3: Faculty wife with a heart for social change

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While Ralph and Putnam Porter made “Music from Montevallo” a sound heard around the world, Marcia began a nursery school. She began to put into action some of what she learned during a life-changing summer in the slums of New York City.

Engaging in Social Change

Before her final years in college, aged 18, she took the train from Lincoln to New York to work with children at the Henry Street Settlement on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.  The details she kept in a wide-eyed diary show her world expanding from the prairies of Nebraska.

The Henry Street Settlement was already famous for founder Lillian Wald’s progressive ideas. Its web site today says the settlement “drew from global intellectual currents of reform — especially Progressive and feminist networks. ” 

Marcia and a few girlfriends from the University of Nebraska taught school and explored the city after hours. They heard lectures from Soviets, Communists, and health experts from the just-created United Nations.  They saw Broadway plays, attended concerts in world-famous music halls and walked the streets of Harlem. She listened to union activists and racial integrationists, including Phillip Randolph, President of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters.

The whirlwind of social foment in New York City made her question cultural norms the rest of her life. Within two years of her time on Henry Street she moved with Ralph to the racially segregated south, a world where white Alabamians were not allowed even to worship or eat in public with members of another race. Never again did she attend anything like the breakfast she saw served at Father Divine’s church. 

Experiencing Life as a Faculty Wife

In the spring of 1957 Ralph traveled to Brazil on college business. Exactly what the business was is not clear. Perhaps he was recruiting faculty or students to enroll at Montevallo. His host Ruy Azeredo had some connection to a Brazilian educational institution. From these letters, he sounds like a promoter, a persuasive man who may have been hard to pin down. The trip left Marcia at home with three children under the age of 5. Her letters reveal the active life of a faculty wife, calling for help on other professors including Gid Nelson and Paul Bailey. She writes happily to Ralph “people are snowing me with invitations.” And she enjoins him to get a haircut.

Opening the Meadowlark Nursery School

Marcia did begin a nursery school as the Sears family expanded to three children with Randie born in 1956. Meadowlark Nursery School filled the ranch style house built on Ashville Circle. Students included an expanding circle of youngsters, many of them children of other faculty families. The students in the new nursery school included children who would be friends with the three Sears children all through school in Montevallo.