Chapter 02: Early Education and the Idea of Going to College
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Description
In this chapter, Mr. Brewer explains that despite modest educational resources, his teachers prepared him to study and learn, though he had no clear idea of going to college. He explains how he worked throughout his school years. On relocating to Dallas, he explains, he was exposed to different teachers and different professional roles for African-Americans and, by his senior year, was thinking about going to college. One sister had attended vocational nursing school and another had attended a small black college. He discusses the turbulent environment of the 1960s and explains how he started at Bishop College in Dallas, Texas.
Identifier
BrewerCC_01_20190516_C02
Publication Date
5-2-2019
City
Houston, Texas
Interview Session
Cecil C. Brewer, RN, BSN, MS, Oral History Interview, May 02, 2019
Topics Covered
The Interview Subject's Story - Educational Path; Personal Background; Character, Values, Beliefs, Talents; Experiences Related to Gender, Race, Ethnicity; Personal Background; Faith; Women and Diverse Populations; On Texas and Texans; Cultural/Social Influences
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Disciplines
History of Science, Technology, and Medicine | Oncology | Oral History
Transcript
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
How did you begin to bring that intense awareness of the environment into this new environment in Dallas? Because, obviously, I’m interested in how after the few years, you are positioning yourself that you’re going to go on, you’re going to go to college, and you’re selecting what you’re going to do with the rest of your life. So how did that all happen?
Cecil C. Brewer, RN, BSN, MS:
I think what happened is that my instructors, my teachers in Rosser had prepared me how to study and to have a hunger to learn. And I was able to demonstrate to my new teachers and to the other students that I was pretty smart. When I would be challenged to take a test, I would make good scores. That was impressive to those around me. And I’ve never had a gymnasium to go to, to do any type of activity. We had a gymnasium with a basketball court, and that was amazing. And I was a very good athlete, but I was a natural athlete, and that began to—that experience brought me many friends, and I became part of the group. I was relatively very smart, intelligent, I was a good athlete, so I’m assimilating into the group. At that time, in the seventh grade and the eighth grade, I was in that middle school, and I did well in that assimilation into the grades. And in the ninth grade, I was transferred to Lincoln High School, which is also located in the South Dallas area on what is now known as Malcolm X Boulevard. At the time, it was known as Oakland Avenue, which is a much larger school, and it’s an old school, which was to create—was established in the 1940s, but it was a very nice school, and I would imagine, a thousand kids at the time or more. And that didn’t shock me anymore because I had been to John Henry Brown Middle School in the seventh and eighth grade. Now, I’m in the ninth grade, and I’m doing pretty well. I—
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
When did you get the idea in your head that you would go to college? How did that get there?
Cecil C. Brewer, RN, BSN, MS:
I think that the idea of going to college was something that probably was built over time. I don’t think that was the issue in my ninth grade or tenth grade. I think my thought process at that time was to get a good job, a better job than working on the farm. By being in a single-parent home, I was never without working. Even when we came to—moved to Dallas in 1960 after my father passed away, my brother and I, we did odd jobs. There was a little cafeteria around, we went, and we washed dishes, or we cleaned the floors. We were very industrious. I recall we made all those shoe—we our own little shoe-shine kits, so we went into the very little establishments, the bars and clubs, and shined shoes and got the little quarters. And so it was always being—using our skill set, innovation, innovativeness, how to survive, how to be self-sufficient. I think those things were grounded before then.In the ninth grade at Lincoln High School, we continue—I continued to work. We went through what we called throwing papers. That’s an old thing now but like the Dallas Morning News and the Dallas Times Herald, like the Houston Chronicle, we would get a paper route, and that was our way of getting additional money for our needs as teenagers for shoes and sneakers and buying lunch because in Dallas, we were still very poor. And in the summertime, we would get jobs in the restaurants in the downtown area, which paid a little more and we—so work was never an issue. It had never been an issue with me.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
When did you start to think about the next step? Was there a teacher who encouraged you? How did that all happen?
Cecil C. Brewer, RN, BSN, MS:
Well, I think one of the things that happened at Lincoln High School is that as we moved from the freshman to the sophomore and the junior year, we went to different levels of classes and —whether be it in literatures or just maths or history programs, you began to see a different flavor of teachers and professions. I was more interested in the industrial side of the educational process at that time because Lincoln had industrial education where you could take drafting, architectural drawings, woodwork, metalwork, electronics, auto mechanics, or a mixture of those industrial classes and learn a skill. And I was very interested in the architectural drawing side of the skill. I took the woodwork, and I do—and I still have skills on how to do woodwork today, but I was more interested in the mechanical drawing and the drafting inside.But going back to the classroom, I was also pretty good in math and so I think I—and I was pretty good in the science area, physics. We took physics and biology. We did have a nurse there, but I wasn’t that friendly with the nurse, but we did have a nurse at—who’s on campus at Lincoln. I would say my interest in further education probably started around my senior year probably because no one had ever gone to college in my family at that time. I had an extended education post high school. And in my senior in high school, I had a sister who went to vocational nursing school in Dallas and obtained her licensed vocational nursing certificate, LVN certificate, which we all thought was just great in the family. And I had another sister who entered college at Bishop College in Dallas, and that was a small, black—a historically black college in Dallas, Texas. It originally was in Marshall, Texas, but they relocated to Dallas in the early ’60s. So now, I’m beginning to see college as an option. And also in playing and in being involved in the athletic side of things at Lincoln, I see my buddies, my peers, some of them getting scholarships to go universities, probab—so now, I want to do the same. I want a scholarship. I had guys who I played basketball with, which was my specialty, getting scholarships to go to places like Midwestern University, Iowa State University, Prairie View College at that time, Prairie View University. And so now the thought process of wanting to go to college is there because you see other of your peer level going places.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Making it happen, yeah.
Cecil C. Brewer, RN, BSN, MS:
Making it happen, so—
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
So how did you make it happen? There’s a lot of pieces that had to fall in place there. (laughs)
Cecil C. Brewer, RN, BSN, MS:
Well, I think it’s my post high school days, oh, is quite interesting. I did try out for—first of all, I graduated, and I had pretty good grades when I graduated, and I was all over the board as to what type of profession I wanted to pursue.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
When did you graduate from—
Cecil C. Brewer, RN, BSN, MS:
I graduated from Lincoln High School in 1966. And in the 1960s, there was a lot going on in this world.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
There sure was.
Cecil C. Brewer, RN, BSN, MS:
We were in the mix of all of the things that were happening in our world—in this community, civil rights and Vietnam War and JFK was killed in Dallas and—
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Yeah, you were already in Dallas when JFK died.
Cecil C. Brewer, RN, BSN, MS:
Right. I actually went to the parade route the day he died, I mean he was assassinated. I actually got to see him on the parade route. And so there was just this big mesh of things that are happening here in Dallas, so all of that had an impact on you because you’re trying to—you’re young, you’re a teenager, you’re trying to make a decision of where you go from now and where you’re going. We had all this black power and Black Panthers and NAACP and all, you know.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Were you a bit radicalized at that time? Did you consider yourself an activist for race rights, or what was your relationship with all of that?
Cecil C. Brewer, RN, BSN, MS:
I don’t think I would say I was a radical activist. I knew radical activists, I knew some of the original Black Panthers and those things, but I was more a laid-back type of person. I was not an activist, I was laid-back, but not a pushover if you will. I mixed in with groups quite well, which is—was maybe my upbringing. And when you’re on a farm, you’re kind of—you’re raised in a farm, you don’t have that radicalness, you’ve got to get along and move along. And so those characteristics carried, and I was able to get along with a lot of different groups. There were lots of little gang activities going on because a lot of the groups that we were raise—by the community we were raised in were more of an area where we had a lot of families and family cottages and communities. We also had the public housing or we called it projects, and they were kind of territorial. If you lived in this housing area, you don’t—if you lived in this part of town, you don’t go there. Because it’s cliquish, and you had to learn how to maneuver yourself and not get caught up in—too much into the cliques because it was—you can get in trouble, you can get hurt. And by being an athlete, you get some privileges and you kind of get some respect, and so... But I think that was instrumental in my mind of getting me to where I wanted to be.So I knew my drafting skills were pretty good, but we had a very excellent drafting teacher at Lincoln High School who really taught. A lot of his students went on to college who studied architecture or mechanical engineering and things like that. I thought maybe I want to be, what you call, a machinist and, nah, I didn’t want to do that. So I worked in tons of different restaurants till my high school years not because I wanted to, because I had to. And so I was able to move up in the ranks. You start out low maybe on washing dishes or washing pots or they call it busting tables, cleaning off tables to learning how to cook. So I moved up to where I could cook. I was, what you call, a fry cook, and I thought maybe I wanted to become a culinary artist. So I started to read about different professions that probably didn’t take a lot of money to go to school and—but you can get a nice education fast and make a very nice living, so I wanted—[I thought?] I pursued—maybe I want to become a culinary artist. And I read, and I said, maybe, you could go to France and learn to cook and you could travel. And I said, after giving that a thought, “No, that’s not what I want to do.” (laughter) And just like anybody, any 18-year-old, 17-year-old mixed up in life, you—what do I really want to do. And so finally, I ended up going to school in Dallas at Bishop College at—behind my sister, and my career path was accounting. I was pretty good in math, and I can deal with the numbers and things like that.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Now, what year did you start? Was that right after you graduated from—
Cecil C. Brewer, RN, BSN, MS:
Nineteen sixty-six.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
In 1966? Okay, mm-hmm.
Cecil C. Brewer, RN, BSN, MS:
And I went there, and it’s a religious college, right, a religious school, so I was—
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
What was the denomination?
Cecil C. Brewer, RN, BSN, MS:
Baptist.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Baptist, okay.
Cecil C. Brewer, RN, BSN, MS:
And so that was very good. I think that was a very good exposure because the requirements were that everyone who was at that school had to take two years of bible study and some very strict rules. That was not a problem for me being to follow rules and regulations because that was kind of my upbringing. And I also played basketball there and having—I had a great time. But there was a pivotal turning point in my life while I was at Bishop College. I made new friends in college with all types of people who had all types of pursuits in their life and I had a—I met a guy. I lived at home, but I commuted to school. Bishop was located in Dallas, in South Dallas but much farther away from where I lived, and it’s located in a section of town called Highland Hills. And at that time, Highland Hills was a very new community of modest homes for blacks. It is almost like a middle-class community for blacks and very clean and new, and the college was brand new, and everything was just shining.
Recommended Citation
Brewer, Cecil C. RN, BSN, MS and Rosolowski, Tacey A. PhD, "Chapter 02: Early Education and the Idea of Going to College" (2019). Interview Chapters. 904.
https://openworks.mdanderson.org/mchv_interviewchapters/904
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