1
Beginnings
One of Frank Porter Grahamâs earliest memories, as a five-year-old, was when his father, Alexander, visited with Edwin A. Alderman and Charles D. McIver. Sitting in the Graham household, McIver remembered how, on the night of their graduation from UNC in 1881, he and Alderman were swept up into a new gospel of education. In 1889, Alderman and McIver persuaded the North Carolina legislature to finance three years of teachersâ institutes in order to evangelize the gospel of modern education. Alexander became among the most enthusiastic âconductorsâ of the teacher institutes.1 The institutesâ conductors, among them Graham, Alderman, and McIver, urged teachers to complete an examination leading to certification as a way of improving the quality of public education. In addition, they became educational evangelists, eventually traveling 3,100 miles to speak before 3,600 teachers and 35,000 people.2 Listening to the men express their bond in education, Frank was entranced. He recalled the conversation as âlike the milk from my motherâs breast to me.â3
A decade older than these men, Alexander Graham shared their enthusiasm for public education and common experiences as school superintendents in late nineteenth-century North Carolina towns. McIver, like Alexander, descended from Highland Scots in the Upper Cape Fear region. He also attended UNC, taught school, and led schools in Durham and Winston. In 1891, McIver successfully opened a new publicly supported womenâs college in Greensboro, the State Normal and Industrial School. Alderman, originally from Wilmington, studied at UNC and then worked in Goldsboro under the tutelage of reforming school superintendent Edward Pearson Moses and eventually became superintendent of that townâs schools. In 1891, McIver recruited Alderman to join the State Normal faculty. Alderman subsequently became president of UNC in 1895, Tulane University in 1900, and the University of Virginia in 1905.4
Establishing modern public schools was no easy task. In 1880, nearly half of North Carolinians were illiterate, that is, unable to write their names, including two-thirds of African Americans and nearly 29 percent of whites.5 These grim statistics resembled the rest of the South; illiteracy offered visible evidence of backwardness. Other late nineteenth-century North Carolinians believed that the stateâs social problems were urgent. Another of Alderman and McIverâs generation, Walter Hines Page, a journalist who fled the state in the late 1880s for the North, became a leading publisher and, after 1900, an advocate of change. While in North Carolina in early 1886, Page concluded that its leaders ill served the state. Enterprising young people left the state in droves, he claimed. The stateâs rulers were nothing more than âmummies,â dead in mind and spirit, and living in the past. They feared intellectual inquiry or honest investigation, and those with initiative and who told the âplain truthâ were accused of treason, or having become âYankeeized.â North Carolinians, Page maintained, should ârise up and say plainly . . . that the controlling forces, the spokesmen and the mummies of North Carolina to-day must be rid of power.â In order to achieve real change, the state awaited âa few first-class funerals.â6 With many white and Black illiterates and extensive poverty, there was a consensus that education could serve as a basis for North Carolinaâs awakening.
Alexander Graham and many of his contemporaries served in the Confederate military. The Civil War, only two decades past, cast a long shadow over late nineteenth-century North Carolina. The warâs aftermath became a dead weight, with Pageâs mummies remaining in control. The war had radically changed the regionâs social system, freeing millions of enslaved men and women while reconstructing slaveryâs racial hierarchy into a different form. Railroads expanded to such an extent that the new transportation network reached most of North Carolinaâs hinterlands, fueling growing towns and an emerging cotton textile industry. Alexander realized the new opportunities during the postwar era, but he also could not ignore the persistent poverty and underdevelopment that characterized what was called the âRip Van Winkleâ state.
Alexander grew up in the Upper Cape Fear valley, an enclave of Scottish culture even in the mid-nineteenth century. Nearly 20,000 Highland Scots arrived in the mid-eighteenth century as part of the rush of immigrants peopling the frontier of the Carolina backcountry. These Scottish Presbyterians, devoted to church, reading and literacy, and community-building, subscribed to a Calvinist conception of Christian calling, the belief that Presbyterians had an obligation to service in professions like the ministry, the law, and teaching. Alexander, who was born on September 12, 1844, to tailor and farmer Archibald Graham and his wife Anne McLean, grew up in rural Cumberland County, about four miles northwest of Fayetteville. His parents were by no means poor; in 1810, Archibald owned eight slaves. Fifty years later, in 1860, he reported to the census taker $6,800 in real estate and $18,870 in personal property, wealth that placed the family in a higher social status. Much of that wealth came from Alexanderâs mother, Anne, whose great-grandfather, Alexander McAlister, was a Whig leader during the Revolution. McAlister served as a member of the Wilmington Committee of Safety and the 1775â76 North Carolina provincial congresses. He signed the Halifax Resolves, an early demand for independence from Britain, and served as a colonel in the local militia.
Members of Alexanderâs family, like other North Carolinians, were swept up into the Civil War. In July 1862, his older brother Archie enlisted as a private in the Fifth Regiment, North Carolina cavalry. During 1863â64, Archie served as courier for Confederate generals Joseph Gordon, Fitzhugh Lee, Wade Hampton, and J. E. B. Stuart. On April 26, 1865, Archie was at Greensboro when Gen. Joseph Johnstonâs 90,000-strong Army of Tennessee surrendered to Union commander William T. Sherman near Durham at Bennett Place.7 Alexander, an adolescent, missed most of the war, and his military career was briefer than Archieâs and most likely did not involve major combat. Privately educated, Alexander began teaching at age sixteen, working two years at the Richmond Academy, near Spring Hill, North Carolina. At twenty years old, only months before the Civil War ended, Alexander joined the Third North Carolina Home Guard, which Confederates raised in Cumberland County. One account reported Alexanderâs capture at Bentonville, fought on March 19â21, 1865, between Shermanâs invading armies and Confederate defenders under Joseph Johnston. But the evidence remains slender. Alexander subsequently applied for a Confederate pension in 1926; after his death, his wife continued to receive the pension provided by the North Carolina state government, but there is no other record clearly documenting his service.8
When the war ended, Graham taught school in Bladen County, but, on his own and impoverished, he also ran a peddlerâs wagon in South Carolina. In September 1866, Alexander managed to save enough money to enroll at the University of North Carolina, where he joined the Philanthropic Literary Society and in 1867 served as captain of the universityâs first baseball team. During Reconstruction, UNC was in a perilous condition after Republicans took control of the university in 1868 and enemies of Reconstruction, opposing Republican influence in state institutions, refused to accept their leadership. In 1871, only two years after Graham and seventeen other students graduated in 1869, an anti-Republican boycott closed UNC for five years.
When Walter Hines Page, in his mummy letters, reported the exodus of enterprising North Carolinians, he listed Franklin Porter, Tarboro native, Alexanderâs UNC classmate and Frank Porter Grahamâs namesake. Frank later called Porter âone of the best friends my father ever had.â After spending two years at UNC with Alexander, Porter finished his undergraduate degree at Yale and then studied law at Columbia University. After practicing in Fayetteville, Porter eventually moved to St. Joseph, Missouri, where he established a prosperous law practice.9 A UNC classmate of Porterâs and Alexanderâs, R. H. Lewis, later a Raleigh physician, recalled how as children Porter had rescued him when he went swimming in the Tar River and almost drowned. Lewis was disabled in one of his legs, and the river current was too strong, forcing him under. Porter dove in and pulled him back to shore. When Frank Graham, as an adult, went to Lewis for medical treatment, he refused to charge a fee. âI will not accept payment for this service,â Lewis said, âto a boy who was named for the boy who saved my life.â10
Perhaps encouraged by Porter, who studied law at Columbia University, Alexander secured a job at the Columbia Grammar School in 1871. Teaching during the day, Alexander also completed a law degree in 1873 at Columbia by finishing many of his classes at night. He returned to Fayetteville in 1875, where he obtained a law license and was for three years a practicing attorney. Soon after his move to Fayetteville, on January 28, 1875, Alexander married nineteen-year-old Katherine âKateâ Sloan. Kateâs ancestors were mostly English, propertied, and established members of the planter class. Henry Sloan lived in southeastern Virginia and served in the House of Burgesses from 1657 to 1661. About a century later, his great-great-grandson, David Sloan, migrated to the Cape Fear region, then a North Carolina frontier. Kate was Davidâs great-granddaughter, the fifth of seven children. Her father, David Dickson Sloan, was a physician who lived in the Ingold neighborhood of southern Sampson County, east of the Cape Fear River.11
Frankâs familial influences were powerful, shaping his worldview. His parents, according to one account, were âstrikingly different in bearing and temperament.â12 He resembled his mother, who was born on March 5, 1855, in Garland, Sampson County. She was five feet tall; Frank was five foot four. Compared to the more reserved Alexander, Kate was warm and outgoing. Nonetheless, the example of his father profoundly influenced the views of his son. Frank internalized his fatherâs faith in the importance of education, traveling with him and observing his missionary zeal. As a stout Presbyterian, Alexander ensured that all of his children attended college, a rare feat among nineteenth-century southerners.
Alexanderâs time in Fayetteville proved formative.13 Created in 1783 by the merger of the smaller towns of Cross Creek and Campbellton, Fayetteville was named in honor of the Marquis de Lafayette, the Revolutionary War hero. Located at the fall line of the Cape Fear River, beyond which rapids became less navigable, Fayetteville during the antebellum era became a transfer point for cargoes arriving from the North Carolina Piedmont on three plank roads terminating in the town. Paddlewheel, flat-bottom steamboats transported people and goods such as tobacco, cotton, turpentine, wheat, and lumber from Fayetteville to Wilmington. By the Civil War, the town, with a population of more than 4,000, had become the largest community in the Upper Cape Fear region and the third largest in the state.
Although Fayetteville served as a transportation and weapons manufacturing hub for the eastern Confederate armies, its postwar recovery was slow, and the town did not regain its antebellum population until the twentieth century. Concerned about the townâs future, Fayetteville leaders turned to schooling, and during the summer of 1878 town leaders organized a new, modern graded school. Graded-school education had become a marker of town development. These modern school systems, popular in urban settings during the Gilded Age, offered professionalized teaching, upgraded and permanent facilities, and improved pedagogy, while they also provided a new approach to socialization and training for citizenship. Schools, according to graded-school advocates, could trigger a social transformation.14 In contrast to rural schools, in which all ages were amalgamated, urban graded schools organized grades and constructed permanent wood or brick facilities. With money from the George Peabody Fund, plus $3,000 raised by public subscription, Fayetteville leaders during the summer of 1878 turned to Alexander Graham to lead the new all-white school.15 Town leaders wanted what other growing late nineteenth-century urban communities already possessedâmodern schools. Graham now saw his Christian calling not in the law but in teaching.16
In charge of Fayetteville schools for a decade, Graham constructed a model town school system.17 He participated in the Summer School for Teachers at UNC, an early effort at teacher training, where he met aspiring schoolmen such as Alderman and McIver. Using Peabody support, the state school superintendent also operated summer teacher training, or normals; Alexander taught summer normals in Washington, Wilson, Elizabeth City, Newton, and Franklin.18 The early historian of southern education Edgar Wallace Knight described Alexanderâs âsimplicity, sincerity, unaffected dignity, engaging humor, fidelity to duty, devotion to the public weal, and a clear conscience in the hour of death.â He had, according to Knight, qualities of âgentleness, sweet reasonableness, potent personal charm, a sensitive intellectuality, and the calm rationality of philosopher and sage.â A person of âextraordinary stamina,â he was a âhard fighter, but always in the open.â Alexander had linguistic ability, according to Knight, who described how he gained a âfair masteryâ of Spanish at the age of seventy-five.19
In early 1888, the Charlotte school board was looking for a new graded-school superintendent, and, after a search in which twenty-five people appliedâincluding AldermanâAlexander was elected to the position on February 16, 1888, taking charge two days later.20 His reputation, one newspaper put it in 1891, grew into âone of the best known, brightest and most energetic educators in all North Carolina.â21 In 1895, Alexander took an exhibit of a model graded school to the Cotton States Exposition in Atlanta.22 A year later, the Charlotte Democrat praised his âprogressive methods, executive capacity and eminent fitnessâ as well as the âhigh state of efficiencyâ of the Charlotte schools.23 A well-respected community leader, Alexander led local efforts to refashion Charlotteâs history by promoting the subsequently debunked idea that the first Declaration of Independence was signed in Charlotte on May 31, 1775, a year before Thomas Jefferson penned his more famous document.24 On November 2, 1934, Alexander died in his ninetieth year, according to a contemporary, the âmost honored and beloved school man in the state.â25
Alexanderâs growing family included Frank Porter Graham, the sixth of nine children and the fourth son, who was born in Fayetteville on October 14, 1886, and named for Alexanderâs good friend Franklin Porter. When Frank was a child, the Grahams lived in a two-story, four-bedroom house at 1001 South Brevard Street, at the intersection with Liberty Street, near the cen...