Author helps provide 'just desserts' for famed Henrico educator Randolph, who built unintentional legacy by doing 'the next needed thing'

Almost no one would travel half the country just to see a 98-year-old cake – Susan McMahon included. But getting to do so when she arrived at the Virginia Randolph Museum in Glen Allen April 25 was a highlight of the Minnesota historian and author’s recent trip to Virginia.

McMahon was in the area as part of a tour to promote her book, New York Times No. 1 best-seller The Small and the Mighty: Twelve Unsung Americans Who Changed the Course of History, from the Founding to the Civil Rights Movement, which spotlights Randolph and 11 other difference-makers who helped change American history despite having little inherent power or clout.

The cake had been presented to Randolph (the daughter of former slaves who is now regarded as one of the leading educators of her time for her work in Henrico County and its subsequent impact throughout the South and beyond) in 1927 by the Stewart sisters of Brook Hill as a congratulatory gesture.

For McMahon, who had never before visited the Randolph Museum (aside from taking virtual tours online), the presence of the preserved cake seemed a fitting undertone to a discussion of Randolph’s life, which she researched extensively for her book.

“It’s time for Virginia to get her just desserts,” McMahon said, weaving an unintentional pun into a 30-minute off-the-cuff discussion that demonstrated the reverence she holds for Randolph and her achievements. “This cake was very fun for me to see. [Randolph] was so impactful in this area. Her impact on the entire American South is also pretty difficult to overstate.”

Randolph was born in Richmond in 1870, and by the age of 16 had graduated high school and was beginning what would become a lifetime of teaching. In the early 1890s, she began leading the one-room schoolhouse for Black children on Mountain Road in Glen Allen (now the museum named in her honor, which was dedicated in 1970 and named a National Historic Landmark four years later).

The needs of those she taught and their families at the time were massive, McMahon said, but Randolph followed the mantra of her mother: “Just do the next needed thing.”

That mantra would serve her (and others) well for more than half a century.

“She didn’t have the tools to fix all of society’s ills, but what she could do was the next needed thing, and the next needed thing ultimately now is impacting millions of people,” McMahon said.

What ultimately made Randolph a key figure in education nationally and beyond was her willingness and ability to take a holistic approach to education, McMahon said.

“Her idea was that it is our job to educate the whole child – the head, the hands and the heart – that children need to learn useful skills that they can take with them,” McMahon said, gesturing to a quilt in the museum as an example of the non-academic skills she taught her students.

As a young teacher in the segregated South, Randolph wanted to teach her students how to cook, so she went to her neighbor’s house with her horse and buggy and loaded up the neighbor’s stove to take it to school for the day to do just that.

“It was still warm from the breakfast that her friend had been cooking on it earlier in the day,” McMahon said. “She had a holistic approach to education that was more than just ‘Sit in this classroom, and learn numbers,’”

When Randolph realized that the systems that were in place in the community weren’t addressing basic needs for Black families, she decided to address them herself.

“She realizes these children don’t have dentists, and she brings a dentist to the schools,” McMahon said. “The parents don’t know how to read; let’s have a Sunday school where we bring in a preacher, and then I’ll teach a reading lesson. She teaches parents how to do things like can their fruits and vegetables in a way where they don’t get full of botulism toxin that makes everybody sick. She brings in nurses to do health checks.

“So not only does she educate the children on sums and letters, but she has this very holistic approach to the entire community that then becomes really the cornerstone of Black education through the entire American South.”

Randolph and the 'Henrico Plan'

A history professor in the Richmond area during Randolph’s era said that her work was on the level of that of another famed Black, educator Booker T. Washington, McMahon said. But, she said, Washington – though famous for well-deserving reasons – also benefitted from a close friendship with President Teddy Roosevelt, which provided him with a certain “cache” that Randolph never sought nor had, McMahon said.

“Her name is largely not on the school buildings. There are not very many Virginia Randolph schools, unlike Booker T. Washington, where there are many around the country,” McMahon said.

Still, Randolph did benefit from some good fortune in her own way.

Henrico Schools Superintendent Jackson Davis, who doubled as a famed photographer of the era, learned of the Negro Rural School Fund of the Anna T. Jeanes Foundation (more commonly known as the Jeanes Fund), a $1-million effort by the Quaker philanthropist Jeanes to support rural Black schools in the South. He applied for funding from the foundation for a supervising industrial teacher who could travel to each of the more than 20 Black schools in Henrico, then tabbed Randolph for the position once the funding was approved.

After her first year in the role, the county’s report about her work was published and dubbed “The Henrico Plan.” Davis had about 1,000 copies of it printed and distributed to school divisions throughout the South, where it became the foundation for similar efforts.

As a result, it’s impossible to underestimate Randolph’s impact, McMahon said, “when you think about the 1,000-plus teachers who were ultimately were trained by her and then thousands of other teachers that those thousand teachers impacted, and then hundreds of thousands of children [taught by them]. When you think about the math today, there are probably millions of people alive today who may not know it, but who were impacted by the work of Virginia Randolph. And I just think, what an amazing legacy, for a single individual – who did not come from wealth, who did not come from power.

“It wasn’t her own largesse of ‘Everyone look at me, what a great educator I am,’ it’s that other people saw her success and wanted to replicate it. She knew that what she did made a difference, but she wasn’t doing it for herself, she wasn’t doing it for fame and fortune.”

To McMahon, the legacy of Virginia Randolph deserves a much wider audience than it has enjoyed to date. That’s a sentiment echoed by the new caretaker of the Randolph Museum, former seven-term Fairfield District Supervisor Frank Thornton, who also was a longtime educator and professor of French at Virginia Union University.

“My vision right now is to make sure more people know about this lady,” Thornton said of Randolph, who is interred just in front of the museum. “She was a warrior of education, she was a humanitarian. She had this tenacity. As a person of color, she also had the right temperament for the times. I’m sure she was called Aunt Jemima and other things, but she persisted. And that, I think, is her legacy, because the students she produced, they persisted.”

McMahon, a longtime teacher herself, marvels at how much Randolph did. In addition to teaching full-time, she also was raising money for Black schools in Henrico to be built and to continue operating, since they received government funding that amounted only to pennies on the dollar in comparison to white schools in the county.

“I recognize in her how much work that was – not just to show up in a classroom every day but to take on the challenge of funding schools as well,” McMahon said.

During her research, McMahon uncovered some rare journals educational journals written for Jeanes teachers by Jeanes teachers, including Randolph. They gave a new insight into Randolph’s own way of thinking, McMahon said, in a way that superficial newspaper coverage from the era could not.

“The newspapers are great. . . but they don’t get to the heart of who she was,” McMahon said. “It was really gratifying and fun for me to come across her own writing and not somebody else’s description of her.”

Perhaps key to Randolph’s persistence in doing whatever she could to reach, and teach, as many children as possible was the memory of her own childhood, which she described in one of those journal entries. In it, she described that she herself could not read as a child and that when she was 6 years old, her teacher “sort of gave up on her,” McMahon said.

But, through her own persistence, Randolph was teaching others little more than a decade later, beginning to establish an unintentional legacy that continues to grow.