PRINTOvercoming obstacles
Hickman alumni recall the end of segregation in Columbia high schools
COURTESY OF HICKMAN HIGH SCHOOL CRESSET 1961
Students enter the then main entrance at Hickman High School during the 1960-1961 school year. Following the end of segregation, black students transferred from Douglass to Hickman.
September 24, 2009 | 12:00 a.m. CST
For Wynna Fay Elbert, Douglass High School was a utopia before integration. Fulfilling the stock stereotypes of any high school movie, Elbert took pride in singing Douglass’ school song, celebrating the election of the Homecoming king and queen and being around teachers who genuinely cared about her success.
“We had black teachers that told us we could be somebody,” Elbert says. “We had people who shared our joy and happiness.”
Eliot Battle, a Hickman High School guidance counselor who worked during integration, stands next to ...
Emil Gardner, class of 63.
- Scenes from the Providence Bowl
- Fast times at Hickman High
- Tech-savvy students
- The young and the reckless
- Rumors and realities
- The spread
- The Education of Segregation
- Lifelong leaders
- Edged out
- Roosters, cows and mice, oh my!
- Crosstown competition
- Playing the field
- Say what?
- Where are they now?
- On the Job: High School Custodians
- After-school alliance
- Rival Survival
- Through the Years
- High school mascots go head to head
In the fall of 1960, all that changed.
Six years after the famous Brown v. Board of Education decision outlawed segregated schools, an increasing number of black students transferred to what had been white schools. Douglass, the first and only school in Columbia designated for black students, ended its high school program after enrolling only 66 students for the school year. Douglass’ elementary and junior high schools continued to operate, but the high school students transferred to Hickman High School, the only other public high school in the city.
Elbert, a sophomore at the time, admits that Douglass lacked resources, specifically updated textbooks, but she was not ready to leave her school. “Integration resulted in loss of community, our own heritage, our own culture,” Elbert says. She would have preferred improving Douglass so that white students would come to them.
Instead, Elbert and several other students were in for culture shock. White faces replaced black ones, the Homecoming king and queen no longer looked like her and the hallways and cafeteria tables were segregated by race.
The reality of the integration was hardly integration at all. In 1960, black students made up only 11 percent of Hickman’s population. “They didn’t understand where we came from, and we didn’t quite understand where they came from,” Elbert says.
Although black students didn’t feel accepted within Hickman’s walls, they were quickly embraced on the field. Black students got positions on several varsity teams, says Roger Gafke, a professor emeritus at the Missouri School of Journalism and a Hickman alum, in his book A History of Public School Education in Columbia. It came as no surprise to Elbert that blacks were welcomed for their athletic talent. “The guys were always good enough to be on the team,” Elbert says.
Some black students were similarly accepted into the National Honor Society, but it was a lack of representation in other activities that concerned students such as Mildred Cox.
Ten years after the integration of Hickman, senior Mildred Cox asserted in a letter to the school newspaper that black students at Hickman were not happy. Gafke includes a portion of the letter in his book, which reads, “We feel that the black male athlete is exploited, and the black female is all but forgotten throughout her entire stay here unless, of course, she is gifted with extraordinary intelligence. What kind of opportunity does this hold for the black student who lacks outstanding intellect, or is not capable of becoming an all star? My answer for the average black student is that Hickman holds nothing.”
Emil Gardner, a 1963 graduate, became one of the unfulfilled students Cox describes. “I don’t remember getting any F’s, but I don’t remember getting any A’s either,” he says.
Students such as Gardner struggled to make the transition from Douglass to Hickman, and they were prevented from participating in high school rituals. During his sophomore year, Gardner’s classmates elected him the “Most Versatile” student, but he was stripped of the honor. Gardner believes his teacher used his grades as an excuse to hide the real reason he was unable to keep his title: Each class elected a boy and a girl for the superlative, and once chosen, these two students walked down the aisle together. That year the girl chosen was white.
“They weren’t going to let me walk down the aisle with a white girl,” Gardner says.
Despite his mediocre grades, Gardner was allowed to play on the football team.
Black students had few support systems at Hickman, but one came in the form of Eliot Battle, a man who served as a social studies and English teacher, guidance counselor and assistant principal at Douglass. In 1960, Battle transferred to Hickman as a guidance counselor and later became the director of guidance. “If integration was going to work, those of us involved in an integrated-type setting would have to be top quality, and I knew I could set that pattern,” he says. Although Battle was there for the students, he found that some Douglass parents were not pleased with his decision to leave. Douglass parents called him a traitor to his race.
Battle noticed that after black students began attending Hickman, parental involvement waned. Parents, who once maintained close relationships with their children’s teachers, did not feel comfortable with white faculty. “Many parents were anti-integration and didn’t feel comfortable in an integrated environment,” Battle says. In their absence, Battle became a mediator between the black students and teachers who sometimes lacked racial sensitivity. In one incident, Battle asked an art teacher to remove an illustration hung in her classroom. It featured a black face with white lips, an image resembling offensive minstrel cartoons.
There were undeniable struggles associated with integration, but Battle felt it was essential to academic achievement of all of the students. “My view was and still is, if you’re going to compete in the world, you need to have the same background as your competitors,” he says.
For black students, life at Hickman was a challenge, but not an insurmountable one. Battle still sees several of his students and says many of the black Hickman graduates have become important community figures. “It makes you proud to know that they were strugglers at one time,” he says.
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