'Big Four' alumni speak

When you consider the Black education emanating from Forsyth County in the late 19th century and early 20th century, you see a dedication, a care, and how, when needed, Black educators served in loco parentis for the students. In addition to their academics, there was attention given to their mental and physical well-being. As Wanda A. Hendricks writes in The Life of Madie Hall Xuma, these educators "transformed the Black educational system." Whether it is Depot Street Graded School or Fourteenth Street School, these institutions laid the foundation for the "Big Four," a reference to the four Black high schools that educated students in Forsyth County during the 1960s. They included Simon G. Atkins High School, Albert H. Anderson High School, Carver Consolidated School, and John W. Paisley High School.

Wayne Ledbetter, a 1970 Anderson graduate, said that foundationally, they "had some very good Black teachers. ... I think a lot of people miss that they were very highly trained." Highly trained they were as documented by Leslie T. Fenwick in Jim Crow's Pink Slip. "In seventeen states, Black residents desiring to attend graduate school could only attend HBCUs, so if the course of study desired was unavailable at an in-state HBCU, the prospective Black graduate student had to leave the state of his or her residence to attend an integrated university, usually located in one of the northeastern or midwestern states," she writes. "The data show that, overwhelmingly, these Black educators forced out of their home states for graduate degrees often enrolled in some of the most highly ranked universities in the nation." North Carolina was among those states, and between 1921 and 1943, it spent more than $97,000 in tuition scholarship allocations for Black educators to obtain graduate-level degrees elsewhere. That academic attainment, coupled with the social experiences endured at northern and midwestern universities, prepared educators like those at the Big Four to shepherd their students into adulthood.

Black educators across the south were in disputes about fair pay in the 1930s and 1940s, and that fight was happening in North Carolina through the North Carolina Teachers Association (NCTA). And in 1940s Winston-Salem, the NCTA had an example of what labor reform could look like as described by Sarah Caroline Thuesen in Greater than Equal: African American Struggles for Schools and Citizenship in North Carolina, 1919-1965. She makes a correlation to the self-determinism of the Black workers who walked off the job at R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company in 1943 for a litany of reasons, mainly fair pay and the tacitly bad working conditions. She writes that "Winston-Salem's black tobacco workers dared to join forces with the national labor movement. ... Even though [they] eventually fell victim to company repression and postwar anticommunism, its members dramatically strengthened their bargaining power at the plant during the mid-1940s." Similarly, the Black educators of the mid-20th century vigorously educated their pupils about the possibilities of life and their agency over their future. Arthur Dark, Carver class of 1964, said those teachers "instilled in us a will to do better. They constantly reminded us," he said, "of where we came from, and where we needed to go and what we needed to do to get there."

These vignettes and more present themselves in interviews with graduates from the Big Four. As Norman Williams, Anderson class 1967 recalled, their teachers stressed to them that a good "education could not be taken away."