Norma English Thompson helped pave a new path that allowed black girls to attend Rosati-Kain Catholic High School in St. Louis. She transferred from Kinloch High School to Rosati-Kain in 1949 – before school integration was mandated by the U.S. Supreme Court in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision.
After attending two years at Kinloch, she was chosen by Holy Angels Parish to be one of six or so outstanding black students to attend the white all-girl’s school.
“Norma English was one of our esteemed graduates of the Class of 1951. Among Gloria Waters White and Rose Marie Banks, to name a few, she graduated in 1951 as one of the first African Americans to become Rosati-Kain Alumnae. Coming from a most difficult, but historical time in our nation’s history, Norma English is an Alumna our students are very proud to call their R-K sister,” a school spokesperson told The American.
Sisterhood did not feel very sisterly back then.
“That’s where I learned how deeply prejudice was rooted,” Thompson said. “I was under the impression that it was religious, Catholic – everything was going to be okay.”
But it wasn’t.
“She thrived at R-K, her grades reflected that,” according to the school. While Norma English (her maiden name) thrived academically, it was in spite of withstanding repeated challenges to her own self-worth because of her race. She described to The American her experience inside and outside of the school – isolation, disparaging comments and feigned invisibility for her and the other high-performing black students selected to attend alongside white classmates.
“I remember the chemistry class when the teacher was talking about the mineral carbon, and she said, ‘Look out that window – it’s as dense and black as that man who’s putting in the coal.’ And I turned around and told her ‘No,’ you should have said that it was the coal – not the man,” Thompson said.
Thompson said she particularly remembers that she was good at art. However, she had to use creativity to get around her work being overlooked for competition in poppy poster art contest for the city of St. Louis for veterans.
“They called it Armistice Day back then, and I did my poster, turned it in and just happened to be walking by the art room and there my poster was laying on the desk, and the nun told me, ‘Oh, I’m so sorry, I forgot about it.’” Thompson said. “But I grabbed by poster and I went down to Stix and just asked questions all around to get to the office upstairs where it was to be delivered and I won first prize in the city. I got a $25 bond at the Missouri Historical Society. I was a junior then, in the 11th grade.”
It was certainly an accomplishment during her junior year – one that received no accolades from the school, she said.
Integrating Rosati-Kain also meant having little interaction with girls who should have been school friends and being relegated to participating only in certain school-based activities.
“The Glee Club – that was one thing I could belong to,” Thompson said.
However, on an occasion when the club was going to perform at Kiel Auditorium, she was forewarned not to be so conspicuous – singing while black.
“The nun called me down and she said, ‘Don’t turn your head, don’t move too much, because you’re so noticed,’” Thompson said. “In other words, I was going to stand out from the group.
“I wasn’t the only black, but I think I was the most defiant one.”
Those were not happy times. And even when the adults tried to get her to keep their dirty secrets by telling her to not tell of their awful behavior, Thompson bravely refused to keep quiet about it, attributed to her quest for knowledge being an avid reader – and, speaking up for oneself was one of her mother’s superpowers.
“My mother was like that,” Thompson said. “My mother would stand flatfoot and tell people ‘No,’ and she made sure that she took us any place that we could go and she never accepted ‘low,’” Thompson said. “She taught us about education … ‘Get your education because I don’t want you to have to take care of master’s children.’”
Thompson also recalled a school field trip that prompted race-based confrontations starting in St. Louis to Jefferson City and back. Thompson was among students selected to visit the state capital, and a chartered Greyhound bus took some students for a tour of the capitol, the governor’s mansion and a banquet.
It started on the bus.
“I went to Maplewood, got on the bus, and they said, ‘You might be more comfortable with your friends.’ All the black students, they had sent them to the rear of the bus and I refused to go. I told them I did not know them, which I didn’t. I didn’t know anyone on that bus,” Thompson said. “I told them, ‘In the state of Missouri, I don’t have to sit in the rear,’ so I stood in the front.” She finally got to sit down because the bus had to start moving.
That was only the precursor to what was to come in Jefferson City.
“Got to Jefferson City, got to the Governor’s Mansion – got our cookie and our tea and everybody was together. Toured the capital – everyone was together,” she said.
Then, segregation made an ugly reappearance at the church across the street.
“We had to go over to St. Henry’s, which was the Catholic church. It was across the street for the banquet. We were told that our name tags would be on the table. I didn’t see mine,” she said.
“‘No, no, no, no, no. The Colored will be in the basement,’” Thompson said she was told.
“I went down and I looked up and I saw pipes and said, “I can’t sit here.’
“‘Oh, you’ll be able to hear the speaker,’ the adult responded. “I said, ‘But I won’t be able to see the speaker and I’m not eating in a basement … I’m above that… If I’m qualified to be outstanding like the others are, then I should be equal with them and this is not equal.”
She said the adult was very shaken by her response. She and two girls she did not know from other schools who were assigned to the basement walked out and found a nearby store, where they bought some crackers to eat and sodas to drink. They sat on the steps until the bus came. And when people asked why they were sitting there, Thompson told them because she wasn’t going to eat in a basement.
“When we finally got back to St. Louis, one of the women said, ‘Please don’t discuss with anyone what occurred today,’” Thompson said. “At that time, there wasn’t any social media – I just had a mouth, and I told everyone that I met who inquired about it.”
She said not all of black girls who integrated with her stuck it out. But she graduated from Rosati-Kain, went to Stowe Teachers College for a year before joining the U.S. Air Force at age 18. She was there 19 months.
“I got a ‘general discharge under honorable conditions’ for one thing, because I had to ball out my commanding officer because he called me a ‘negress,’” Thompson said.
She worked at the General Electric plant that used to be in St. Louis, was married and had three children. The assassination of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968 prompted her to register for college again, this time at Harris Teachers College. A generous benefactor paid her tuition, and she excelled academically on the Dean’s List, becoming the first black top of class.
“I was grand marshal of my class … so my children, they had no way out because their mama was going to college,” Thompson said. “I’ve been very fortunate. All have their degrees – the three of them have their masters and then I have grandchildren now who are also getting their masters. I’m very satisfied.”
Thompson became a teacher and taught at Turner Middle School for a number of years and worked as an instructional coordinator in St. Louis Public Schools before retirement.
She also left Catholic Church. After a period of being a non-affiliated Christian, joined a Baptist church.
“I wanted to feel the presence of the Holy Spirit … I needed more,” she said. “My mother belonged to a Baptist church, so I joined that church and they were very lively. I felt something – baptized in the Mississippi River.”
In the 1980s when she moved to a different area of town, she joined the AME church, where she remains an active member.
What Thompson said she experienced back then was a reflection of many cruel encounters against blacks by whites during a legally segregated time in St. Louis and throughout the United States. The one incident in St. Louis which she said hurt the most, also gave her hope. After a trek by bus and streetcar to get to the Muny, on the way back home, Thompson said her younger sister became very ill near the Wellston Loop. She went in to a nearby whites-only hamburger joint to ask for water for her ailing sister.
“I went in – which was brave for me to do and I told them, ‘I know that I cannot eat anything or take it through but my sister’s ill – could I please have a glass of water’ to take outside to her. And that woman – that waitress behind the counter – called me every dirty name you could imagine.
“But I’m not going to drop a tear,” she recalled. “I remember saying, ‘So be it.’”
She left and didn’t know how she was going to help her sister. Then a beacon of hope came through that same restaurant door.
“A man came out with a glass of water, and he says ‘I want you to remember this and know that all white people aren’t ornery like that.’”
