CHARLESTON, W.Va. -- Katherine Atwater remembers going to Booker T. Washington High School, a black high school, when there were only five employees and four classrooms in the whole building.
Juanita Brown, with Juanita Day and Isabelle Godfrey, looks at a Booker T. Washington High School reunion photo from 2006. Graduates of the school and their family members are invited to attend a reunion, which will be held the weekend of Aug. 8.
"The English teacher taught English and French," the 95-year-old recalled. "The math teacher taught math and history. It was exactly like a family."
Atwater will be sharing these and other memories with about 150 of her schoolmates at their fourth biennial reunion Aug. 8 through Aug. 10.
One classmate is Lou Myers, who played Mr. Gaines on "A Different World" and also appeared in the Broadway production of "A Raisin in the Sun." He will be singing at the occasion.
All of the school's graduates and even their children, most of whom remember the days when schools were segregated and the rough days of integration, are invited to attend the event.
Most are grateful to have had the opportunity to attend high school becuase a majority of West Virginia black students in the 1920s ended their education in the eighth grade, according to a history of the school provided by Patricia Wilson, the reunion's organizer and daughter of a Washington High School graduate and teacher.
A select few from across the state were lucky enough to attend West Virginia Collegiate Institute, a secondary school in Institute. They had to pay tuition, and most lived in dormitories.
But when Booker T. Washington High School opened in 1925, a whole new world and a new set of opportunities were open to teenagers in eastern Kanawha County.
Getting the school built was not an easy task.
Parents in the upper Kanawha County banded together in 1923 to ask the Kanawha County Board of Education for permission to build a school for black children.
The school board granted their request, but they had to find their own land.
One site in Cedar Grove and another in London were considered, but they settled for the London plot after whites in Cedar Grove became alarmed at the prospect of a black school in their community.
Leonard Barnett served as the school's first and only principal.
"He was very personable and very forward thinking," said Wilson, who is writing a dissertation on him. "He was very proactive in education. He had a very active parent group and encouraged students to come to school."
Only 35 students were enrolled in school the first year, but the school continued to grow and prosper. By 1929, there were 184 students.
Atwater, who lived in Glen Terrace in Fayette County for a little while, would take a 25-minute train ride to school. Simmons High School, the school in her county, was overcrowded, so the board of education paid Kanawha County to allow students at Washington High.
She remembers the train stopped at different places along the way and picked up students. She had to ride the train for only one year before she moved back to eastern Kanawha County.
Perhaps one of Atwater's favorite classes was home economics. After she graduated, her home ec teacher took her to Columbus, where she planned to attend Ohio State and major in sewing.
However, after one year in the big city, Atwater moved back to Kanawha County to help her family. She started her own sewing business, and has not stopped since. She has made everything from wedding dresses to majorette outfits.
CHARLESTON, W.Va. -- Katherine Atwater remembers going to Booker T. Washington High School, a black high school, when there were only five employees and four classrooms in the whole building.
"The English teacher taught English and French," the 95-year-old recalled. "The math teacher taught math and history. It was exactly like a family."
Atwater will be sharing these and other memories with about 150 of her schoolmates at their fourth biennial reunion Aug. 8 through Aug. 10.
One classmate is Lou Myers, who played Mr. Gaines on "A Different World" and also appeared in the Broadway production of "A Raisin in the Sun." He will be singing at the occasion.
All of the school's graduates and even their children, most of whom remember the days when schools were segregated and the rough days of integration, are invited to attend the event.
Most are grateful to have had the opportunity to attend high school becuase a majority of West Virginia black students in the 1920s ended their education in the eighth grade, according to a history of the school provided by Patricia Wilson, the reunion's organizer and daughter of a Washington High School graduate and teacher.
A select few from across the state were lucky enough to attend West Virginia Collegiate Institute, a secondary school in Institute. They had to pay tuition, and most lived in dormitories.
But when Booker T. Washington High School opened in 1925, a whole new world and a new set of opportunities were open to teenagers in eastern Kanawha County.
Getting the school built was not an easy task.
Parents in the upper Kanawha County banded together in 1923 to ask the Kanawha County Board of Education for permission to build a school for black children.
The school board granted their request, but they had to find their own land.
One site in Cedar Grove and another in London were considered, but they settled for the London plot after whites in Cedar Grove became alarmed at the prospect of a black school in their community.
Leonard Barnett served as the school's first and only principal.
"He was very personable and very forward thinking," said Wilson, who is writing a dissertation on him. "He was very proactive in education. He had a very active parent group and encouraged students to come to school."
Only 35 students were enrolled in school the first year, but the school continued to grow and prosper. By 1929, there were 184 students.
Atwater, who lived in Glen Terrace in Fayette County for a little while, would take a 25-minute train ride to school. Simmons High School, the school in her county, was overcrowded, so the board of education paid Kanawha County to allow students at Washington High.
She remembers the train stopped at different places along the way and picked up students. She had to ride the train for only one year before she moved back to eastern Kanawha County.
Perhaps one of Atwater's favorite classes was home economics. After she graduated, her home ec teacher took her to Columbus, where she planned to attend Ohio State and major in sewing.
However, after one year in the big city, Atwater moved back to Kanawha County to help her family. She started her own sewing business, and has not stopped since. She has made everything from wedding dresses to majorette outfits.
Wilson also went to school when it was segregated.
A typical day for most children was to wake up at 4 a.m. and catch the bus by 5, she recalled. Black students were always picked up first, dropped off at school, then the white children were picked up, she said.
When they got to school, they would have to wait for school to start. Then in the afternoons, the opposite happened. White children were picked up first and brought home while the blacks waited. They would eventually walk through the door at about 5 or 6 p.m., Wilson said.
Since her mom was a teacher, Wilson's grandfather and father would come to pick up her and her mom after school, so she was not forced to wait.
But she remembers seeing people eating popsicles, doing homework and dancing in the gym while waiting for the bus.
By the end of Wilson's fifth grade year, schools began to integrate.
Not everyone was happy about the change, she recalled.
"I can remember lots of tears on the last day of school," Wilson said. "I can remember difficult times. Some went to great lengths to see that black students were treated equally. There were others that tried to stop the progress. If you were a good student, sometimes you had teachers negotiating against you. We went through growing pains."
When Wilson graduated as valedictorian of her class at Cedar Grove in 1963, seven years after integration, the principal would not announce her name in the newspaper. Instead, her father had to call the paper, she recalled.
Many black teachers lost their jobs and had to move out of state to find other positions, she said.
Even Barnett, the school's principal, was forced to become a math teacher at another school in the county after integration. Eventually, he moved to Philadelphia, where he became a principal, Wilson said.
She doesn't seem bitter about what she and her classmates went through, just thankful things have since changed.
Things got much better after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, she said.
"It took time," she said. "Attitude is the problem. For people to realize that African Americans are people like everyone else, that they have feelings, it took a while."
It is important for people to remember their history, and the reunion helps to serve that purpose, Wilson said.
"We want to do what we can to keep the dream alive," she said.
To share any memories of the school or to find out more about the reunion, e-mail Wilson at washingtonhig...@yahoo.com.
