1976 Crosby
Kathleen “Kat” Earle Ross Crosby was born in Winnsboro, South Carolina on March 9, 1925 to Beatrice Tucker and W.A. Ross. She received her B.A. in 1946 from Johnson C. Smith University in Charlotte, North Carolina and in 1970 earned her M.A. from Bank Street College in New York City.
Crosby began teaching in 1946 in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg School System. After twenty years as a classroom teacher she was then an in-service specialist for early childhood education from 1967 to 1970. She was principal of Billingsville Elementary School for six years during which time her leadership skills were recognized for dealing with school desegregation and busing issues. The year 1976 was important first because of a CBS television documentary about her outstanding leadership of Billingsville Elementary School and became an area assistant superintendent to the district, which comprised twenty-five schools. Ten years later she retired as superintendent in 1986 after a successful forty-year career.
She was also very involved in the community. In 1970 she was appointed to the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Charter Commission and in 1977 she was appointed to the University of North Carolina Board of Governors.
In 1974 she received the B’nai B’rith Women’s Human Relations Award and was inducted into the NAACP's Hall of Fame in 1975. She also served on the WBT Radio's Black Advisory Board and the Board of Trustees for Johnson C. Smith University, and as vice president of the United Community Service Board.
She was married to Joseph Crosby for fifty-one years and they had two children, Joseph Crosby, Jr. and Kathy Wells. She died in Houston, Texas on November 13, 2012. She was nominated for the Woman of the Year award by the Charlotte-Mecklenburg League of Women Voters.
The Charlotte Observer did a feature on Crosby on Saturday, November 22, 1986 when she announced her retirement entitled “Outspoken Educator Official to End 40-Year Career With No Regrets” which gives wonderful insight into her using her own words:
When Kat Crosby was a child in Winnsboro, S.C., she once noticed her street had been repaired with tar, while blocks away in a white neighborhood, city leaders had used cement.
One evening, she and her brother walked over to the white neighborhood with a tenpenny nail. In darkness, the two children knelt on the ground and carved their initials in the wet cement.
It was a small gesture against injustice. It was perhaps the last time she protested so silently.
“I grew up around people who were used to having real strong feelings and not doing anything about them,” says Crosby . “When I see something I think is wrong, I just take a risk.”
She calls herself a “loving warrior” in education. Others call her the “conscience” of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school system. “I don’t have any regrets, I go out feeling really good about what I tried to do. I know I`ve stepped on a good many toes. Sometimes I wish I could have found a different way to step on those toes and not have it hurt so much. But all of it was done because I felt strong actions needed to be taken.”
There was the time in the late 1940s when, as a first-grade teacher at Pineville Colored High School, she told the white schools superintendent he had no right to say black teachers didn’t work as hard as whites.
There was the time in the early 1970s, when as principal of Billingsville Elementary School, then plagued by racial tension, she marched into a closed- door meeting of top administrators.
“If you want me to make this a good school,” she told them, “then you have to give me the things I need.”
That afternoon, Crosby recalls, six trucks laden with supplies pulled up in front of the school.
And there was the time several years ago when, as area superintendent at a staff meeting, Crosby heard a principal suggest children who misbehave should be put in closets.
“If you believe that I don’t think you should be a principal,” Crosby spat out angrily.
She was reprimanded. “I felt like 2 cents, having the superintendent tell me to shut up,” Crosby recalls. “But I believed it. And I said it. Every child has the right to be treated with respect.”
Colleagues say Crosby’s greatest strength is her ability to rise above the bureaucratic maze of a 72,000-student school system and focus on what`s best for the individual child.
“She is the most child-centered administrator I know,” says Marie G. Davis Principal David Kimmelman.
Crosby says she tries to treat her schoolchildren with the same respect her parents treated her with as a child. Once when she was in third grade, her father, William Ross, a school principal, brought home boxes of candy he was selling to raise money for encyclopedias for his school. He stored them behind a dining room buffet and told his six children not to eat any.
Soon after, Crosby sneaked into her empty house at lunchtime. She had her small hand on a candy bar when she heard a stern voice rise from somewhere in the dark house. “Kathleen Earl,” was all her father said.
About two weeks later, Ross, sitting on a trunk in an upstairs hallway, motioned for his daughter to sit beside him. He asked quietly, “You’re not ever going to steal any candy again, are you?” Crosby said “No, sir.” She was never punished. And she never stole candy again.
“My parents cared about people,” Crosby say, “and they taught us how to care about people.” From a young age, Crosby assumed she would become a teacher like her mother.
“I’ve always been competitive,” Crosby says. “As a teacher, my guiding principle was that my children would know more than any other children in the world. I would tell them there`s not going to be anybody in Charlotte as smart as they were.”
In 1966, she attended a seminar on desegregation of Southern schools at Bank Street College of Education in New York City.
“That was the beginning of my knowing how little I knew about things,” she says.
Crosby went to workshops where, she remembers, “blacks and whites shared their pain.” She went to a party in a luxurious white neighborhood in Connecticut and, she says, “I was treated like a person.” She saw a white maid for the first time in her life.
Crosby wanted to get a master’s at Bank Street, a school at the forefront of research in teaching disadvantaged children. She was told that, because she came from a small Southern college, she was not qualified. But after she did a case study of an 11-year-old boy named Roger, the admissions directors changed their minds.
“Roger lived in Manhattan and had been involved in the juvenile courts,” Crosby recalls. “My responsibility was to find out what makes him tick.” Crosby got an A-plus on the case study, then went on to get a master’s degree in early child education.
One day in 1971, as Charlotte-Mecklenburg`s desegregation effort began, Crosby was invited to become principal of Billingsville, an elementary school in the predominantly black community of Griertown.
“A lot of people told me I was needed,” Crosby says. “There was low teacher morale, a lot of anger, and it was physically located in a place that didn’t have magnolia blossoms.”
By all accounts, Crosby turned the school into a symbol of successful integration. She went to every classroom and told each child, “We have the best school in Charlotte.” For parents, she held freewheeling evening sessions – “Chats with Kat.” Soon, parents were cooperating, children were learning and test scores were on the rise.
“She had capacity to gain immediate credibility and confidence,” says school board member Ward McKeithen, who was a Billingsville parent when Crosby became principal. “She is a personable woman who does what she says she’s going to do, and she has darn good sense.”
In 1976, Crosby was named area superintendent. In many ways, she says, it has been the most difficult job of her career: “You are on your own, and you either sink or swim.”
“I don’t advise anybody to be quite as outspoken as I have been,” she says. “It doesn’t work now – it’s 1986. Blacks need to speak out. But they need to be slow to speak out. They need to be firm, but tread in a way that will not hurt them. But, I would always tell them not to be afraid to tell to the truth, even though it hurts.”
When Kat Crosby died the Charlotte Observer remembered her years of service in the November 20th edition with an article entitled “Education pioneer Kat Crosby dies - CMS teacher, administrator was leader in desegregation fight and healing afterward.”
“She really loved children. She believed that every child deserved an opportunity to become the best citizen that they could be,” former school board member Sarah Stevenson said.
Stevenson also described Crosby as a fearless defender of civil rights. She recalled one year in the early 1970s when she and Crosby helped organize a celebration for Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday at the convention center. The festivities were interrupted by a bomb threat, forcing participants to evacuate, Stevenson said.
“Kat came up to me and held my hand and said, ‘Sarah, let’s sing,’ ” Stevenson said. “We led the group out of the building singing ‘We Shall Overcome.’ I’ll never forget that.” Later, when they found out there was no bomb, Crosby helped lead the group back into the building because “we were not going to be deterred,” Stevenson said.
She also frequently emphasized the importance of working together to solve common problems, said Willie Ratchford, executive director for the Charlotte Mecklenburg Community Relations Committee.
“She was a real strong advocate for what was best for the community, and I recall she used to say, ‘We need to remember that no one of us is as good as all of us,’ ” Ratchford said. “That was her way of saying that we need to come together and begin looking out for the needs of all children if we're going to be this world-class community.”