October 12, 2008
Voices of Brown
7 Marylanders talk about the impact of the Brown decision
Lawrence E. Leak
When Lawrence E. Leak's mother went to register her two seventh-grade sons in the fall of 1965, Queen Anne's County officials automatically signed them up at Kennard High School, the county's historically "colored" secondary school.
But the Leaks, a military family just relocated from Germany, were accustomed to the racially mixed schools of the U.S. Defense Department. They insisted on enrolling their sons at Centreville High.
That fall, 11 years after the Brown decision, the Leak brothers and a third African-American, Kevin Ringold, became the first blacks to integrate secondary schools in Queen Anne's.
"The Supreme Court in 1955 called for 'all deliberate speed,' and Queen Anne's County was certainly deliberate," says Leak, 50.
"The administrators went out of their way to make sure we were OK," says Leak, who later became a top official at Towson University, the Maryland State Department of Education and the University of Maryland University College.
"The three of us hung out together in sort of a mutual protection society. Since we were the youngest kids in the school, the older boys found it easy to call us names and push us around. ... But the way we were treated was mixed. Some of the students and teachers were kind."
The Leak brothers' sojourn at Centreville High was short. The
family moved west of the Bay Bridge in April 1966.
"We were just getting used to you," the principal told Leak the day he left.
Leah Hasty
Leah Goldsborough Hasty grew up on the Eastern Shore, where her parents were once butler and maid to the family of developer James Rouse. Her route to teaching and public school administration took her from one segregated setting to another: Talbot County public schools, historically black Morgan State College, teaching assignments in segregated Somerset and Harford counties.
But finally, in 1956, she arrived as a young teacher at a newly desegregated school in East Baltimore -- No. 20 at Eden and Federal streets.
"I was assigned there," she remembers. "I was so happy to have a job that I would have gone anywhere."
Hasty says the experience of teaching in a majority-white school "was invigorating. Children are children, and they were then. And parents were parents. They wanted what was best for their kids. Blacks and whites worked well together on the PTA. Those were strong times for education in the city, really."
One thing that struck Hasty: As a freshman at Morgan, and later as a teacher in East Baltimore, she held in her hands brand-new textbooks. That wasn't the case in Hasty's first two teaching posts in Somerset and Harford. Nor had young Leah Goldsborough, growing up in Talbot County, experienced the joy of a new schoolbook. She had always been given hand-me-downs from white schools.
"When they first handed me a new book at Morgan State, it was like Christmas," says Hasty, 72, who went on to a distinguished career as teacher and principal in Baltimore. "I was about 16 and young enough for it to make an impression. Holding a book that wasn't first read in a white school didn't mean a lot to other folks, but it sure did to me."
Joel A. Carrington
The transition to integration was particularly difficult at schools such as Northern High, which is surrounded by white neighborhoods in Northeast Baltimore.
"We had only a small contingent of blacks," said Joel A. Carrington, who was the second African-American to serve as a Northern assistant principal.
He recalled a time in the 1960s when black students, with the school's blessing, organized an assembly celebrating black history.
Copyright © 2008, The Baltimore Sun
