Williston High

"The greatest school under the sun"

By Elizabeth Wright

[Reprinted from Issues & Views Winter 1994]

"They who win the war get to write the history," goes the saying. The losers of a war have little say, if any, in how the stories about the battles are told to later generations. So it is with the stories of the battles waged to integrate the races in this country. These sagas are endlessly recounted and documented by those who pushed hardest to open white institutions to blacks, while pulling the masses along in their crusade for "equality."

Squelched, probably forever, are the voices of those who protested not only the means employed to achieve the lofty goals, but those who questioned the motivations of the crusaders who were hell bent on bringing "progress" to America. Black skeptics especially, crushed under the weight of epithets ("Uncle Tom," "self-hater," "separatist," "segregationist"), soon learned to bite their tongues as they were pushed aside to let history take its course.

Occasionally, however, there is a glimpse into the frustration felt by those blacks who, while desiring to end legal restrictions on their mobility in American society, feared the irrevocable loss of community. Such people, although inundated with the powerful propaganda of the times, which taught that only one road could be taken to "liberation," perceived the potential for long-term loss.

They might not have been able to describe this intangible something as "culture," but they suspected a price would be paid by the total dismembering of black life as it had evolved in the South. They knew there was something special about the small, intimate communities in which they had been nurtured.

More than an Education

Events surrounding the forced integration of the Hanover County school system, in Wilmington, North Carolina, in the 1950s and 1960s, offer an interesting glimpse into this past. A current exhibition at Wilmington's Cape Fear Museum, "More Than An Education: The Black Learning Experience in New Hanover County," puts some of these events in perspective.

Dozens of Wilmington residents were interviewed and helped with the preparation of this show. They contributed memorabilia and tape recorded memories of their student years in Wilmington. Their taped voices are heard in the exhibition hall, as they describe another time and place in this country's history, and offer their opinions on the ultimate dissolution of their city's "segregated" black schools.

Much of the exhibition centers around Williston High School, which closed its doors in 1968, yet is still referred to by Wilmington residents as "the greatest school under the sun." Since its closing, former Willistonians and other loyal supporters have kept alive the school's special heritage. Last year, for example, members of the alumni published an "Anniversary Yearbook" to commemorate the 25th anniversary of Williston's closing. They titled it, "Lest We Forget."

A loving, carefully documented memorial, the yearbook makes palpable the spirit of a group of people who once shared close ties, and where almost all were linked socially through the community's institutions. In those days, residents, from the barber to the doctor to the domestic worker, whether formally educated or not, whether parent or not, felt they had a stake in their local schools. Their interest was generally repaid with the serious labor of devoted teachers and dedicated principals.

The tone for excellence was set by David Clarke Virgo, Williston's inspiring principal in the 1920s. It was during his tenure that Williston achieved State accreditation as a Group 1, Class A high school. Virgo, determined to ensure a bond between home and school, required all Williston teachers to visit the home of each of their students, before teachers could draw their first paycheck.

Williston Industrial High School's Faculty and Staff, 1939

A standard of excellence

As many blacks can attest, the Wilmington story is similar to that of countless other southern communities, where school, home and church wove a circle of familiarity around the residents. And where parents, teachers and school administrators all played a cooperative role in influencing the behavior of the young. These "segregated" schools, whose histories were intertwined with the origins of many rural communities, were often founded by blacks, staffed by black teachers, and administered by black principals.

Williston Industrial High School graduated its first class in 1923. By the 1950s, as Williston Senior High School, it had a long-established reputation for academic excellence, offering its students a solid grounding in English, mathematics, biology, chemistry, two foreign languages, as well as auto mechanics, carpentry, cooking, and industrial arts.

Williston students were kept busy not only with their studies, but with a variety of clubs. Among them were the Crown & Sceptre Club, the Thespians, the Hi-Y Club, the Glee Club and the football squad. The school's 1952 yearbook describes the all-boys' Hi-Y Club as, "dedicated to the building of character, the development of leadership, the establishment of Christian principles, the development of self-confidence and all other attributes that go into the making of desirable citizens."

To belong to Crown & Sceptre, the honor society, a student had to maintain at least a "B" average throughout his or her junior and senior years. Such rules for membership were indicative of demands and expectations that black educators placed upon their students in an era long before "race norming" of grades. Right into the 1960s, Williston students passed National Scholarship Examinations and won awards "granted on the basis of intellectual merit," as did Richard Turmage, Gwendolyn Page and Herbert Harris in 1961.

A 1953 photograph shows a group of black men from the Wilmington community, who made up one of the school's several "booster" clubs. These particular men organized themselves to aid Williston's athletic program. They pooled resources and raised funds to pay for the installation of lights in the athletic field, so there could be night practice and/or games.

Williston Industrial High School 1939 Graduating Class

The story of Dunbar

Much of Williston's history mirrors that of Dunbar High School in Washington, DC. An educational gem from 1870 through 1955, Dunbar's teachers and administrators surpassed themselves in turning out successful, confident young men and women. Economist Thomas Sowell, in Black Education: Myths and Tragedies, calls the story of Washington, DC's all-black Dunbar High School "remarkable and almost incredible." During its academic peak, when college attendance was the exception rather than the rule for most white Americans, about three-quarters of Dunbar's graduates went on to college.

Hundreds of Dunbar graduates became prominent in their fields. The first black general, the discoverer of blood plasma, the first black federal judge, many Phi Beta Kappas, all were graduates of Dunbar. Sowell could be speaking of Williston and other all-black schools during the segregation period, when he says, "Dunbar was the product of particular kinds of people who came together at the right time and established a tradition that sustained itself in an environment where it was appreciated and supported by the community."

Like other black schools throughout the South, Sowell says, "Dunbar refused to make educational concessions to any such notions as 'cultural deprivation'." And, like those other schools, over the years, it was blessed with an abundance of committed teachers and principals who "inspired students with confidence that they could do anything, in spite of anything." Williston and Dunbar alumni both use such terms as "confidence" and "self-confidence," when reminiscing about the legacy left them by the faculties of their respective schools.

Williston and Dunbar also mirrored one another as physically aging institutions. Sowell's description of Dunbar's physical state could have been said about most black schools: "Its classes were large, its building poorly maintained, its lunchroom dark and overcrowded. . . By the standards of those who count students and measure floor space, Dunbar was substandard."

The new Williston and integration

Wilmington's black citizens had long mulled over what could be done to improve their high school's physical condition, to increase the number of classrooms and upgrade its library and science laboratories. A leader in the campaign to get the New Hanover County Board of Education to apportion funds to Williston and other black schools was a black medical doctor, Hubert Eaton. In his book, Every Man Should Try, Eaton describes in detail how he set about the campaign, in 1951, to expose the "inequality existing between the white and Negro schools," which was "both cumulative and current."

After some legal wrangling, he was able to lead a photography crew into the black and white schools to document in photographs the disparities between the buildings, equipment and supplies. He discovered that the county school system spent only $65.72 per month on its black students, while spending $168. 73 on white students.

Eaton's aim was to get the board of education to call for a school construction bond issue, so there would be funds to construct a new building for Williston High and to renovate existing primary and junior high schools. A date was set in 1952 for a vote on the bond issue by the county voters. Every civic organization and Wilmington's newspapers endorsed the proposal. It came as no surprise when the bond issue was passed by a substantial majority of voters.

There was now money to build a new Williston High, in addition to improving other schools. In May 1954, Williston reopened to great fanfare. Members of the black community, who filled the school's entire first floor and balcony at the dedication ceremony, swelled with pride at their accomplishment.

Their joy was to be shortlived, however. On the very day of the new school's dedication, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered the desegregation of the public schools in four states and in Washington, DC. It would not be long before a school like Williston would be declared "illegal." Over the next decade, Williston would find itself in the eye of the storm that brought integration to Wilmington, and that ultimately shut down black schools throughout the South.

Upon passage, in 1954, of the Brown vs. Board of Education decision, Hubert Eaton had become a strong supporter of school integration, joining those who ultimately succeeded in bringing about the integration of Wilmington's school system. For nine years after the Supreme Court decision, no one in Wilmington came forward to force the issue, and education proceeded as usual. In 1964, however, Eaton and others filed a lawsuit calling for the immediate desegregation of the public schools.

Violence and discontent

Now litigation escalated, as Wilmington's white citizens resisted the orders for integration. By 1968, the "new" Williston High was in need of renovations and upgrading. Also, during the interim of 1954-68, a new white high school had been built, John T. Hoggard. Still functioning was the older white high school, New Hanover. A financial struggle ensued over how funds would now be allotted to maintain these three high schools.

The board of education ruled to discontinue funding to Williston. Under pressure from the federal government to speed up integration, the logical thing to do was to transfer black students to the white high schools. About a thousand blacks and whites attended a special board meeting, where Williston supporters protested the school's possible closing. Over their objections, the board voted to shut down Williston High School.

Eaton opposed those blacks who sought to devise compromises, whereby black schools would not be shut down. Several plans were offered to the board suggesting the admission of a few white students to certain black schools, in order to keep them open under the new law. None of these plans were taken seriously.

As outside "activists" rolled into Wilmington to exploit the discontent, violence broke out. In his book, Eaton claims that the blacks in Wilmington "fractured into splinter groups." And, as outsiders came in to stir the pot and take the reins of leadership away from the locals, "pettiness, jealousy and bickering" became the order of the day.

And the children? Bewildered and uncomprehending, they were almost forgotten in the melee. Bused back and forth across the county to white schools, many black youngsters expressed their anger and sorrow at their changed circumstances. After the closing of several black schools, and with forced busing in place, the lament went out from black youth of feeling like outsiders in a strange system.

Many black parents, once used to the attention of caring teachers, now complained about the paucity of black teachers in the white schools. The students, once part of a close-knit, intimate circle, where teachers interacted with their homes, now complained about the loss of such attention.

The consequences

The loss of Williston High especially was keenly felt. After all was said and done, it had been forced to close primarily through the efforts of those blacks who, like Eaton, believed that the continuance of predominantly black schools, run by black administrators and teachers, would somehow keep blacks out of the "mainstream of American life."

The closing of Williston was a sad day in Wilmington. Eaton writes that, "Many black Wilmington citizens had a proprietary interest in Williston and a big emotional investment in it. They associated the building with fond memories. They felt they were being deprived by the closing and resented it."

In defiance, a black man, Aaron McCrae, whose son had been the first in the county to desegregate a white elementary school, now filed to have his daughter reassigned to Williston, in a test to keep the school open. His efforts were to no avail, and Williston closed at the appointed hour, just 14 years after it opened its new building.

Once again, a parallel with Dunbar High School is fitting. Sowell writes that after the massive overhauling of schools that was brought about through forced integration, Dunbar was quickly reduced to "just another ghetto high school with all the usual problems." He goes on to suggest that, to the white liberals who later descended on Dunbar to perform their sociological case studies, "It might be incomprehensible to them that [Dunbar] achieved excellence without their help." And so had Williston.

The Williston/Dunbar stories were to be repeated around the country. In the South, communities were turned upside down, as black teachers and principals were either demoted or fired. Once among the highest paid professionals in black communities, they now found themselves jobless, as black children were shunted miles away to white schools. Those few black teachers who were transferred to teach in white schools were now lost as influences in their black neighborhoods.

Last year, the New Pittsburgh Courier, quoted researcher Horacina Tate, as saying, "We just don't have black educators in the rural Georgia counties." Her father, state Senator Horace Tate, who served as teacher and principal in several schools during segregation and after integration, said, "In the old days, the black principal was to the black community what the mayor was to the whole town. Although their resources and facilities were inferior, principals had authority in their schools and respect in their communities."

Denver educator, Barbara Holmes, confirms, "Before we had integration, we had black teachers and principals in the schools who could tell black students, 'You can do it! You are expected to do well.'" Describing the loss of black educators, she says, "Blacks have been hit where it hurts most. These were the people who held us together."

A death in the family

"Twenty-five years ago, a death occurred in our family," writes Williston alumnus Linda Pearce in the 25th anniversary yearbook. "Why?" she asks rhetorically. "Why close our school?" In 1968, she never received an adequate answer. After citing the educational advantages of possessing new books and equipment and students' exposure to new sets of opportunities, she reflects, "but a terrible price was paid by our black society."

Another yearbook alumnus, Lethia Sherman Hawkins, writes of "the nurturing bond that linked home, school, church, and community into a unified force." She claims that Williston implanted a lasting legacy of "morals, discipline and values."

And Dr. Delford Williams, who now runs a family medical practice in Detroit with his son David, expresses his thanks to Williston for providing him with a quality education, dedicated teachers and positive role models. "For this, I am truly grateful," he writes.

Last year, Williston was reopened as a "middle school." Its current principal is Kenneth McLaurin, an alumnus of the old Williston High, who writes in the anniversary yearbook, "The closing of Williston High School contributed to further disruption of the lives of hundreds of teachers, students and citizens within the community. Sent into an unknown world by the powers who had made decisions behind closed doors, teachers and students were precisely misplaced without benefit of preparation. Being snatched from the comfort of our own environment was unreal. It was like a nightmare . . . unwarranted and unjust. We lost the bond between school, parents and teachers. We lost the ability to love and live together in the way to which we were accustomed." He says about the final closing of Williston, "It still hurts!"

McLaurin alludes to decisions made behind closed doors, which is a suggestion shared by James Meredith. Meredith, the civil rights pioneer who integrated the University of Mississippi in 1962, became a staunch foe of integration tactics and the elites who made integration the focal point for black progress. He holds such people accountable for the loss to the black community of its best schools and teachers.

In a 1989 Issues & Views interview, Meredith spoke bluntly about the role played by certain black elites who took part in "school consent agreements," through which, he says, "the right of a black to become a teacher in a public school system was knowingly given away." He claims that these agreements are documented and almost all of them are "on the public record."

Whether carried out in broad daylight or under cloak of darkness, the words of Williston alumnus Linda Pearce sum up the consequences of those decisions: "Our community has never been the same."

[Reprinted from Issues & Views, Summer 1995]

While black elites, in the 1960s, were fighting to integrate the schools of Wilmington, North Carolina, the city’s white former school superintendent, Herrick Roland, attempted to warn them of what they might lose. Needless to say, he was scorned as a "racist."

Like other Wilmington residents, Roland was moved when Williston had to close to comply with integration laws; he even composed an elegy to the school. Years later, he wrote a verse to describe the whole integration fiasco, part of which reads:

Ardent Blacks, all on their own,
Produced the topmost cultures;
Their genteel acts worldwide were known,
‘Til squashed by federal vultures.

Says N - A - A - of the C - P,
On Whites, Blacks are dependents.
Take Black schools away from them,
To make them merely peasants.

Free Blacks built great schools of fame,
And produced famous leaders.
Give them half a chance again,
To peaceful times they’ll lead us.

While these lines were being composed by a white southerner, black elites were continuing the fight to turn over their community’s children to whites to educate.

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