EchoEs of integration The desegregation of the Clarke County School District affects the educational experiences of students in the district both socially and academically to this day.
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he Clarke County School District took its first steps toward an integrated educational system by selecting five Black students to attend the all-White Athens High School in 1963, 11 years after the Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education (1954) ruled racial segregation in schools unconstitutional. Community member Linda Davis began attending the previously all-White Clarke Junior High School, now Clarke Middle School, among the group of students who exercised their freedom of choice to desegregate the district in the late 1960s. “My mom explained to me that we were working to help desegregate the schools and improve education for everybody in Clarke County,” Davis said. “We were (recommended), which is what probably sold us on it, because we were academically doing well. (CCSD) wanted to make sure that, in this desegregation effort, there was no doubt that Black people can learn.” For Davis, entering an allWhite school was a drastic change from her previous experiences at segregated schools and required much preparation. “We were taught about nonviolence. We were taught to ignore the taunts. We were taught to ignore the stares, to ignore anything that anybody did to us because we were warned that it was not going to be easy, and it may not be pleasant, but we were there for a purpose,” Davis said. The next year, Davis entered AHS, where the large number of majority-White clubs and sports diminished her participation in such activities.
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“There was nothing to give us a sense of belonging. We weren’t welcome in a lot of the clubs when we desegregated these schools,” Davis said. “Leaving campus every day, we made a beeline over to (Burney-Harris High School) because we wanted to be with people that look like us, that liked us and that treated us like we were normal people.” Community member Barbara Archibald, a current CCSD substitute teacher, attended the all-Black Athens High and Industrial School, renamed BHHS in 1964, throughout the district’s desegregation. According to Archibald, the students at her school were at an academic disadvantage. “We lacked so many things in terms of material resources that would have helped us probably to accomplish a little bit more academically,” Archibald said. “The books, for example, were used and torn, and they were given to us after they have been used by students at AHS.” Despite this discrepancy, Archibald feels that she received a quality education and was motivated community member to succeed by the school’s faculty. “The principals would get on the intercom in the mornings and talk about (how) you were important, what you need to be doing, how education was important (and) it was the key to our success,” Archibald said. “(Segregated schools) instilled in us different values that would help us be successful in this world.” Community member Barbara Barnett transferred from BHHS to begin attending AHS in 1965 and found it difficult to participate in the new environment. “It wasn’t easy because we were not wanted, we were not accepted,” Barnett said. “We didn’t have
“There was nothing to give us a sense of belonging.” --LINDA DAVIS,
Features
February 2020
24
