First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt Visited Douglass School
During the Great Depression all Shelby county schools were encouraged to participate in gardening and students and families received free seeds. The Memphis World reported: “The Douglass school, a Negro industrial center, has in and around its territory a total of 682 gardens.” For a community of about 800 families, that was a phenomenal ratio. “The school children (Rush-Plummer, Henderson, Cross, Ware children, etc) used nearby vacant land to plant gardens and real estate developers cooperated by allowing families to plant gardens in empty lots. The foodstuffs grown were canned and used to provide hot lunches for school children through the coming year. Also, residents could use the canning equipment to preserve their own vegetables for their families. In return, the user gave the school one out of every six cans.” It was during this time that Douglass School and its community achieved national prominence. On November 20, 1937, Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt came to make a first-hand visit to observe the Live-at-Home total program. She was so impressed with what the Douglass community exhibited that she took the project back to the nation’s capital and wrote several articles in leading newspapers and magazines pertaining to the Live-at-Home project. First Lady Roosevelt put it in plain words, “There is nothing southern about Memphis! We stopped at a Negro school built by WPA labor where the NYA youngsters carried out a garden and canning project for the benefit of their school lunches which would have done credit to any county 4-H Club.” Eleanor Roosevelt, “My Day” 22 November 1937
Read more about this topic: Douglass (Memphis), Education
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