Supt Cassidy (left) at Picadome School
1920 - Woodland and the schools
Over the years, the Woodland Christian Church and the Lexington city schools have shared resources. When space was needed, before Woodland’s 1924 church building was completed, Superintendent M. A. Cassidy (who lived nearby on Kentucky Avenue) and School Principal Eva Faulconer allowed the church to use the Maxwell School for Sunday school classes. In time, Faulconer would marry Woodland Pastor E. T. Edmonds.
In 1920, student enrollment in the city schools had risen to over 6,500, of which ~5,000 were white and ~1,500 were black. In 1923, the segregated Jefferson Davis Elementary School opened on South Limestone. But when the school burned, Woodland church classrooms and auditorium were used for public school children for several months.
Among white southerners, the two dominant approaches to race early in the 20th century were racial exclusion - excluding black children from school altogether; and racial accommodation – providing basic instruction for black students under the social gospel notion of providing for the least of these among us - while still maintaining white superiority. Superintendent Cassidy had moved north from Tennessee, and found a “southern” state where his accommodationist racial attitudes were a good fit with the white majority: at once, progressive and paternalistic; concerned but condescending. Unique among southern school superintendents, Cassidy embarked on improvements to schools for blacks with nearly the same passion as he did for whites.
In his 1922 History of Kentucky, Judge Charles Kerr praised Superintendent Cassidy as “one of the most progressive, thorough and successful educators of the South” whose Lexington schools “compare favorably with those of any other city in the country.”
In 1923, new Woodland Pastor Hayes Farish began a Community Training School for teachers of religious education at Morton Junior High School. Farish directed twelve teachers who worked with 190 religion educators from thirteen Baptist, Christian, Episcopal, Methodist, and Presbyterian congregations.
Pastor Farish supported cooperation with other congregations to provide religious instruction in the city schools but found his liberal views under attack from a local Baptist preacher and even the Ku Klux Klan. But his philosophies were undeterred. From 1924 to 1926 Woodland shared it’s building with Temple Adath Israel after a fire destroyed the Jewish temple.
In 1920, student enrollment in the city schools had risen to over 6,500, of which ~5,000 were white and ~1,500 were black. In 1923, the segregated Jefferson Davis Elementary School opened on South Limestone. But when the school burned, Woodland church classrooms and auditorium were used for public school children for several months.
Among white southerners, the two dominant approaches to race early in the 20th century were racial exclusion - excluding black children from school altogether; and racial accommodation – providing basic instruction for black students under the social gospel notion of providing for the least of these among us - while still maintaining white superiority. Superintendent Cassidy had moved north from Tennessee, and found a “southern” state where his accommodationist racial attitudes were a good fit with the white majority: at once, progressive and paternalistic; concerned but condescending. Unique among southern school superintendents, Cassidy embarked on improvements to schools for blacks with nearly the same passion as he did for whites.
In his 1922 History of Kentucky, Judge Charles Kerr praised Superintendent Cassidy as “one of the most progressive, thorough and successful educators of the South” whose Lexington schools “compare favorably with those of any other city in the country.”
In 1923, new Woodland Pastor Hayes Farish began a Community Training School for teachers of religious education at Morton Junior High School. Farish directed twelve teachers who worked with 190 religion educators from thirteen Baptist, Christian, Episcopal, Methodist, and Presbyterian congregations.
Pastor Farish supported cooperation with other congregations to provide religious instruction in the city schools but found his liberal views under attack from a local Baptist preacher and even the Ku Klux Klan. But his philosophies were undeterred. From 1924 to 1926 Woodland shared it’s building with Temple Adath Israel after a fire destroyed the Jewish temple.
- Day, R., & DeVries, L. (2012). A Southern Progressive: M. A. Cassidy and the Lexington Schools, 1886-1928. American Educational History Journal, 39(1), 107-125. http://www.edhistorians.org/aehj/aehj.html
- http://lexhistory.org/wikilex/a2-lexington-board-education-1873-1945
- (Kerr 1922, 329-330)
- (Cassidy’s death certificate available on Ancestry.com
- (Lexington Leader, October 15, 1930).