Black Heritage Tour: #3, The First Black Elementary School

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According to the tour guide:

3. The first black elementary school at 215 E. Sixth Street. It used to be the old Stonesipher's bakery, and is currently being used by Citizens of Chinese Ancestry of Tucson.

This one was a little harder to find, as there currently is no address 215 East 6th, but my first guest was that the white and blue building -- which is unoccupied, save perhaps for "Million Magazines" -- was the former bakery turned school turned Chinese cultural center. On the corner of 6th and 6th, there's a used car lot. This guess turned out to be wrong; see below.

I'm not sure who the Citizens of Chinese Ancestry of Tucson are; perhaps this is an older name for Chinese American Citizens Alliance, Tucson? Or perhaps Gloria Smith got the name close but not quite right, as she had with the Arizona Historical Society's library?

For more details on Tucson's early Chinese populations, see the site The Promise of Gold Mountain, hosted by the University of Arizona and online since October 1995.

The Gold Mountain site details the history of Tucson's Chinatowns -- and it's important to note that these immigrant communities arose at a time when the U.S. had racist anti-Chinese immigration laws.

Many of the earliest Chinese immigrants living in Tucson moved into run-down adobe buildings located at the west end of Pennington Street. The residents of "Old Chinatown" were primarily young men trying to become established in this country. Wash houses, stores and opium dens soon sprang up in the area. [Henry, E-3] The Chinese population eventually spread southward, and by 1908, 37 Chinese businesses were operating south of Congress Street. Many Chinese families moved with their businesses, settling in neighborhoods alongside Anglo and Hispanic families.

New construction gradually swallowed up Old Chinatown. In 1911, a block of buildings west of Main between Pennington and Alameda streets was demolished to make way for a Women's Club. Additional buildings were lost to make way for City Hall and new, costly homes being built along Paseo Redondo.

A second "Chinatown" evolved in the area roughly bordered by Meyer, Main, McCormick and Broadway. Eventually Ying On, a Chinese association, grew large enough to own the city block bounded by Meyer, Main, Jackson and Broadway. Chinese associations played a role in helping immigrants get established. Many associations were based on family relationships. Ying On was a non-family group that became the largest and most influential in Tucson.

There is currently a Tucson Chinese cultural center, but their web site doesn't seem to contain much in the way of history.

Some more pictures:

Perhaps this used car lot was once the place where young schoolchildren played between lessons?

The old Stonesipher bakery? (No -- see below.)

Looking at the block from 5th Avenue and 6th Street.

The street address of this building is 221, not 215.

S'more historical facts from Gloria Smith:

In the fall of 1913, the colored school was established with Mr. Cicero Simmons as teacher. He received $90 a month and taught primary to high school grades. The school was leased at $35 a month at 215 E. Sixth Street. By May 1916, Mr. Simmons received a $5.00 raise and with the citizens' petitions he was permitted to teach ninth grade. From 1910 - 1920 the schools were segregated and only the first eight grades were offered.

In his book The History of African Americans in Tucson (ISBN 0-9611668-2-7), Dr. Harry Lawson further describes the history of this first black school.

From the start, the separate but equal doctrine was nothing more than a sham, as it was in the rest of the nation, a counterfeit promissory note. The colored school opened in 1912 in a one room building which had been a bakery near the corners of Sixth Street and Sixth Avenue with Mr. Simmons, originally from Buford, South Carolina, as its first principal.

Zanders (1946) reports that conditions were so unfavorable that the first teacher refused the job. Mr. Simmons, accoridng to reports, was a consumptive, one of the factors that Black parents protested. One indication of how little the school board thought of its facility can be inferred from the fact that it didn't even have a name; it was merely called: "the colored school." And it didn't receive an appelation for six years.

We'll see more about segregated education in Tucson history later on; the unnamed school later became the Dunbar school, and a new building was constructed in 1920 -- site six on the heritage tour.

As a native of southern California who grew up in the 1970s (born in 1968), the idea of officially segregated schools is alien and creepy and nauseating to me. I've never before lived in a city where at one time people of color were excluded from education -- compare that older evil with the more recent one of trying to exclude "children of illegal aliens" from attending public schools. It's all the same thing. The bigots fear educated minorities, because they give lie to the racist assumptions of the white supremacist myths and point out the ongoing inequities faced by people of color.

Update:

Originally, I indicated that I was unsure as to whether the impressive deco-looking blue and white building was the original home of the school that would become Dunbar.

Mystery solved! It's not. The In The Steps of Esteban site at the University of Arizona contains this picture and caption:

The first "colored school" in Tucson was established 1913 at 215 E. 6th St. It was established as a result of a legislative mandate segregating African Americans.

Which means either:

1. The existing building at 221 E. 6th was constructed sometime between 1920 and 1985, and Gloria Smith just didn't mention that the old school was torn down and the new building constructed during that time, or
2. The new building blue and white building was put up sometime between 1985 and 2005.

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