Federal Writers' Project – Life Histories/2021/Spring/105/Section 60/Frank Freeman

Overview

Frank Freeman was interviewed by Nancy T. Robinson as a part of the Federal Writers' Project on June 22, 1939. In the interview, Freeman was referred to as Tim Summerville.

Biography

Frank Freeman was an African American man born around 1858 in Wake County, North Carolina. For the first 21 years of his life, Freeman worked on his family farm before being allowed to leave and pursue his interests. Freeman was one of the oldest of 11 children, so he “was hardly missed because there was [such] a large family”. Using his life savings of $47.75, Freeman attended the Tupper Memorial School (which is now known as Shaw University) where he was educated and learned to teach, finishing his education in 1883. Freeman was the only member of his family to receive a formal education. For the next 43 years Freeman taught in many different towns, teaching for four years in New Light Town, for 8 years in Barton Creek, and 10 years in Wake Forest, before ending up as the Principal of a school in Macedonia.

After 21 years as principal he retired because he no longer thought he was qualified for the job. For his entire teaching career Freeman received a salary of only $25 a month, never once getting a raise: “I couldn't save anything on that salary. It took all of that to live on. I taught for the love of teaching”. He took up many odd jobs including being a bean sheller, but had to retire as his wife of 32 years, Mary, became very sick. The two lived in a condemned house because they only brought in $25 a month with their old-age pensions, which alone was not enough to pay for both rent and food. Freeman was a deeply religious man, and was incredibly grateful to have the opportunity to live in such a home, saying god was looking out for the pair.

Social and Political Issues

Inequality of Schools and Education

Schoolhouse from the early 1900's.

Schools in the south in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were strictly segregated. Segregation of schools based on race led to a very different schooling experience for black Americans than whites: “Blacks born between 1880 and 1910 completed on average three fewer years of education than whites”. Following the “separate but equal” decision reached by the Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, little changed in schooling inequality for African Americans in the south. Funding for black schools in the south was much lower than that of white schools. For many of these schools books and materials were scarce. While many private projects, such as the Rosenwald School project, helped to fund many black schools across America, the lack of money was largely too widespread an issue to be solved by philanthropy alone. Schools as a whole operated very differently than they do now, with one room and one teacher dedicated to teaching grades one through eight. For black schools, this was often amplified further, as “a lone teacher, usually a young woman with less than half a year's training past high school, struggled with classes of as many as seventy-five children spread over eight grades”.

Housing in the Great Depression

In the early 1900’s, the housing market was relatively stable. The onset of the Great Depression would change this, however. Due to a decrease in housing demand in tandem with the crash of the stock market in 1929, the housing market quickly crashed. The Great Depression caused hundreds of thousands of Americans to lose their homes. By 1933, thousands of mortgages a day were being foreclosed. As a part of the New Deal, Roosevelt’s administration created the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation and the Federal Housing Authority in order to rebuild the housing market. The Home Owners’ Loan Corporation offered long-term low-interest mortgages to encourage people to buy houses. The people who were affected by these programs “were typically white, middle-class individuals who could afford to buy houses in the first place. Their houses were generally built on the outskirts of cities, in the suburban areas”. This left many African Americans and poorer whites without access to proper housing for much of the Great Depression, with many turning to shantytowns to receive shelter.

Bibliography

• “African American Perspectives: Materials Selected from the Rare Book Collection 1881 to 1900.” Library of Congress. Library of Congress, n.d. https://www.loc.gov/collections/african-american-perspectives-rare-books/articles-and-essays/timeline-of-african-american-history/1881-to-1900/.
• Balcilar, Mehmet, Rangan Gupta, and Stephen M. Miller. “Housing and the Great Depression.” SSRN Electronic Journal, 2013. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2209998.
• Eriksson, Katherine. "Education and Incarceration in the Jim Crow South: Evidence from Rosenwald Schools." Journal of Human Resources 55, no. 1 (2020): 43-75. muse.jhu.edu/article/747880.
• Fairclough, Adam. “‘Being in the Field of Education and Also Being a Negro...Seems...Tragic’: Black Teachers in the Jim Crow South.” The Journal of American History 87, no. 1 (2000): 65. https://doi.org/10.2307/2567916.
• "Housing 1929-1941 ." Historic Events for Students: The Great Depression. Encyclopedia.com. (March 29, 2021). https://www.encyclopedia.com/education/news-and-education-magazines/housing-1929-1941
• Maffly-Kipp, Laurie F. “An Introduction to the Church in the Southern Black Community.”The Church in the Southern Black Community. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, May 2001. https://docsouth.unc.edu/church/intro.html.
• Robinson, Nancy T, and Frank Freeman. At Least We Have a Roof. Interview. Folder 716, in the Federal Writers' Project papers #3709, Southern Historical Collection, The Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, June 22, 1939.