Sydney Borden Scott stepped into the world as a graduate of Atlanta Baptist College (now Morehouse) in the Spring of 1901. What came next? To be honest, I’m not quite sure. However, I do know what he’s up to just a little bit later, from the Fall of 1903 to the Spring of 1904: He’s teaching a gaggle of 3rd and 4th graders in Athens, Georgia. In fact, he’s not just teaching them, he’s also the Principal of their school!
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| Catalogue of Atlanta Baptist College, 1903-1904,
showing Borden's current occupation as an alumni of the Academic Course
class of 1898. He is also listed with the same info as a graduate of
the College Course c/o 1901, but the info is broken across two lines.
Accessed via Hathi Trust: https://hdl.handle.net/2027/uiug.3011200458590 |
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| Snippet of the Athens City School List of Officers and Teachers, 1903-1904 Annual Report, Athens City Schools. Full citation below. |
About Athens, GA
Athens, Georgia sits about 70 miles east of Atlanta, where Borden attended high school and college, and about 60 miles north of Sparta, where he seems to have been raised. It’s the county seat of Clarke County, with a population of just over 10,000 people in 1900, or almost two-thirds of the county’s population.
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| Google Map showing Athens in orange, Atlanta in blue, and Sparta in yellow. |
The city seems to have dealt in all the usual industrial and farming businesses, but its real pride seemed to be education: Athens was the home of both the University of Georgia and the State Normal School, a teaching college. Not only that, the city housed several private schools, including the Lucy Cobb Institute, for (white) girls, and Jeruel Academy and the Knox Institute, for “colored” children. And on top of all of this, Athens also operated 6 public schools that they were seemingly quite proud of. The 1904 City Directory wrote:
“Athens has a magnificent system of city schools. This system is unsurpassed in the United States… Many systems of schools throughout the union have been modeled after the Athens system.”
Of course, it’s important to note that these city schools were segregated – four were for white children, two for black - and that Borden’s time there was just seven years after the landmark Plessy v. Ferguson court case established that segregated public facilities were fine so long as they were equal. Many people could have – and would have – told you that “separate but equal” was fiction. This seems to have been the case at the East Athens School, where Borden taught.
East Athens School
East Athens sits across the Oconee River from the city’s downtown district. It seems to have been something of a “red-headed step-child” of the city, likely because of the large numbers of African Americans and working-class white families who called it home, and the geographic separation of the river. The East Athens School sat at the intersection of Water Oak and Griffeth Streets, and served as the elementary school for all of the “colored” families living “east of the middle portion of Lumpkin Street.”
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| 1895 Map of Athens, Georgia, marked to show Lumpkin Street and East Athens School. Courtesy of Athens: Layers of Time (https://athenslayersoftime.uga.edu/), Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Georgia. |
The Archivist Emeritus of Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library at the University of Georgia, Steven Brown, believes that he may have found the only known photo of the East Athens School to exist, hiding in the background of this image – check it out!
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| Courtesy of the Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library / University of Georgia Libraries |
Here’s a close-up:
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| Courtesy of the Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library / University of Georgia Libraries |
How amazing!
The West Athens School, also known as West Broad Street School, served black families on the other side of the city, and Brown believes the two schools were built essentially to the same plan, though he noted that West seems to have an extension at its back for more space. Take a look:
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| Photo of the West Athens School, ca: 1916. Source: School Conditions in Clarke County, Georgia. Full citation below. |
But back to East: Borden would likely have started his walk to the school down the helpfully-named Bridge Street, from his rented home at number 421 on that same
thoroughfare. He shared the street with a stone cutter, a mechanic, a plasterer,
a barber, a minister, a washerwoman, a plumber, and more than a few laborers. It’s
possible he taught their children.
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| Snip of 1895 Map (Hargrett Library, UGA) showing Bridge Street and the East Athens School. |
During the 1903-1904 school year, the East Athens School served grades 1 through 4. It had two 1st grade classrooms, one led by Miss Annie Mack and the other by Miss M. R. Harris. The 2nd grade was led by Miss Mollie Budgett, and Borden was in charge of the 3rd and 4th grades. He also served as principal. The 1903-1904 Annual Report notes that there were a total of 278 students at East Athens, though average daily attendance was closer to 168. This may have been, in part, due to attempts to control the spread of infectious diseases - smallpox in particular - across the city. There was also a lot of handwringing in the newspapers, Annual Reports and other documents about parents, black and white, not respecting the importance of school, so that may have played a role as well.
Life as a Teacher and Principal
So what was it like to be a teacher or principal at East Athens School? Well, for the 171 days that school was in session over the nine months of the school year, Borden would have needed to arrive at least 30 minutes before his students’ school day began. Then he and they would have been in class from about 9am to 1:30 or 2pm, although one record suggests it’s possible that school ran in two sessions, one group of students in the morning and a second group in the afternoon, due to overcrowding. That may have been a later situation, after Borden’s time.
Still, the situation was not ideal. Mary Wright Hill, the principal after Borden, noted in a 1939 oral history that “When I first took the place as principal it was just a four-room wooden building with no modern conveniences. The toilets were just topsoil privies, and we got our drinking water from wells.” In fact, she remembered that “Not long after I took charge and began to drink that well water, I began to feel bad and didn’t feel like doing my work as it should be done. No matter how hard I talked to the city officials they wouldn’t do anything about it.” When they finally (in her recollection) tested the water, she says “Headquarters said they didn’t understand why there wasn’t typhoid fever and other contagious diseases over there.”
Thomas Dozier, the County Schools Commissioner in 1903, wrote in a letter to the local newspaper that,
“The schools for white children in this county are all taught in good, comfortable, well supplied school houses, by teachers as competent and efficient as may be found in any county of the state.
The schools for colored children are kept, with one exception, in houses totally unsuited for school purposes, and while a few of the teachers are competent, environments are weak, as that can not be expected to do efficient work.”
He may or may not have been including the city schools in this assessment, but one gets the idea that Borden was definitely working in an environment where separate was not equal. And what about Dozier’s comment on the competency of black teachers?
As the 3rd grade teacher, Borden would have been responsible for teaching his students multiplication and division, using numbers no larger than the tens of thousands. He would have needed to help them with reading, writing, spelling, and oral composition, plus geography, music and history, including “Columbus, Franklin, The Pilgrims, John Smith, Penn, Oglethorpe, Washington, [and] Lee.” They would have learned “easy lessons on the flesh, muscles and bones of the human body” and would have practiced clay modeling and drawing, including, at the suggestion of the school board, items on this list: “jug, walnut, fruits and vegetables of all kinds, hat, key, shoe, vase, [and] nuts of all kinds.”
For the 4th graders, many of the subjects were the same, but the details were new or more advanced. Mathematics now included fractions, geography was now global, American history was more in depth. There were Bible questions to answer, and clay modeling and drawing now included flowers and trees, plus “shells, vase forms, bells, [and] continental outlines and shore forms.” The Annual Report boasts of a very active school library for the system to support the students in their learning, but it doesn’t seem the black students had access to it, because all 7,195 books that were borrowed were done so by students at the schools for white children.
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| 1903-1904 Annual Report, Athens City Schools. Full citation below. |
As a teacher, Borden needed to track his students’ progress, attendance and behavior from month to month, sending reports home to their parents or guardians for their signatures. As principal, he also collected these reports from his three colleagues to report up to the Superintendent. As teacher, Borden was also responsible for maintaining order in all school spaces and while students were traveling to and from school. And, since it’s not like we ask a lot of teachers or anything, the following was also expected of them:
“Teachers shall be responsible for the discipline and government of their rooms, ruling as would a kind and judicious parent, always firm and vigilant, but prudent. They shall endeavor, on all occasions, to inculcate in their pupils truthfulness, sef-control (sic), temperance, frugality, industry, obedience to authority, reverence for the aged, forbearance to the weak, respect for the rights of others, politeness to all, kindness to animals, desire for knowledge and obedience to the laws of God; but no teachers shall promulgate partisan or sectarian views in the schools under any circumstances”
Whew!
Add to that Borden’s responsibilities as Principal, which include the following, and you have to wonder how much he got paid!
““They shall have a general supervision of the grounds, buildings, furniture and appurtenances of the schools, and see that they are kept in good condition, and that minor repairs are done by the janitors; they shall see that good order is maintained upon the school premises, in the neighborhood thereof, and that the strictest cleanliness is maintained in the school buildings and premises belonging thereto; they shall promptly report to the Superintendent any repairs that may be required, and any negligence of the janitors; they shall make requisition upon the Superintendent for all supplies of books, stationery, and other articles required for the use of the schools”
So, how much did he get paid? According to the Annual Report, $315. The Principal of the other black school, West Athens, was paid $450. Both were paid much less than the Assistant Principal and Primary Principals of the white schools, who earned $630, though their enrollment was in several cases lower. I wonder what Borden thought about that?
I’m especially curious since it seems that black and white teachers needed to pass the same test to be qualified to teach in the city. Each year, on a Saturday in May – actually, two different Saturdays, separated by race – applicants needed to pass both a written exam and an oral examination, including questions I’m not sure I could answer off the cuff right now:
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| The Athens Banner, 5 May 1903, page 3. Accessed through Georgia Historic Newspapers, via the Digital Library of Georgia, https://gahistoricnewspapers.galileo.usg.edu/ |
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| Page 1 of 3 pages of examination questions that Borden would have needed to answer. 1903-1904 Annual Report, Athens City Schools. Full citation below. |
The Principal of West Athens School, Samuel F. Harris, had studied at the University of Georgia, though they refused him a degree due to his race. Instead he was awarded one from Morris Brown, in Atlanta. He was clearly well-educated, and would go on to study at Harvard University and the University of Chicago. Borden’s preparation at Atlanta Baptist College surely served him well, as well. And Borden seemed set to continue his time at East Athens School: when the test results from the May 1904 teacher testing were announced, he was listed as returning to the position of Principal.
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| The Weekly Banner (Athens, GA), 27 May 1904, Page 3. Accessed through Georgia Historic Newspapers, via the Digital Library of Georgia, https://gahistoricnewspapers.galileo.usg.edu/ |
Yet, between that spring and the start of the new school year, something changed his mind. What was it? Well, your guess is as good as mine, but it had something to do with the Panama Canal.
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Do you know something about Borden’s time as a teacher and principal at East Athens School? Drop a note in the comments!
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Sources and Thanks!
I have to give a shout-out to Steve Armour, University Archivist at UGA’s Hargrett Library; Steven Brown, Archivist Emeritus at UGA; and Ashley Shull, the Archives and Special Collections Coordinator at the Athens-Clarke County Library, for their helpful suggestions and for pointing me towards a number of useful resources. (Need help? Always ask an archivist!)
Also, shout out to Maxine Easom, local historian and co-author of the book, Across the River: The People, Places, and Culture of East Athens, for offering to make herself available if I have questions after digging in.
In addition to the sources directly cited above, I used the following to dig into Borden’s time in Athens, GA:
Athens Banner. "Athens city directory [1904]." University of Georgia. Map and Government Information Library. 1904, http://dlg.galileo.usg.edu/acd/do:acd1904.
Eighteenth Annual Report of the Athens City Schools, Athens, Georgia. Session 1903-1904. Athens Banner Press, 1904. (Note: I also consulted 1901-02, 1902-03, and 1904-05.) Accessed via Google Books: https://www.google.com/books/edition/Annual_Report_of_the_Athens_City_Schools/wO8WAAAAIAAJ?hl=en&authuser=1&gbpv=0
Johnson, M.K. “School Conditions in Clarke County, Georgia with Special Reference to Negroes. Phelps-Stokes Studies No. 3.” Bulletin of the University of Georgia, Vol. XVI, No. 11A (August 1916). Accessed via Hathi Trust: https://hdl.handle.net/2027/osu.32435012903779
Knight, Monica Dellenberger. Seeking Education for Liberation: The Development of Black Schools in Athens, Georgia From Emancipation Through Desegregation. Dissertation, 2007. Accessed online at: https://getd.libs.uga.edu/pdfs/knight_monica_d_200708_phd.pdf
Thurmond, Michael L. A Story Untold: Black Men & Women in Athens History. Third Edition. Deeds Publishing (Athens, GA), 2019.
Hill, Mary Wright, and ? B Hornsby. Principal of Grammar School. Georgia, 1939. Manuscript/Mixed Material. Retrieved from the Library of Congress: www.loc.gov/item/wpalh000509/. (Note: This is an interview from the WPA Federal Writers’ Project series: Folklore Project, Life Histories, 1936-39.)
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