Heading: (African American, 1945)
Author: [Angelou, Maya]
Title: Surveyor - George Washington High School yearbook, 1944-1945
Place Published: San Francisco
Publisher:
Date Published: 1945
Description:

104 pp. (including ads). Illustrated from photographs. Original cloth; pictorial endpapers reproducing one panel of the later-controversial 1930s WPA mural on the life of George Washington.

On Page 38 is a group photo of "Low Seniors" who would graduate during the summer of 1945, at the end of the back row stands a young Black woman identified as Margarite Johnson. Some six years later, as a singer at San Francisco's Purple Onion night club, she would change her name to Maya Angelou. This may be the only published adolescent photo of the celebrated future poet and Civil Rights activist.

The book shows only a handful of other Black students at the school. None of the boys were in military uniform and only two were on the sports teams - both varsity football players. Perhaps Margarite was acquainted with one of these, Henry Williams, who, after Marine service, would go on join the San Francisco Police Department. Having observed the mistreatment of Black people by fellow officers and the barriers to promotion of Blacks within the Department - he himself would be the first African-American promoted beyond patrolman to Lieutenant - he would found the organization Officers for Justice, to address issues of racism in the Department and to speak out against the needless use of firearms by officers on duty, Williams himself, on retirement, would proudly throw his guns into the ocean.

Also significant are the endpaper illustrations which reproduced one panel of a 1930s WPA mural, depicting scenes from the life of George Washington. That panel showed the prostrate body of a Native American apparently killed by white pioneers. Another panel, not shown in the yearbook, was of Washington looking down on several of his Black slaves. Margarite was spared the anguish of having to see that scene every time she would open a yearbook. In 2019, the San Francisco School Board voted to destroy the murals but recently, that decision was reversed and the murals were allowed to remain on the walls of the school as lessons in shameful American history.

Small stain to front cover, student ink inscriptions throughout; good.