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Ethel Rae Stewart Smith, The Teacher Who Asked For Coal
Ethel Rae Stewart Smith, The Teacher Who Asked For Coal
By Pat Reilly
January of 1956 was particularly cold and Willisville elementary teacher Ethel Rae Stewart, 28, could see that the coal bin for the stove in the two-room schoolhouse would be down to just coal dirt in a few weeks.
In the meticulous hand of a teacher, she wrote Loudoun school superintendent Oscar Emerick asking him to “send some coal up right away,” pointing out that, “dirt doesn’t half burn.”
More than 60 years later, that letter has inspired a book, “Dirt Don’t Burn” (2023), by historians and preservationists Larry Roeder and Barry Harrelson, whose Edwin Washington Society found it among abandoned papers in Leesburg. The Society is a volunteer effort documenting the inequities in education in the county preceding the belated integration of schools in 1968 and the efforts of the Black community to get more resources.
The teacher, now Mrs. Smith, 96, and still living in Willisville, wonders about all the fuss. She never considered her letter bold or heroic, just part of caring for students. She knew the superintendent; he had hired her in 1950. An avowed segregationist, Emerick, in office since 1917, told her there was only one job available, even if she did graduate with a BA from Storer College in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia.
The Bull Run (Colored) School southeast of Aldie was a one-room schoolhouse with 61 students in seven grades. She remembers him telling her, “If you need anything, just write and let me know.”
Her mother drove her to school and picked her up. Her stepfather, Colonel Brooks, was one of the best steeplechase jockeys in the nation. Transportation was in the family.
Born in Purcellville in 1927, she and her family soon moved closer to her grandmother in Willisville, near Upperville, where generations of her family had lived. The two-room school she attended was across the street from her house. She later went to Douglass High School, the hard-won first Black high school in Loudoun, graduating in 1946.
Storer College was the only one to admit Black students in West Virginia and was open to men and women. Stewart liked to cook and sew and wanted to pursue Home Economics, but she recalls being advised early on to set her sights elsewhere because Home Economics positions went to white teachers. Her experience confirmed the advice.
After a year at Bull Run, she took an opening in Willisville. In 1954, Ethel Stewart married Nathan William Smith of Middleburg. They started a family. She learned to drive. Smith would teach at Willisville for eight years, until the building was sold.
She taught at Round Hill Elementary for one year, bringing the older of her four children with her, though not to her classes. Smith remembers being paid $99 a month and states matter-of-factly that “the white group got more.”
In 1962, Smith had a contract to teach at Banneker in the historically Black community of St. Louis. Her salary was “$5,300 for the session of 10 months,” according to their website. She spent the rest of her career there, teaching various grades, her favorite being third.
“I liked the age,” she said. She retired in 1985.
Asked about teaching white children for the first time after Virginia schools were fully integrated, she said, “It wasn’t too much different. They all treated me the same way. I didn’t have any problems with them in 14 years.”
Even with strangers today, she prefers a hug to a handshake.
Sitting amid her many mementoes, including a piano given to her by William Nathaniel Hall, cards from former students, photos of her children, six grandchildren and three great-grandchildren, she said of her career, “I went along with the flow. I knew, don’t cause trouble.”
“Dirt Don’t Burn: A Black Community’s Struggle for Educational Equality Under Segregation” is available at Middleburg Books
