The Media Branch NAACP wishes to take this opportunity to commend you for the courage you possessed in taking your stand with the Morton School Board. Needless to say it is very necessary that we have more parents with such courage and faith as you.

Sincerely Yours,

Josephine L. Shumate

secretary3

Elinor kept tabs on the Morton school board even though Stephen never attended the Smedley School. In the same scrapbook as her letter, she included a dateless clip about the school district from a local newspaper with the headline “Morton Expects Integration by Next Autumn.”

Elinor and Frederick did their best to shield their sons from bigoted people, but they couldn’t prevent it entirely. Nor did they fully grasp how being mixed-race impacted their sons’ lives. One afternoon Elinor found Stephen yelling out the window, “Nigger, nigger,” to a black child he saw outside on the street. She grabbed him immediately and pulled him away, but she knew why he was doing that. He was repeating what he had been called by the children in Göttingen. He was simply imitating what he had experienced himself.4

It could only have been shocking for Elinor to see how her son had been affected by some of the decisions she and Frederick had made, including moving to Germany. Yet Elinor and Frederick didn’t complain to family members about the discrimination they encountered. Whenever something happened, Elinor and Frederick moved—that was their survival mechanism. Focusing on prejudice could have destroyed their relationship, since it seemed the world was against them. Instead, Elinor and Frederick put things behind them and left them there.

When Frederick wanted to purchase life insurance he made several calls to schedule an appointment. Well-dressed men in suits would stop by their house, but a disturbing pattern of rejection ensued. Once the agents arrived and discovered Frederick was married to a black woman, they would go through the pretense of showing him different insurance options but would then deny him coverage each time. At one point, a salesman told him to stop calling and finally admitted that most of the sales agents thought Frederick was mentally unstable because he was married to a black woman.5

“They thought he was out of his mind,” said Chris, who heard the story many times when he was older. The grievances weren’t discussed until years later when wounds had healed and the children were grown.

Frederick and Elinor carried on as if they had never been insulted or rejected. There were never any memorable or animated discussions about race in the Albert household. They didn’t focus on it, because their union represented where they stood on the subject. They were committed to facing the world and their children as a solid unit, even when the prejudice was blatant.