Sterling High students led way for Greenville civil rights movement
http://www.greenvilleonline.com/article/20101205/LIFE/312050003/1004/NEWS01/Sterling-High-students-led-way-for-Greenville-civil-rights-movement
High school students led the way for civil rights change
By Lillia Callum-Penso
December 05. 2010
You can't talk about the civil rights movement in Greenville without
talking about Sterling High School. The school that once stood in
West Greenville wasn't just a place that inspired activism; in 1960
it solidified its role as a place where activists were born.
On March 16 of that year, seven students at the all-black high school
staged a sit-in to integrate Greenville's all-white public library.
The students Hattie Smith Wright, Benjamin Downs, Virginia
Hurst-Madden, Doris Walker Atkins, Robert Anderson, Dorothy Franks
and Blanch Baker were arrested, and the library remained closed to
African Americans.
But the move was a pinnacle moment for local civil rights efforts and
for Sterling High, said Sean O'Rourke, a professor of rhetoric and
oratory at Furman University who is working on a book about the civil
rights era in Greenville. The sit-in cemented the school's role, and
that of Springfield Baptist Church, in bringing change to Greenville.
"The two of them work hand in hand in cultivating the protest
spirit," O'Rourke said. "Most of the meetings that were held in that
spring and summer of 1960 were at Springfield Baptist, but most of
the students came out of Sterling."
A prior library sit-in on March 1 had yielded no arrests. But the
March 1 and March 16 actions together spurred another demonstration
in July that ultimately led to the library's desegregation in September.
The initial spark, though, began with those first students; it began
with Sterling; it began with a term paper.
"We were getting ready for our term papers," recalled Atkins, who
graduated from Sterling in 1961 and now lives in Birmingham, Ala. "We
had to do our note cards and we had to do the research for that."
March 16, 1960
Atkins was a mere 17 when she walked into the all-white library with
six of her classmates on March 16. Now 67, she has to dig into the
recesses of her mind to recall that day. It was a Saturday; breakfast
was toast, eggs, a slice of ham and tea; the walk from Springfield
Baptist Church, where she met the others, to the library was several
blocks; she brought her school book bag.
"We were actually going to do our schoolwork hoping we would be
able to do what we needed to do," Atkins recalled.
She had no idea that the action would hold such significance.
None of the seven did. Once they arrived at the Main Street library,
which Hurst-Madden likened to the "Taj Mahal" compared to the black
library on McBee Avenue, the students spread out and nervously
settled in between the rows of books and periodicals. It took about a
minute for officials to ask them to leave. The students silently
refused. It took about 30 minutes for police to come and arrest them.
The beginning
The rumblings of change in Greenville had begun in the late '50s. The
NAACP began holding organizational meetings at Springfield Baptist
Church, said the Rev. James Hall, who headed the congregation there
at the time. And blacks were already challenging the city's
segregation laws by refusing to sit in the back of public buses, O'Rourke said.
But the first organized action came on Jan. 1, 1960, when a thousand
protestors marched on the downtown airport after baseball great
Jackie Robinson was denied access to the facility's white waiting
room. Robinson had been in town to speak at the annual NAACP meeting
and the snub sparked outrage.
The march sent a message and opened the flood gates. The local NAACP
chapter began planning more actions, finally settling on the library
in an effort to make a moral case for integration.
"We were not at that point sitting at lunch counters or freedom
riders," Hall said in an interview with The News in July. "But we
thought, how can they refuse students to go to a library to get a
book so they could improve their knowledge?"
Like organized protests around the Southeast, the library sit-ins
were part of the overall plan to push the issue of integration to the
courts. Actions were fueled by court cases like Brown vs. Board of
Education and the February 1960 lunch-counter sit-ins in Greensboro,
N.C., which proved integration could be successfully challenged
through the justice system.
Local organizers felt focusing on the library would bring the issue
into a different realm, appealing to people's moral conscience, Hall
said. But they needed the right students to participate.
"You had to be a person who was in control," said Hurst-Madden, who
now lives in Huntsville, Ala. but recently returned to Greenville to
celebrate her 50th high school reunion. "You were not going to be
able to retaliate. We were trained not to say or do anything that
would cause other problems."
The seven who walked to the library that day were star students. All
were on the honor roll, all had their sights set on college and all
got their fuel from Sterling. They wanted to learn, said Xanthene
Norris, a Greenville County Councilwoman and a former Sterling
student and teacher. At Sterling, teachers promoted education as the
way up and out.
"It was nothing we pushed on them to do," Norris pointed out. "They
wanted to learn and they realized that although we had a library full
of discarded books, they wanted to go first-hand. Their parents felt
the same. They wanted life to be better for their kids, and learning
was the way to do it."
School pride
The students who filtered through Sterling, the only secondary school
for African Americans in the area, described it as more home than
school. Teachers not only taught literature and mathematics, but
character and self-worth as well.
Hurst-Madden described it as "a pride."
Within those walls students developed a sense of self and a sense of
the world, and in 1960, that also meant a sense of change, said Ruth
Ann Butler, director of the Greenville Cultural Exchange Center, a
local black history museum.
"We didn't feel like second-class citizens at Sterling High School,"
said Butler, who graduated from the school in 1962. "They told us we
could achieve whatever we wanted to, we could be whatever we wanted
to be. And they didn't accept anything but the top."
As a result, said Butler, "we started asking why."
Impact
The March actions paved the way for more, said O'Rourke.
On March 1, a group of 15 to 20 students entered the all-white
library on Main Street. When they were turned away, they left. On
March 16, seven students walked to the library and sat down. When
they refused to leave, they were arrested. They were bailed out and
the case never made it to court, O'Rourke said, but the arrests were
significant because they were visible and they involved high school students.
"These were young men and women, and at 16 they were carrying the
burden of their future on their backs," O'Rourke said. "It's an
amazing thing when anyone considers what he or she was like at 16."
When Atkins arrived home after being released from jail that day in
1960, her mother had just heard the news on TV. She wasn't angry,
Atkins recalled, but scared of the repercussions that might come.
Slowly, though, change began to come.
Later that summer, eight students several of them local college
students held another sit-in at the library, and the timing was
right, said O'Rourke. It was in the middle of "Greenville's long hot
summer," and tensions were at a high. In just a few months, civil
unrest had spread across the country, and after the July protest, the
library board reopened the building as an integrated public facility.
Organized sit-ins at local lunch counters also began.
Atkins eventually got her term paper done, too, even without the use
of the Main Street library. Today, it's still a point of pride for
the retired teacher.
"Oh, I got an A," she chuckles. "Oh yes."
--
Lillia Callum-Penso can be reached at 864-298-3768.
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