Women of Taunton: Hattie Cunningham led a mission for compassion

Last week, we looked at some women you ought to know about for Black History Month (and in general, really). This week, I would like to end Black History Month by shining a light on a local woman who shared the same spirit of bravery, kindness, and civic-mindedness:

Hattie Cunningham.

According to her daughter Kathryn, Hattie Cunningham was "the first black teacher hired to teach the 'three R's' to elementary school children in Taunton.

This was in 1968, at the height of the Civil Rights Era.

Her husband, James A. Cunningham Sr., was serving in Vietnam and she had a sister, Allie, who lived in the city.

Born in Florida in 1932, Hattie Cunningham (also known as Arlene, as well as Hattie Williams) grew up in a South that was still caught in the grip of Jim Crow.

Those were the racist laws that enforced segregation, laws that not only made life incredibly difficult for people of color, but oftentimes downright dangerous. When something is the law of the land, it makes certain hateful civilians all the more emboldened.

One of Cunningham's relatives, Hilliard Vaughn, was a victim of the worst possible example of how far that hate can be carried out: he was murdered by the Ku Klux Klan and his body was left on some railroad tracks.

Though Vaughn lived some years before Cunningham was born, the weight and reality of Jim Crow persisted into her adulthood. Her daughter Kathryn recalls traveling all night by car with her mother, because the places they were driving through were too dangerous for people of color to stop in. The risk was too great.

Despite the odds being stacked against her achieving success, Cunningham never stopped working to build the kind of life that she wanted for herself, the kind that was her self-evident right as an American.

She was very studious. In order to pay for her education, she picked cotton, oranges and snap peas. She was also a housekeeper at the Dinner Bell Motel in Dunnellon, Florida.

After graduating from Booker T. Washington High School, she attended Bethune-Cookman College in Daytona, an HBCU that was founded by Mary McLeod Bethune. Cunningham was close to her; she became one of "Bethune's girls," even marching along with her once to meet First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt.

In 1955, Cunningham joined the U.S. Army as a medic. It was in the Army that she would meet her husband. They traveled all over, including overseas to France, and her daughter Kathryn recalls never knowing the pain of segregation and racism until they returned to the South.

It was after this return that Kathryn remembers an incident at a segregated ice cream parlor: she and her siblings sat waiting for some time, wondering why no one was taking their order. They only found out the truth of the matter when Cunningham found out where they were, and explained that sadly there were laws that meant they had to use the entrance marked "colored."

In order to achieve prosperity, Cunningham decided to bring her family North. Not that Massachusetts was perfect. There were still the Boston busing riots to come, after all. But her daughter Kathryn recalls that they thought they "would never have a life of freedom" until they got away from Jim Crow.

Life in Taunton was vastly different, better. They settled in an area that was becoming home to Portuguese immigrant families (they lived right up the street from my grandmother, which I found out to my delight) and Cunningham began her career teaching in the city. She taught at Caswell School until it burned down. She also taught at Barnum, and at the Weir Grammar School.

She taught her children as well as her students to love everyone.

"She was a loving, kind and compassionate person, because she grew up where hate was the norm," Kathryn said. "She wanted to be a role model for black and white kids who almost never saw a person of color in a position of authority. She saw it as a mission."

Cunningham lived her beliefs, whether it was setting a kind example, or always having extra clothing on hand for a student who might need it. Along with other African American families in the area, she helped start a branch of the Coalition of Concerned Citizens for African American Children. She wanted to "promote black culture in a positive way," her daughter said, as well as make it possible for local children to get educational scholarships, as it was especially hard at the time for people of color to get financial aid for school.

She also helped start a Taunton chapter of The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

It was during this time that she and the local NAACP led the fight against Sambo's, a restaurant that wanted to open in Raynham.

Sambo's was a fast food chain at the time, trying to get a foothold in the Northeast. The term "sambo" has been used in the past as a slur against people of color. Though the restaurant's founders claimed they had meant no racism with the name (it was apparently a combination of some of their initials), the racist history of that word is enough to make most decent people lose their appetite. The restaurants were also known for their decor that featured scenes from the old children's book, "Little Black Sambo." It was definitely racist.

Cunningham and the NAACP petitioned for the restaurant's permit application to be denied. Sadly, it wasn't, and the restaurant was built. Still, Cunningham and her students led protests against it, and thankfully the restaurant was closed within a year.

She was also instrumental in organizing Martin Luther King Jr. events in the city. These dinners used to be attended by city residents and officials alike, and were often standing-room only.

Cunningham remained a teacher here in Taunton, pursuing her mission, until the year 2000. She had still been going to work while on dialysis and suffering from diabetes, but she lost a leg that year to her disease. She died in October of that year, just a few months after she retired.

But her example lives on:

Hattie Cunningham was a woman who met hatred with love, and cruelty with compassion. She taught her children, her students and her community love and perseverance, and that fighting for good isn't always easy, but it is always right.