Lettie, the youngest daughter of Joseph Hugh Dent and Frances Lillia "Fannie" Dent, was born in Newnan, Coweta County GA 7 March 1894. She attended St. Mary's Female Seminary in St. Mary's County, MD, graduating in 1911. (Followed a few years later by her cousin and my grandmother, Elizabeth Dent.) Here is her picture at May Day 1911.She went on to Western Maryland College in Westminster MD, graduating in 1915 with cum laude honors.
After college, she became a teacher in St. Mary's County Public Schools and by 1928 was the principal at River Springs Elementary school.
At that time, the superintendent's position became open and a member of the school board encouraged Lettie to apply. She did and was appointed at age 34 to the position which she held for the next 30 years, retiring in 1957.
"Miss Lettie," as she was known, took a very personal interest in the schools she supervised. Sometimes, in lieu of meetings, she would take School Board members on a tour of the one of the 48 schools in the county so they could see first-hand what was happening in the schools. She also had a reputation for personally selecting new teachers hired in the county.
Certainly Miss Lettie's tenure as superintendent was not without challenges. In her first decade, she had to deal with the effects of the Great Depression as she struggled to find resources for the schools. During and after World War II, she dealt with enormous growth in the system as many military-connected personnel and their families moved into the county. In her last years as superintendent, the system was dealing with the enormous changes brought by the movement to integrate the schools.
In the 1950's, the county built consolidated schools that drew in students from the old one-and two-room school houses, but these schools were still segregated. In 1956, the N.A.A.C.P brought suit against her and the St. Mary's Board of Education on behalf of 66 black children, claiming that the schools provided for these children were inferior to those provided for white children and that the county had no plan in place for integrating the schools, despite a Supreme Court ruling directing integration.A judge at the time described the county this way: "St. Mary's County is the southernmost county in Southern Maryland, slow to change. Its traditional pattern has been disturbed during the last fifteen years by the establishment of Patuxent Naval Base. Serious problems exist with respect to school facilities and transportation."
According to the first black member of the St. Mary's School Board, appointed in 1955, Miss Lettie was against integration of the schools and even threatened to resign when a black man was appointed to the Board, However, she did not resign and integration proceeded slowly, but fairly peacefully. In August 1956, the School Board announced that it would begin voluntary integration in the next school year. Four black students applied for transfer to white schools, but none actually attended the next year. In 1958, the year after Miss Lettie's retirement, two black students attended the formerly all-white Great Mills High School. The local paper reported that "race barriers crashed silently as two Negro youngsters quietly took their place in class. Except for a cluster of out-of-town reporters, it seemed like any other opening day at Great Mills." Thus St. Mary's County became the 15th of Maryland's 23 jurisdictions to integrate the public schools.
Miss Lettie retired from her position 31 December 1957. At the time, her salary of $6500 was the lowest superintendent salary in the state. After her retirement, Lettie married Arthur Page Gough, a widower and road contractor. She survived her husband by almost 20 years, dying in 1982 at a nursing home in Lexington Park at age 88.
St. Mary's County honored the memory of Lettie Marshall Dent by naming an elementary school in Mechanicsville in her honor.
No comments:
Post a Comment