Chattanooga: Joseph E. Smith students were taught more than three R’s

Teachers at Joseph E. Smith School were years ahead of the No Child Left Behind legislation, former students remembered.

Not only were they given instruction in academic subjects, they said, but they were taught social graces rarely dispensed in schools today.

Joyce Watson, who attend the school from 1956 through 1960, said students there learned both correct posture and proper handwriting.

“They made us sit correctly in our seats,” she said. “They made us sit up. And if you didn’t write beautifully, with your shoulders back, you might get your ear pulled. These were good things.”

Even in the cafeteria at lunch, remembered Eddie Ruth O’Neal, who entered the school the first year it opened, there was instruction.

“The teachers would sit in the middle to be sure we were doing the right things,” she said. They taught us things like how to use silver(ware). We got a lot of training.”

The three-story, brick Joseph E. Smith School, located on 10th Street in what is now called the Martin Luther King Jr. neighborhood, opened in 1927 and closed in 1985.

The school served only black children for most of its existence but was integrated for its last 10 years or so. Enrollment fell to 80 students in 1981 but, after the closing of Pineville School, had risen to 196 when the Chattanooga School Board voted to close it.

A year later in 1986, when the building housed the then Afro-American Museum and an adult basic education program, a $1 million plan was suggested by the nonprofit development corporation Innercity to convert the former school into 40 to 50 low- to moderate-income apartments. But that proposal never gained favor from city officials, and the building was eventually raised. Today, its site is occupied by a rear parking lot of Olivet Baptist Church.

Carol Hicks, now of Atlanta, said she was able to skip first grade and start Joseph E. Smith School in second grade after attending a private Seventh-day Adventist kindergarten on East Eighth Street.

“We were all eager to learn,” she said, “and our parents encouraged us to learn as much as we could because knowledge, my mother and grandmother told me, was something no one could ever take from you.”

The school, according to Ms. Watson, was larger than many neighborhood schools and drew students from Main Street north to McCallie Avenue and from Central Avenue west to Lindsay Street.

Like their compatriots at most schools, Joseph E. Smith School remembered their first few teachers as influential.

Ms. Watson said her favorite was Hazel Robinson Bowles, a former student at the school herself.

“She was beautiful,” she said of her fourth-grade teacher, who went on the a length career in the Chattanooga City Schools. “She came home (from college) with cashmere sweaters and tight skirts. I thought she was just beautiful. And she lived in the neighborhood. All of (the teachers) lived in the neighborhood.”

Ms. Hicks recalled Lillie M. Nash in second grade as a “no-nonsense teacher who was as much a disciplinarian as she was a teacher,” Albert F. Seay in fourth grade as “a kind and gentle soul” who students only thought didn’t know what was happening around him because of poor eyesight and Nina Moore in fifth grade as a “great influence.”

After attending a small, country school in Alabama with older students prior to first grade, Mrs. O’Neal, 86, said she initially was disappointed when she had to attend Joseph E. Smith, even though it was brand new.

“I used to cry because I didn’t want to go,” she said.

First-grade teacher Ethel Scruggs, assisted by Cornelia Minor, was a comfort, Mrs. O’Neal said.

“You hold onto them,” she said.

May Day was the social highlight of the year, the students remembered.

Students wrapped the May pole and chose a king and queen, Ms. Watson said. Itinerant physical education teacher John Franklin, later a school principal and city commissioner, would come and lead students in the hokey pokey.

“We had fun, we’d run and play games,” she “It was royal time.”

Mrs. O’Neal, who attended from 1927 through 1933, agreed.

“That was really something we looked forward to,” she said.

Ms. Hicks said the day was shared by the community.

It was “a day filled with much laughter,” food and games,” she said. “Such good memories.”

Ms. Watson also recalled an annual spring fashion show when students wore their best Easter outfits, while Ms. Hicks remembered community variety shows that could be attended for a nickel.

“I tap-danced and danced and danced,” she said. “I was the skinny, little girl with the funny tap shoes.”

“My early years were my learning years — good character, good morals, family values,” Ms. Watson said. “People who taught us were people who lived in my neighborhood. A whipping at school (meant) a whipping at home. Every family tried to send at least one person to college. They often came back and helped and taught.”