To Attend a Black High School?

If you're too young to remember segregation, or if you attended a high school with no African Americans, you probably have never seen a "school for Blacks." In the Jim Crow era, schools that were like Second Ward were not very different from any other school. Before the late 1950s and early 1960s, people of different skin colors were not allowed to be present in the same public places. In fact, before 1923, African Americans who wanted to get a high school diploma had to go to a college like Shaw University because there were no schools for black children. And black children were not allowed to go to school with white children.

Second Ward High School changed that, opening its doors in Charlotte in 1923 to the first African American class. Until 1940, students entered high school in the 7th grade and graduated in the 11th grade. In 1940, students preparing to graduate had to stay another year to graduate from 12th grade.

Subjects and activities didn't differ from today's high school. After saying the Pledge of Allegiance in the morning, students attended classes in English, math, foreign languages, social studies, music, science, civics, biology, chemistry and physics. After-school activities included sports like basketball and football (at that time taught by Vermelle's father, the French teacher), drama club, Girl Reserve (similar to YMCA) and debate teams.

However, instead of typing, shorthand and driver's education, students took more basic classes to prepare them for the world outside of school. Classes like home economics, cooking, tailoring, horticulture, brickmasonry and journalism gave students a foundation to enter the working world or start college. Students who wanted to take typing had to go somewhere after school to learn it.

Resources were quite different between black and white high schools. As white high schools ordered new textbooks, they donated their used ones to the black schools. Most students had to walk to school since they had no school buses, sometimes amidst jeering or projectiles being thrown by white teenagers. Students also dressed quite differently; African American parents understood the value of an education, many having been denied one themselves, and the bright, clean clothes they dressed their children in reflected the seriousness with which they took a school day. So the clothes that children wore to school were often no different from the ones they wore to church--they wore the best that they owned.

Being Black in North Carolina