Published: March 08, 2008 10:08 pm            

Minnie Marsh bridges the gaps

Editor’s note: This story originally ran in dalton magazine. For copies, stop by the office on South Thornton Avenue or call (706) 217-6397.





By Keith Cerniglia

[email protected]

Dalton’s Minnie Marsh always considered it the highest mark of achievement, the one that bridged decades and life changes for her and her students.

“I’ve never forgotten you,” Marsh’s former pupils would tell her from time to time.

A good teacher makes all the difference, and Marsh has made her imprint as a career educator. First inspired to go into education by a fond and loving high school math teacher, Marsh immersed herself in the entire experience, from 11 years in the classroom to eventually becoming the first black voted to the Dalton City School Board.

Every child has meaning and value. It’s the prevailing philosophy Marsh first learned while apprenticing in a Head Start program during college and the one she carried into her first teaching job as a fourth-grade teacher at North Dalton Elementary.

Marsh learned to be not only a teacher, but a surrogate parent during her early teaching years. She remembers many children coming from disadvantaged situations, busing into school on empty stomachs.

That was rectified quickly.

“We started a breakfast program at North Dalton,” said Marsh, 57. “We were the first in the (Dalton Public Schools) system to have that. Kids would get there early and go in the cafeteria and get a hot meal.

“Every child needs love and acceptance. Every child can learn. Every child deserves attention. That was just the way I went about it.”

From the outside in

It was 1950 — four years before Brown vs. the Board of Education, five years before Rosa Parks decided she wasn’t going to take a back seat to anyone, and 14 years prior to the passage of the Civil Rights Act.

William J. Willis had seen enough.

Willis, Marsh’s father, drove his pregnant wife, Dorothy, to the maternity ward at Hamilton Medical Center when she began to experience labor pains. Childbirth facilities were segregated at the time at Hamilton, and Willis didn’t like the unkempt look of the ward reserved for black mothers.

So he helped Dorothy back into the car and drove 80 miles south on Interstate 75 to a private hospital in Atlanta, and out came baby Minnie.

Minnie Marsh’s earliest recollection of the institutional racism that influenced the very way in which she entered the world would come during her elementary school years.

“Growing up in Dalton, I remember there was a school that was one block from my house,” she said. “Instead, my father had to drive me all the way across town to go to school. I couldn’t make sense of it at the time and asked my father why I couldn’t just go to school up the street.

“All my father said was ‘Because that’s not your school.’ That was the way it was.”

Marsh has vivid memories of the turbulent ‘60s, sparked by a child’s acute sense of recall. There was John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963 (eighth grade English class at Emery Street School) and Martin Luther King Jr’s assassination (senior year at Dalton High School, where she transferred when city schools were integrated in 1965).

The slaying of King had a profound effect on Marsh, as it would many young blacks.

“My reaction was a state of shock and grief,” she said. “It started my view of America. I felt some anger, but mostly sadness. I couldn’t understand why this had to happen. It was a wake-up call for my generation — we knew the world had to be better and it was up to us to make it more positive and be more accepting of other people.”



Let change begin with me

Marsh graduated from Dalton High in 1968 and went on to Berry College. It was her geometry teacher in 11th grade, Mrs. Grace Acree, who first told Marsh about the private liberal arts school in Rome that stresses education of the head, heart and hands.

“She was a great blessing,” Marsh said of Acree. “I asked my dad to take me to Berry and I knew that was where I wanted to go. Mrs. Acree passed away, but I always told her how much she influenced me.”

The pieces of Marsh’s life began to fall into place as a young collegian. She majored in childhood education and got a job working for a Head Start program in Dalton during her second year of college.

Created in 1965, Head Start is a program of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services that focuses on assisting children from low-income families. It’s now the longest-running program for stopping the cycle of poverty in the United States.

“That was my first job, right here in Dalton,” Marsh said.

After graduating from Berry in 1972, Marsh got her first full teaching job in the public school system. She began at North Dalton School — “those are the years I probably treasure most,” she said — and later taught at Westwood Elementary School in North Dalton.

No matter where she was or which subject material she was teaching, Marsh said there was one overrunning theme.

“I loved all of my children,” she said. “I taught for 11 years and it didn’t matter who they were or where they came from.”



From classroom

to superstructure

Reading, writing and arithmetic had their place for Marsh as a teacher. But the longer she taught, the more interested she became in school administration and educational policy.

She and her husband Hubert, a director of Dalton’s Teen Resource Center, volunteered their time on parent-teacher associations. Minnie and Hubert, in fact, were co-presidents for the PTA at Fort Hill Elementary, Morris Street School and Roan Street School.

Those positions would be unpaid, much like her service on the city school board years later. But that didn’t matter to Minnie, she said.

“I’d been very involved with school from the time my children (daughter Willisa and son Andrew) were in kindergarten,” she said. “A lot of it was a love for education, but I also felt like I wanted to reconnect myself back to the public school system (after taking leave for motherhood). I wanted to give them my time.”

The city school board was a natural extension. This would require more than volunteerism; Marsh would have to craft policies on which she would run and which she would strive to uphold during her time on the board.

“I wanted to represent everyone,” Marsh said. “That’s what my campaign was about. I felt like I could understand teachers from a teacher’s perspective. I knew what kids needed. I knew that my time in the classroom and my background in education could only help.”

Her 1995 campaign committee consisted of co-presidents Frank Ray and Claudia Miller, longtime colleagues and friends from her time in the public school system; treasurer Freddie O’Neal; and publicity chief Susan Anderson.

She began campaigning in September of that year. The color lines she remembered from childhood had been blurred by time and nearly erased. Marsh said she realized she was part of a co-racial cooperative committed to establishing the values she had learned at a policy-making level.

“There was a great outpouring of support,” Marsh said. “There were so many people in town who volunteered to help me with my campaign. I don’t think people looked at me as a black or a female but as someone who could do the job.”



A public servant

Election results were overwhelmingly in Marsh’s favor. After she took office in 1996, the city school board — unsalaried — was able to get the first Special Purpose Local Option Sales Tax (SPLOST) passed in Dalton and Whitfield County. “It was a milestone,” Marsh said of its passage in 1998.

The sales tax money was appropriated toward construction of schools and classroom technology such as front-end computers. Two brand new public schools — Dalton Middle School and Park Creek Elementary — came as a direct result of the SPLOST, Marsh said.

“I think that’s what I’m proudest of from my time on the board,” said Marsh, who served until 2000. “By the time I came off the board, Park Creek was completed. It was a very positive time. I don’t look at it as a struggle but as a challenge.”

One such challenge was a community discussion on whether city and county schools should merge — a topic of debate that still arises in certain corners. When the merger issue came up on the city board, study groups were formed “to determine pros and cons,” Marsh said.

As a product of a school system that underwent a necessary and forcible merger of black and white, Marsh carefully weighed the matter.

“I felt like the city school system was strong,” she said. “I felt like we could have gone either way, but most of the students at that time wanted to keep the city schools like they were. The best thing that came out of all that was that the city and county school boards developed a good, working relationship. Communication was great and everyone benefited from that.”

Bridging gaps. Opening strong lines of dialogue. Listening to her kids.

Marsh, now helping her ailing father with his family business at Willis Funeral Home, has never stopped being an educator.

“People of this town can work together,” she said. “I know that.”

        

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