“A slave who could work in the field cost $1,500. A house slave $3,000. A little black child was the foot warmer for the master.” Family members were sold to different places. “Families were separated and never saw each other again.”
At most school assemblies, there’s an undercurrent of fidgeting and talking, an occasional exclamation like “really?” But upon hearing this from Bishop Richard D. Howell, Jr. Feb. 27 the room went totally still. “It’s quiet in here now,” he said. “I got it. When you go home tonight start asking questions to your significant adults – what are my roots? You need to know who died, who hung, to give you an education today.”
Howell attended Tuttle school when his parents were in University of Minnesota student housing, a “United Nations” atmosphere. When his parents moved to Lowry and Pierce he became the first – and that year and for his tenure 1964 to 1967, he was the only – black student to integrate Northeast Junior High, now Northeast Middle School (NEMS).
An April 1967 article in the Minneapolis Tribune lists Howell as secretary of the Shiloh Temple Church Sunday School, saying “he guessed he wanted to be a Bible teacher when he grows up.” He now leads that very church, Shiloh Temple International Ministries, in North Minneapolis. He was also one of the early presidents of the North Minneapolis Rotary Club founded in 2013.
Shelly Hughes, NEMS’s Family and Community Liason belongs to that Rotary Club, and upon hearing of Howell’s time at the school, invited him to speak. Ms. Patty Nelson’s history class and the school’s Student Council attended.
Principal Vernon Rowe, in his introduction, said they were chosen as student leaders, and challenged them to think, “how do we make a difference, how can I act a little different so that what happened to him doesn’t happen to someone else?”
Howell’s career at Northeast included being president of the student council in his last year there, and giving the announcements and intramural sports reports “in a puckish speaking style of which his mother doesn’t entirely approve,” the Tribune article said.
It wasn’t so smooth at first, and never totally so. Howell detailed the events typically taught in American schools – prefacing it all with the admonition that “well-intentioned people thought they were doing the right thing…but it turned out not to be.” Even after the end of Jim Crow laws in 1954, in schools, no one said anything about black history.
While his father thought it “wonderful” to be integrating a school, Richard Jr. said, re-living the stares of people who’d never seen a black person up close, “I did not want to be black. I was lost. Drowning in white supremacy. I was so messed up. I wanted to be like John, Paul, George and Ringo, I combed my hair down like theirs and it bounced back up. I was told as a black person you’ve gotta be twice as good, three times as good. I had a self-identity crisis.”
Howell contrasted the 1967 prices of things like a gallon of milk for 95 cents, a new house for $20,500, with the prices today. He noted Martin Luther King received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964. He listed many inventions by black men and women, ending with the first blood bank and the first open heart surgery (the crowd let out an audible “ohhh”).
The exclamations changed as Howell chronicled some ugly parts of American history – Emmett Till killed in 1955 for calling a white woman “baby,” and the successful Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott (Dec. 2, 1955 to Dec. 20, 1956) when Rosa Parks, saying she was thinking of Emmett Till, refused to give up her seat.
The 1963 Birmingham Sunday when four little girls perished in a church bombing after giving a Sunday school program on love through forgiveness. The 1963 children’s crusade “and Bull Connors letting his dogs bite these kids and the water hose turned on them, the pressure will take the skin off your body.”
“WHAT?”
Against this backdrop, Howell told how his time at the junior high school evolved. For a while he changed his name to Randy Battey, playing into the rumor that Twins catcher Earl Battey had moved to Northeast and claiming he was Battey’s son. “More people started liking me, until the cover blew off.” (Howell also admonished the students that such lying is not recommended.)
Howell fondly remembered Jerry Bisek, his choir teacher, Hallie Brickner for English and History, Gerald Roehning the principal, and Ms. Scholl. The Edel Scholl Memorial Garden was dedicated on Arbor Day, 1967, and young Richard unveiled the plaque which is still there.
To the students, he told “only one story” about being reminded of the N-word, after things had pretty well normalized. It’s a story that also appeared in that 1967 newspaper article.
And then in January 1968 a molotov cocktail was thrown at their house. “Here’s where I found out what love was. We got letters from white people saying we are sorry (that anyone would do this), please don’t leave the neighborhood.”
“The most beautiful thing about you,” Howell told the students, predominantly students of color, “you don’t have to let negativity be your monster. Make your dreams through education.”
Bishop Howell showed slides throughout his presentation, and closed with a 2004 photo of coming back to the school, “and look what’s here!” pointing out (in positions of authority, no less), “black people, in an ‘all-white school!’”
“Everybody’s got to go through some kind of storm, some kind of fire. Make something great out of your life, bridge this gap.”
Below: Bishop Richard Howell, Jr. celebrated the fact that 40 years after he integrated Northeast Junior High as a student, people of color were, and are now, in various roles at the school. Bishop Howell visited with students and advisors after his presentation. (Photos by Margo Ashmore)