Truckin' on the Western Branch

the building and the grammar school in three classrooms on the other side. The Elliots’ 1938 graduating class had 13 members with Ida (Willie) Elliot the valedictorian. No law required them to go to school—just their own drive and initiative.

Olanda Gibson also grew up in Twin Pines, a few doors from where he and his wife, Shirley, live now.

“I went to the Churchland School for blacks and walked a half a mile there and back in all kinds of weather,” he said. “Then we were in Norfolk County, so I went to Douglas Park for high school and graduated in June 1947.”

Twenty years later his four children were among the first black children to go to Churchland High School. Previously, the children had been bussed to Southwestern and to Crestwood. Edgar “Butch” Morgan was the Churchland High principal then, Gibson remembered.

“They didn’t make it easy on them,” Shirley Gibson said. “They put them by themselves, one black child to a class. I would go up to the school and have lunch with them several days a week so they would feel comfortable. But they mixed in, one ran track and they were in the band. ”

“There will always be bullies, black or white, and looking back I don’t know if I would have put the children through all that in that school,” Olanda Gibson said. “But when we asked them about it years later they said they kinda liked it.”

Carolyn Taylor taught at Crestwood Elementary in 1962 and remembered all the students there were black except the children of two white families who were living in dilapidated houses . W e felt sorry for them because they were so poor. In 1970 we were integrated and I was sent to Chittum. I went with an attitude, a fro and a Dashiki—and I still flaunt the fro. Each school‘s teaching staff had to reflect the 30% black 70% white ratio of the community. I was at Chittum from 1970 to 1991 teaching grades 4, 5 and 6. My first year at Chittum I had 29 white students and two black. I told the children they could question anything if it wasn’t disrespectful.

In Churchland, residents remember, token integration began in 1964–65 with full integration several years later.

Art Brandriff came to Churchland High in the fall of 1963. He was the head football coach and taught physical education there for five years. He remembered Churchland was a very good school academically. We had about 1,000 kids, lots of community support, and the whole area went there. The school was all white for the first two years I was there and then it integrated slowly. I recruited Chasper Taylor and Jerry Gaines, both black, both outstanding athletes. They had ridden bikes up to watch the Churchland football practice and were tossing a ball around. I asked Chasper—can you catch a pass? He answered, “I never dropped one.” Can you run? “No one’s ever caught me,” he answered. I took them both. Western Branch was the only school in the whole area that was totally integrated—with 125 black students.

Bruce Wright Robinett graduated from Churchland in 1967 and said, “As I remember Chasper Taylor and two girls were the first black students, and there was some chatter but no real scenes with integration.”

The Rev. Melvin Marriner, Grove Church, remembered integration differently. Growing up in Bowers Hill, he walked to school at Southwestern Elementary before going to the new Western Branch High in the class of 1974.

Carolyn Taylor. Image by Sheally

“That was where I was called ‘nigger’ for the first time,” he said. “I didn’t know how to respond. Couldn’t think of what to say—so I just turned into my locker and cried. The school was good overall, but there was lots of racial tension. Things got better in my junior and senior years when I ran track and played football.”

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