked about what she thought about the Brown decision. She didn’t talk about the challenges, but she did always talk about how she wanted to be the best teacher she could be, in a period where inequality in salaries between black and white teachers dominated the era. I can remember my mom saying, ‘I just wanted to make sure that I earned the salary that I made,’ which in retrospect is an interesting statement because she could have been saying ‘they didn’t give me enough money’ and be mad about it. But she didn’t talk about that. She talked about the importance of teaching, and that shows this kind of resilient mindset.”