A school with a colored memory

An unpopular truth

[Reprinted from Issues & Views March 25, 2002]

Here's a scenario that has been related many times in different forms, especially by those blacks who lived to regret the integration fever that compelled them to abandon black towns, black neighborhoods and black educational institutions. (See "Williston High: The greatest school under the sun.")

In a Pacific News Service account (3/13/02), Elmetra Patterson tells of her experience when she returned for a visit to her all-black high school from which she graduated over 35 years ago:

I returned to my hometown of Louisville, Miss., two years ago to plan our high school reunion. While there, I toured my former high school, which was once called Louisville Colored High School and then [renamed] L.C. Eiland Middle School.

I saw walls and trophy cases stripped of the photos, yearbooks, trophies, and awards of the African American students who had attended the school prior to integration. I knew the treasures had not been sent to Louisville High School (the pre-integration "white" school), because I had been there and seen no memorabilia from our "colored" school.

At Eiland, our school song was no longer sung. Our Trojan mascot had become a wildcat. Our school colors were gone. As the tour continued that day, I thought about people stripped of their heritage -- their diminished reason for being, diminished soul, diminished self-esteem, diminished hope.

After Patterson's reunion with a former teacher, she was inspired to start a campaign to restore some of the school's artifacts:

I imagined going door to door in the community, gathering whatever people had in their homes, and bringing it back to the school. A white student [in the now integrated school] asked me who L.C. Eiland was. I was shocked at the question and pained that there was not a single photo at the school nor any biographical information about a man who had been an institution in our community -- a hero. Principal Eiland, known affectionately as "Prof," had expanded the curriculum, hired new teachers, and organized the community to build new classrooms.

After 37 years, my classmates and I would return to renew old acquaintances and to restore some of Louisville Colored High School's history. The class reunion project, which had been inactive for several months, was now underway again. Several of us searched for artifacts of our heritage. I found yearbooks from 1959 and 1962-65. I met with Superintendent John C. Gardner and Principal Joe Wylie and gained permission for our class to hang a photo of Professor Eiland in the school.

With the photo enlarged and framed, the ceremony took place last July, with more than 200 people in attendance. We did a few cheers and sang our school song: "O' Louisville, Dear O' Louisville, We owe our all to thee."

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