Don S.S. Goodloe

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Rev. Don Speed Smith Goodloe (born 1878 in Lowell, Kentucky), and first attended a segregated normal school for the training of black teachers–Knoxville College in Knoxville, Tennessee. Here he met his future wife, Fannie Carey, of Knoxville, who graduated from the college. Knoxville, founded in 1875 as a normal school for training of black teachers, was designated a college in 1877. It offered classics, science, theology, agriculture, industrial arts, and medicine, as well as industrial training on the model of Hampton Institute, Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute, and later, Bowie Normal School. Students at Knoxville cut timber and helped construct most buildings on campus and made a million bricks.

After studying at Knoxville, and until 1899, Goodloe attended Berea College, a racially integrated school in Berea, Kentucky. This college was founded in 1855 by Presbyterian abolitionist John G. Fee who believed that God has made of one blood all peoples of the earth. The school claims to have been the only racially integrated college in the South up until 1904, when Kentucky passed a law that required all its schools to be segregated.

Goodloe and Fannie were married in Knoxville in June 1899, and moved to Greenville, Tennessee, near Nashville, where Goodloe began his career as a teacher and principal at Greenville College, a black normal school. The Goodloes remained in Greenville from 1899 until 1903, and started their family there. Fannie gave birth to sons Don B. and Wallis.

In 1904, they moved to Meadville, Pennsylvania, for Goodloe to complete his Bachelor of Arts degree at Allegheny College. He was also attracted to the Unitarian seminary there, Meadville Theological School, which was founded in 1844, and later became Meadville / Lombard Theological School in Chicago, which is affiliated with the University of Chicago and the Unitarian Universalist Association. In Meadville, with two boys, and Fannie pregnant with their third child, Carey. Goodloe was quick to find work to help support them. Then he enrolled at both Allegheny College and Meadville Theological School.

Goodloe was the second black enrolled in Meadville, and the first to graduate from the school. Others followed, and Goodloe can be said to have integrated the school. Although he did not encounter the angry resistance of George Wallace standing in the schoolhouse doorway, he likely encountered racial prejudice from some students and faculty. He was, in the words of Unitarian Universalist minister, the Reverend Mark Morrison-Reed, “a Black Pioneer in a White Denomination.”

In a 1903 letter Meadville president Franklin Southworth states that Goodloe was a “residing elder in the Methodist Episcopal Church” and that although “the way was open for him at two or three orthodox institutions in the South and the money would have been provided...he could not bring himself to accept the doctrinal limitations, so he applied to us. I endeavored before advising him to come here simply to find out what his ambition was, and it seemed to me that to satisfy that ambition it was necessary for him to choose a school like ours rather than a sectarian school.”

He came to Meadville even though he knew it was unlikely he would be ordained by a Unitarian church because none would accept a black minister. President Southworth wrote, “I find this morning in putting the possibilities squarely before him that he has come here with his eyes open, knowing that it is probably not a good way into the orthodox ministry, but ready to take the consequences.”

Southworth continued, “What the negroes need in...[Goodloe’s] judgement more than emotionalism in religion and more even than industrialism in education, is moral teaching and preaching.” Goodloe “proposes,” said Southworth, “with the help of his wife, to start a small school composed of carefully selected and choice students, and to run the school along with his Sunday preaching.”

After graduating from both Allegheny College and Meadville Theological School in 1906, Goodloe resumed his career as a teacher at Danville, Kentucky Industrial Normal School and as a businessman in Danville – from 1906 until 1910. His desire to be in business probably demonstrates not only a need to do well for his family, but also shows the ambition and entrepreneurial drive that led Goodloe to achieve and to organize his environment. These attributes may have been critical to his success in the development and growth of Bowie Normal School.

In 1910, the Goodloes left Danville, and Don became vice-principal at Manassas Industrial School in Manassas, Virginia, for a year. Then he responded to the opportunity to build a new school near Baltimore and Washington, Maryland Normal and Industrial School at Bowie for the Training of Colored Youth, also known as Maryland State Normal School No. 3.

When the Goodloes arrived at the school it had a farmhouse, barn, chicken house, and a new brick building, the new building having been constructed by the State of Maryland. The state had just taken over the funding of the Normal School and moved it from Baltimore to Bowie. The Goodloes lived in the brick building with the female students. Male students were housed in the loft of the barn, previously used for horses and cows.

According to his son Wallis, Goodloe was a persuasive speaker. His writing skills are demonstrated in his school catalogs and reports. The 1911-1912 school catalog espouses a philosophy in harmony with that of Booker T. Washington. Goodloe states that “now and perhaps for many years to come agricultural and industrial training are plainly indicated for the Negro by the situation itself...[It is important to teach] the negro boy and girl to love and live successfully the agricultural life...” The Maryland legislature was controlled by farmers in rural counties who were short on labor and feared that education would draw blacks away from the farm. The catalog emphasized the importance of teaching skills to black students–carpentry, painting, blacksmithing, plastering, papering and shoemaking, and the women domestic science, sewing and millinery work. The school also aimed to prepare African American teachers. The academic curriculum was equal to the ordinary high school course, with English, arithmetic, algebra, history, geography, music, government, physics, botany, and Latin or German. There were six teachers. Mrs. Goodloe taught music.

In 1911, the school enrolled 58 students: 23 preparatory, 22 first year, 6 second year, and 7 third year. Incoming students had to be at least 15 years old and to have completed “six grades in the best public schools of that state.” Thus, for most of Goodloe’s tenure, the school was the only place in the state for black students to receive an education past the sixth grade level. The first black high school in the state was started in Cambridge in 1917, followed by one in Baltimore, then Annapolis.

During the first year, the black elementary school at the corner of 11th Street and Normal School Road was placed under the direction of the Normal School, thus giving teachers-in-training a model school for practice with 86 students. At that time, Maryland only provided primary school education to blacks.

In 1915, Goodloe was honored by inclusion in Who’s Who of the Colored Race, which listed essential bibliographical information, including his membership in the Knights of Pythias, a secular fraternal order. Pythians promoted friendship, universal peace, kindness and tolerance, and had rituals based on Greek philosophy of 400 B.C.

This membership would have been in the African-American Knights of Pythias. Like most fraternal orders, the Pythians admitted no blacks. This led blacks to establish the African-American Knights of Pythias and parallel versions of other orders (e.g., Masons and Odd Fellows). In 1906, when the white fraternal orders attempted to force the black counterparts out of existence, the black Pythians, 300,000 strong nationally, raised money, sued the white Pythians, and litigated all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which in 1912 ruled in their favor, agreeing that too much time had passed (40 years?) for the white order to retain exclusive use of its name and ritual. The case was the forerunner of NAACP lawsuits using the Supreme Court to overrule state courts, including Brown vs. Board of Education.

Also in 1915 the Goodloes decided to build a house for themselves. They hired John Moore, a black architect, and black workers built it. Lumber for the framing was cut, and bricks for the veneer, were made on the property. It was completed in 1916. In 1988, the Goodloe House was listed in the National Register of Historic Places. In 1916, Goodloe was included in Who’s Who in America.

In 1917, household chemistry, farm physics, and practice school work were introduced. The terms household chemistry and farm physics may have been added to satisfy the farmers who controlled politics in Annapolis.

In the fall of 1918 student enrollment declined sharply to 36 students as a result of World War I, the national outbreak of influenza, and the high cost of living. In 1919, it bounced back up to 69 students, and faculty was increased from 7 to 10. Goodloe established the first summer session for the school in 1920.

In 1920, the secretary of the Maryland State Colored Teachers’ Association sent Dr. D.S.S. Goodloe, a letter of commendation “for the constant and progressive fight he has made toward enriching of the curriculum and the uplifting of the standards of the Bowie State Normal School.”

During his tenure in Bowie, from 1911 until 1921, Don Speed Smith Goodloe established a faculty of ten members, student enrollment of 80, an admission requirement of completion of seventh grade, a model school for student teachers at Horsepen Hill School–the first school for black children in Bowie–a summer session, a new dormitory for women, and renovation of living quarters for men. One additional year was added to the course, which led to a second grade certificate and the opportunity for students to do two year’s additional work to earn a first grade certificate. He made many pleas for additional funding before the legislature in Annapolis, which might have brought more rapid development to the school, but the state seemed to favor the white normal schools in its appropriations.

Little is known about why Goodloe resigned his post at the age of 43 in 1921. Goodloe told a friend of his in Washington that he resigned because he was just tired of being principal. It is possible that he was tired of the inability to gain sufficient funding, to expand into more industrial training courses, and to upgrade the normal school to the standard curriculum used at Towson and Frostburg. Perhaps he was tired of dealing with the segregation, inequality and the continued racism of the times and wished to immerse himself in the black community. The Ku Klux Klan was reviving in the South. There were 64 lynchings in the U.S. in 1918 and 83 in 1919. There were at least fourteen in Maryland in the twenty years before Goodloe arrived and two during his tenure here. Black soldiers returning from the war met the brutal face of white supremacy. Race riots in Chicago killed 38 people. Perhaps Goodloe gave up on Booker T. Washington’s dream of gaining equality with whites through hard work and patience. Perhaps he acted too “white” for the powers in Annapolis.

Goodloe’s liberal religion also may have been a cause of conflict at the school. His successor as Principal, Leonidas S. James, according to his daughter, considered it “very important to be guided by sound philosophy in an environment that was sprinkled with many Christian liberals.” His daughter may have been referring to Goodloe.

After leaving the school, Goodloe moved to Baltimore, where a directory of black businesses listed him as President of Standard Benefit Society in 1923-24. Other records show him owning rental housing in Baltimore. Later he moved to Washington, and is said to have owned extensive property in the District. In 1924, he testified in Congress on behalf of a bill creating an inter-racial commission. Fannie and two of their sons, Wallis and Donald B. continued to live in the two-story house on Jericho Park Road. Both sons graduated from Howard University, became teachers in Baltimore, and later in Washington. Donald B. Goodloe taught at Dunbar High School. In 1949, at the age of 71, Goodloe divorced Fannie and remarried. He died in Washington, D.C. in 1959. Although we have no record of Goodloe’s religious affiliation after Meadville, we do know that one of his sons, Donald B. Goodloe, was a teacher and active member at All Souls Church, Unitarian who caught the train from Bowie to D.C. to attend service. This son lived in the Goodloe house in Bowie until his death. In 2005 the Unitarian Universalist congregation located in Bowie, Maryland changed its name from the Bowie Unitarian Universalist Fellowship to the Goodloe Memorial Unitarian Universalist Congregation.

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