Black schools gone, but not forgotten on Lower Shore
Golden anniversaries are approaching across the Lower Shore to commemorate a fallen anchor of black life.
In Cambridge, it was Mace's Lane.
In Crisfield, it was Carter G. Woodson.
In Newark, it was Worcester.
In all the towns, it was the black high school.
Celebrations start in Salisbury this summer, as former students pay homage to Salisbury High School, which closed permanently 50 years ago as the all-black high school in Wicomico County.
Across the region, those who lived and breathed the experience of the segregated secondary public school say the milestone anniversary is a bittersweet reminder of the challenge to pass on a legacy that was visibly erased from the landscape.
"The greatest challenge is carrying on the legacy," said Edward Henry, president of the Salisbury High School Alumni Association. "Children are not aware."
Lower Shore public schools were relatively late to desegregate.
In 1957, for instance, nine black children made history when they integrated Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. Three years earlier, in a unanimous opinion, the Supreme Court declared that the institution of "separate-but-equal" schools was inherently unequal. The ruling in the infamous Brown versus Board of Education class action lawsuit resulted in the desegregation of public schools, although on the Lower Shore, full integration of schools came more than a decade later.
Some 15 years after Brown, in the fall of 1969, Somerset County high schools desegregated, as did those in Dorchester County. The measure closed Somerset as a black high school in Princess Anne. Mace's Lane closed as a high school for blacks in Cambridge. Carter G. Woodson closed as a high school in Crisfield. In the spring of 1970, Worcester closed in Newark as the black high school in Worcester County.
The Supreme Court ruling was pivotal to the success of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s that led to full integration across America. But in small towns across the Shore and elsewhere, blacks who attended segregated schools say the movement for black uplift and progress destroyed black high schools and ripped the fabric of their communities.
"Many black teachers lost their jobs," said Henry, a member of Salisbury High School's Class of 1960. "One of the biggest negatives was our teachers losing their jobs. Overall, the reaction was positive and hopeful because the promises under 'separate but equal' education never took place. We got all second-hand stuff."
The association has sponsored a youth program on Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday each year for 30 years, and raises money for endowments established at historically black colleges and universities, as well as at Salisbury University.
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"That's a concern — keeping alive the memory because many of us are getting tired," Henry said. "Who's going to continue this process?"
The impact of desegregation on all of Wicomico County students who lived through the experience is the focus of a proposed documentary by Mark Thompson, a Salisbury pastor and member of the Wicomico Board of Education.
"I want to show the difference in education from 1966 to the present," said Thompson, who hopes to fund the documentary through a grant from the National Humanities Alliance. "My goal is to show how we have improved and how we haven't. What do we do differently now, in today's time, to make education a focus for our young people?"
"What a tragedy it was"
Despite the significant role of school desegregation in civil rights, the measure left black high schools for vocational, middle or elementary education, say critics. Some of the structures have been torn down or repurposed for uses not resembling their original worth, observes Earl Richardson, former president at Morgan State University in Baltimore.
“No one can argue that integration or desegregation was not a good thing,” said Richardson, who attended the all-black Somerset High in Princess Anne. “It was the strategy to end segregation that was at issue. We look back and see what a tragedy it was to close our black schools and exclusively move to the white institutions."
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Mayor Victoria Jackson-Stanley of Cambridge welcomes a proposed preservation of the former all-black Mace’s Lane that still stands. At the time, black students matriculated to the former all-white high school and the name Mace’s Lane lived on to crown a middle school on the black high-school property.
“The black high school structure is abandoned, but it wasn’t torn down,” said Jackson-Stanley, who attended the school in her earlier school years. “The idea was to revitalize and repurpose it. It’s historic, and I’d like to see that school preserved to bring that life back to the community.”
Henry was instrumental in preserving the brick archway that graces the front of the school known today as Chipman Elementary School on Lake Street. Between the 1930s and mid 1950s, the Chipman property served Salisbury High. In 1954, the black high school opened at what is today Salisbury Middle School on Morris Street. Henry, too, successfully pushed to retain the middle school’s front entrance and hallway.
Alton White recalls his transfer senior year to the desegregated James M. Bennett High School. In some ways, life was good.
“I heard about we were going to integrate,” White said. “All I could think about was that we hadn’t written our senior graduation song. We would do that senior year and I was looking forward to that. It hurt, but the best thing that came out of closing Salisbury High was it exposed a lot of athletes to sports we would not have gotten to play.”
Shanie Shields was in White’s class, and was assigned to Wicomico High School. Others from the former Salisbury High went to Mardela High School in Mardela Springs.
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“There was no diversity training, no diversity avenues for students, teachers, staff people — none of that,” she said. “It’s a shame how they wiped out the black schools, threw us into the mix with whites and offered no counseling for any of the students, black or white, but especially the blacks who felt they had lost everything.”
Richardson hopes to see permanent memorials around the region, the state and the nation to symbolize the lost institutions.
“We have to struggle to preserve structures that represent our history,” said Richardson, whose name graces the multimillion-dollar library at Morgan State. “This is a part of the history of our state, black education in Maryland, and therefore deserves to be preserved with subsidies from governments.”