Allen Young, pioneer educator

Profiles in leadership:

(The editor plans to present four profiles during February, Black History Month.)

Allen Lawrence Young was born Sept. 5, 1875, in or near Wake Forest in the year that the tide began turning away from Reconstruction for African-Americans in the South, a year when the Freedman’s Bureau and federal troops were leaving and southern states were taking back control of state and local government.

He died Feb. 17, 1957, having seen the U.S. Supreme Court overturn segregation in schools but well before the written word became reality in North Carolina and the rest of the South.

But during his lifetime he achieved more than most men of any color, founding a school that gave a thorough education to not only local black children but those from as far away as Pennsylvania. All his 10 children who survived intoik adulthood attended college or other training. Young not only educated generations of youngsters but from the 1930s led efforts to register more black adults as voters; he was a delegate-at-large at the 1920 Republican National Convention in Chicago though he later changed his registration to Democrat as the stances of the two parties changed. He and others led unsuccessful efforts for better conditions such as street lights and water lines with fire hydrants in the East End, then as now a largely black section of town. An avid tennis player, he advocated for better recreational opportunities for black children, youth and adults. An Odd Fellow, he helped establish the Spring Street Presbyterian Church in Wake Forest and was a commissioned elder to the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church of the United States.

Allen Young was the oldest of Ailey Fowler Young and Henry Young’s 10 children, and he certainly worked on his father’s rented farm land growing up. There were no schools for black children in Wake Forest at the time. In 1956, just before the college left town, he told Yulan Washburn, a Wake Forest College student, that as a child he began working for white people in Wake Forest, some of them college professors. They recognized his abilities and several professors, including W.R. Cullum, J.H. Gulley, J.L. Lake, G.W. Paschal, W.L. Poteat and B.F. Sledd, gave him private instruction which allowed him to enter Kittrell College and then transfer to Shaw University, after which he qualified for a teaching certificate.

For a time he taught school at Wyatt, a small community south of Wake Forest which has now disappeared, and by 1900 he and his wife, Louzania, and their two young sons, Arthur and Lewis, were living on Spring Street just around the corner from the family home. That family home is now called the Ailey Young House because his mother bought it in 1899 from Mrs. William G. Simmons, widow of the college professor who built the row of rental houses across the railroad track from their home, the North Brick House, later razed. Allen and Louzania ran a dry cleaning business catering to the college students and faculty which made up much of the town’s population at the time.

In 1900 black folks in North Carolina and across the country were still in shock and fear because of the 1898 Red Shirt raids through black neighborhoods and the subsequent Wilmington Race Riot where several black men and a very few while men were killed, black families fled to the swamps in terror, and an elected city council was overthrown. A 2006 investigation documented that it “was the result of the 1898 white supremacy campaign instituted by the Democratic Party.”

Undeterred, in 1905 Young and four other men – Nathaniel Mitchell is the only other person named – were the charter members and elders of Spring Street Presbyterian Church. In that same year Young, Mitchell and others organized a school first called the Presbyterian Mission School for Colored Boys and Girls, an enterprise helped and underwritten in part by the Freedman’s Board of the national Presbyterian Church. The name was quickly changed to the Wake Forest Normal and Industrial School, which it held through the rest of its existence.

There were 30 students in the school that opened on Nov. 6, 1905, in part of an abandoned bed spring factory on White Street, part of a failed business venture by Dr. Poteat and a brother-in-law. The classes were “to prepare colored boys and girls for practical duties of life,” the first catalog said, and to equip those planning to enter college with basic English, Latin and other courses.

It was a tuition school with both boarding and local students. There were different charges for different courses; room and board was $5 a month but students could work at the school to pay their bills. Boarders lived in nearby homes, including Young’s, and Louzania taught housekeeping until she died in 19010. Young would soon remarry, this time to Geneva Tice Young, who died in 1934.

Washburn wrote that Young’s philosophy of education was “. . . by educating the heart, head and hands – heat to obey God’s law, head to think, and the hands to do with might what they could find to do.” There were classes in sewing and homemaking for the girls and manual training for the boys.

In 1971 the two Young daughters who lived in town, Ailey Mae and Maude, watched as the remains of their father’s grocery store (begun in 1914) were torn down and reminisced to Wake Weekly reporter Jean McCamy. The store had a soda fountain and Young also sold coal and ice. Later he added a side room for a bakery. “Our stepmother was an excellent baker,” Maud said. She sold rolls and loaf bread on Fridays and Saturdays besides baking for the students’ meals.

The family with students helping raised vegetables for the school and to sell to the boarding houses in town. Young called working in the garden getting an education in “muleology.” The girls weeded and canned.

Through the years the school’s student body grew to 300 in the 1920s and 1930s when there were also a dozen people on the faculty, some of them Young’s children. The high school department – up to grade 11, which was the highest then – was the first for black students in Wake Forest and one of the first in Wake County. The school operated the first bus for black students in Wake County. Two sons, Arthur and James, organized a music department and directed a choral group, a band and a touring musical drama troupe, and all these performed across North Carolina and as far away as Connecticutt.

At the same time Young was building a campus bounded by Spring, Taylor and Pine streets which included the chapel (the Presybterian church at that time), the K-6 classroom building, the cafeteria, the large three-story dormitory and classroom building, a tennis court, and the large family house and store.

To raise the funds for operations and the expansions, Young traveled across the country to solicit money from individuals and groups. He went by car, and his driver was Luther A. Watkins Sr. There were stories that the individuals included John D. Rockefeller and Pierpont Morgan; whether true, Young did have funding to sustain the school and allow for building up into the late 1930s.

One of Watkins’ daughters, Dianne Laws, remembers: “Not only did he and Mr. Allen Young travel north to raise funds, they also traveled throughout the South, Midwest, (Chicago) and as far west as California. They sometimes slept in the car since there were very limited facilities (hotels) that would allow African-Americans (blacks) to rent a room or even to purchase food. They often took boxed lunches on their trips and friends along their journeys helped out. I don’t know the exact number of years he drove for Mr. Young.  However, I do know according to my Dad he began driving for him when he was a student at the school and continuing until the school closed in 1957 through his illness until his death. He continued to drive for Ailey and Maude until Ailey received her drivers license.”

Young maintained close ties with the college, many of the professors, and students. It was college students who began the school’s athletic programs, which meant they then continued support by attending. It was usual for professors and students to be featured in the morning chapel service and to take part in other activities.

Enrollment began to drop after the small Rosenwald school was built nearby in 1926 and after the early 1930s when the state began improving and building black schools and soon there was a free black high school, which later was renamed to honor W.E.B. DuBois. Also, the Freedman’s Board stopped funding the school.

Young soldiered on, offering a tuition kindergarten long before the state had any, and dreaming, according to Washburn, of a day when the school would be a reality again. By then, 1956, most of the buildings were gone; by the early 1970s they were a memory and the family home had been torn down to make way for a modest brick house, home to Maude and Ailey Mae. At his death at the age of 81, he was working on plans to rebuild the school to serve handicapped and retarded people.

(For more about the Wilmington Race Riot go to http://www.ah.dcr.state.nc.us/1898-wrrc/powerpoint/powerpoint.htm. Information for this profile came from the Dictionary of North Carolina Biography, a biography written by Elizabeth Reid Murray, who knew Young, and from Washburn’s article in the college’s publication The Student, dated March 28, 1956.)