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| 1938 (?) Photograph of Alphonse Heningburg (The George Washington University, Special Collections Research Center, National Education Association Records-Special Collections [NEA1007], Box 3043, Folder 8) |
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| 1881 Certificate of Marriage for Andrew Heningburg and Florence Ella Reves (Ancestry.com. Alabama, U.S., County Marriage Records, 1805-1967 [database on-line]. Lehi, UT: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2016) |
But when Alphonse was only four years old, his mother, Florence Ella Heningburg (1865-1906), who was only 40 or 41 herself, died quite suddenly. With toddler Alphonse still under foot, her death must have traumatized the household. Evidence for having rearranged the family comes from the 1910 US Census which found Alphonse, then eight years old, living in a Mobile household headed not by his widowed father, but by his older brother, Joseph, then 24 years old and working as a brick mason; a widowed sister (26) and two other brothers were the only other members of the household. The children's father, Andrew Heningburg, seems not to have died until 1930, so why the children were living together without their father in 1910 I do not know. In a 1933 essay Heningburg reported that his father had been a "fairly successful contractor, although his school work had not extended beyond the third grade" (Alphonse Heningburg, "The Relation of Tuskegee Institute to Education in the Lower South," Journal of Educational Sociology v. 7, n. 3 [November 1933]:160). Early census reports describe him as a brick mason or laborer, but I could find little else about the man.
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| Extract from 1910 US Census for Carvers Precinct #8, Mobile, AL |
Alphonse evidently did his primary schooling in Whistler, but in 1916 he enrolled at Tuskegee Institute, which, under the influence of Booker T. Washington, had organized its curriculum to emphasize trade skills in addition to a more conventional curriculum (Heningburg, "The Relation of Tuskegee Institute to Education," pp. 159-62). As the catalog points out,
Tuskegee Institute aims to provide an opportunity for young colored men and women to acquire a sound vocational training so that upon graduation they may be thoroughly equipped for active leadership in improving moral, educational, industrial and civic conditions in the communities in which they may thereafter live...The more or less abstract teaching of the classroom is supplemented and illustrated by practical lessons in field and shop (1920-1921 Catalog of Tuskegee Institute, pp. 14-15).
Consequently, it was at Tuskegee that Alphonse began his life-long love of and skill at woodworking.
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| Extract from1920-1921 Catalog of Tuskegee Institute, p. 27 |
Heningburg also did well at Grinnell, although his arrival brought him face to face with racial bias. In an essay he wrote many years after leaving Iowa he recalled his first attempt to get a haircut in town:
The shop was clean and attractive, and the barber at the first chair looked up with a cheerful "Good morning" as I entered. I sat for a few minutes waiting my turn and continued to read a Spanish play which was one of my assignments for the afternoon. The barber whose customer I became was evidently of Spanish descent, for after having noted the book I was studying, his "Buenos dias, señor" greeted me cordially as I took my seat in his chair. An air of friendliness developed and we talked about some of the better-known Spanish writers and artists...The discussion turned in my general direction after a while, and I mentioned casually that I was perhaps the first Negro student to attend the college. My glance into the mirror caught his expression of surprise and bewilderment.With hands raised above his head and in a tone of incredulity, he demanded: "You mean to tell me you're a Negro!" I admitted that I was. "Why I can't cut your hair!" he gasped....I finally persuaded him to finish the job, but he did it with much reluctance and with a great show of effort. He knew the temper of the community; he was probably in danger of losing his job if it became known that he had trimmed a Negro's hair...I was a Negro and, as such, immediately lost claim on the hospitality of the community (Alphonse Heningburg, "Two Worlds," Common Ground 49[1944]:46).
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| 1919 Photograph of a Grinnell Barbershop in the 900 Block of Main Street https://digital.grinnell.edu/islandora/object/grinnell:6152 |
Unfortunately, Heningburg reports that he encountered the same racial attitudes on campus, as he illustrated with another anecdote. Heningburg tells of an in-class assignment (from an instructor he does not name, but who might have been Edward Steiner [1866-1956]) requiring students to "tell how they felt when the word 'Negro' was mentioned...." No names were required, but the instructor asked students to reply "as clearly and as concisely as you can the kind of thoughts you have when you hear the word 'Negro.'" Heningburg then recalled, as well as his memory would allow twenty-some years later, the exact words of his fellow students.
"When I hear the word 'Negro,' I feel a strange kind of resentment, and I think about things which are not pleasant." "The very mention of the word 'Negro' makes me see red, for I think of all the problems which the people in my part of the country face because we have to put up with these people." "Negroes are an awful nuisance in my community—at least all those that I have known. It would be a great thing if all of them could go back to Africa" (ibid., p. 47).
Alluding to his fellow students, Heningburg ruefully recalled that "There was hardly a one who seemed to think about Negroes as if they were [people] much like themselves" (ibid.).
One may wonder how faithfully Heningburg could recall these statements decades later. As scholars have noted, memories—even terrible memories—are fungible and can be reconstructed over time (Randy Rieland, "What Scientists Know About Repairing Memories," https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/what-scientists-now-know-about-repairing-memories-1566240/). Moreover, because Heningburg begins his recollection by describing Grinnell as "the small northwestern town in which I went to college," it is tempting to question the accuracy of the statements he recalls. But even if the literal accuracy of the quotations be questioned, it is much harder to doubt that Heningburg has remembered accurately the sense of these comments, whose vocabulary and tone call to mind the 1921 Rosenwald Fund summary of the students' experience at Grinnell:
At first there were slights, perhaps exaggerated by natural apprehension, Negroes being new both in college and in the community. Local barbers refused to give service...There were social and scholastic adjustments necessary both with members of the faculty and with the student body (Anonymous, undated, untitled Summary of the Project, Julius Rosenwald Papers, Box 16, Folder 17, Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago).
Nevertheless, Heningburg remained in college and succeeded brilliantly at Grinnell. Majoring in Spanish which he combined with courses in Business Administration, he did well enough to be elected to Phi Beta Kappa (Scarlet and Black, May 21, 1924). He was also a member of the Cosmopolitan Club (ibid., October 20, 1923) and the Romance Language Club of which he was treasurer (ibid., April 30, 1924) and one of its few male members.
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| Romance Language Club, 1924 Grinnell College Cyclone |
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| Extract from Passenger List of S.S. Caronia, arriving in New York, August 27, 1927 (Ancestry.com. New York, U.S., Arriving Passenger and Crew Lists [including Castle Rock and Ellis Island], 1820-1957 [database on-line]. Lehi, UT: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2010) |
Hard on the heels of his two-year sojourn in France (October 15, 1927), Heningburg married a young Alabama woman—Madeline J. Davis (1907-1979). Given the speed with which they married, Heningburg must have known Davis from before he went to Paris, but I could not find the link. At first I thought that they might have grown up together, but the 1910 and 1920 US Censuses found Madeline and her family living on 6th Avenue in Birmingham, Alabama, about 250 miles from Whistler. I did not locate her in the 1930 census, but the 1940 US Census identified her as a "widow" who lived with her widowed mother in Birmingham along with her six-year-old son and four-year-old daughter. If Madeline remarried after her marriage to Heningburg, she did not change her surname: the 1940 record knows her as Madeline Davis. But whatever that earlier relationship with Alphonse Heningburg, their marriage did not last long, although I discovered no evidence of a divorce.
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| 1927 Marriage Certificate of Alphonse Heningburg and Madeline J. Davis (Ancestry.com. Alabama, U.S., County Marriage Records, 1805-1967 [database on-line]. Lehi, UT: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2016) |
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| 1929 Marriage Certificate of Alphonse Heningburg and Willa Mae Scales (Ancestry.com. North Carolina, U.S., Marriage Records, 1741-2011 [database on-line]. Provo, UT: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2015) |
In 1930 Dr. Robert Moton (1867-1940), then the principal of Tuskegee, accepted a request from the U.S. State Department to name a delegation that would travel to Haiti for "educational study." The committee that Moton named included the President of Howard University, a field secretary of the General Education Board, the president of Georgia State Industrial College (now Savannah State University), and the Dean at Tuskegee. Heningburg was to accompany the delegation: "Prof. Alphonse Heningburg of the department of romance languages at Tuskegee Institute, graduate instructor in French from the Sorbonne, Paris...will act as official interpreter and aide to the committee" (U.S. Department of State, Press Releases, vol. 2, no.14-39a, 1930, pp. 90-91).
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| Graduate Education Board Fellowship Record Card for Alphonse Heningburg (Rockefeller Foundation, Record Group 10.2 [Fellowship Recorder Cards], General Education Board A-Z Box 20 Heningburg-A). |
In 1933 Heningburg received a fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation's General Education Board that allowed him to begin graduate study at New York University. That summer he enrolled in several courses devoted to educational administration (along with a course in "Advanced methods of woodworking," which evidently followed up on his early years at Tuskegee). He also passed two foreign language exams and his field prelim exams, meaning that, together with his credits from the Sorbonne, he could complete residence requirements soon. The following summer, thanks to an extension of his fellowship, he was again in New York at work on his dissertation. His NYU supervisors were much impressed, one of them writing to the Graduate Education Board that Heningburg was an
Unusual man in every respect [and] ranks high among candidates for the degree of Ph.D. [He] is well poised, has [a] splendid outlook, works well with everybody, and is very commendable in every respect (Rockefeller Foundation, Record Group 10.2 [Fellowship Recorder Cards], General Education Board A-Z Box 20 Heningburg-A).
Heningburg had hoped that he might receive the degree as soon as 1935, but in fact he completed all requirements at NYU in 1939, devoting his dissertation to "The Teacher in the Negro College" (List of Doctors and Masters Theses in Education, New York University, First Supplement, October 1936—June 1940, comp. Nouvart Tashjian [New York: RHO Chapter, Phi Delta Kappa, School of Education, New York University, 1941], p. 11).
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| 1939 Yearbook of North Carolina College for Negroes |
In 1937 the Heningburgs relocated to Durham, North Carolina where Alphonse began work as a special assistant to the President of what was then called the North Carolina College for Negroes—today's North Carolina Central University (Campus Echo, 25 October 1937; ibid., 8 March 1939). Very soon Heningburg was named vice-president, as confirmed by Durham city directories for 1939 and 1940. The 1942 directory, however, identified his title as "instructor" and the following year called him "professor," indicating that Heningburg had moved from administrative duties to full-time teaching (Ancestry.com. U.S. City Directories, 1822-1975 [database on-line]. Lehi, UT: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2011). His foreign language instruction did not overlook the importance of race: the campus newspaper reported that in 1939 during National Negro History Week Heningburg had provided his French students with special classes about Negro Americans and Negro Frenchmen who were "not mentioned in textbooks of this day and age" (Campus Echo, March 8, 1939). From the first Heningburg was active in the local YMCA and was also involved in campus theatre, which in 1939 brought him into contact with Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960), who was on campus to direct a play (ibid., 29 November 1939).
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| New York Age, March 29, 1941 |
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| New York Age, May 17, 1941 |
With the outbreak of World War II, Heningburg, like the other Rosenwald Scholars from Grinnell, registered for the draft. The Durham, North Carolina Selective Service Draft Board #2 measured Heningburg at 5 feet, 10 inches tall and gave his weight as 165 pounds, about the same height and weight he reported thirty years later, an indication that Heningburg remained active and in good health (Ancestry.com. U.S. WWII Draft Cards, Young Men, 1940-1947 [database on-line]. Lehi, UT: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2011).
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| Photograph of Alphonse Heningburg and staff with National Urban League Booth at National Conference of Social Work, Cleveland, Ohio, May 21-27, 1944 (Opportunity 22[1944]:133) |
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| Alphonse Heningburg as Secretary of NY Department of Welfare in announcement of 1947 NY Metropolitan Council Workshop (https://radar.auctr.edu/islandora/object/auc.146%3A0051) |
In 1946 he became the first African American to be Secretary of the New York City Department of Welfare (today's Department of Social Services), a position he held until 1949. Even before he accepted this latest post, Heningburg had been teaching at NYU, including a course entitled "Racial Contributions to American Culture" (People's Voice, June 8, 1946). In 1949 he was named assistant professor at Adelphi University in Garden City, New York, where he worked until 1953. Among the courses he offered at Adelphi were Educational Philosophy, School and Community, and Audio-Visual Methods, a subject that would influence his later career (The Delphian, February 24, 1953, p. 6).
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| The home that the Heningburgs purchased in 1944 at 112-27 176th Street, St. Albans, Queens, New York |
At about this same time Heningburg joined several other African American activists to form the "Non-Partisan Citizens' Committee for Reapportionment" in Queens with the goal of forcing politicians to make sure that Blacks, who made up a gradually larger proportion of Queens residents, had a voice in government. As Martha Biondi reported, "Heningburg called the fight for 'political autonomy' for African Americans 'the most important issue that has confronted this community'" (To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Post-War New York City [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003], p. 218; "Queens Leaders Set to Elect Negro," New York Amsterdam News, June 23, 1951). One consequence of this commitment was his willingness to stand for election to the City Council from Queens; were he elected he would have been the first African American elected to public office in Queens. Running as an independent Democrat on the Liberal Party and Independent Party slates, Heningburg had to face a Democratic incumbent as well as a Republican and two other candidates (New York Amsterdam News, October 17, 1953), but he gained useful endorsements from the Citizens Union, which called him "Qualified and Preferred," and from the Queensboro Independent Citizens Committee for Good Government, which asserted that it could "think of no one individual whose background and virtues are more deserving of our support." Several other groups weighed in with similar views (ibid., October 24, 1953).
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| Heningburg's 1953 New York Teacher's Certificate (Special Collections Research Center, Gelman Library, George Washington University, National Education Association Records (NEA1007), American Teachers Association and ATA Affiliates, 1911-1986, Box 3043, Folder 8, "Alphonse Heningburg") |
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| Alabama Tribune, December 5, 1958, p. 8 |
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| "Cocktail Chitchat," Jet, February 28, 1980 |
In 1980 the Heningburg children arranged a joyous celebration in Virginia of their parents' 50th wedding anniversary, a half-century of accomplishment and adaptation that Alphonse and Willa had shared.
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Sadly, that long record of shared adventure was ruptured within two years of celebrating a golden anniversary: Alphonse died in Orange, New Jersey, July 22, 1982. He was eighty years old, and had filled his life with achievements. The last child of nine, orphaned (it seems) when he was only four, Heningburg went on to excel at Tuskegee, Grinnell College, the Sorbonne, and New York University. He taught at several universities, and at least twice served in those schools' administrations. In his forties he worked for the National Urban League in New York, helping set the post-war political agenda for African Americans. In the Eisenhower years he moved from university teaching to the public schools, administering audio-visual resources and reaching out to the West Hempstead community. In the midst of these Long Island occupations Heningburg took leave in 1962 in order to assist in the establishment of programs at the University at Tunis, a loud echo of his visit to Haiti in 1930 with African American educators. He concluded his work career in the private sector, bringing to Learnex some of the skills he had accumulated earlier. Through it all he maintained a healthy marriage which lasted more than a half-century. He and his wife raised two sons, both of whom served their country in the US Army and then put their lives to work for their communities and for fellow African Americans.
It's an impressive resume, reflective of Heningburg's intelligence and energy. Although he encountered racism when first he ventured onto the Grinnell campus and into downtown Grinnell, he did not let this hatred undermine his accomplishments. An excellent student at Grinnell, where he became the second African American inducted into the Grinnell chapter of Phi Beta Kappa, and later an outstanding student and teacher at his high school alma mater—Tuskegee—and then at North Carolina Central, Heningburg introduced legions of students to the world of Spaniards and Frenchmen, especially drawing attention to the Black men and women of those countries. In New York, where he served both the National Urban League and the City of New York, he applied his learning to advance the cause of African Americans in mid-century America. If his last productive years focused upon Long Island, even then he interrupted this work to imagine and equip a university in North Africa.
Grinnell College is fortunate to name among its graduates many women and men of accomplishment, but few can have lived lives so full of meaning as did Alphonse Heningburg, the third of Grinnell's Rosenwald Scholars.
He led a life of great social usefulness.
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