![]() ![]() After losing a second teaching job, she took a job as a waitress until 1941, when she took a teaching job in Farmville. At the time, black colleges got calls from schools nationwide requesting teachers and Dorothy, through her alma mater, landed a job at a school in rural Illinois.ĭorothy lost her job, however, when the Depression led the school to close after her first year. Dorothy was only 19 but she felt a great responsibility towards her family, so she chose to pursue a degree in education and become a teacher, which was the most stable career she would be able to find. She stayed home to help out and to ensure that her sister could also go to college. The Great Depression had just begun and Dorothy’s parents could not find work. Dorothy decided not to go to graduate school, however. The first two black men in the country to earn PhDs in mathematics ran the department. The African Methodist Episcopal Sunday School Convention of West Virginia underwrote her scholarship.Īt Wilberforce, Dorothy’s professors recommended her for a master’s degree in mathematics at Howard University, which was the best black university in the country. Dorothy graduated early from high school as valedictorian, then won a full-tuition scholarship to Wilberforce University, the country’s oldest private black college. She also enrolled Dorothy in piano lessons. Susie taught Dorothy to read before she started school, which allowed her to skip two grades. Her mother died when she was two, and her father, a waiter, married Susie Johnson, a housekeeper. They inform every move she makes, though she often has to choose between spending time with them and working to make sure they have what they need.ĭorothy was born in 1910 in Kansas City, Missouri. ![]() Even the most successful black people know that discrimination can, at any moment, destroy everything they have built, and a good education will offer her children a better chance at a good life.ĭorothy knows the money she is making at the laundry will buy school clothes and help her send her children to school. She wants to use it to send them to college. But the 40 cents an hour is more than what she earns as a math teacher, and she has four children who can use the extra money. The laundry is 40 miles away from her home, which means she has to live in worker housing during the week. She lives in a large Victorian house with her in-laws and their parents.ĭorothy eagerly accepts the work at Camp Pickett, even though another woman in her position and of her status might have looked down on it. Vaughn’s husband’s parents are business owners and members of the black elite, and her family’s name regularly appears in the social columns in the newspaper. Teachers are considered very accomplished in the black community because they are thought of as the leaders of social movements. Nonetheless, it feels like a lot to them.ĭorothy, a recent college graduate, also works a job in Farmville, Virginia as a teacher. They earn 40 cents an hour, which means that they are paid the least of all those who work in the service of the war. Most of the women have left behind jobs working as domestic servants or laborers to work in the laundry. ![]() They worry over their loved ones who are headed off from Virginia to fight in World War II. The women who work there fold socks and trousers for the black and white soldiers who come to Camp Pickett for basic training. In the summer of 1943, 32-year-old Dorothy Vaughn works in the sorting station of a massive laundry room at Camp Pickett in central Virginia. ![]()
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