ABSTRACT
This chapter tells the story of a public school teacher/principal who stood out in her community because she was different. In an overwhelmingly Protestant city, she practiced Roman Catholicism. In an era when teachers were supposed to behave like grateful employees, she organized a teachers’ union and publicized its fight for better salaries and working conditions. At a time when most women knew their place, she was assertive and, as she put it, unwilling to ‘play safe’. After she worked for thirty years as a teacher and administrator, the School Board fired her. What happened to Miss Julia T.Riordan in Atlanta in 1921 was dramatic, to be sure, but hardly exceptional. Across the nation, teachers who were at variance with the community risked losing their jobs, for teachers in most school systems did not have the protection of tenure. When the Atlanta Board of Education fired Julia Riordan, she received neither a statement of charges nor the opportunity to defend herself at a hearing. Throughout the United States, teachers who stood out as different often found themselves in the same position-out of work and out of luck. The rehearsal and restaging of this drama in one community after another led teacher organizations to press for tenure laws.
