On the evening of May 17, 1946, more than 1,200 festive supporters streamed into the Brooklyn Academy of Music to honor a New York City teacher who had survived, by the skin of her teeth, charges of “un-American” teaching. Since 1935, New York City's public school teachers faced the threat of investigation and dismissal for potentially subversive radical political beliefs or affiliations. Tonight, however, the audience breathed a collective sigh of relief that the Board of Education hearing had turned out well and that the teacher in question would retain her position.

Margaret Gillum was distressed. Her sophomore English students in Terre Haute, IN were making “sneering remarks” about “dirty foreigners,” even though she implored them to use language that reflected the principles of “brotherhood” and “true neighborliness.” Pressed into action by the catastrophic world war unfolding around her, Gillum decided to teach her students to be more tolerant of human diversity. Describing her successful lesson to colleagues in a popular teaching journal in 1941, Gillum explained, “There are in my city a number of racial groups gathered into neighborhoods, as one finds them everywhere: Syrians, Italians, French, and a large number of Germans and Jews, as well as three distinct communities of Negroes drifted up from the South.” Hoping to foster empathy for the “racial groups” in her community, Gillum initiated her lesson by asking students to list familiar racial epithets. Her students responded enthusiastically and as Gillum called out the names of different “races” her students shouted back their answers:

And what do we call Italians—Dagoes!
And the Germans?—Dutchmen!
The Irish?—Oh, Pat or Mike!