The 70th anniversary of Brown vs. Board of Education serves as a reminder of the Augusta children who braved the color barrier to integrate Richmond County public schools.
It also calls to mind the 19th-century Augusta case that helped set the tone of “separate but equal” for more than 50 years.
Brown, decided by the U.S. Supreme Court May 17, 1954, made segregating students by race in public schools illegal. Richmond County would take nearly 20 years and another federal lawsuit to more fully integrate.
MORE: Augusta Newcomers Club supports tiny home initiative with donation
In the meantime, there emerged a handful of local Black students such as Juanita Burney, whose father was determined his three children would be among the first to attend formerly all-white Richmond County public schools.
“There were nine of us Black students, and 2,500 white students,” said Burney, a member of a second small group of Black students to enroll at the Academy of Richmond County, in 1967.
Burney had been a sophomore at Lucy Craft Laney High School and preferred not to leave her friends there to spend her junior and senior years at Richmond, she said.
It was a time when ARC students still sung “Dixie” during assemblies. Her best friend sang along, but Burney said she just couldn’t. In the classroom, Burney said only one of her teachers seemed not to mind teaching Black students. The group of nine, all bright students, hung together.
“We were able to pull it on our own recognizance, but the support system was definitely not there,” she said.
She remembers the time as “two fairly unpleasant years” she chose not to remember, but softened after former classmates offered apologies at class reunions.
“Would I like to do it again? No thank you,” she said.
But she’s come to appreciate the challenge of those years as she entered her professional career as a quality management coordinator at the medical college.
“For a long time I stayed miffed with my dad for making me go, but once I got outside in my professional career, I realized what I learned at Richmond Academy really helped me learn to stand on my own two feet, not to rely on anyone else to help, because it wasn’t coming, and to be able to excel under difficult circumstances,” she said.
Cumming et al v. Board of Education of Richmond County
Post-Reconstruction Augusta was a vibrant time for education. There were three Black private schools, including the Haines Normal and Industrial Institute founded by Lucy Craft Laney in 1883. There were public elementary schools for Black pupils as well as publicly-funded Ware High School, which opened in 1880.
Frederick Douglass visited Ware in 1888 and praised its classically-trained students. Judson Lyons, Georgia’s first African-American attorney and register of the U.S. Treasury, attended Ware.
But citing a budget crunch and low enrollment, the school board decided in the 1890s to shutter Ware, and divert its resources to crowded elementary schools for Black pupils.
Some 150 would petition the board to save “the pride of the community” that was Ware, according to historian Edward Cashin, in his 1985 “History of Public Education in Richmond County, Ga.”
They argued that taxing the Black community to fund operations of white high schools, Tubman and Hephzibah, but none for Black students violated the 14th Amendment, the Equal Protection Clause.
Former Vermont Sen. George Edmunds, credited with drafting the 14th Amendment and visiting Aiken at the time, took interest. He argued the case before the U.S. Supreme Court on Jan. 24, 1898.
The Supreme Court, in a 1899 opinion authored by Justice John Harlan, said there was no evidence the school board closed the school based on race.
The opinion complemented the court’s 1896 decision in Plessy vs. Ferguson upholding “separate but equal” train seating for Black and white passengers.
“No other decision by the board has had such historic dimensions as its closing of Ware High School,” Cashin wrote.
The board would not again fund a public high school for Black students until 1937, and even with the Brown decision, Richmond County persisted in maintaining dual white and Black schools.
A U.S. District Court’s decision in a 1964 case, Acree vs. County Board of Education of Richmond County, forced the board to end a school “choice” program and adopt plans to actually desegregate in 1972, although the board did not make parity in support staff and facilities.
