67 pages • 2 hours read
The Small and the Mighty: Twelve Unsung Americans Who Changed the Course of History, From the Founding to the Civil Rights Movement
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Part 2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2: “The Next Needed Thing”
Part 2, Chapter 4 Summary: “Virginia Randolph, Virginia, 1890”
Virginia Randolph was born to formerly enslaved parents in Richmond, Virginia. Her father died when she was a girl, leaving her mother alone with four young daughters. However, her mother worked hard to ensure that her daughters grew up free and educated.
Virginia attended school and started working at eight years old, going to a neighbor’s home to perform housework before and after her classes. Her mother impressed upon her the importance of cleanliness and doing “the next needed thing” to make sure she continued working for a better future (46). At 16, Virginia graduated from Richmond Colored Normal School with a teaching qualification and began working as a teacher.
Virginia’s pedagogy was controversial within Richmond’s Black community. Many African American parents wanted their children to receive the same academic education as white children, and they felt that Virginia wasn’t delivering that promise because her classes focused on things like cooking, basketmaking, and furniture construction. However, the county was short on teachers, and there was no one to replace Virginia.
Virginia began teaching at Mountain Road School when it was severely underfunded and underdeveloped in comparison to nearby schools for white children. At the time, state spending inequalities meant that Black children’s education was often worth less than one-third the cost of white children’s education. African Americans wanted their children to go to school, but poverty and transportation were often limiting factors. Guided by the principle of doing “the next needed thing” (51), Virginia began to improve the small schoolhouse using her own time and money. However, Black parents still argued that she was teaching their children manual skills, not the intellectual work that white children did in school. Virginia, however, was committed to “doing the hard work of inventing Black education for a new century” (53), and she slowly began to win over the parents in her community.
Part 2, Chapter 5 Summary: “Henrico County, Virginia, 1907”
In Henrico County, Virginia, many of the white residents approved of Booker T. Washington’s education model that Virginia Randolph was offering her students. Booker was a Black educator who believed that “good citizenship, literacy, and job skills” would eventually lift Black people out of poverty (54). Henrico County secured money from the Jeanes Fund, which a wealthy Northerner had established to aid in developing rural Black schools. Virginia agreed to become the Fund’s supervising teacher, a role in which she would make history.
Virginia was so successful that counties across the South began to replicate the “Henrico Plan.” However, many African American intellectuals of the time viewed Booker’s education model as a capitulation to white supremacy and called teachers like Virginia “double agents” for trying to secure funds from white donors. Virginia remained focused on her students and delivering the next thing they needed. A key part of her success was winning the community’s trust. She traveled to small churches across the county every Sunday and always stood up to introduce herself when the preacher called for announcements. She put in “years of effort,” but it finally began to pay off.
Virginia saved all her money and used it to buy parcels of land around her schoolhouse. Then, she deeded it back to the county so that it would belong to the school. On this land, she built a number of new classrooms and dormitories and hired more teachers. By 1929, the little one-room schoolhouse was a small complex called the Virginia Randolph Training Academy. However, tragedy struck when the school burned to the ground. Virginia was so devastated by the loss that she had to be hospitalized and sedated, but after a week, she went back to work. As she had been doing for years, she asked herself, “What was the next needed thing?” (61), and she set about developing plans for a new school. She raised money inside and outside of her community, and by 1930, the new school was complete.
By 1938, Virginia had purchased another 50 acres, complete with a farmhouse that she intended to turn into a boys’ dormitory and a working farm school. She planned to deed the land back to Henrico County when it was paid for, and a professor at the University of Richmond urged the county to pay off the rest of Virginia’s mortgage. By the time the county agreed, Virginia had already paid $15,000 on the land, leaving a balance of just $5,000. Virginia was reportedly very moved by the gesture, but McMahon points out “the audacity” that Henrico County had to “act like they were doing her some kind of giant favor” by contributing this small amount to pay for land that Virginia planned to give them (63). Virginia was undoubtedly an incredibly selfless and hardworking person, but she also was forced to exist amid racist systems that forced her to spend her own life savings on a school for rural Black students that should have been paid for with state funds.
Virginia’s career spanned almost 60 years and encompassed all the great and tragic events of the first half of the 20th century. She traveled widely and trained countless teachers, sharing her view of schools “as tools to fight systemic poverty” (64). When Henrico County hired her, tens of thousands of lives and the course of American education were changed forever.
Part 2 Analysis
Part 2 tells the story of Virginia Randolph and introduces the concept of “the next needed thing,” which becomes one of The Small and the Mighty’s guiding principles. When Virginia began teaching in Henrico Country, she was working with nothing but a rundown one-room schoolhouse. Over the course of her 30-year career, she contributed to improving Black education across the South by asking herself what the next thing was that needed to be done. Some Black leaders objected to the educational model that figures like Booker T. Washington and Virginia advocated, arguing that this model perpetuated white supremacy by teaching Black children cooking and farming instead of the more academic education that white children were receiving. McMahon defends this model as a product of its time and as evidence of History as a Continuum of Progress: Black students in Virginia’s era needed to overcome centuries of enslavement and lack of education, and they needed to find employment in a profoundly racist society. Her methods were meant to address the needs of “the whole child, their family, and the community at large” (64). For Virginia, an education focused on tangible, marketable skills was “the next needed thing.”
Virginia’s early life offers clear evidence of Hope and Resilience in the Face of Adversity. McMahon highlights the adversity she faced as the child of formerly enslaved parents in a state that, decades after the end of the Civil War, remained deeply segregated and unequal. From the age of eight, Virginia’s education was paired with labor, as she worked as a housekeeper to pay her way. This experience mirrors that of the young Booker, who worked as a custodian to pay for his boarding school education. These formative experiences instilled in both Booker and Virginia a belief in the power of hard work and perseverance.
Like Clara Brown, Virginia was committed to supporting her community, even at a steep personal cost. She purchased land to build her school with her own money and then gifted it back to Henrico Country, something that would have been unthinkable from a white teacher. This story raises new questions about The Importance of Forgotten Figures in Shaping History: McMahon points out stories like this often emphasize “the incredibly selfless act of an individual” (63). However, simply celebrating people like Virginia for their generosity and selflessness “ignore[s] the racist systems” that forced Virginia to spend her own money so that her students could have a place to learn (63). In celebrating the work of forgotten figures, McMahon argues, it is also necessary to examine the unjust social structures that caused them to be forgotten. It is a narrative that glosses over the ugly reality and hides the true obstacles that people like Virginia faced.
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