Frederick J Dumas

An Autobiographical Sketch

I draw this picture of my life in order that my heirs and descendants may to some extent understand the conditions under which my generation lived and to appreciate the economic and cultural changes that have occurred.

I was born on Wednesday, February 23, 1916 in a small double house (duplex) at 3316 South Liberty Street in New Orleans, Louisiana, the second child of Letitia Leona Duvernay and Fredric Dumas.

This was the year prior to the entry of the United States as an active participant in World War I. The population of the Unites States was 101,961,000 and the national debt was $1,225,146,000. The average annual income was $790, a new house cost $5,057 and an automobile cost $390. Gold sold for $20.67 an ounce, gasoline was $.23/gallon, bread was 7 cents and a half gallon of milk was 18 cents. A dozen eggs sold for 38 cents and a pound of bacon for 28 cents.

I was a sickly and frail child whom the doctors said could not live. The miracle of survival was due to the love and care I received. The science of medicine was primitive and poor people relied on folk medicine and home care.

My grandmother massaged my weak limbs daily with cod-liver oil until the whole house stank. Finally, mother had her stop this treatment and I began to get better.

The house in which I was born belonged to my grandparents Letitia Louisa Carriau and Mandeville Duvernay.

My father was a hotel waiter. Jobs were scarce in New Orleans so soon after my birth he went to New York to accept a job. There he contracted typhoid fever, complicated by pneumonia. He died September 5 of the year of my birth. I never knew him.

Mandeville (Père-Père), my grandfather, died the following year. Both breadwinners were gone.

My birth year was marked with one other significant event. Legislation was passed making education mandatory in the state. This law, however, was weakly enforced for whites and not enforced at all for coloreds.

World War I ended in 1918. In 1919, Article XVII was added to the United States Constitution (Prohibition) and Article XIX, which extended the franchise to women, was added in 1920. This affected white women since colored people, both men and women, were denied the vote.

The first eight years of my life were spent in the house of my birth. Since lots in New Orleans were thirty feet wide, houses were very narrow. Each side of the double consisted of rooms aligned one behind the other. It was called a "shotgun" house, because a rifle fired through the first room would go through every other room.

When it was built at the end of the last century, there was no indoor plumbing, electricity or gas in that area. Later gas was piped in and the outdoor privy was converted to a flush toilet. We still had no electricity and used kerosene lamps.

Telephones were seldom found in poor homes. Emily had one installed when I was about five years of age. The telephone was not used for socialization but rather for business. The only other telephone in our neighborhood was at the corner grocery store. Messages were taken or neighbors called whenever a call for them came.

Telephone calls at night usually meant sickness or death.

Our telephone was a party line.

Two rings were for one party, one ring for the other. In later years, during the depression, we had a four party line. Seldom were there conflicts between parties. All calls were short and visitations were not made by phone.

Although automobiles had been invented, no one in our neighborhood owned one. The fire wagon at the station around the corner was horsedrawn. Big dray horses pulled the beer and produce peddlers' wagons. The ice wagon was also a horse drawn. Gradually these changed.

There was a Baptist Church on our block. When funerals occurred, all the people walked to the church and the cemetery. The hearse was horse-drawn.

People walked in a quiet procession to the cemetery with a band beating a solemn cadence. After the internment, the band struck up lively marches and the congregation would strut back to the church. It was a memorable spectacle.

About a block away on Louisiana Avenue, the Lincoln Theatre was located. It was a large tent with a dirt floor liberally covered with sawdust. Most pictures were westerns.

On rare occasions, mother took us there.

All people of black ancestry were called "colored." Before the turn of the century, they were called "blacks" and "mulattos."

If I repeated a naughty word or was not polite, my grandmother gently reminded me that I should not behave like the black children because they did not know better. She constantly reminded us that we were descendants of free people. Mère-mère emphatically stated that there had never been slavery in our family and that we should behave in a manner consistent with free people. She never explained how the mixture of races occurred.

Because the houses were small and hot, people frequently sat on the front steps to escape the heat. Each time we walked past, we would bid the neighbors "Good afternoon." Sometimes they did not respond.

If we passed by without bidding a person the time of day, our grandmother would know within the hour. When she scolded us about our manners and we replied that the neighbors did not respond, she would state, "It is not important that they are not courteous. It is important that you are courteous." We did not know the motto, but we were brought up to live by the words and spirit of "Noblesse Oblige."

When we were children, any adult could reprimand any child who was less than perfect and one could rest assured that one's parents would know of the event before the sun had set. Every adult was a surrogate parent.

Every afternoon we bathed and put on clean clothes. Since mother sewed beautifully, our clothes were better than those the average child wore.

Today's children can hardly comprehend the scarcity of toys available to us. We had few manufactured toys and the ones we had were very inexpensive. Audrey played with paper dolls. I played with marbles. Most of our marbles were made of clay. Pretty glass marbles were used as shooters. Clay marbles were called chineys. We also had a few prized agates and steelies, which were ball bearings.

Boys played baseball with balls made from the raveled thread of black stockings. I didn't wear stockings so I was envious of the boys who did. We wound the thread around a rock until it was the size of a baseball. If we were lucky we used a small rubber ball or a golf ball as the core. The bat was usually a broom stick.

Cypress wood was always available and we made kites to fly.

Wheels from baby buggies were used to make wagons out of soap boxes. We made guns which shot rubber bands cut from inner tubes, sail boats to sail in gutters or tubs and club houses with discarded lumber.

We also played hop-scotch, jacks, hide and seek, tag and ring games.

We never lacked ways of amusing ourselves.

From infancy, mother read to Audrey and me. As soon as we could read we began the weekly walk to the branch of the public library which served colored people.

The librarian allowed us to take as many books as we wished. I always borrowed five or six. I was a voracious reader. While in elementary school, I read almost every book on the high school reading list.

We didn't have a radio or television to distract us.

When Audrey began school at Holy Ghost School, I cried to attend also. The nuns permitted me to enroll at the age of four with the understanding that I would remain in first grade for two years. Kindergartens did not exist in schools of that era.

After four years at Holy Ghost School, mother transferred us to McDonough No. 6 public school. I had had a lay teacher, Miss Smith, in the third grade. Miss Smith could not control the class and was totally incompetent as a teacher. Another factor was the strain that tuition placed on our limited budget.

Schools were segregated. Whites had much better facilities and classes less than half the size of those for colored. Our text books were those discarded from white schools and teachers were paid half the salaries of white teacher.

When I was about eight years of age, we moved to 2510 Jena St. The old neighborhood had deteriorated and was no longer desirable.

Shortly after moving, my grandmother's health began to fail. She probably had Alheizmer's Disease but it was simply called senility. She died two years later.

Emily, our aunt, married a few months after Mère-mère's death. Mother, Audrey and I were left alone.

Mother sewed out by the day and then again until midnight at home to survive. I stayed up each night reading until she retired.

The stock market crashed in 1929 and with the depression came a loss of work for mother. We were poorer than ever.

We moved from Jena Street to a smaller rental on Soniat Street. The prices mother received for her work dropped markedly and she worked even longer hours for us to survive.

Although I worked as a drug store delivery boy in the summer, mother would not allow me to work at nights after school. School had to come first.

In the segregated environs of a southern city, the only contacts I had with whites were those with the priests and sisters when I attended Holy Ghost School. They were kind and considerate.

We sat behind the screens on street cars, drank from separate fountains, were served from the back doors at food outlets and made to wait in stores until whites had been served, but never developed any personal relationships with whites.

I was about ten years of age before I had a direct conflict with a white. In the block where we lived on Jena Street, there was one white family. A boy about my age called me "nigger" when I passed his house and threw rocks before my skates in attempts to make me fall.

One day he confronted me directly and we had a brief fight. The altercation was fairly even but he never called me names or threw rocks again.

Other than the humiliation of segregation, my first confrontation with injustice occurred in elementary school.

In New Orleans, children from all schools travelled by chartered buses or street cars to city hall to place flowers before the statue of John McDonough, who gave vast sums to the cities of New Orleans and Baltimore to construct schools.

The children from white schools paraded first. Those from colored schools came later.

One year, we all brought money to buy skull caps with our school colors. The white superintendent would not allow us to receive or wear our caps because a white school had the same colors. (How many color combinations could there be?)

We did not receive the caps we had paid for or our money back.

I refused, thereafter, to join the observance.

When I was about twelve years of age, a neighborhood bully cowed me into giving way to him. A friend, Bill White, witnessed the event and told me never to back down. He said the bully did not want to fight anymore than I did and that I should stand my ground.

A few days later, the bully confronted me again. I told him to fight as I would never give in to him again. To my surprise, he backed down. I pressed my advantage and he ran away. I had discovered a truth about human behavior.

For several weeks, I became the neighborhood bully, but I found this role dissatisfying and stopped. However, that marked the time that I learned to hold my own and found that a certain amount of aggression could be a positive thing.

The high school we attended, McDonough No. 35, was probably the worst excuse for a high school in the country. There was not one competent teacher. A few were smart, but not could teach.

Students were divided into three tracks, college preparatory, normal preparatory and general. Since our finances offered little chance for college attendance, I was in the normal preparatory class. I learned little in high school.

I starred in extra-curricular activities. I was school president, senior class president, newspaper manager, annual manager, manager of the cafeteria, president of the French Club (even though I couldn't speak French), manager of the football team and a leader of just about any other school activity.

I graduated from high school in January, 1932--a month before my sixteenth birthday.

Nineteen thirty-two was also marked by the election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt to the presidency.

In September, 1932, I entered the normal school, graduating in June, 1934.

Teaching jobs were scarce, so my first job was teaching illiterates at the Lafon Old Folks Home under the National Recovery Act.

My first purchase was a Philco radio.

Later, I worked as a substitute teacher at a private high school and in January, 1935, I received a regular teaching assignment in the public school system.

When I began teaching in 1935, my salary was sixty-six dollars a month. Half of this I gave to mother for house expenses.

At the end of my first year, white teachers demanded a raise. The Board of Education proposed to cut the salaries of colored teachers in order to raise those of white teachers.

I appealed to the officers of our teachers' organization to protest this action. They were afraid to question what the white folks wanted to do.

I called a meeting at our house. About fifty people came. On their behalf, I protested the proposed action of the board.

The white teachers' union offered to help and demanded that all teachers receive a raise. The board raised all salaries.

I found out later that the leaders of the white union were card carrying members of the communist party. This did not matter. We worked closely together for many years. I did not become a communist nor did they seek to enroll us.

I did develop an appreciation of how victims of discrimination and oppression can turn to communism to get from under the heels of tyrants.

A few years later, a group of us attempted to sue the Board of Education for equal treatment. The only two colored lawyers in the city refused to take the case because they would be fired by the companies for which they worked.

We found a white lawyer but his fees were excessive. We paid five thousand dollars for a retainers fee, but could not raise more to have the case filed.

Then the NAACP offered to assist us. Donald Jones was the local president. Thurgood Marshall represented the NAACP and A.P. Tureaud was the local attorney.

The Board of Education spent two years in delaying actions but compromised when the case came up for a hearing. We received one-half the differential during the first year and equal salaries in the second year.

I was in the army by then. World War II was in progress.

During those years, I pursued my college degree by taking night and summer courses. I received my B.A. in 1941 and had completed the work for my M.A. when I was drafted in October, 1943.

The M.A. degree was awarded in abstentia January, 1944.

On February 24, 1943, Nettie and I were married. Since the war was on, we lived at home, dreading the day when the draft would catch up with me. This occurred in October, 1943.

The armed forces were segregated. The officers were white even in all Negro units.

When I was first drafted, I was offered an assignment in the Air Force Cadet Program. I had no desire to fly and declined.

I was in the army for a year and a half before I was able to go to Officer Candidates School. Each class was totally white with a single minority student.

The usual practice was that grades be posted for all tests and grade averages be posted at the end of each month. The students were assigned officer corps ratings during the final month based upon average grades for the first three months.

During the entire enrollment, the grades for my class were never posted. Every other class had grades posted. A Negro could never be given a rank superior to a white.

Democracy in action!

I was assigned to the Tuskegee Air Base. I first served as an Intelligence Officer and then became a Psychological Officer.

I was released from the Army in January, 1946. Diann had been born in November, 1943 and Daphne was born in April, 1946. Frederick followed on December 19, 1947.

Several events followed in the post-war years.

The Freedom Train came to New Orleans. Many teachers took their classes to visit the train. Some of the Negro schools arrived as early as eight in the morning.

They were not allowed to get on the train until all white classes and white visitors had been through. At nightfall they were still waiting. Finally the teachers protested. They were arrested and put in jail. Their students were left alone to shift for themselves.

In another incident a first grade teacher took her class to the zoo in Audubon Park. After visiting the animals the children were tired and thirsty. Negroes were not allowed to use benches or fountains in the park.

This teacher allowed her pupils to drink from the fountain and to rest on the benches. She was arrested and put in jail. Her first grade pupils were left unsupervised.

I had applied for a principalship. The superintendent told me that "I was too cocky--that I was not willing to bend the right way."

Nettie and I decided that for the good of the family, we should move to another city.

In the summer of 1948, I came to the University of Southern California for the summer session. I already had my California teaching credentials so I took the teaching examination in Los Angeles. I was also recruited for Pasadena.

The results of the exam came too late for us to make the move that year, so I returned to New Orleans.

In the summer of 1949, I returned to Los Angeles to accept this assignment and to find a house. I bought one on Thirty-Eighth Place. Nettie and the children joined me in October.

I taught three years at Main Street School until I was qualified to take the principals' examination. I passed the exam and was assigned to Nevin Avenue School.

In the meantime our family had grown. Roland was born June 7, 1950 and Jennifer on October 28, 1951. Nettie was pregnant with Lisa who was born January 24, 1953.

We had outgrown our house and moved to a larger one on Twentieth Street where we remained until 1964 when we moved to Valleyridge Avenue.

Richard was born the following January.

The Watts riots took place in 1965 and I was loaned, under the joint powers agreement, to the Economic and Youth Opportunities Agency to establish the Head Start program for the County of Los Angeles.

A year later, I returned to the school district to supervise two federal programs for inner city schools. The programs were a waste of money and I recommended that they be discontinued and that I be returned to a principalship. This was done and I was assigned to Crescent Heights School.

In 1970 I was called downtown as the director of a new reading program and six months later assigned as Area Superintendent of Area E, supervising over fifty elementary and secondary schools.

Five years later, I was transferred to Area J in the valley where I retired in August of 1977.

After all the children had moved away, Nettie and I moved to a smaller house at 5248 Parkglen Avenue to spend our golden years together.

This biographical sketch did not deal with the love I have for Nettie and for my children. It does not deal with the affection I have for other members of the family. It was meant only to convey a sense of the social conditions and changes which have occurred during my lifetime. It is in a sense a literal diorama of one section of history.

An old oriental proverb states that "a man with descendants is immortal." May the following research give some degree of immortality to those people who have given us our being, and since immortality has no beginning may we receive some greatness from our antecedents.