Remembering Dillon County, South Carolina

Author

THE JAMES K. BRABOY STORY

Teaching is a profession that I have always had a great deal of respect for. I have known a lot of teachers in my life. Some I thought were very dedicated to their jobs in seeking to educate and train their students to the best of their abilities. Then I have known some that I felt were just in it for a paycheck and the benefits that the job offered. As I think back to my school days, and all the teachers I studied under, only two stand out in my mind as being really dedicated to giving their best to the profession they had chosen. I started school in 1946 at a small country school called Dothan, which was about six miles from Dillon and eight miles from Latta in Dillon County. There were six grades at the school—grades one through three were in one room and four through six in another room.

My first teacher was Mrs. Kate Berry, and she was one of the two that affected my life the most. Teaching was not as accelerated as it is now; you were taught a basic education of reading, writing and arithmetic. Even though Mrs. Berry taught three grades, she always took time to explain what she was trying to get across to the students. She always took the time to work with students that needed extra help. Mrs. Berry always looked after the smaller kids on the school ground, to make sure the older kids didn’t take advantage of them. Since I didn’t have brothers or sisters in school, this meant a lot to me.

After my first year at Dothan, the school closed, and I was sent to Latta. This was a big deal for me; the school was much larger and we had hot lunches and indoor bathrooms. I was elated when I found out that Mrs. Berry had also been moved to Latta and that she would be my second-grade teacher. I think that the leadership she gave me in my first two years of school gave me a big head start that would last me through my formal education.

The second teacher I would like to mention was Miss Hettie Willoughby. I wrote an article about her a couple of years back, and so many people who knew her commented on the article. Most agreed she was a great teacher. Miss Hettie was a person that you either loved or hated—there was no in-between. She had one purpose in life, and that was to be sure you got some math in the time you spent in her class. Miss Hettie was what you would call an old maid school teacher because she never married and teaching school was her whole life. I had her for math in the fifth and sixth grades, and in Miss Hettie’s class you behaved or you felt her wrath.

Miss. Hettie could not teach school today, because she had complete control of her classroom. You paid attention or you would get to know her famous paddle. She would probably be arrested today for child abuse, but she didn’t really have to paddle that many students, because you knew she could and would if need be. In her class, you learned more than math. You learned strict discipline, which in my opinion we need more of today.

This story is about a teacher that I never knew or had the opportunity to talk to, even though he taught school in Dillon County for thirty-seven years. I read a little about him in the local newspaper back in the late sixties, when he won the Teacher of the Year award for the state of South Carolina, but I never met the man or took time to find out something about him. There were never any books published about him, or anything on television, so I figured he must not have been too special.

When I began writing newspaper articles about five years ago, I was always looking for new and unusual stories to write about, and for some reason, the name of James K. Braboy kept running through my head. All I knew was that he taught school at some obscure school called Leland Grove. Even though I have lived in Dillon County all my life, I had no idea where this school was. When I married my present wife in 2002, she lived about six miles from the school, and I began to ask her some questions about the school and Mr. Braboy. She didn’t know a lot about the man personally, except that she had seen him on occasion and that he was an Indian. She stated that he was always very nice, and had a good manner about him.

In August 2005, I decided that I was going to research this man and maybe write an article on him. Bear in mind that this man had been deceased for twenty-nine years, so I figured that information might be pretty hard to find. One of the first places I went to was the Dillon School District office to talk with the superintendent of personnel. I asked to see the file on Leland Grove School, and she answered Well, they didn’t keep many records back then. She showed me the Leland Grove folder, and to my amazement, there were four sheets of paper in the folder. Leland Grove operated for forty years or perhaps longer, and the only records they had were four sheets of paper.

The superintendent said to me, Carley, that school has been closed for more than thirty-five years; I wasn’t even here when Leland Grove closed. It sounded to me like that they might have been a little ashamed of this school. I found out later that there was plenty of information on the white schools that had been closed for years. The next day, my wife and I went to the library to get what we could from the old newspapers that were on microfilm. There were just a few articles about James Braboy and Leland Grove, and they were all during the time that he was South Carolina Teacher of the Year. I knew nothing about James Braboy’s life or his time at Leland Grove.

I was determined to uncover this story, and the best place to start was with the people that knew him and went to Leland Grove School. So began a journey that would take us many miles and many hours of interviewing people in both North and South Carolina. A great breakthrough came when we found Mr. Braboy’s son-in-law, through the reading of Mr. Braboy’s obituary. His name is Cecil Madden, and he lives in Charlotte. We got in touch with Mr. Madden, and he was delighted that we were going to do the story. He visited us a couple of times and shared many pictures, articles and stories that Mr. Braboy had saved over the years. Mr. Madden’s wife, Dorothy Louise Braboy Madden, had passed away just a few months before we got in contact with him. Cecil Madden helped more than words can say to make this story come about. Mr. Madden had nothing but the highest respect for his father-in-law.

The James K. Braboy story would take more research and time than anything I have written, but to tell this exceptional man’s story was worth it all. What I planned to be one newspaper article turned out to be nine weeks’ worth of articles. When I decided to write this book, there wasn’t any doubt that this would be my feature story. With respect to an extraordinary man, this is the James K. Braboy story.

James Knox Braboy was born October 6, 1906, in Pembroke, Robeson County, North Carolina, on a tobacco farm, the oldest son of Tecumseh Bryan and Mary Jacobs Brayboy. (You will notice the difference in the spelling of the name, the reason to be explained later.) James Braboy had thirteen brothers and sisters. When his mother died in 1929, his father married Ruth Carter and they had five children. There was also an adopted child, for a total of twenty children. The Brayboy family was Indian, probably of Cherokee descent, but now known as the Lumbee tribe.

The Lumbee tribe is the largest Indian tribe east of the Mississippi, with a population of over fifty thousand. The tribe has also become the most educated tribe in the country, through the very fine University of North Carolina–Pembroke campus. The heaviest concentration of Lumbees is in Scotland, Robeson and Bladen Counties of North Carolina. The Brayboy name has been changed down through the years; it began as Brave Boy, which came from their Indian ancestors. James Braboy is the only one I can find that used his spelling of the name. I think this was due to the circumstances under which he left the state of North Carolina. You might say that James Braboy was born with a strike against him; he was born an Indian and there were not many opportunities for him in that time. He worked on the tobacco farm as a youth, and his father also had a sawmill. With all those children, Mr. Brayboy had plenty of help to run his business.

James K. Braboy in his younger years. Courtesy of Cecil Madden.

Baseball was a big part of James Braboy’s young life. He loved the game and played with Indian teams around Pembroke. James also loved school, and his passion as a young boy was to be a school teacher. He graduated high school at Pembroke and enrolled at the Indian Normal School, which would later become Pembroke College. A two-year diploma was all that the school offered, but he could teach school at that time on the two-year certificate.

James Braboy started his teaching career at the Indian elementary school near Pembroke. He was offered a teaching position in Nash County, North Carolina, due to a large movement of the Indians to that county to work on the tobacco farms of Nash County. His stay in Nash County didn’t last very long, as the Indians had a dispute with the landowners and moved back to Robeson County. Braboy also came back and took up teaching at Pembroke once again.

On December 19, 1931, James Braboy married Lily Costin Hall from McColl, South Carolina. There was only one problem with this marriage: Lily Hall was a white woman, and in those times it was against the law for an Indian to marry a white woman in Robeson County. Word got out about the marriage, and soon James Braboy was arrested and brought before a judge. The judge ordered him to leave his wife or leave the county.

Forced to leave Robeson County, the young couple moved across the North Carolina line to McColl, South Carolina, but there was no place for James to teach school. Things were much different here because there were no Indian schools. The couple wound up in Dillon County, and James Braboy began to do the only other thing he knew, and that was to farm. With a plow that someone in Dillon gave him and a rented mule, Braboy began to sharecrop a farm near where Old Pee Dee Park is located. James Braboy was at the lowest point in his life. He had studied so hard to become a teacher, and now he was living in poverty because of the color of his skin. James admitted later that he hated farming, but what was he to do? There were no other jobs he could get. The couple lived in a two-room sharecropper’s shack, the kind of home in which they would spend much of their life.

Faith had always been a big part of Braboys’ life. He was a religious