Elvare Lucreatia Smith Gaskin

 46 years in education – when schools were separate and unequal

 March 9, 1919 – December 10, 1997

“She had a real passion for children and education. It was nothing for us to have kids around the house all the time. She’d be standing there preaching ‘you’ve got to get an education.’ She was very involved in the community. After she retired, she was a pupil personnel worker. And she would go to peoples’ homes and get the kids and say, ‘you have to go to school—you have to go to school.’ It was just something that she was born to do.”  Alonzo Gaskin (son)

Elvare Lucreatia Smith Gaskin started school at age five in a one-room “colored” school in Scotland, St. Mary’s County, Maryland. Her grandmother boarded schoolteachers, and they would sneak her into the classroom. She loved learning and loved teaching. Her first teaching job was in the one-room Gravelly Knolls School in Oraville, MD, where she taught African American students in grades one through seven. The one-room schools would require a single teacher to teach all seven grades with sometimes as many as forty children in one room.

Elvare Gaskin went on to teach at other one and two room schools in St. Mary’s County, the consolidation of schools, and, finally, the transition to an integrated system. She ended her forty-six-year career as principal of Green Holly Elementary School, the first fully state-funded school for special education children in the state of Maryland.

“To see those children who were limited be able to grasp enough information to be able to work on their own, to get a job, and to work. And, also what’s gratifying is that several of my students taught in the same building with me while I was still teaching there. They went on to Bowie (State College), graduated and came back to the county and taught. I was just so happy that I had had a part in their lives.” Elvare Gaskin

As a Black teacher in a segregated system, Ms. Gaskin suffered discrimination in a variety of ways. The quote below illustrates one those ways:

We used to get our checks once a month. When I got married, I got my check three days earlier than everybody else. My maiden name was Smith. Gaskin just had to be a White person. So they sent my check all year long with the White teachers. They didn’t know any better. Then at the end of the year when I went up (to Leonardtown) to carry my register – we had these darn registers – and she said, “You’re Mrs. Gaskin??” I said, “I am.”   I didn’t get another check early.” Elvare Lucreatia Smith Gaskin

Ms. Gaskin with her grandmother.

Additional Resources

UNIFIED COMMITTEE FOR AFRO-AMERICAN CONTRIBUTIONS, Oral History Project, ELVARE GASKIN, Interviewer: Merideth Taylor, Recorded: January 28, 1997. Oral Histories (ucaconline.org)

UCAC online, Experiences – Education (ucaconline.org)

Find a Grave Memorial, Elvare Lucreatia Smith Gaskin (1919-1997) – Find a Grave Memorial

Gaskin, John William Alonzo, Slackwater Archives, Interviewed by Michael Kline and others, Southern Maryland Folklife Project, St. Mary’s College of Maryland, February 11, 2002. He talks about his mother as a teacher and principal, race relations, and other topics