Part of a series of articles titled The Watsons Go to Birmingham—1963.
Article
Chapter 2: Give My Regards to Clark, Poindexter
Courtesy of the Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library.
Kenny is in fourth grade at Clark Elementary, the same grade as Larry Dunn, aka the king of kindergarten through fourth grade.
Larry rules the younger grades because he's stronger and older than the other kids, on account of repeating a grade two or three times. Lucky for Kenny, his brother, Byron, is even more powerful: he's considered a god at Clark Elementary. Normally Larry Dunn teases Kenny for having a lazy eye and always reading, but when Byron is around, Larry and the others go easy on him. Kenny is such a good reader that back in second grade, his teacher paraded him in front of Byron's fifth-grade class to read aloud passages from Langston Hughes, which was mortifying. Thanks to his smarts, Kenny gets teased with nicknames like egghead and "Poindexter."
But everything changes on the way to school one morning, when two new boys get on the school bus. The brothers wear raggedy clothes, talk in a "real down-South" accent, and smile big. Everyone on the bus stares, and Kenny wonders if God sent these boys to his school as new targets for the bullies that usually bother him. The bus driver tells the new kids to sit next to Kenny, and even though they don't talk to one another, Kenny is pretty sure the older one is his personal "saver" (Kenny’s mix-up with the religious term "savior").
Fact Check: What does "Poindexter" mean?
Kenny's classmates call him "Poindexter." What does this insult mean?
What do we know?
Poindexter is probably a reference to a character in Felix the Cat. Originally a comic strip, Felix the Cat was made into a popular television cartoon in the 1950s, and it was one of Kenny's favorite shows. Poindexter is a boy genius who looks like a stereotypical scientist, with round thick glasses, a square academic cap, and a lab coat. Thanks in part to the 1984 movie Revenge of the Nerds, "Poindexter" became a common term for a person who is bookish and awkward. Kenny's classmates think he's super smart and a little odd, so they call him Poindexter. While the meaning of Poindexter is probably inspired by Felix the Cat, it became a popular slang term in the 1980s.
What is the evidence?
Primary source:
Felix: What are you going to do with that telescope, Poindexter?
Poindexter: Well Mr. Felix, since uncle left us alone tonight, I think I'll compute the orbit of the moon. ...
Felix: Huh?
Fact Check: Was Langston Hughes' writing taught in the 1960s?
Kenny's second grade teacher asks him to read a poem by Langston Hughes in front of Byron's fifth grade class. Was Langston Hughes' writing taught in the 1960s?
What do we know?
Langston Hughes (1901-1967) is a celebrated African American poet who was deeply committed to economic and racial justice. He expressed these beliefs in his poems, plays, and essays, which he wrote with a Black audience in mind. Despite Hughes' critical acclaim, it was uncommon for public school teachers—in Flint or elsewhere—to teach his poetry and prose in their classrooms. African American authors rarely appeared in the curriculum outside of majority Black schools. In fact, nearly everything taught in schools at the time was written by white authors. While smaller publishers created compilations of Black writing for young audiences, these collections rarely found their way into classrooms. Langston Hughes was also outspoken about racism and economic inequality—issues labeled Communist during the Cold War—so he was seen by many as especially controversial.
What is the evidence?
Primary source: Saul Bachner, "Where are our Negro authors?," The Clearing House: A Journal of Educational Strategies, Issues and Ideas 39, no. 1 (1964): 30-34.
"Young people, both white and Negro, should know that there are Negroes who have contributed to the literary heritage of this country. Very few white students know this. Fewer still know that there are any Negro writers of substance today. Their 'education' hasn’t told them so. Quite a case, indeed, could be made for discrimination in our American literature anthology. Just the other day I asked a student in our accelerated program what she thought of including Negro authors in the American literature anthology. Her first response was, 'There aren't any good ones.' ...I asked her if she had ever heard of Paul Laurence Dunbar, Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Gwendolyn Brooks, James Baldwin, or Richard Wright. She said that she recognized the name of Richard Wright but didn't know much about him. This was the extent of her knowledge of Negro writers. She is an excellent student. …The prescribed course of study, oriented around an anthology, includes virtually no Negro authors. Thus most students conclude that 'There aren't any good ones.' If such a conclusion is the result of omitting Negro writers, and I believe it is, then perhaps a revision of our anthologies is in order. The worthwhile contributions of all Americans belong in them."
Primary sources: Major textbook publishers like Houghton Mifflin and Scott Foresman dominated the recommended reading lists for K-12 schools districts like Flint Public Schools. Their textbooks were written by white authors and featured white characters.
Secondary Source: Perrillo, Jonna. "Bringing Harlem to the Schools: Langston Hughes’s The First Book of Negroes and Crafting a Juvenile Readership." In Educating Harlem: A Century of Schooling and Resistance in a Black Community, 119-137. Columbia University Press, 2019.
“Time and again, teachers and students who thought of themselves as ‘brotherhood conscious’ saw Hughes, despite his alleged communist affiliations, as one of their best role models. Often this impulse, as was also the case for [Martin Luther] King [Jr.], required teachers to sanitize and depoliticize Hughes’s ideas to a certain extent and reify [make concrete] some works while ignoring his more provocative and critical essays, poems, and other writings. But correspondence between Hughes and students [in Harlem, New York City, in the early 1960s] shows that teachers asked their classes to read a broader range of his works than those often canonized in the elementary and secondary curriculum today. Teachers’ desire—if not that of the textbook adoption committees—to make Hughes a part of their literary education certainly stemmed from his deep and residing confidence in the capacity of Black Americans and in his larger sense of concern for children, a group to whom many writers of Hughes’s stature gave little attention” (130).
Fact Check: Were Flint public schools segregated?
Textual clues suggest that all Kenny's classmates were Black. Is that accurate for Clark Elementary in the early sixties?
What do we know?
Clark Elementary School, like all public schools in Michigan in the 1960s, was open to all students who qualified by residency, age, and other factors to attend. However, this did not ensure the school was racially integrated.
A predominantly white city in the 1930s, Flint's Black population rose significantly in the 1940s and 1950s, as Black families in the South moved to Flint for industrial jobs, including those created by World War II. As the city's racial demographics changed, Flint officials began adopting practices that resulted in the city's Black and white children attending different schools. This included building new schools in primarily white neighborhoods, closing schools through 'urban development' initiatives, tracking students, erecting temporary stand-alone classrooms in segregated neighborhoods, and drawing odd (not logical) lines to determine where children living on particular streets went to school. As a result of these efforts, in 1963, nearly all students at Clark Elementary were Black. In fact, the school became increasingly segregated over the course of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s.
What is the evidence?
Primary source: Flint Public Schools Racial Distribution Report, c1967, 5; 11. From the collections of Kettering University.
Historical records show that Flint K-12 public schools became increasingly segregated from the 1950s through the 1960s. For instance, at Clark School, 474 out of 645 students were Black during the 1950-51 school year. The number of white students had shrunk by 1955-56, when 559 of the 582 students were Black. By the end of the decade, in 1959-60, 611 out of 614 students were Black.
Primary sources: The four images below depict students at Clark Elementary between 1900 and 1971. These photographs illustrate the racial demographic data conveyed in the Manley Papers. They show the number of Black students attending Clark increased and the number of white students attending Clark decreased over time. Clark closed its doors in 1971.
From the collections of Kettering University.
From the collections of Kettering University.
From the collections of Kettering University.
Courtesy of Sloan Museum of Discovery Archives.
Secondary source: Andrew R. Highsmith and Ansley T. Erickson, "Segregation as splitting, segregation as joining: schools, housing, and the many modes of Jim Crow," American Journal of Education 121, no. 4 (2015): 563-95. doi/10.1086/681942
"In 1952, the school board opened Pierce [Elementary School] with an all-white enrollment in one of the city's most exclusive and segregated east side neighborhoods. ...Prior to Pierce's opening, these students attended Clark Elementary, a decaying, overcrowded structure with a black enrollment of over 95%. Despite the fact that many of the Sugar Hill and Elm Park [neighborhood] students lived closest to the new building, school board members excluded them from the Pierce attendance district. ...'They drew boundaries around houses,' Ruth Scott remembered, 'down the middle of the street ... when blacks moved onto a street, they would change the boundaries.' As a direct consequence of the board's decisions, Pierce remained all white at the end of the 1950s while Clark's black enrollment soared to 99.5%."
Voices from the Field
"Langston Hughes in the Classroom" by Dr. Donna Akiba Sullivan Harper, professor of English at Spelman College and Hughes scholar.
Lesson Plan Ideas
- Read Langston Hughes’ “Dream Variations.” Consider the different emotions in the poem and draw a picture that reflects the sentiment of the poem.
- Create a lesson around one of Langston Hughes’ children’s books available in open access – or even: here are 3, which do you think would be Kenny’s favorite and why?
Writing Prompts
Opinion
The fifth-grade students in Byron’s class respond to Kenneth reading a Langston Hughes poem. State your opinion regarding the students’ response. Provide reasons that support your point of view. Link opinion and reasons using words, phrases, and clauses (e.g., consequently, specifically). Provide a concluding statement related to the opinion presented.
Informative/explanatory
Research conditions that are casually called, “lazy eye.” Use definitions, concrete facts and details, quotations, and other information to report on what you learn.
Narrative
Larry Dunn acts like a bully. Develop a story where a student stands up to a bully and defends another student being bullied. Describe the setting. Introduce the characters, then use dialogue to develop the narrative and show the responses of the characters to the situation. Use a variety of transition words, phrases, and clauses to manage the sequence of events. Provide a conclusion that follows from the narrated events.
Note: Wording in italics is from the Common Core Writing Standards, Grade 5. Sometimes paraphrased.
Last updated: December 22, 2023