By Alice Bernstein, Correspondent
My story about George Dawson, born in in Marshall, TX in 1898 first appeared in the Tennessee Tribune and elsewhere in 2002! The meaning of Mr. Dawson’s life today, in the 21st century, grows larger every day. He represents what Eli Siegel, founder of the education Aesthetic Realism, identified as “the force of ethics,” working in reality and in people throughout history. Here is my original story, ending with a thrilling 2021 update.
As I read George Dawson’s memoir, Life Is So Good (co-authored by Richard Glaubman, published by Random House), I was stirred by two starkly different things: his enormous pride in learning to read at age 98, and his personal account of the racism so shamefully rampant in America. It moves me that George Dawson came to know of Aesthetic Realism, and shortly before he passed away at age 103, he told me that he was grateful to Mr. Siegel for what he explained.
Books: A Way of Knowing the World and People’s Feelings
People, young and old, are thrilled by Mr. Dawson’s story: his enthusiasm about reading criticizes the way we can limit ourselves, and makes vivid that it’s never too late to learn. “Man’s mind,” wrote Eli Siegel, “was made to know everything,” and George Dawson shows how true this is. He said:
My first day of school was January 4, 1996. I was ninety-eight years old and I’m still going….I’m up by five-thirty to make my lunch, pack my books, and go over my schoolwork. Books was something missing from my life for so long….I learned to read my ABC’s in two days—I was in a hurry….Now I am a man that can read.
When a 5th grader asked “What was the first book that you chose to read on your own?” Mr. Dawson answered, “The Bible.” His favorite passage is from John 1:23: “I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness.”
The beauty of reading and what affected George Dawson so much, are explained by Mr. Siegel in his essay “Books” from Children’s Guide to Parents and Other Matters (Definition Press):
Every time you read a book, someone else’s feelings meet yours, and mix with yours. You are always being affected by other people’s feelings; but books are the big way of bringing to a person the feelings he might never have otherwise.
This is what happened as I read Life Is So Good: Mr. Dawson’s feelings mingled with mine in a way that made my mind larger.
Through him we see America in a new way. His grandparents endured the brutal injustice of slavery in the South. Later, as freed slaves, they worked their way to Texas, where they received forty acres and a mule. George Dawson was born in Marshall in 1898 in a 3-room log cabin.
His life of hard work began at age 4 on his parents’ farm, combing cotton and pressing sugar cane; later building levees, working in a sawmill, laying railroad tracks and breaking wild horses. Readers can feel so much—from the pain of racial injustice and segregation, to the wonder of seeing the first airplanes and automobiles, “That Model T was beautiful…polished black with a
shiny brass radiator cap”—and his account of reading a book and signing his name for the first time at age 98! “Life is so good,” he said at 100, and “I do believe it’s getting better.”
Some of the most vivid accounts of baseball—the beautiful technique and style of the game—are in his descriptions of playing in the Negro Leagues in the 1920s. And we are also there as he tells of a hair-raising game played against a white team which regarded all pitches to black players as strikes. To make every at-bat count, Dawson’s team came out ready to swing and, despite the racist rules, they won the game—which meant they literally had to run for their lives!
Mr. Dawson’s life, while unique, says so much about America and what all people are hoping for.
Contempt, Feelings, Racism
The existence of books, I learned from Aesthetic Realism, comes from the deepest desire of every person: to know and like the world honestly. But there is another desire, contempt. When we have contempt, the last thing we want to do is to see a person’s feelings as real.
Unforgettable is George Dawson’s account of the lynching he witnessed at age 10, of his friend Pete Spillman, a youth of 17, falsely accused of raping a white woman. This murder (like thousands of others) went unreported and unpunished, even when the child born to the woman was white. Almost a century later, Mr. Dawson asked, “Why am I still here?” and answered: “I am the only man alive that knows the truth about Pete Spillman [and] I can’t let the truth die with me.” Most people never experience such horror, and I respect George Dawson enormously for his courageous life-long desire for justice to come to his friend.
I say here with deep gratitude that Aesthetic Realism is the one body of knowledge that explains the cause and answer to these horrors. “How can ordinary people, with families, who tuck their children into bed at night, become a lynch mob?” asked Ellen Reiss in The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known, #1408:
Every person who took part in a lynching had been looking for a chance to see something as against him; to punish and annihilate it; to make himself wholly right and good, and someone not himself wholly wrong and evil. It is horrible and completely unforgivable. Yet the elements I have described have been welcomed by everyone in some fashion….We won’t understand how persons can take another person and torment and kill him (in the American South; or Germany of the 1940s; or anywhere) until we understand the contempt that is in everyone.
My contempt was criticized in Aesthetic Realism lessons taught by Eli Siegel. I learned, for instance, that my hope to feel superior made me prejudiced against my own sister. Because her appearance and disposition were different from mine—Judy was blond, lively and welcoming; I was brunette, serious and aloof—I felt she showed me up. I didn’t see how I tried to show her up by feeling I was deeper and better. I unfairly saw her as against me and was mean to her.
In a lesson Mr. Siegel explained the cause of my pain and what could change it. “The only thing you’ve been troubled by with Judy,” he said, “is that you’ve been mean to her. She is different from you. Lots of people are. Now what are you going to do with people who are different?” And Mr. Siegel continued so kindly “Don’t be kept back by injustice. [Difference] is part of education….You can enjoy using other people to see yourself better, particularly those people who are very different from you.” As I learned that Judy had feelings and hopes like mine—we both wanted to be happy, to be cared
for and expressed—I became kinder and had new self-respect. I began to see our differences, and the differences of others, as interesting, friendly, and adding to me.
George Dawson suffered greatly from racism. In his book he tells of struggling with his own prejudice against white people and feeling that they can’t be trusted. He recalls his father saying, “Don’t have no dealings with white people….Somebody will get hurt.” While this is understandable and what many African Americans still rightfully have reason to feel, I respect Mr. Dawson for deciding to sign a book contract with his white co-author. “I felt so good,” he said. Later, when he told a reporter, “I don’t know whether it will ever get to where one man is the same as another,” I felt he expressed the yearning of humanity for the knowledge of Aesthetic Realism. The solution to racism, the only alternative to contempt, is in this powerful, kind statement by Eli Siegel:
It will be found that black and white man have the same goodnesses, the same temptations, and can be criticized in the same way. The skin may be different, but the aorta is quite the same.
George Dawson can encourage everyone. He showed that a person wanting to know, including through books, can respect himself and have an increasingly happy life. At 103, while he was studying with Mr. Carl Henry at the Lincoln Instructional Center in Dallas, he said:
I always had a dream that I would learn how to read….All my life, I had been just too busy working to go to school. [Now] every morning I get up and I wonder what I might learn that day. I can’t wait….I am so grateful to have this chance to go to school.
I’m happy to have learned from George Dawson about America and about how a unique yet representative person sees the world. And I am grateful for my continuing Aesthetic Realism education about how to be truly kind and to criticize contempt everywhere it may be. This is what Aesthetic Realism can teach to all people. Dear reader, it is the knowledge you were born to know.
*
2021 Comment
Texas Update: George Dawson’s autobiography inspired many readers and led to media attention in print and on television, along with local speaking engagements.
In 2021, I spoke with Richard Glaubman who recounted a wonderful experience he and Mr. Dawson had as a result of speaking in an economically fortunate community in South Dallas that is not ethnically diverse. A young boy was excited to hear Mr. Dawson’s story about learning to read—so much so, that he told his father, who was on the School Board in Southlake, that he wished the new intermediate school (then in process) could be named for Mr. Dawson. Mr. Glaubman said that the passionate wish of this child, so unlikely to ever become a reality, in time did come to pass! And he encouraged me to interview Mr. Ryan Wilson, the principal of what became, the George Dawson Middle School, which I was glad to do.
Principal Wilson was pleased and proud to describe the impact on children and adults alike, of George Dawson’s visit to Southlake, and the role of the 5th grader in changing history on behalf of education and justice. Mr. Wilson recounted the intense deliberations and votes by the School Board—which ultimately led to historic change. I was moved as he explained that this school is the only building of 11 in the district that is not named after a local legend such as President George H.W. Bush. George Dawson was posthumously honored when the Carroll Independent School District of Texas inaugurated the George Dawson Middle School. At the ceremony, Mr. Dawson’s son and other relatives, his beloved teacher Carl Henry, and co-author Richard Glaubman–all spoke of his legacy. A distinguished bust of Mr. Dawson greets all who enter the campus.
In 2003, and every year since, on January 17th, Mr. Dawson’s birthday, a celebration takes place at the school with readings from his book. Ryan Wilson said, “It’s really cool to watch kids get a glimpse at what Mr. Dawson’s life was like. Many of the topics are racially sensitive. It’s extra special for those kids in the middle of the day to actually read about that alongside Mr. Dawson’s family and others.”
Update: New York City: As a result of my 2001 article appearing in The Harlem Times, the New York Public Library named an Adult English Language and Literacy class after George Dawson at the Aguilar Public Library branch on West 110th Street. I was invited to celebrate with tutors and students, some born in countries far away, who had completed the 20 hour-course. It was thrilling to hear people with accents from all over the U.S. and beyond, reading from my article and saying George Dawson’s name and learning too, about Eli Siegel and Aesthetic Realism. —AB
