Parsons, Kansas Honored Former Douglass School Principal Levi Watkins with a Powerful Showing of Love, Admiration and Respect
- Donald V. Watkins
- Jun 22
- 7 min read
Updated: Jun 25
By: Donald V. Watkins
Copyrighted and Published on June 22, 2025
An Editorial Opinion
Sontana “Tana” Johnson was waiting for me at the airport in Tulsa, Oklahoma. She drove me to Parsons, Kansas last Wednesday.
Tana is the well-known, much-respected, community activist in Parsons who invited me to come back home for the city’s 2025 Juneteenth Celebration. This year's celebration honored my father, Dr. Levi Watkins.
I have lived in many places during my 76 years in this world, but Parsons is the only place I have called my “home.”
My birth certificate notes that I am the fifth child of Levi and Lillian Watkins, who were 37 and 31 when I was born. The certificate also states that my father was “Principal, Douglass School.” At the time, Douglas was the premier elementary and junior high school for “Colored” students in America.
In 1940, the Douglass junior high division was the only accredited four-year separate junior high school in Kansas. In 1946, the Douglas junior high division became the home to Chapter No. 446 of the National Honor Society, commencing with seven honor students. By 1947, Douglass students outperformed their peers in Parsons’s ten public schools.
Black Life in the "Free State" of Kansas
On January 29, 1861, Kansas was admitted to the Union as a “free state." Whites in Kansas voted against becoming a slaveholding state. That vote favorably impacted the lives of Blacks in Kansas for over a century.
The Kansas legislature never mandated racial segregation in housing, education, and public accommodations. Segregation existed, but it was mostly a byproduct of social pairings among ethnic communities.
The Black community in Kansas, which was 16,250 residents in 1870 (the first time the U.S. census counted Blacks as citizens), rose to 168,279 residents (or 10% of the state's population) by 1950. The state's Black community was hard working, fiercely independent, courageous, deeply religious, and very committed to the education of its children.
Between 1881 and 1949, Blacks in Kansas litigated 11 equal education cases all the way up to the Kansas Supreme Court and won an affirmance of the state's "equality mandate" in public education each time.
By the time the U.S. Supreme Court decided Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas in 1954, Blacks in Kansas were proficient in litigating and winning education-related cases that benefitted “Negro” students.
The Douglass School was an Early Model of Education Innovation
The Douglass School in Parsons, Kansas opened in 1908. By 1940, Douglass had earned a national reputation as the most advanced “Colored” school in America.
When longtime Principal A.E. Clark announced his retirement in 1940, Parsons school superintendent Rees H. Hughes conducted a nationwide search for his succesor. Hughes, who also founded Parsons Junior College, sought the "most promising young Negro educator” in America for the job.
Dr. Harold Fawcett, a professor of education at Northwestern University identified Levi Watkins as that person and recommended him to Hughes. Watkins earned his Master's degree from Northwestern in Fawcett's Education Administration and Leadership program.
Armed with Fawcett's recommendation, Hughes drove to Clarksville, Tennessee, where Dad was working as a teacher and assistant principal, and personally recruited him for the Douglass School principalship.
Hughes described a comprehensive support system for Douglass School that was unmatched in other school systems in America. Douglass operated in an ecosystem that rested upon five pillars of strength: (a) a first class faculty and staff, (b) strong, entrenched, and persistent community activism, (c) support from the local chapter of the NAACP and the Parsons Community Services Fund, (d) Blacks in Parsons had perfected the use of court litigation to advance and protect educational opportunities for their children, and (e) the school made the relentlessly pursued educational excellence its standard operating procedure.
In the 1940s, no other “Colored” school in America operated with this paradigm of collective advantages.
At 30-years-old and married to my 24-year-old mom, with no children of their own, Dad accepted the job. He served as the principal of the Douglass School for 9 years.
In April 1947, Dad organized, wrote, and published a "Parsons, Kansas Directory of Negro Residents and Organizations." In the Directory, Dad described Parsons this way:
“Parsons, with an estimated 15,000 population, is . . . . a First Class city offering excellent schools, good churches, fair employment opportunities, and fine people with pleasant racial relations.”
According to the Directory, Blacks accounted for 1,284 of the city’s population. Parsons had 603 “Negro families who maintained 403 homesteads” This meant that 403 of the Black families owned their home. Only 28% of the families were headed by females. Sixty-nine percent of these families had telephone service in their homes.
Blacks owned and operated 42 thriving businesses in Parsons. Many of these businesses had White patrons. Blacks also held managerial jobs in the Parsons school system, at the M-K-T Railroad Company, the Kansas Ordnance Plant, and within the ranks of two large labor unions.
Levi Watkins Took the Parsons, Kansas Model for Black Upward Mobility to Montgomery, Alabama
Dad’s successful principalship at the Douglass School opened the door to three successful university presidencies in three different states. Alabama was one of them.
In 1949, Dad brought the Douglass model for achieving academic excellence, fair employment opportunities, and social justice to Montgomery, Alabama. During his tenure at Alabama State College (ASC), Dad served in the following capacities: Veteran Affairs Officer, Assistant to the President, Business Manager, and President. Over time, Dad built the platform that was necessary to create, enhance, implement, and sustain the Douglass School model in Alabama.
In the 1950s, Dr. E.D. Nixon, the local chapter president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, and my Dad introduced a young Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr., to the art of organizing peaceful civil rights protests and using court litigation to advance educational opportunities for Blacks in Alabama.
In the 1960s, Dad helped to install ASC graduate Joe L. Reed as the young Executive Secretary of the 10,000 member Alabama State Teachers Association (ASTA). This organization, which merged into the 20,000 member Alabama Education Association (AEA) in 1969, litigated landmark civil rights cases for Blacks teachers (and others) throughout the state in the 1970s and 80s.
Dad also leveraged ASC resources to fund a social justice network that included the Johnnie Carr's Montgomery Improvement Association, the NAACP and SCLC, the Alabama Center for Higher Education, and Montgomery’s Black churches.
Dad personally mentored Joseph Cole, a former SGA president at Alabama State University, in the use of effective community leadership skills. After graduation from ASU, Cole became the Gadsden, Alabama Chapter SCLC president. Cole single-handedly desegregated every government body and agency in Gadsden through fearless protests and aggressive federal court litigation.
Once this necessary civil rights infrastructure was in place, Dad used Joe Reed’s ASTA/AEA platform and its dedicated stable of skilled civil rights litigators to desegregate the faculty and staffs of nearly all of Alabama’s K-12 public schools in Alabama and all of the state-supported junior colleges and technical schools.
In 1980, Dad organized, orchestrated, and launched the 25-year litigation that resulted in court-ordered doctoral programs, new undergraduate academic programs, and nearly $600 million in new funding (beyond the regular state appropriations), endowment money, and other tangible financial benefits for Alabama State University and Alabama A&M University.
In 1981, Dad attacked and dismantled Alabama’s bogus and racially discriminatory teacher certification testing program. University of Kansas testing expert, Dr. John Poggio, won this landmark case for the Black plaintiffs in the case. Three decades later, under Dr. Poggio's close scrutiny and diligent oversight, Alabama's discredited teacher testing program was replaced with a unlawful and properly validated one.
Unlike the “pleasant racial relations” Dad experienced during his civil rights activism in Parsons during the 1940s, he caught pure hell from the White guardians of the status quo in the "Cradle of the Confederacy" and "Heart of Dixie"for organizing, initiating, directing, and supporting the litigation that enhanced educational opportunities for Black public school, junior college, and university students and teachers in Alabama.
Epilogue
The Douglass School closed its doors in 1958. The building and grounds were sold to a private company. In 1962, the school was demolished, along with all its contents.
Dad successfully transferred the Douglas School model of educational excellence to ASC’s Laboratory School and enhanced it with college-level course offerings for high school students. The Laboratory School closed in 1969 in the wake of federal court desegregation orders.
The spirit and soul of Douglass School now resides within the walls of the impressive and growing Valiant Cross Academy in Montgomery, which was founded in 2015 by brothers Anthony and Fred Brock. Anthony Brock graduated from Alabama State University with a Master’s degree in Educational Leadership and Supervision.
In 2023, Valiant Cross Academy was named the winner of the prestigious Yass Prize. This award is often referred to as the "Pulitzer of Education Innovation." Along with national recognition, the Yass Prize included a $1 million cash award for Valiant Cross Academy.
Last week, my Dad's work at the Douglass School was recognized and honored in Parsons by Tana Johnson, the SEK Juneteenth Foundation, Parsons School Board President Lou Martino and his wife Holly, Rees Hughes’s granddaughter, Megan Hughes, and a host of other community leaders and distinguished persons of interracial goodwill.
The Watkins family proudly accepted this honor on behalf of our Dad, Mom, siblings, and all of the Douglass School faculty and staff members and students who made this small Kansas school one of the most iconic and transformative educational institutions in American history.
So wonderful!!
The Parsons Sun newspaper covered the Juneteenth Event. Here is its story: https://www.parsonssun.com/article/2666,watkins-speaks-about-douglass-legacy
In 1947, the President for the Parsons Branch of the NAACP was Mrs. Victory Nestfield-Wright. She was also the Secretary of the Kansas State Conference of the NAACP. Mrs. Nestfield-Wright was a notary public, income tax expert, mimographer, and agent for The Pittsburg Courier, The Chicago Defender, The Negro Digest, and Ebony Magazine. She was the Corresponding Secretary of the Kansas Association of Colored Women, the Historian for the Central Association of Colored Women, the Executive Secretary of the Mary B. Talbert Community Service Organization, and Superintendent of the Brown Chapel A.M.E. Church Sunday School. She was also the Chef at Stockyards Cafe and the mother of James W. Wright. Mrs. Nestfield-Wright was a very powerful community leader and staunch…
Blacks in the “Free State” of Kansas were never enslaved or forcibly segregated from Whites.
In 1947, Parsons had 603 “Negro” families. Of this number, 403 (or 67%) of these “Negro” families owned their homes, while the other 200 families lived in rented homes.
Blacks in Parsons focused on the quality of their children’s education, as opposed to social integration with Whites. If the resources made available for their public schools were not equal to the resources for White schools, they aggressively litigated this disparity. This happened on 12 occasions between 1881 and 1954, and they won every time.
In former slaveholding states like Alabama, Whites placed no value in the education of the “Negro.” The…
I am inspired how well you are able to recall family history illustrated by photos, and other preserved documents. It warms my heart to see how well you can describe certain relatives that would not been possible for you to interact with based on your age.
I attribute your broad knowledge of family history to constant teachings contributed by both Varnardo and Watkins families. I would give anything to be in position as you to recall my family history beyond great grandparents.
Dr. Levi Watkins Sr. is certainly fitting of the award based on his long term commitment and contribution to American education.