Philip Banks and Amy Banks
“My favorite person in the world.” At StoryCorps, attorney Philip Banks remembers his grandmother Amy, a Brazos County teacher and school superintendent in the 1930s and 1940s who fought for better education for African Americans and for people in rural areas. The 1973 graduate is interviewed by his daughter, Amy, also an attorney, who was named after his grandmother.
- [Philip] My grandmother was off of the Frontier. She had been raised out in the country. She was very much kind of a pioneer type person. When I was a kid, one of my favorite things was she would fix me fried chicken for breakfast which was something they did on the farm but Amy was very independent and she became a schoolteacher. And in the early days, schoolteachers weren't allowed to be married. Lady schoolteachers could not be married so when she got married, she quit teaching school and was a mom and a housewife. And then when my grandfather, his name was Edgar Neely, when granddaddy passed away, she went back to teaching school. At that time, this was 1934 or thereabouts, at that time the position of county school superintendent paid more than teaching school. She was in charge of all the rural schools. She started a bookmobile where the kids out in the country could get to check out books from the library and this was not like today when we got transportation. They were pretty isolated out there.
- [Amy] And at the time, the bookmobile was a pretty novel idea.
- [Philip] She had the first one I think. And she started the bookmobile. She also did quite a bit to improve the African American schools in Brazos County and hired a African American lady named Pauline Watkins. She got some special money from some kinda grant back east and she hired this lady to come in and really revamp the African American schools. I think every time she ran, she ran every two years until she was finally defeated in 1944, but every time she ran one of the things that her opponents would use against her was that she was an N word lover. And that she was trying to do too much for the Black people. And so later on when she was an old woman and she was in a nursing home and she was my favorite person in the world, which is why I named you after her.
- [Amy] Yes.
- [Phillip] But I ask her, I said, "How did somebody from Iola, Texas whose parents were from Alabama turn out to be such a liberal?" And she said, "Honey, I wouldn't trying to be a liberal, I was trying to be a Christian."
- [Amy] I love that.
- [Philip] And she was a wonderful woman and like I say, really stood up for things that she believed in. After my granddad passed away, she raised her three daughters by herself. And she had to take in boarders. She ran a boarding house and took in boarders and my mom and my aunts had to give up their rooms to these people that would pay rent.
- [Amy] Any you might've already said this but she was, was it the first female?
- [Philip] She was the first woman to be elected county school superintendent in the state of Texas.