May Justus (May 12, 1898 – November 7, 1989) was an American author of numerous children's books, almost all of which were set in Appalachia and reflect the traditional culture of her native East Tennessee. She also worked as a teacher and served for many years as volunteer secretary-treasurer for the Highlander Folk School.
Biography
May Justus was born in Del Rio, Tennessee, in 1898. She was one of the ten children of schoolteacher Stephen Justus and his wife Margaret Brooks Justus. Traditional storytelling and major works of literature were both prominent elements in the Justus home, where family members had a regular practice of reading books aloud.
At the University of Tennessee in Knoxville she studied to become a teacher, graduating with a bachelor's degree. Her first written work grew out of her experiences as a young teacher, as she began to write down the stories that she told to an eager audience of students after they had finished her classwork.
Sometime before 1932, Justus worked as a teacher in a mission school in a remote area of Lee County, Kentucky, together with Vera McCampbell, her long-time companion. When McCampbell's mother, who was living with them, developed cancer, the two women decided to move to a place where they would have better access to a hospital for medical care. Accordingly, they accepted an invitation from Lillian Johnson to join her in the rural community of Summerfield (near Monteagle) in Grundy County, Tennessee, where Johnson had founded a progressive school called the Summerfield School. Justus and McCampbell became two of Summerfield's three teachers. In addition to offering a traditional curriculum to students up to grade 8, they taught arts and crafts, sold student-made handicrafts to help raise funds, and helped provide meals for students through a communal soup pot.
In 1932, Myles Horton and Don West persuaded Lillian Johnson to let them try operating Summerfield after the model of a Danish folk school, thus allowing Johnson to retire. After a tentative start, the new arrangement became permanent, transforming the Summerfield School into the Highlander Folk School. Justus and McCampbell soon left the school and went to work as teachers at a nearby public school. However, West managed to recruit Justus to become a volunteer at Highlander, and she continued in that capacity until Highlander's forced closure and relocation (in 1961), serving for many years as Highlander's secretary-treasurer.
Justus retired from full-time teaching in 1939 due to a heart ailment. Subsequently, she devoted more of her time to her writing. For many years after she stopped regular teaching, however, she provided special instruction to children with various special needs, conducted a program of stories and songs for children, and kept an attic library for children, all in the home she shared with McCampbell.
Having lived her entire life in rural Appalachia, Justus had her first encounters with African Americans and became a committed supporter of racial equality through her work with the Highlander Folk School. She formed a particularly close connection with Septima Clark, an African American woman who had lost her teaching job in Charleston, South Carolina, because of her membership in the NAACP, and who coordinated a Highlander program in South Carolina that taught African Americans to read. Like Justus, Clark was an avid reader, a teetotaller, a teacher from the rural South, and a member of a fundamentalist Christian religious tradition, and the two became friends. Justus first confronted the reality of racial discrimination under Jim Crow laws when the two women were together at the Andrew Jackson Hotel in Nashville and Clark was denied entry to a "white-only" elevator.