Thursday, November 11, 2004
Remembering Rosella A teacher, a role model and a civil rights activist -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- By Stephenie Steitzer Post staff reporter Rosella Porterfield was one of those teachers who truly made a difference in students' lives, and then some. When her students at the all-black Wilkins Heights School in Elsmere needed toilet paper and paper towels in the bathroom, she marched to the school board and got them. When some of her poor students needed a good meal, she took them home and fed them. And when the Supreme Court declared segregation in schools unconstitutional in 1954, Mrs. Porterfield successfully lobbied the school board to enroll five black incoming kindergarteners in one of the white schools. It was the first step in a slow process of desegregating schools in Northern Kentucky. "She was a special lady," said former student Vanetta Lewis, 56, of Burlington. "She was one of those teachers that truly made a difference in the students' lives." Mrs. Porterfield, 85, of Walton, died Saturday at St. Luke Hospital West in Florence. The granddaughter of a one-time slave, Mrs. Porterfield grew up in a snake-infested wilderness called Crane Pond Frog's Ankle Station, about 12 miles south of Owensboro. She always wanted to be a teacher, working hard and graduating at the head of a one-room black school that was down a dirt road, three miles from her home. She graduated as valedictorian of Western High School, the black high school in Owensboro. Mrs. Porterfield desperately wanted to go to college, but her parents couldn't afford to send her. So she worked as a nanny for a white family until, as she used to tell people, she received a gift from her guardian angel. Someone -- and she never found out who -- paid for her to attend a two-year junior college in Paducah and then again to attend Kentucky State College in Frankfort. After graduating with honors in 1940 from the all-black college, Mrs. Porterfield ventured to Northern Kentucky where she was hired to teach in Elsmere. It was at this time when Mrs. Porterfield began making her mark on the region. "She was a role model, she was strict, she had her standards," Lewis said. "But yet she was someone we could talk to." Even though the school had to use old textbooks, Mrs. Porterfield charged ahead and taught as best she could. Lewis said when the school district desegregated, she and another girl were at the top of the new, integrated class because Mrs. Porterfield had taught them so well. After the school district closed the black school -- an effort Mrs. Porterfield helped push -- she was out of a job. A family friend of Mrs. Porterfield, Ruth Wade Cox Brunings, 70, said the district was reluctant to give her a job as a teacher in the integrated schools for fear of what the white parents would think. But, just as Mrs. Porterfield had had a plan to integrate the students, so too did she have a plan for herself. At Mrs. Porterfield's request, the school district gave her a job as a librarian. After all, she already had a degree in library science as well as her teaching certificate. "That was a wonderful solution," Brunings said. "That way Rosella got to interact with all the children in all the grades and there could be no problem with the parents because she was not the primary teacher." The library at Dorothy Howell School in Elsmere was named for Rosella Porterfield, as was a city park. But Mrs. Porterfield's impact didn't stop at the school. One morning, when Mrs. Porterfield boarded a Greyhound bus that would take her from Walton, where she lived, to Florence, where she'd board another bus to Elsmere, the driver asked her to move to the back of the bus. "She said, 'I will not,'" Brunings said. "She said 'I have two brothers who are fighting for this country and I will not go to the back of the bus.'" A young soldier in uniform gave her his seat and the bus, full of whites and blacks, applauded. Despite growing up poor and dealing with racism, Mrs. Porterfield never talked about adversity, Brunings said. "What I saw from her was tremendous warmth. She really affirmed people."
