Colored Graded School

The McGrews call at the Wabash Avenue Y.

In an article about happenings at Chicago’s Wabash Avenue Y.M.C.A.:

Chicago Defender, 7 December 1912. 

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I have found only one other reference to James H. and Hattie I. McGrew in Wilson, which mentioned that James McGrew had come to work in Wilson for Lincoln Benefit Society in the fall of 1912. They didn’t stay long.

In 1910, the couple appears in the census of Brunswick County, Virginia. In 1915, J.H. McGrew was counted in the 1915 state census of Bluff Creek, Iowa. In 1920, the McGrews are listed in Richmond, Virginia, where James worked as state secretary of the Y.M.C.A. By the mid-1930s, he was executive secretary of Atlanta’s famed Butler Street Y.M.C.A.

Wabash Avenue Y.M.C.A., Chicago, Illinois.

Eleanor P. Reid, as imagined.

I am ambivalent about using artificial intelligence to restore photographs. Or, more specifically, I’m concerned about manipulated photographs supplanting original images and further blurring the line between reality and misinformation. However, the allure of AI-enhanced images is strong, as I often contend with blurry, poorly lit photographs in unnatural sepia or black-and-white tones. Photographs whose condition sometimes exacerbates the distance between us and our ancestors.

I have been experimenting with ChatGPT lately, feeding it queries and images to be restored and colorized. The results are somewhat haphazard, with many images weird and off-putting. Other times, the images are breathtakingly sharp and … alive. Black Wide-Awake exists to resurrect forgotten lives, and I believe these images are valuable to help us connect with the men and women we read about in these posts. From time to time, I’ll share the better ones here, clearly marked as AI-generated. Let me know what you think about them.

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Eleanor P. Reid (1877-1958), graded school principal.

Roney Baker’s class portrait.

At Wilson Colored Graded School (also known as Stantonsburg Street School and, later, Sallie Barbour School), classes regularly posed for group photos on the school’s front steps.

In this photo, taken in the late 1910’s, Roney Baker sits third from right on the second row. He was about six years old. Though this was one teacher’s class, notice the range in her pupils’ ages. As noted here, “[t]hree thousand African-American children in Wilson County were enrolled in eight grades during the 1923-1924 school year. They ranged from six to twenty years of age. The 1689 first graders ranged from six to seventeen years old, and nearly two-thirds were classified as ‘over age.’ There were three nineteen year-old second graders, and a full fifth of all third graders were thirteen years old. One was twenty. Only 17 of 269 fourth graders were age-appropriate. The eighth grade class — the highest grade offered to black children — tallied a single pupil.”

Do you recognize the teacher or any other students?

Many thanks to Verona Barnes True for sharing this photo.

The 107th anniversary of the school boycott.

Today marks the 107th anniversary of the resignation of 11 African-American teachers in Wilson, North Carolina, in rebuke of their “high-handed” black principal and the white school superintendent who slapped one of them. In their wake, black parents pulled their children out of the public school en masse and established a private alternative in a building owned by a prominent black businessman.  Financed with 25¢-a-week tuition payments and elaborate student musical performances, the Independent School operated for nearly ten years. The school boycott, sparked by African-American women standing at the very intersection of perceived powerless in the Jim Crow South, was an astonishing act of prolonged resistance that unified Wilson’s black toilers and strivers.

Sallie Roberta Battle Johnson, one of the Graded School teachers.

The school boycott is largely forgotten in Wilson, and its heroes go unsung. In their honor, today, and every April 9 henceforth, I publish links to Black Wide-Awake posts chronicling the walk-out and its aftermath. Please read and share and speak the names of Mary C. Euell and the revolutionary teachers of the Colored Graded School.

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The teachers.

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And here, my Zoom lecture, “Wilson Normal and Industrial Institute: A Community Response to Injustice,” delivered in February 2022.

The sixth anniversary of the Wilson Graded School.

This amazing document is the program for the sixth commencement exercises of the Wilson Colored Graded School, which took place May 21-23, 1889. The ceremonies took place in Odd Fellows Hall — the apparent predecessor to the three-story brick Odd Fellows Building Samuel H. Vick built in 1894. (Was it on East Nash Street, too?)

Teachers Susie Harrison and Lucy Robinson led exercises for the first, second, and third grade students; Braswell R. Winstead for the fourth and fifth graders; and Principal S.H. Vick, the sixth and seventh graders. J.P. Murphey, W.H. Vick, J.E. Hocutt, R.D. Dew, and J.H. Edwards served as ushers. 

The main feature was the sixth and grade exercises. On May 23, Presbyterian minister H.H. Boone of Tarboro delivered the Annual Oration between performances of “Come Again With Singing” and “Soldier’s Chorus.” Sixth grade students Ella Johnson, J.E. Hocutt, Sarah Barnes, Turner Williamson, Howard Edwards, Sarah L. Rountree, Amanda Battle, Ida Rountree, and Augustus S. Clark declaimed, sang, or orated, as did seventh graders J.P. Murphrey, Celia Hill, Adelia Battle, Sarah T. Rountree, Charlotte Jordan, W.H. Vick, Annie M. Washington, and W.H. Clark.

Principal Eustace E. Green.

Wilmington native Eustace E. Green spent only a brief time in Wilson as principal of the Colored Graded School in 1883. He left so quickly that he had time to graduate from Howard University’s Medical School in 1886. He moved his family to Macon, Georgia, to establish his practice that is remembered to this day.

For more of Dr. Green’s legacy in Macon, see:

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Championing the cause of heritage