04/27/2026
Miami University sent twelve white students to learn how to teach from a Black woman in 1940s Dayton. Her name was Louise Clark McBain, and the same Miami had told her in 1928 she could not sleep in its dorms.
They had to come to her classroom at Dunbar High because they could not house her in their own. The dorm rule changed later than the classroom did.
Twelve white college students walked into her classroom at Dunbar High in Dayton, Ohio, wearing their Sunday clothes and carrying notebooks, looking around at the Black ninth graders who had stopped chewing their pencils to stare back. The college students had been sent there by Miami University to do their student teaching.
The teacher they had been sent to learn from was a Black woman named Louise Clark McBain. Sixteen years earlier the same Miami University had told her she could not sleep in their dorms because she was colored.
She had been eighteen years old that fall of 1928 when she walked onto Miami's campus in Oxford, Ohio with her acceptance letter and a single bag. She had just finished four years at Middletown High School, where she had lettered in five sports as the only Black girl on every team she played for.
Miami University in 1928 did not give Black students rooms in its residence halls. Louise stood at the registrar's desk and was told to find a Black family in Oxford willing to take her in.
The family she found was the home of the woman everyone in the dining hall called the vegetable lady. The vegetable lady worked in the kitchen of the white girls' dining hall at Miami, paring potatoes and carrots and turnips and onions for the meals served to the white girls who slept in the beds Louise was not allowed to sleep in.
The vegetable lady offered Louise a room and a job. The job paid twenty-five cents an hour, up to five hours a week, and the work was paring vegetables at the same kitchen table where the vegetable lady prepared her own family's supper after she came home from preparing other people's daughters' meals.
Louise sat at that table with a paring knife in one hand and a potato in the other, working alongside the woman who had taken her in. The two of them ran their thumbs along potato skins and onion skins and the rough surfaces of carrots, and Louise carried home a few quarters every week toward the cost of the education Miami's residence halls would not house her for.
Her father was Bishop Clark, a man from Cherokee County, Alabama who worked the rolling mill at Armco Steel in Middletown. The Clark family had come north in the 1920s as part of the Great Migration, riding the same trains as a million other Black families looking for work and a way out of the South.
By the time Louise made it to Oxford, she had already been the math teacher in her own neighborhood for years. "From the time she was a tiny little girl, she taught every child in the neighborhood, especially math," her sister Eva Clark Mitchell would tell the Cincinnati Enquirer in 1989. "She had a mathematical, computer-type brain."
That brain carried her through Miami University while she pared vegetables for quarters and slept in someone else's house. She graduated in 1932 with a Bachelor of Science in Education at the age of twenty-two, one of only a handful of Black women in her class.
She took a job teaching mathematics at Paul Laurence Dunbar High School in Dayton. The school was newly opened, named for the Dayton-born Black poet whose own parents had been enslaved in Kentucky.
Dunbar had been built because Dayton's white high schools would not enroll Black students in any meaningful number. It also gave Black teachers somewhere to work, in a profession that everywhere else was reserved for white women.
Louise stood in front of those Black ninth graders with chalk on her fingers and the same paring-knife steadiness she had learned at the vegetable lady's table. She taught at Dunbar for seventeen years.
Sometime during that span, on a morning that has not been written down anywhere except in her own retelling, twelve white education majors from Miami University walked through her classroom door on a student teaching assignment. Her old mentor, Dr. Christofferson, had recommended her to the Miami education department.
The university that had once told her to find a colored family to room with had concluded, after a decade of watching her work, that the Black children at Dunbar High in Dayton were being taught math by a teacher their own white students should be sent to learn from. They sent twelve.
She introduced herself. She turned to the chalkboard, picked up a piece of chalk, and walked her own students through a problem the way she would walk it through any other class on any other day, while the twelve white college students from Oxford sat in the back of her room and took notes.
In 1944, Dr. Christofferson invited her back to Miami to complete her master's degree. Her thesis advisor was Dr. Edmiston, and the project she chose to design was titled "What Are The Relationships, If Any, Between Social And Economic Backgrounds And School Achievement."
The question she was asking was direct. She wanted to know whether the children with the most money were really the children with the best grades, or whether everyone had simply been told that.
She tested her theory on one hundred and fifty ninth graders at Dunbar High School in Dayton. These were her own students, the children of porters and laundresses and mill workers, the children whose families had come north on the same trains the Clarks had ridden up from Alabama.
The numbers came back the way she had always suspected they would. Money was not the same as ability, and the children of the men working the rolling mill were not less capable of solving for x than the children of the men who owned the mill.
After the master's degree, Miami's most distinguished Black female graduate of 1932 came home to Middletown to run Booker T. Washington School. The school sat on South Main Street between 17th and 18th avenues, a brick building with six classrooms and an auditorium that seated three hundred.
Booker T. Washington School had been built in 1918 by the Armco Steel Company. During World War I, the steel mill had recruited Black men out of the South to fill the jobs left empty when white workers were drafted, and the Armco president George Verity had built brick housing for these new workers and their families on 17th and 18th avenues, in a subdivision called Bon Veue.
When the children of those families needed a school, Armco built that too. Bishop Clark, the Alabama-born rolling-mill man, had been one of the workers Armco brought up to Middletown.
His daughter was now the principal of the school the company had built for the children of men like him. The custodian, Charlie Cunningham, had been ringing his hand-held cow bell at the start of every class day since 1918, and that bell rang for Louise on her first morning in the principal's chair.
In 1955, the year after Brown v. Board of Education, Booker T. Washington School was closed. The building was repurposed as Edison School for developmentally disabled children, and the Black students of Middletown were sent into the integrated city schools across town.
Louise was reassigned to Middletown High School. She walked back into the same building she had graduated from in 1928 and stood at the front of a math classroom in the school where she had once been the only Black girl with letters in five sports.
She taught math at Middletown High School for the rest of her career, until she retired in 1980. The teenagers who filed into her room in the seventies were taught algebra by a woman whose own daughter Zee, born in January 1944 in the same year Louise was running the regression on those one hundred and fifty Dunbar ninth graders, was already a Middletown teacher herself.
She married Herbert McBain on December 20, 1941, six days before Pearl Harbor. Herbert was the superintendent of grounds at Middletown Regional Hospital, and after he died in 1981 Louise spent her widowhood substituting at every school that called her, tutoring children at her kitchen table the way she had once been taught at someone else's.
In June of 1989, Miami University gave Louise Clark McBain the Bishop Medal. The medal had been established in 1936, four years after she graduated, named for Robert Hamilton Bishop, the university's first president, and given to alumni who had distinguished themselves in service to humanity.
She was seventy-nine years old that June. Cancer had been on her for two years already, and the seat at the ceremony was the seat of a woman who had once been told she could not have a bed in the same university's dorms.
Her sister Eva said she had been "the most energetic person I had ever seen" until the illness arrived. Three months after the medal ceremony, on September 17, 1989, Louise Clark McBain died at her home in Middletown.
She was buried at Woodside Cemetery in Middletown, in the town her father had migrated to from Cherokee County so that his daughter could attend a school that did not want her. The Louise Clark McBain Scholarship was created in her memory, set up to send Black children from Middletown to college.
The scholarship makes room at the table. The way the vegetable lady once made room at her kitchen table, in 1928, for a girl from Lemon Township who needed somewhere to sit.
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