CARVER HIGH ENDS IN SAME CLIMATE AS IT BEGAN
George Washington Carver High School was opened in 1957, a product of a racially segregated society.
Last week, Carver High was closed, a casualty of a racially and economically resegregated society.
It’s nobody’s fault. Nobody in particular. It’s just the way things were and the way things are.
“Education is the key to unlock the golden door of freedom,” the scientist George Washington Carver once said.
We’re still looking for the right set of keys.
It shouldn’t be this hard to find them. Numerous studies have shown that integration works.
That minority adults who attended desegregated schools were more likely to go to college, less likely to be poor or go to jail.
That schools with disproportionate numbers of poor minority children are less likely to have experienced teachers, advanced courses and adequate resources.
We don’t need studies to prove it. We can just look around.
The city’s best performing high school, White Station, is also its most integrated.
Carver ended its life as the city’s worst-performing high school, and its most racially and economically segregated. Did it ever really have a chance?
The Memphis Board of Education opened Carver High as a segregated school for black students in 1957.
That was three years after the U.S. Supreme Court declared separate schools for black children were inherently unequal, even if they had equal resources.
“In the years after Brown, absolutely nothing was done here to integrate our schools,” the late Maxine Smith told my friend and fellow journalist John Branston in a 2011 Memphis magazine article.
“They started building all-black schools like Carver and Lester near white neighborhoods just to keep
(black kids) out of schools like South Side and East. It was shameful.”
Carver opened without a cafeteria. Parents brought hot meals and brown-bag lunches. Teachers took turns running a snack bar. The students and the school got bigger and stronger.
Frances Hooks, the wife of the Rev. Dr. Benjamin Hooks, became the school’s first guidance counselor in 1959. By the time the first senior class of Carver Cobras graduated in 1961, the school had 2,200 students.
After decades of forced racial segregation, courtordered desegregation of schools finally came to Memphis in the early 1970s.
That was followed by decades of human-ordered resegregation.
Carver worked hard to adjust. Additions were built in 1958, 1960, 1962, 1971 and 1976.
Finally, after 40 years of life, the old school was sagging and struggling to move into the high-speed new century.
“This building was never built for the 21st century. It doesn’t have the technology we need for education,” Carver principal Jerry L. Marlin told the newspaper in 1997.
That year, the school board approved a $10 million renovation/replacement project for the school. It included a new, state-ofthe-art academic building with fiber optics and a research library.
“We picked the best designs from all over the country,” Marlin said. “We’re going to have a safe and efficient plant in which to educate children.”
As Carver’s hopes soared, the Riverside neighborhood around it began to nosedive. Middle-class people moved out. Gangs moved in.
In the past two decades, Riverside’s population has dropped from 6,500 to 3,900. There are 300 fewer housing units and twice as many vacant ones. Nearly half of all families in Riverside now live below the federal poverty line.
Court-ordered desegregation didn’t work. Now we’re trying a court-ordered “safety zone.”
That’s a court injunction that prohibits gang members from “standing, sitting, walking, driving, gathering, or appearing anywhere in public view or anyplace accessible to the public” with each other.
There are two exceptions: inside a place of worship or inside a school.
This past school year, Carver’s enrollment dropped below 200. Its student body was 99 percent black and 92 percent poor.
Last week, the Shelby County Board of Education approved the superintendent’s recommendation to close Carver High, citing the school’s low enrollment and poor academic performance.
Starting in August, Carver’s students will be sent to Hamilton High — which is 98 percent black and 92 percent poor.
Today, in Memphis and across the country, as The New York Times noted last week, black children are more segregated than they have been at any point in the past half-century.
It’s nobody’s fault. Nobody in particular. It’s just the way things are. And it’s still a shame.