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Tuesday, February 6, 2007
Black History Month: Remembering Hooper-Renwick School
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
To this day, he still remembers the principal.
Robert Hightower was his name. He was a strict disciplinarian, role model, mentor. He didn’t demand perfection, just encouraged kids to achieve it.
“He had a pretty good influence on all of us,” said Eron Moore of Lawrenceville. “He believed that you should be in school, do what you are supposed to do when you were supposed to do it, and take pride in doing it.”
Hightower was a principal at the Hooper-Renwick School in Lawrenceville. It was the only public school in the county that blacks could attend. This was when segregation was par for course, back in the 1950’s and most of the 1960’s. Back then, black kids were picked up by bus from towns all over the county to Hooper-Renwick. Often, they were bussed past all-white campuses.
“Drove right by them,” said Nathaniel Brown of Norcross, a 76-year-old civil rights activist who drove a “relay” bus that took Norcross-area students to Duluth, where they continued to school on another bus.
“We didn’t know any better,” Brown told me. “What I mean by that is, that’s just the way it was back then.”
Back then, Ruby Neal lived in Dacula. She’s a proud Hooper-Renwick graduate, class of 1956.
“It was wonderful,” said Neal, 71, of Lawrenceville. “Just wonderful.”
The Hooper-Renwick campus closed its doors to students in 1968. Public schools had integrated. The campus still exists today. It carries the same name, but has a different purpose. The renovated campus, on Neal Boulevard in the mostly black section of downtown Lawrenceville, reopened in 1995 as a separate middle and high school for autistic students and those with severe emotional issues.
Memories of the segregated school — the good and bad of what it represented — are etched in the minds of old-timers. Folk like Moore, Neal and Brown. This time of year, history can strike a sensitive emotional chord. After all, it’s Black History Month.
“We need to know where we’re coming from to know where we’re going,” said Robbie Moore, Eron’s wife and president of the United Ebony Society of Gwinnett County, a civil rights group.
“We had a great, strong black community in Gwinnett, even before integration. We need to remember that.”
And because of that, a Hooper-Renwick reunion is in the works.
Graduates and former students are to gather for brunch and a tour of the school on July 21. A banquet will be held later that night at the Gwinnett Place Marriott. Festivities will continue the next day at Pleasant Hill Baptist Church, which hosted Hooper-Renwick’s graduation ceremonies back in the day.
“We’re prepared for 250 and we hope that it’s going to be more in attendance,” Neal told me. “We keep losing people, so we want to get together and have a good time. We want to keep in touch with each other. I’m so excited I can hardly contain myself.”
For more information about the Hooper-Renwick reunion, contact Ruby Neal at 770-277-5123.
Rick Badie’s column appears on Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Contact him at 770-263-3875 or e-mail: rbadie@ajc.com.
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