Segregation has existed in Arizona schools from the time Mexican and Native American children first walked through the classroom door, often being turned away and refused an education in predominantly white communities.
As African-Americans migrated west after the Civil War, laws banishing them from school rooms started appearing on legislative books.
A 1909 Arizona law allowed segregation of black students and by 1912, segregation was ordered in all grade schools. Legislation in 1921 included high schools, making Arizona one of the strictest western states banning blacks from white school rooms.
Many small towns with just a few black pupils could not afford to build a second school and instituted a unique method of separation by hanging a bed sheet between the races. While teachers usually taught all the children together, they sent black students to the other side of the sheet when officials visited.
This was the atmosphere that African-American Rebecca Huey Dallis encountered when she came to Arizona to teach in 1929.
Born in Connersville, Indiana, in 1896, Rebecca received her teaching degree from Swift Memorial College in Rogersville, Tennessee, in 1924.
The year before graduating from Swift College, on Dec. 23, 1923, she married William Curtis Dallis. The couple moved to Phoenix in 1929. William opened the Dallis Funeral Home, which he operated until 1932. Rebecca taught school in Mobile, Arizona, a predominantly black community about 30 miles south of Phoenix.
In 1939, Rebecca and William moved to Casa Grande.
Back in 1933, the black population of Casa Grande had reached the point that a separate “colored school” was required by the laws of the state. In September 1939, Rebecca Dallis replaced the retiring teacher in the one-room Southside Colored Grammar School, located in a far corner on the grounds of the white South School. The cramped school building accommodated between 50 and 70 students under Dallis’ tutelage. As one student remembered, entering the long narrow building made her feel “like cattle going through a chute.”
“You had to listen to all the noise from everybody,” said another student. “There were no divisions or separation in that building ... but we did the best we could because that’s all we had.”
Earning about one-third less than her white counterparts, Dallis was allotted tattered textbooks with missing pages and worn-down chalk from South School. She worked without a library or science equipment. Her students, forbidden to ride school buses with white students and banned from school playgrounds when white children were at recess, played with deflated soccer balls, old baseballs and bats.
Dallis was determined to produce strong, educated students. Her courses of study included extracurricular subjects as well as academic classes. With no school facilities for programs such as home economics, she taught students how to cook in her kitchen.
She had older children tutor youngsters outside under a tree to reduce the noise in the cramped classroom. When she discovered some of her students needed an understanding of Spanish to enroll in college, she ordered a correspondence course and learned the language right along with them. Many of her students went on to higher education. “She expected all of us to go to college,” said one student.
Integration became a volatile subject in Casa Grande during the late 1940s when a white farm woman, Louise Henness, argued before the board of education to approve equal schooling for all the town’s children. Public opinion, however, vetoed any vote for integration. Two years later, Henness again opened the discussion of integration in the schools and this time, the Casa Grande High School Board approved the issue. (Arizona endorsed statewide school integration in 1953.)
In 1952, Dallis left the narrow classroom of Southside to teach at Casa Grande’s new East School, acquiring the title of head teacher. But not until 1960 did the school board give her the title of principal, the job she had performed over the previous eight years.
Dallis retired from East School in 1962, but she certainly did not retire from teaching. Although records are unclear, she may have taught for several years at a school in Stanfield just west of Casa Grande. She also did volunteer work with developmentally challenged students as she had done at East School.
She also taught piano to many of Casa Grande’s children and was often called on to play at weddings and funerals.
One of her former students once said of her favorite teacher, “She was one of the most positive influences, other than my parents, in my life. She challenged all of us. She told us she expected great things from us.”
Rebecca Dallis died Feb. 13, 1971.
Dallis was named one of Arizona’s notable women honored in the history project “Making a Difference: Arizona Women Building Communities, 1900-1980,” sponsored by the Governor’s Division for Women; the Arizona State Department of Library, Archives and Public Records; and the Arizona Humanities Council.
In 1992, the old Southside Colored School was relocated onto the grounds of the Casa Grande Valley Historical Society and Museum, and renamed the Rebecca Dallis Schoolhouse.
