TOAD SUCK COMMUNITY — Stories about the Bigelow Rosenwald School can still be heard in the Toad Suck community.
Roxie Jones, 86, lives across the highway from the old school, which she attended as a young girl. She later returned as a cook for the school.
“I guess that was back in the 1950s when I cooked there,” she said. “I attended school there from the time I was 6 or 7 until ninth grade. I dropped out, got
married and moved to California. I came back later and cooked at the school for 12 or 13 years.
“I cooked every day,” she said. “We had beans, macaroni and cheese. … At that time, the government gave us a lot of things to cook. We cooked what we had, and the students ate it. Whatever we fixed, they ate.”
Culer Gill Keith, 93, lives just down the road from the school, now known as the Rosenwald Community Cultural Center. She has a long history with the school, which was built in 1926 as a “two-teacher community school” with funds provided by the Julius Rosenwald Fund.
“I finished high school at Pine Street High School in Conway during wartime,” she said. “I began teaching at the Rosenwald school when I was 18.
“There was a shortage of teachers,” she said. “We had no money for me to attend college, so I went to the superintendent’s office and took an exam to be able to teach. I taught first through fourth grades.
“I later became principal and still taught, too,” she said, noting that she attended
Arkansas AM&N College (now the University of Arkansas
at Pine Bluff) during the summers to get her college degree. That’s where she met her husband, the late Murphy Keith, who was an educator in the Menifee schools.
“We’d get the kids up in the morning, and he’d be fixing breakfast while I was combing hair,” Keith said, laughing. “Lord, we had a time. Don’t tell me what you can’t do if you want to.”
The Keiths’ three daughters also went to the Rosenwald school. They followed in their parents’ footsteps to become educators.
Diane Hood of the Toad Suck community is retired after 30 years of teaching at Anne Watson Elementary School in Bigelow, which is part of the East End School District.
Jannette Torrence of Little Rock is still teaching; she is a resource specialist at Brady Elementary School in Little Rock.
Verna Keith Carr of Birmingham, Alabama, is also still teaching; she is a professor and chairwoman of the sociology department at the University of Alabama at Birmingham College of Arts and Sciences.
“We went to Rosenwald, too,” Hood said, smiling.
“We went to that two-room schoolhouse,” Torrence added.
Keith said she always wanted to be a teacher.
“I loved it,” she said. “I always thought about being a teacher.”
Keith remained at the Rosenwald school until it closed in the mid-1960s. She continued her career with the East End School District as a teacher at Anne Watson Elementary School. She was honored by the district, which named the annex at Anne Watson Elementary School in her honor. She retired several years ago after 41 years as an educator.
“I hope they can restore the old school,” Keith said. “It is important to our history.”