“No One Can Take Away From You What You Know”
“No One Can Take Away From You What You Know”
Written by Pamela Stephenson Monday, 07 August 2006
Born to a former slave with no formal education, Mrs. Fannie Mae Caldwell learned from her father the value of knowledge. Her father, James Tyson, told his children, “No one can take away from you what you know.”
Tyson learned to read and write with help from anyone who was willing, including his children. Daughter Fannie Mae earned her teaching certificate from Samuel Huston College, now Huston-Tillotson University, in Austin. Fannie Mae taught school in Pflugerville for more than 20 years.
Caldwell emphasized the importance of education to her 13 children as well. Daughter’s Dorothy Ates of Austin and Betty Dixon of Pflugerville, remember their mother making up games to teach them reading and math. To practice reading, each read until they mispronounced a word or failed to emphasize the punctuation of a sentence, passing the turn to the next child. They learned multiplication tables by replacing a number with a word each time that number appeared, including those divisible by that number.
The Caldwell children attended the Pflugerville Colored School located near the present day St. Mary’s Baptist Church on FM 1825. Two teachers taught four grades each in the two-room schoolhouse.
“A lot of children were not as fortunate as we were that had parents at home that …could help them,” recalled Dixon.
After completing eighth grade, the highest grade offered at the school, children left Pflugerville if they wanted to continue their education. Some lived with relatives in Austin or Fort Worth, while others rode a bus from Three Points to Round Rock to attend Hopewell School.
Caldwell worked tirelessly for the rights of African-American children. She advocated integration of the schools so that they might receive quality education. Thanks to her perseverance, buses were provided for the children to travel to segregated high schools by the late 1950s until the Pflugerville schools were integrated in 1965.
At the age of 101, Caldwell attended the 2001 dedication of Fannie Mae Caldwell Elementary School. Her daughters say that the naming was important to their mother, especially knowing the “struggle she had to get educated and how important it was in her life… and her father’s life.”
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