This day in 1946, Dottie (Dorothea Mae Williams Anderson, b. January 18, 1920) started teaching at Stowe Teachers College in St. Louis.
After finishing her masters degree from Ohio State, she did not begin teaching, but instead riveted airplane wings (“Rosie the Riveter”) because it paid much better than teaching (if you can imagine that….). Her first teaching job was in a Florida elementary school while my father was in the army, but once back in St. Louis, she started teaching at Stowe.
A “teachers college” was designed to prepare teachers for the elementary schools. The St. Louis Board of Education established Harris Teachers College for this purpose in 1857 and, as you can imagine, it prepared white teachers for the white elementary schools.
Stowe was established about 33 years later, and prepared black teachers for black elementary schools. This would coincide with the end of the war and the commencement of “separate but equal” segregation laws that were formally approved of most noticeably in the U.S. Supreme Court case of Plessy v. Ferguson. Plessy dealt with a state law requiring separate accommodations for blacks and whites in railway travel (and Dottie has some great stories of trips during these times), but the upshot was that state laws requiring segregation were A-OK. But to appease the then modern sensibilities, states were required to demonstrate that each race had “equal” accommodations where the segregation existed. Sounds like a winner.
Dottie started at Stowe in 1946 — back in the “separate but equal” days. She remained at Stowe for a while before teaching high school, still in the St. Louis Public Schools. In the interim, the U.S. Supreme Court was busy deciding a series of cases that began with the famous 1954 case of Brown v. Board of Education which overturned the “separate but equal” doctrine of the previous 60 or so years.
So no more Stowe for coloreds and Harris for whites. The two were merged as “Harris Teachers College” in 1954 (it was law, not enlightenment). In 1966 (or so) Dottie was recruited from Central High School to come to Harris to continue teaching English. In the mid 70s, the name was changed to Harris-Stowe College just a few years before the state made the college part of the state educational system.
So there you have it — a Masters’ degreed Rosie the Riveter starts teaching at a segregated college in St. Louis.
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