The Advocate tells the stories of three AEC Graduates
The Advocate kicked off our “Still, We Rise” event on October 16, 2019 with an article featuring three of the AEC graduates – Lorraine Washington ’70, Paulette Dunams Robertson ’69 and Dorothy Payton ’69. Their testimonies of the impact that the school had on them and their families help tell the story of this remarkable school and keep the legacy alive.
The four Cole Sisters (from left): Brenda, Eunice, Carol and Pamela, are Adult Education Center graduates. They are recognized with letters of commendation by Charles Blackburn, Vice President of Shell Oil Company and a member of the Center’s Board of Directors.
Leon Trice Photography
Fifty years ago, Lorraine Washington was a 29-year-old mother of five looking for a job.
She tried a few job-training programs. But afterward, potential employers still looked askance at her 10th-grade education or told her that her qualifications didn’t match any open positions. “It was as if the programs trained me for jobs that didn’t exist,” she said.
Then an employment agency recommended that she enroll in the Adult Education Center, an intensive secretarial training program for African-American women based in the French Quarter, at 112 Exchange Place.
The center’s groundbreaking legacy will be remembered this week as some of the 431 women who graduated from it between 1965 and 1972 gather on Wednesday for a reunion at the Historic New Orleans Collection. Two adult learners will be given $1,431 scholarships in honor of Alice Geoffray, the center’s founding director.
Over its seven-year run, the center earned plaudits by placing 94 percent of its graduates in good-paying government jobs and career positions at companies such as Shell Oil, Delta Airlines, IBM, Exxon, Chevron and Pan-American Life Insurance.
The U.S. Department of Labor named the Adult Education Center one of the most effective government-financed programs of its type; The Wall Street Journal lauded its success with job placement.
In 1968, Geoffray and some of her students even testified in front of a U.S. Senate subcommittee interested in why the program succeeded when so many other job-training programs did not.
But when Washington was first referred there, she knew nothing about it. She was skeptical: “I said, ‘Why would I believe in this program?’ I was busy enough, trying to get a GED at night while taking care of a husband, five kids and a house. I thought it would be another dead end.”
Washington ended up giving the program a chance.
In the late 1960s, even though the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964 had prohibited workplace discrimination, few New Orleans companies were hiring African-Americans in professional positions.
“Back then, we faced so much prejudice, it was hard for a Black person to get a job in an office, period,” said Paulette Dunams Robertson, now 72, who made a living by cleaning offices and taking in ironing before she graduated in 1969 from the Adult Education Center and was hired immediately by the Small Business Administration — kicking off a 33-year career in the federal government.
Robertson’s first assignment was dicey — each day, federal marshals escorted the three young Black women to the town of Happy Jack, in ultra-segregationist Plaquemines Parish, to process loan applications for Hurricane Camille victims — but it was the start of a career that included positions at the Coast Guard and the Department of Defense. “I wanted a better job, and this fantastic program helped me get it. It changed my life,” Robertson said.
At the time, the idea of a vocational school for Black women was controversial enough that when Geoffray, a former schoolteacher, began searching for a building to rent, she was turned down by five dozen landlords. Then she met attorney and businessman James J. Coleman Sr., who not only rented her the space on Exchange Place, a former barroom, but ended up chairing her board. Norman Francis, then a top administrator at Xavier University of New Orleans, was also an early adviser.
Once the center was open, Geoffray and her staff of dedicated teachers created a well-oiled machine: a no-tuition business school where students brushed up on academics while learning typing and shorthand.
Students also took classes for a “second language” — basically, “business-speak” — taught as if it was a foreign language, using a speech lab with programmed audiotapes. After all, they were told, Shell Oil wouldn’t tolerate an employee who pronounced the company's name “Shell Erl.”
“They were simply teaching us the way the business world talked,” Washington said.
When Washington walked through the center’s doors in 1970, she suffered from low self-esteem, she said. “I didn’t know how to type. I couldn’t do shorthand. If I was called on in class to stand up and give a speech, I would be devastated. I couldn’t talk. I would cry. Really and truly, I did not have the confidence to interact with people a lot,” she said.
Having grown up in segregated New Orleans, the idea of integrating an office was also intimidating to her.
But when she graduated several months later, Washington was judged to be the most improved student — and she had gained confidence. “I felt qualified to walk into any building, any office, and work as a secretary,” she said. She submitted one application and was immediately hired by a hurricane-rebuilding program run by the state of Louisiana, which she worked for until she retired 28 years later.
The women who went through the center say that its results live on, through successive generations of their families.
Dorothy Payton, now 82, enrolled in the center as a 31-year-old widow with four young daughters. Right after graduation in 1969, she had a candid moment with her interviewer at Pan-American Life Insurance: “Not only do I want this job; I need this job,” she said. With her hopes high, she walked from Poydras Street to the Adult Education Center, where she was met with a phone message, telling her she was hired.
She worked at Pan-American for the next 20 years. “I was able to raise my children to be independent,” Payton said. “And now they tell my grandchildren how they were raised.”