Schooling

In the Anniston of his childhood, a Black child’s education depended on the town and also on the people who refused to accept the town’s limits.

His first classrooms were not public ones. Before the city opened a school for Black children, he recalled, “there was always some diligent lady who’d have kindergarten and elementary school in the basement of a church or the lodge hall.” He went to one of these private schools through the fourth grade.¹

One grade at a time

The public school for Black children stood at Seventeenth Street and Pine Avenue. It was built to stop at the sixth grade, and the board of education did not plan to take Black students any further. The people who ran the school kept pushing.

“Originally they built the black public school to go through six — just for the elementary classes, and it went from one through six. But through the ingenuity of some loving and cooperative black principals, down through the course of ten years they added one grade at a time, without getting full financial support from the board. And uh, so I was able to go to Anniston schools through the ninth grade.”

1995 interview · Tape 1 · 2:35

Seven years later he told the same story again. Each time students finished the top grade and wanted more, the principal would “go to the board of education and get another teacher.” Grade by grade the school grew, until Anniston eventually built Cobb, the city’s only public high school for Black students.² Gordon Rodgers heard the lesson early. A school might be denied a seventh grade, and a seventh grade could still be won.

Not everything about those years was lofty. White children from the cotton-mill streets to the north walked past Cooper Avenue on their way to school, and the boys on both sides sometimes threw rocks at each other. He told the story matter-of-factly. It was, he said, what you thought you were supposed to do.³

His mother’s standard

When the time came for high school, Fannie Rodgers made the decision. She did not think the new school could give her children their full potential, and she would not send them.⁴ Instead, all three children went to the preparatory school at Talladega College, about twenty-five miles away, “they called it that instead of calling it a high school.”

“My brother is the younger, and he went through the ninth grade in Anniston, Alabama, before — like I did — before we were sent to Talladega to finish high school, in the college preparatory school.”

1995 interview · Tape 1 · 4:35

Talladega was founded just after the Civil War by formerly enslaved people with the support of the American Missionary Association, and it is Alabama’s oldest private historically Black liberal arts college. It became the Rodgers family’s school. His mother had trained there, his sister Frances took her bachelor’s degree there in the early 1930s, and both brothers stayed on for college after finishing the preparatory course.⁵

There was also pressure at home. A physician’s son was expected to become something, and everyone seemed to know what.

“It kind of worried me — everybody was telling me what I was going to be when I grew up. Hell, I’d be anything I wanted to be, and I wanted them to know that.”

2002 interview · Side A · 24:35

He chose dentistry, and that choice was also shaped by a local example. When he thought about why, he remembered a Black dentist in town, Dr. John C. White, “a real quiet guy — reserved, never raised his voice.” “Maybe that’s part of why I wanted to be a dentist,” he said.⁶

Gordon Rodgers graduated from Talladega College in June 1937.⁷ By his own account, Samuel finished the same year. Within two years of each other in age, the brothers were now headed in the same direction: to the two great Black medical schools of the day, Samuel to Howard in Washington and Gordon to Meharry in Nashville, where their father had studied thirty years before.

Footnotes

1. Dr. Gordon A. Rodgers Jr. on Blacks in Anniston (2002 interview), Side A, 9:38–11:22. ↩

2. 2002 interview, Side A, 10:36–12:40. In the 1995 interview he credits “black principals,” plural. In 2002 he speaks of one principal. Frederick Burger’s notes locate the school at 17th Street and Pine Avenue (Burger research file, notes p. 1). ↩

3. 2002 interview, Side A, 34:21–36:53. ↩

4. 2002 interview, Side A, 12:47. ↩

5. Alabama Oral History No. 93 (1995), Tape 1, from 4:00; 2002 interview, Side A, 14:20. Talladega’s founding is a matter of public record. ↩

6. 2002 interview, Side B, 17:39 and about 41:30. ↩

7. 2002 interview, Side A, 38:42–39:56, and Burger’s same-day notes (“June 1937: he grad from Talladega College”). The machine transcript of the 1995 interview renders the year as “nineteen thirty-four” in a passage that contradicts itself. The 2002 sources are consistent and are followed here. His brother Samuel’s 1937 Talladega degree is independently documented. ↩