Colored Graded School

No armistice in sight.

Buried under this peculiar title stack is an update on the Wilson Normal and Industrial Institute — the independent school founded by African-American parents and their supporters who were boycotting Wilson’s public schools.

The article notes that attendance at the independent school was 250 students versus fewer than 100 at the public Colored Graded School and offers a brief and inaccurate description of the incident that led to the boycott. (Mary C. Euell is described as “the Washington city teacher.” More about my attempts to learn more about Euell’s life later.) The aftermath is laid out nicely, though, noting that the discharge of J.D. Reid — called “the pouring of oil on troubled waters” — failed its goal, and teachers at the Colored Graded School had so few pupils that they had time to knit socks for World War I soldiers. (Those at the independent school, in contrast, were “having the times of their lives hammering progressive ideas into the heads of little pickaninnies.” One of which was my grandmother.) The writer wondered if support would falter when people realized they still had to pay a school tax, but admitted “at present there’s no sign of an armistice in sight.”

Greensboro Daily News, 17 November 1918.

Rountree defends sister, threatens principal.

As printed in the 26 March 1915 edition of the Wilson Daily Times:

Julius Rountree Threatened Life of Principal Reid and Bound Over Under a Peace Bond.

There was only one case before Mayor Dickinson this morning, that of Julius Rountree, who threatened the life of J.D. Reid, principal of the colored graded school, telling him he would kill him if he put his foot on the ground.

Rountree went in the class room where he was making his threats, and witnesses heard him.

The trouble was over the principal whipping one of his pupils, a girl about 17 and sister of Rountree. Rountree was placed under a peace bond of $250 to keep the peace for six months. This was done at Reid’s request who stated he didn’t want to see Rountree go to the roads.

The evidence presented showed that Reid whipped the girl with a small switch and not unmercifully.

It seems the trouble started on the account of the misbehavior of the girl who shook her fist at Reid when reprimanded and the switching followed.

The girl resented this and struck Reid in the face and he put her out of the building. Then followed the entry of Julius into the trouble.

——

Julius Rountree was almost 20 years when he confronted J.D. Reid. The sister he defended was most likely Cora Rountree (sister Daisy Rountree had died the year before.) Three years after this incident, J.D. Reid was involved in the incident that led to the teacher strike and parent boycott of the Colored Graded School.

Mack D. Coley, Colored Graded School principal.

When Henry C. Lassiter and Turner G. Williamson graduated Lincoln University in June 1895, their classmates included Mack Daniel Coley. Coley was born in 1864 in northern Wayne County. He graduated from Hampton Institute’s preparatory division in 1890.

Excerpt from Twenty-Two Years’ Work, see below.

After receiving a bachelor’s degree at Lincoln, he returned to North Carolina.

New York Times, 5 June 1895.

M.D. Coley’s remarkable career as educator (which included a stint as principal of Wilson Colored Graded School circa 1920-21) and lawyer is chronicled in Arthur Bunyan Caldwell’s History of the American Negro and His Institutions (1921):

Coley did not helm the Graded School for long. He and his family are listed in the 1920 census of the Town of Mount Olive, Wayne County, and he may have boarded alone in Wilson during his short tenure. He died in Mount Olive in 1950.

Twenty-Two Years’ Work of the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute at Hampton, Virginia (Records of Negro and Indian Graduates and Ex-Students with historical and personal sketches and testimony on important race questions from within and without, to which are added, by courtesy Messrs Putnam’s Sons, N.Y., some of the Songs of the Races gathered in the School (Hampton Normal School Press, 1893).

The Colored Graded School’s early days.

This beautifully sharp photograph is the earliest known depicting the Colored Graded School. Photographer F.M. Winstead, who operated in Wilson from about 1880 to about 1908, shot this wintertime scene, most likely within a few years of the school’s opening in the 1890s. The school was built at what was then the edge of town, and I am fairly sure that the field in front of the school has been picked clean of cotton.

My thanks to J. Robert Boykin III for this photograph.

A morning with the Knights.

I spent a delightful hour or so yesterday speaking with students at Greenfield School about revolutionary African-American teacher Mary C. Euell and the Wilson Colored Graded School boycott. I appreciate the opportunity to share community history and stories of resistance with young people, and I thank Jennifer Johnson, Greenfield’s librarian, for the invitation.

Greenfield opened in the fall of 1970, the same semester I started first grade. That’s not a coincidence. After 16 years of stonewalling post-Brown v. Board of Education, Wilson finally fully integrated its school system in 1970, more or less at gunpoint. Some in the city’s monied class had seen the handwriting on the wall, and Greenfield was just one of many seg academies that sprang up across the South.

Fifty-two years is a long time, but no guarantor of change for the better. Greenfield, however, has moved along the arc of the moral universe, and the faces of the teenagers who listened so attentively and asked such thoughtful questions reflect its progress.

Schoolhouse “I do.”

Well into the twentieth century, African-American couples married overwhelmingly at an office of a justice of the peace or the home of a relative. However, on 21 March 1906, as carefully noted a Wilson County marriage register, William Sutton and Laura Williams tied the knot at Wilson’s Colored Graded School. Free Will Baptist minister John Steward performed the ceremony, and Charles Best, Charley Dawson, Minnie Sutton, and Henry Garnett.