In the 1930s, a woman named Janie Bell Williams got a job at a school in Butlertown, an African American community in Amite City.

Administrators at a local Rosenwald school hired her to teach Black students. She was part of a movement.

Launched by Black education visionary Booker T. Washington and funded by New York businessman Julius Rosenwald, the Rosenwald schools emerged as pillars of Black communities across the rural, segregated South, enrolling the likes of John Lewis, Medgar Evers and Maya Angelou.

There are records of other Rosenwald schools in Louisiana. But much of their history disappeared when 90% of the little clapboard structures were torn down during desegregation. Annalists know where just 1% of the state’s Rosenwald schools stood, according to the Louisiana Trust for Historic Preservation.

For years, Amite City residents relied on stories passed down by ancestors to forge a murky picture of the school’s role in the Black community.

So when Dr. Antoinette Harrell found a dusty booklet memorializing Williams tucked away in a stack of old funeral programs, a single line of text mentioning her employment at the school caught her eye.

The program lent details about Williams’ life — that she grew up in Roseland, was a devout Baptist, and worked as a teacher for years before the Rosenwald school hired her — to this chapter of Black history largely ignored by government records and newspaper reports.

It also added to the sparse pile of known evidence that a Rosenwald school had stood in Amite at all.

“Finding the funeral program validated to me that there was a school here receiving funds for books, for buildings — for Black students,” said Harrell, a local genealogist, author, and archivist of Black history. “That is vital information — not just for genealogists but for students, historians and filmmakers.” 

Hidden history

The Williams pamphlet is one of 300 included in a new archive at Southeastern University and recreated online on Harrell’s website. The archive holds funeral programs amassed over generations by a single funeral home built to serve Black residents of this rural part of the Florida Parishes east of Baton Rouge.

It’s a continuation of Harrell’s years-long mission to assemble historical records in a pocket of the Deep South rich with Black history, but where racism and segregation left generations with few resources beyond oral storytelling to preserve it.

When Williams died in 2005, relatives celebrated her life where hundreds of Black families in St. Helena and Tangipahoa parishes have laid loved ones to rest: The Richardson Funeral Home in Amite City.

Since Alexander and Melissa Richardson founded the home in 1964, it has hosted funerals for three generations of Black residents in the Florida Parishes. Today, about 30% of people in St. Helena and Tangipahoa parishes — whose residents Richardson’s serve most regularly — are of African ancestry.

“The goal of this business was always for African American families to be able to put their loved ones to rest affordably and with dignity,” said Valerie Richardson, Alexander’s granddaughter and one of the home’s co-owners.

A sense of kinship extends across parish lines among Black families in St. Helena and Tangipahoa, and celebrations of life at Richardson’s have an intimacy about them.

“Everyone who comes here, we know,” funeral director Bobby Ginn Jr. said. “Every family’s service is individualized based on the life that person lived.”

Out of that familial atmosphere sprang a commitment to preserving the funeral programs that offered glimpses of Black life over the decades.

The bigger picture

For years, Alexander Richardson stowed away hundreds of programs the funeral home amassed, chronicling the lives and deaths of people born as early as the 1880s.

There was the obituary of Mae Louise Miller, daughter of Cain Walls, whose story of 20th century enslavement in Gillsburg, Mississippi appeared in ABC News and People Magazine.

Miller, her father and her sister told of a White family keeping them in bondage until 1963. But her Richardson Funeral Home obituary relays moments from later in her life, when she joined the 1960s civil rights movement, meeting people like Martin Luther King III and Essence Magazine editor Susan Taylor.

Musician Robert Parker was memorialized at Richardson’s, too, after he died at his home in Roseland last January. His 1966 hit “Barefootin’” took the country by storm.

“Every single one of those people had an individual and distinctive life,” said Dr. Samuel Hyde, director of Southeastern University’s History archives. “But they’re also part of a bigger, historical picture.”

Violence marked much of that history.

Founded in 1869 at the height of Reconstruction, Tangipahoa Parish lacked the fertile land that led a planter class to flourish in nearby Livingston Parish and the Felicianas. Disputes over property use drove bloody clashes between farmers, while White people lynched Black sharecroppers in the eastern Florida Parishes at the highest rate in Southeast Louisiana.

For places haunted by such painful pasts, the funeral programs offer more than remembrances. In the segregated society that emerged from the Reconstruction era, they became stand-ins for records that White people had access to, like death notices in newspapers, which Black residents did not.

“These became legal documents,” said Earl Richardson Jr., Alexander Richardson’s grandson and another of the home’s co-owners. “They would be used in court battles, for example, where someone would use a program to prove a family tie or right to custody.”

As they prepared this February to relocate the funeral home from its current Amite location to a new building several blocks away, the Richardson siblings found file after file of funeral programs in the home’s archives. They handed them over to Harrell. With plenty of time on her hands during the COVID-19 lockdown, she set about alphabetizing the paper programs that now reside at Southeastern.

She hopes to expand those to include programs from other funeral homes in the Florida Parishes, the eight parishes east of the Mississippi River and north of Bayou Manchac and lakes Maurepas and Pontchartrain.

When Harrell started her career as a genealogist, she first tried to unearth the her own family’s roots in the Florida Parishes. She recalls the pain of discovering how few newspaper articles, books and archives existed that could help her.

“When I first started this work, I wasn’t a grandmother,” she said. “I’m a grandmother now, and I don’t want my grandchildren to experience what I experienced. It felt like for all this time, our history doesn’t matter.”

In the growing archive of funeral programs, Harrell hopes future Black historians, students and genealogists will find a place from which to start their own research.

Residents of St. Helena and Tangipahoa parishes who wish to submit funeral programs to Dr. Antoinette Harrell’s archive are encouraged to email her at nurturingourroots@gmail.com. Learn more at nurturingourroots.blogspot.com.

Editor’s note: This file has been updated to correct the year when Janie Bell Williams died; it was 2005, not 2020.