Don’t Fuss ... Let’s Discuss
The African-American Community Forum
Part IV: 1970-71, Children of Wilkes initiate cross-cultural education and social reform

The 1970 decision of the Wilkes County Board of Education to desegregate its public schools set in motion changes and new challenges for the children and adults of Wilkes County that continue even today. It is the context of some of these changes that we are here discussing this week.

In September 1970, the Wilkes County School System opened as an integrated system without any serious outside public disturbances. Within the school system the principals, teachers, administrators, and support staff began to operate under the supervision of the federal court in an orderly fashion to carry out the desegregation/integration order to accommodate two different groups of culturally and socially conditioned children coming together for the first time in the same educational school physical facilities to begin learning together on a newly created academic field tract that was built by the Supreme Court of the United States of America.

Each child, African-American and white, came with a culturally inherited ethnicity and different social and cultural experiences and heritages. Each child came to school on that historical day with an already learned ethnic culture that had conditioned their minds, hearts, souls, and personalities; an ethnic culture derived from the lives and experiences of their families, their segregated neighborhoods and churches, their differing social and economic positions and other aspects of their social environments.

In other words, the children were already pre-packaged with baggage of their forebears and ancestors. So, on that opening day of school in 1970-71, the African-American and white students of Wilkes County brought their separate social and cultural backgrounds with them into the beginning of a mutual learning experience that had never happened before in Wilkes County.

The challenge of the school system’s board, principals, teachers, administrators, and support staff, together with the parents, extended families, ethnic communities, and churches was, collectively, to help the children/students to move beyond their differences tot the point where they could form a single and shared learning school community, and yet maintain their respective ethnicity cultures and traditions.

That challenge, of course, was not necessarily embraced by all at the beginning of school desegregation in the county. According to Kathleen Reaves’ study of the Integration of Wilkes County Public Schools, some white families chose not to enroll their children in the desegregated public schools. The Wilkes Academy, private white school, enrollment increased from 242 to 375 for the 1970-71 school year, including white students from Lincoln, Warren, McDuffie, and Oglethorpe counties.

Wilkes Academy eventually closed, however, Briarwood Academy in Warren County as of 20032004 school year reported an enrollment of 343 white students comprising of a student-teacher ratio of 13.3 to 1. Nevertheless, those first Wilkes County students from the 1970s were saddled with the burden and responsibility to begin the incredibly difficult task of transforming their separate racial-ethnic communities into a more equal multicultural society, a society that would preserve their ethnic identities while learning respect, equal opportunity, and understanding for each other.

Let’s go back to the backgrounds that the students brought with them into the mutual academic learning environment in 1970. To be more specific, the cultural heritage and social traits of the African-American students entering the integrated school physical facilities in the fall of 1970 originated in the lives and experiences of their enslaved Africa ancestors, who were involuntary emigrants from the continent of Africa to Wilkes County, beginning in 1773, and their descendants over the succeeding generations.

Similarly, the social and cultural traits of the white students originated from their European ancestors who also immigrated to Wilkes County beginning in 1773 and their descendants over the succeeding generations. Our Wilkes County enslaved African ancestors fought in and supported the Revolution War of 1775 in Wilkes County under the leadership of General Elijah Clark, Colonel John Dooly, especially the free African hero of the “Battle of Kettle Creek,” Austin Dabney, who fought courageously along the side of General Clark.

The war ended with the signing of the Treaty of Paris in 1783 that freed the 13 colonies in North America, including the present Wilkes white ancestors from domination and oppression by Great British and thereby gained their freedom, liberty and justice as a free people of a democratic society.

The students (and their teachers) who entered Wilkes County schools in 1970-71 were already the products of 197 years of separate ethnic experiences and history in Wilkes County. Embedded in the social and cultural heritage of those two separate ethnic groups of children, brought together under the same school building roofs in 1970 were cultural differences and social conflicts inherited on American and Wilkes County soil that had existed and grown between the two separate ethnic communities in Wilkes County since the Creek and Cherokee Indians defaulted on their 1763 Treaties of Augusta in 1773 and ceded the 2 million acres of land to Britist 13th county Georgia that eventually became Wilkes County.

Historically speaking, the ancestral roots of African-Americans and white citizens of Wilkes County were sprouted not on the continent of North American but on the continents of Europe and Africa. We are all immigrants to this land of the Cherokee and Creek Indians. And today we have equal interest in and pride for the territory we now live in, and are partners, albeit unequally, of the inherited economic development and wealth accrued in Wilkes County since 1773, representing the combined togetherness of human resources of Wilkes County’s African-American and white citizens and our ancestors during that same 197 year period: 1773-1970.

Although our African-American forbearers were not given their equal share of legal title to all capital assets and wealth accumulated before or after 1865, they did provide the major source of enforced human labor without compensation for the economic development of Wilkes County. And the public educational facilities students began to share on the first day of classes in 1970 were just one component of the capital assets and economic development of Wilkes County that represented the combine human resources of Wilkes County’s AfricanAmerican and white citizens and ancestors.

Unfortunately, the children of the original native Cherokee Indians who were inhabitants prior to 1773 of the territory that became Wilkes County in 1777 were not among the children who enrolled in the Wilkes County School System in 1970. Some of my readers may recall the article of October 27, 2005, where I made reference to the Cherokee Nation in Georgia. The Supreme Court of the United States ruled in the case of Worcester v. Georgia in 1832 that the Cherokee nation in Georgia had an inherited right to self-government.

Notwithstanding, Georgia’s white settlers wanted the Cherokee land to grow cotton and the State of Georgia and the then United States President Andrew Jackson simply ignored (with no impeachment proceeding initiated for violating the U.S. Constitution) the Supreme Court ruling. In 1835, President Jackson ordered the Native Cherokee Indians removed at gunpoint by the U.S. Army that marched the Indians out of their native land of Georgia over the “Trail of Tears,” where about 4,000 Cherokees died before reaching their designated Indian territory of Oklahoma.

In 1970, 135 years after their illegal removal from Georgia, there were no native Cherokee Indian children (no record located) to participate and celebrate in the desegregation of Wilkes County schools; located on land of their ancestors’ native home of the Cherokee Indians.

The cultural differences and social conflicts that grew and segregated our two ethnic communities until 1970, when we began to try to bridge them through our shared school facilities and professional employees, have been the source of many troubles and problems for us as a county and community of people. While we have begun a healing and reconciliation process of our shared history of inequality as master and slave, boss and servant, we still face many challenges.

Genuine cross-cultural awareness, understanding and education continue to be important. Little by little we see the changes in our culturally conditioned minds, hearts, and souls from bigotry and prejudice to the recognition that all God’s human beings should be treated and respected as I or you wish to be. From these steps that we must continue to take today, our future generations can create a humane and more equal multi-ethnic community in Wilkes County, a community that will bring good health, social justice, economic prosperity and peace to both of our ethnic communities.

Much has changed since the 1970s. The children who took first steps into desegregated schools of Wilkes County in 1970 are now adults with children and grandchildren of their own. Although the immediate challenge of the school desegregation that we faced in 1970 has been transformed and is behind us, we and future generations of our children still face new challenges in education and in other areas of community life.

The African-American and white teachers, principals, administrators and support personnel who began the 1970-71 Wilkes County schoolyear had to undergo a process of cultural and social transformation not unlike the process that students faced. And for the most part, they too had received no more prior preparation than the students had.

According to the Wilkes County Board of Education records of 1969-70, the Washington Central High School employed 26 AfricanAmericans; one principal; 13 male and 12 female teachers; and the student enrollment of 554. The elementary school employed 33 African Americans; one principal; six male and 26 female teachers; and the student enrollment of 676. The aggregate consisted of two principals and 57 teachers, total 59 African American professionals and 1,230 students or 25.5 percent of the African-American population of 4,817.

These are the African-American academic professionals and the additional support staff that merged with the white schools’ personnel and students to begin the transformation into a new era for the betterment of our ethnic communities and the future of Wilkes County.

We have not yet heard their stories. But that is a story for another article for another day. Meanwhile, for the 2003-2004 school year, African American principals and teachers are an “endangered species,” (59 in 1970 decreased by 36 to 23 in 2004), even though African American students made up 51.9 percent in the 2003-2004 enrollment.

Send your responses to docdanner@nu-z.net or P.O. Box 1328, Washington, Ga. 30673.

The opinions expressed by this columnist do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of this newspaper.