Todd Family Finds St. Marcus A Christian Day School

The Todd Family Finds A Christian Day School v2
Memoirs Set lwt-stm-002 v2
The Colored Perspective
Draft 8/3/10
Leon Todd

She had promised God that if she got a teaching job up North in Milwaukee, she would send her children to a Christian Day School for a God Fearing education. My mother had taken her children on vacation one summer to Milwaukee to visit her sister, an MPS teacher, and while vacationing in Milwaukee had heard that the Milwaukee Pubic Schools was interested in hiring colored teachers and on a lark she had put in an application. For surely, no public school system would hire a teacher that had been fired for getting married. But because she had been fired from her previous teaching job for getting married and based on that firing there was the question of whether my mother was fit to teach children. Was she marked like Cain of Old Testament fame and banned from teaching forever. The year was 1939 and my mother had eloped with a man 16 years her senior. She was now applying for a teaching job in a Northern city. So my mother felt that a little help from God was seen as the wisdom of the day. So she prayed hard because she had decided she wanted this teaching job.

Would God see fit to reward this woman who had run off with such an older man and ran out on her contract with the St. Louis Public School System? Perhaps not. So my mother prayed and she prayed hard that God would bless her with a teaching job up North and so she offered up her children and a strict God fearing education for them if God would Bless her with a teaching job up North because the St Louis Public School System would certainly not hire her for her past indiscretion of getting married. What would God do? What would the Milwaukee Public Schools do? We already knew what the St. Louis Public School System would not do. So mama prayed harder, she prayed really hard. House work and the role of a Happy Days housewife was not her thing. And the shrink had advised her for her mental health to Get A Job. And my dad had reluctantly went along with all of this newfangled life style of a working wife. I think my dad hated the whole idea but the shrink had advised mom to go for it. My dad had worked hard to provide my mother with the Happy Day Life Style of White Suburban America which she was now disrespecting in her pursuit of a teaching career in a strange land of new rules about segregation and integration to which the family was unaccustomed. We understood the rules of staying alive in a Mason Dixon Line City like St. Louis and could tip toe around: could you drink at this drinking fountain, could you try on a bra in this certain department store, could you or your family stay at this Howard Johnson motel or at that HoJo's.

The children were oblivious to all of the background jockeying that would determine their future and had no idea that they bait in a deal my mother was trying to make with God. Was a de jure segregated public school education with all colored children, their friends of 6 years, on the Mason Dixon line be their destiny? Would the Todd kids desegregate a strange all white religious school? What would the future hold? How would the gods favor their destiny? Would they learn the Knowledge of Good and Evil of integration?

The letter arrived form the Milwaukee Public School System my mother had been looking for after returning home from her vacation trip. When she opened the letter my parents learned that The Todd Kids were to learn of the Knowledge of Good and Evil of desegregation.

My father's sister, our Aunt Sarah, would send me to Valparaiso University in Indiana for 3 Summers to study under Pastor Schultze , whom some within the church considered a social Negro loving agitator, at the Luther Human Relation Association. Ideas about integration were revolutionary in those days and and my Aunt Sarah felt her nephew needed the learned wisdom and knowledge that these summer internships would provide me with how to handle the 19th century racism which pervaded history and literature and was still prevalent in the culture and literature in those days of our early youth. I had no idea that my Aunt Sarah was preparing me with critical education and background to challenge that racism and steel me against the accepted cultural insults that would follow. For surely, Pastor Schultze was a role model of how to face cultural insults with dignity and integrity. I would need that liberal orientation to the truth to negotiate my social and academic destiny.

My Grandfather Clarence Marshall purchased a two family home for his two daughters, Fern Todd and Enid Yancey, in which to live their new life in Milwaukee.The Yanceys lived downstairs and the Todd's lived upstairs in a two family frame home on 2nd Street in Milwaukee. We arrived in Milwaukee and moved in upstairs in the two family home not knowing where we would go to school and how we would work out this deal my mother had made with God. My mother prayed for God to give her guidance on how to find a strict Christian Day School who would accept her children. After all, we were accustomed to the segregated life with the Lutheran Church. One day in August that summer we took a walk around the neighborhood and passed by a large German Lutheran Church, St. Marcus, and Lo and Behold, it had a Christian Day School right next to it to provide that God Fearing Education for which my mother had prayed. Our fate was sealed. My mother sought entrance. It was like God had lead us on that walk 6 or 7 blocks from our new home straight to St Marcus.

After getting some directions, my mother met a Pastor Dornfeld of St Marcus and announced that she would like to send her children to their German Christian Day School. Pastor Dornfeld told my mother that their would be tuition for non Lutherans of the Synodical Conference, assuming that we were non Lutherans, not knowing that the Todd family was already of Lutheran faith. My mother explained that we were Lutherans of the same faith so of course their would be no tuition. Pastor Dornfeld was polite and indicated that he would present the Todd family's request to the school council. This was going to be very delicate and had to be done right.

After a few days Pastor Dornfeld came and told the Todd Family that there was a problem with some of the church council members and that we should be patient because he was sure that they were Christian men and women of St Marcus and would come to the right decision as Jesus would have them do. It was probably just men knowing that the Lutheran Church of German orientation, Mainly Wisconsin and Missouri Synods, was very conservative as opposed to the Liberal Lutheran of Scandinavian cultural background, ELCA today. But in general, the Germanic Lutheran churches had the strict Christian Day Schools for their children of which my mother was interested to fulfill her bargain with God. My mother was very patient with Pastor Dornfeld because she had already made a bargain with God and she knew where her children were destine to go to school. My mother and Pastor Dornfeld would meet every few days into September and then October, discussing the slow progress Pastor Dornfeld was having with members of the St. Marcus School Council and with their attitudes with accepting a family of color into their Christian midst. Pastor Dornfeld did a careful and patient job of working with church council and finally they voted to recognize and accept a family of color as one of their own in faith and admit the Todd Kids II to their strict educational and social standards. The Todd Kids had a great time out of school that whole time of September and October but my mother would remind Pastor Dornfeld that since the Todd kids were on a January to January school calendar then God had given her and the St Marcus School Council a semester to get their act together in faith as the Lord would have us do. Leon, Marshall and Sharon, the 3 Todd kids, would repeat the first semester of their grades and she had no problem with them doing just that.

Leon was brought in and introduced to the 7th and 8th grade class as their new classmate with unusual ceremony versus how children were usually introduced to the classmates with a non introduction. The adults would learn more than the children about WWJD in the coming months.