THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, July 6, 1996 TAG: 9607040047
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY JON GLASS, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: 178 lines
LIKE MOST GRADUATION ceremonies, the occasion at the old Cumberland Street School in Norfolk must have been a joyous one for Eva M. Tynes and her family.
But that's only a guess.
It's unlikely any witnesses are alive: Tynes graduated 100 years ago, on June 19, 1896, from the two-story brick school, constructed 10 years earlier to serve the city's black children.
Last month, a century later, thousands of high school seniors across Hampton Roads collected their diplomas and are preparing for life in a technological age that Eva Tynes could barely imagine.
Hers were still horse-and-buggy days. Typewriters, for example, were introduced in Norfolk's public schools only a year before Tynes graduated, in 1895, according to ``A History of the Norfolk Public Schools'' written in 1968 by Henry S. Rorer, a former city school principal. Electric lights in local schools didn't come into use until four years later, in 1899. The first school telephone was installed in 1901.
A copy of Tynes' ``certificate of graduation'' from Cumberland Street School showed up in the mail recently at the pupil personnel office of Norfolk public schools.
Tynes' granddaughter, Roberta Payne, 54, a public school teacher in New York City, discovered the yellowed sheepskin diploma among papers she inherited several years ago from her mother, the late Esther Gash.
Payne teaches eighth-graders who've been suspended for fighting, carrying weapons, truancy and ``school phobia.'' During Black History Month in February, Payne said she'd bring in her grandmother's diploma to show her students - Hispanic, Italian, but mostly black kids - what a black girl had achieved during a time just one generation removed from the Civil War.
``Nobody had ever seen a diploma that old,'' Payne said in a telephone interview. ``I wanted to let them know how far back the accomplishments of African Americans went.''
Payne said she thought Norfolk school officials might be interested in Tynes' diploma because this year is the 100th anniversary of her graduation. She was right.
``It's amazing,'' said Dorothy Martin, senior pupil records clerk for Norfolk schools. ``We have people who graduate a year or 10 years ago who want to get another diploma because they can't find theirs, and here this one is from 1896.''
The find also excited local historians, who said it sheds light on the type of education the city's public school system offered to blacks at the time.
While the Civil War had ended slavery three decades before Tynes' graduation, memories of life in the old South lingered. For example, Richard A. Dobie, city school superintendent from 1896 to 1922, was the fourth and last schools chief to have served in the Confederate army, according to Rorer.
Life continued to be hard for most blacks. During the 1890s, about 200 people a year were lynched, most of them blacks who lived in the South. Southern legislatures passed Jim Crow laws that denied blacks the right to vote, and society was strictly segregated by race.
In the same year Tynes graduated, the U.S. Supreme Court approved racial segregation in the public schools under the ``separate but equal'' doctrine in its Plessy v. Ferguson ruling.
In 1896, Cumberland Street School was one of two ``colored'' schools in Norfolk, offering an education for both boys and girls.
Tynes' certificate of graduation indicates a well-rounded education grounded in the basics. For that era, especially for a black child, her schooling was remarkable, local educators say.
The certificate shows Tynes satisfactorily completed a study in orthography (spelling), reading, grammar and composition, arithmetic, geography and penmanship. In addition, she passed ``elementary'' courses in algebra, geometry, rhetoric, physiology, physical geography and freehand drawing.
``I'm just very much surprised they were teaching those academic courses,'' said historian Tommy L. Bogger, dean of Library Services and Special Collections at Norfolk State University. ``I wasn't sure that black public schools (of that era) had that type of curriculum. This is fascinating.''
Students likely endured rote drills in the three R's - reading, 'riting and 'rithmetic - that may seem alien to youngsters in this post-modern era of push-button convenience, satellite TV and instant access to global information.
``This is really the old school, where they taught everything,'' said Norfolk native Celestyne Diggs Porter, 84, student teaching supervisor at the Darden College of Education at Old Dominion University. ``I think we've lost a lot of this. Children are not writing as much as they were - television took care of that. Grammar needs to come back - I tell my students all the time that they have to talk and give answers in a complete sentence.''
One mystery about the diploma remains: Norfolk did not open a public high school for black students until 1911, according to Rorer's book, so Tynes probably did not receive the sort of secondary education available to white students of the time.
Historic records identify the Cumberland Street School as an elementary school. It appears likely, though, that students attended at least through eighth-grade. A Norfolk public schools booklet published in 1901 entitled ``Course of Study in the Public Schools'' stated that grammar schools went up to eighth-grade.
Several courses Tynes had completed - among them algebra, geometry and rhetoric - were taught to ninth-graders in 1901.
Payne, who never lived in Norfolk, said she has few records about her grandmother's life and doesn't know how old she was when she graduated from the school.
Porter, a 1929 graduate of the then all-black Booker T. Washington High School, said black teens during Tynes' time probably remained at the elementary school during their high school years.
``They didn't worry about age,'' she said. ``All they worried about was that they were good citizens . . . She could have well been 17 or 18, because she was doing all the education she could get.''
Historically in the South - especially during the Reconstruction years following the Civil War - schools and churches formed a nucleus of social life for black Americans, Bogger said. The Cumberland Street School was no exception.
The significance of Cumberland Street School to blacks at the turn of the 20th century in Norfolk can be gleaned from old issues of the hometown paper, the Norfolk Dispatch. Bogger has photocopies of the newspaper in the Norfolk State archives. News of local blacks ran in a section of the newspaper called ``Afro-American Happenings.''
A report in the Nov. 7, 1899, issue of the Dispatch, for example, reported on a meeting at the school of the women's Sunday School Teachers' Union. The ``select reading'' of the evening outlined 13 reasons ``to our people to attain success in the United States.''
Among the reasons listed: ``Stop attributing our troubles to our color . . problem is the proper rearing of our children. Keep them out of the street . . Always be on the side of law and order . . . Remember that when anything arises between the race we generally get the worst of it. . . .''
The Dispatch article closed by stating: ``While whiling away the time drinking tea, the ladies gave some very fine quotations. These brave women have never lost hope of saving their race, or rather lifting them up to a higher standard of life.''
An article in the Nov. 2 edition of the Dispatch described the opening of the ``Southern Industrial Classes'' at the school. The classes were meant to ``gain the appreciation of the young women and mothers of our city,'' and featured sewing and cooking instruction and a first-aid course. The classes were offered from 3:30 p.m. to 8 p.m. for youth and adults.
The Nov. 15, 1899, Dispatch described a visit to the Industrial School by a Mrs. Hobson of New York, who reportedly said there ``was not another school of its kind in the South for colored people.''
In 1912, officials changed the name of Cumberland Street School to the Samuel Chapman Armstrong School, in honor of a black man who headed the Freedmen's Bureau in Virginia and later was a founder of present-day Hampton University.
A ceremony was held on Jan. 23, 1953, for the ``final closing'' of the school, according to a bulletin printed for the occasion. The building, constructed in 1886 for $10,000, had been used to educate the black community's children and adults for 67 years. It was torn down years ago.
These days, Cumberland Street has few occupants. City Fire Station No. 1 is nestled at the corner of City Hall Avenue and Cumberland, and historic St. Paul's Church is across the way. The street will border the MacArthur Mall planned for downtown.
Eva Tynes would not recognize her old neighborhood, where an old brick school once pulsed with the life of a black community attempting to rise above the struggles of a nation divided.
Payne said she knows little about Tynes' life in Norfolk. Her mother told her Tynes became a music teacher.
Bogger has an 1899-1900 catalog from the old Norfolk Mission College - established by the Board of Freedmen's Mission of the United Presbyterian Church after the war to educate blacks - that lists an Eva Tynes as a teacher at the mission's ``model school'' for elementary age students.
A search of census records of the time, stored on microfilm in the NSU archives, didn't turn up an Eva Tynes.
Payne said she was about 10 years old when her grandmother moved to New York City in retirement to be close to family. Payne was about 14 when Tynes died of cancer 40 years ago.
``She had gray hair, and she was a very soft-spoken person; I never heard her raise her voice,'' Payne said. ``She always wore a flowered dress with big wide, white collars. That's what I remember about her.''
Now, Payne wonders more about her grandmother's life and hopes to fill in missing pieces.
``It's something I took for granted all these years,'' she said. ``It was just a piece of paper I took in to my class. I didn't realize all the history behind it. It's been an awakening for me.'' ILLUSTRATION: Photos
Armstrong Elementary School (originally the Cumberland Street
School) shortly before its closing in 1953.
Eva M. Tynes (at far right) with relatives in a snapshot from the
mid-1950s
Eva's diploma from June 0f 1896 by CNB