Rev. Don Speed Smith Goodloe (June 2, 1878 – September 2, 1959), born in the Lowell community, near Paint Lick, Kentucky, was a black teacher who became a pioneer for racial integration in the Unitarian church. He was the first principal of the Maryland Normal and Industrial School at Bowie for the Training of Colored Youth, also known as Maryland State Normal School No. 3—which later became Bowie State University.
Biography
Education
Goodloe first attended the Grammar School and Academy of Berea College, a racially integrated school in Berea, Kentucky, from 1893 to 1898. He completed his sophomore year in the Academy [Berea (KY) College Archives]. Berea College was founded in 1855 by Presbyterian abolitionist John G. Fee, who made the school's motto "God had made of one blood all peoples of the earth", quoting Biblical scripture. Berea claims to have been the only racially integrated college in the South until 1904, when Kentucky passed the Day Law, requiring all its schools to be segregated.
From 1898 to 1899, Goodloe attended a segregated normal school for the training of black teachers–Knoxville College in Knoxville, Tennessee, which was founded by the United Presbyterian Church. Here he met his future wife, Fannie Carey of Knoxville. They were married in Knoxville on June 9, 1899, after Fannie graduated from the college. Knoxville College offered classics, science, theology, agriculture, industrial arts, and medicine, as well as industrial training on the model of Hampton Institute, Booker T. Washington's Tuskegee Institute, and later, Bowie Normal School. Students at Knoxville cut timber, made bricks, and helped construct most buildings on campus.
Early career
Goodloe began his career as principal of a black public school at Newport, Tennessee fifty miles east of Knoxville. He held the post from 1899 to 1900. The Goodloes' first son, Don Burrowes, was born in Newport.
In 1900, the Goodloes moved to Greenville, Tennessee, near [Nashville], where Goodloe was a teacher and principal at Greenville College, a black normal school. Goodloe served there from 1900 to 1901. The next year they moved back to Lowell, where Goodloe taught from 1901 to 1903. Fannie gave birth to a second son, Wallis, in Lowell.
Meadville
The Goodloes moved to Meadville, Pennsylvania in 1904, so that Goodloe to complete his Bachelor of Arts degree at Allegheny College. He was also attracted to the Unitarian seminary there, Meadville Theological School. In Meadville, with two boys—and Fannie pregnant with their third child, Carey—Goodloe was quick to find work to help support them. He then enrolled at both Allegheny College and Meadville Theological School.
Goodloe was the fifth black to attend Meadville, and the first to graduate from the school. Others followed, and Goodloe can be said to have integrated the school. Although he did not face the angry resistance of George Wallace standing in the schoolhouse doorway, he likely encountered racial prejudice from some students and faculty. Unitarian Universalist minister Reverend Mark Morrison-Reed discussed this period of Goodloe's life in his book "Black Pioneers in a White Denomination."
In a 1903 letter, Meadville president Franklin Southworth states that Goodloe was a "residing elder in the Methodist Episcopal Church", and that although
Goodloe came to Meadville even though he knew it was unlikely he would be ordained by a Unitarian church, because none would accept a black minister. President Southworth wrote, "I find this morning in putting the possibilities squarely before him that he has come here with his eyes open, knowing that it is probably not a good way into the orthodox ministry, but ready to take the consequences."
Southworth continued, "What the negroes need in...[Goodloe's] judgement more than emotionalism in religion and more even than industrialism in education, is moral teaching and preaching." Goodloe proposed, said Southworth, "with the help of his wife, to start a small school composed of carefully selected and choice students, and to run the school along with his Sunday preaching."
Danville, KY
After graduating from both Allegheny College and Meadville Theological School in 1906, Goodloe resumed his career as a teacher at Danville Industrial Normal School and as a businessman in Danville—which was just twenty miles west of his family home in Lowell—from 1906 until 1910.
In 1910, the Goodloes left Danville, and Goodloe became vice-principal for a year at the Manassas Industrial School in Manassas, Virginia.