Alumni of Fayetteville's Reid Ross High return to school that led the way in integration

For some Fort Bragg students in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the lifelong memories they forged at Reid Ross High School began with them literally picking a school name from a jar.

Reggie Pinkney, a former NFL player who was a star athlete at Ross, was one of those junior high students. He lived with his family on what was then Fort Bragg, now Fort Liberty. He said students who lived on post would travel to the Fayetteville city schools central services building to randomly choose from a jar between E.E. Smith High School, Fayetteville High School (now Terry Sanford) or Reid Ross.

“Isn’t that crazy?” Pinkney says now with a laugh. He serves as an administrator in Cumberland County Schools and is past principal at Ramsey Street High School, where he was a finalist for 2020 Principal of the Year. “They had sheets of paper that were folded up real small. You go in and pull it out and then the superintendent opened it up and said, ‘You’re going to Terry Sanford.’”

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But Pinkney immediately thought, “I’m not going to no Terry Sanford.”

He was already known to be an outstanding athlete and believes to this day, the jar he pulled from was full of Terry Sanford slips. His parents changed their address so he could attend Ross instead, he says.

Pinkney graduated from Ross in 1973 and is among graduates who will return to their alma mater next weekend, July 21-24, for an all-classes reunion hosted by the Class of 1983, which is marking its 40th reunion.

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“We’ve got quite a few coming,” says organizer Joseph Singleton, who is a church pastor in Greenville and is a class of ’83 alumnus. These include many from the first full graduating class in 1973, he said. “This will be their 50th anniversary.”

Events include a golf tournament that Friday morning at King’s Grant Golf & Country Club off Ramsey Street; a meet-and-greet in the evening at B&B Bowling Lanes on Fort Bragg Road; a tour of the school on Ramsey Street on Saturday, followed by a cookout; and that evening, a banquet at The Diamond Venue on Gillespie Street. A worship service is scheduled for Sunday morning at Grace & Truth Church on Murchison Road.

A place in history

Today, Reid Ross is a classical middle and high school that focuses on arts and academics and is part of the county school system.

In September of 1968, it was a brand-new high school — an experiment in integration during a time of great unrest in the country. In April of that year, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed by an assassin’s bullet in Memphis, Tennessee.

“Reid Ross was the first (public) school opened in the state that had never been segregated,” says Angela Reid, a retired school teacher in Atlanta who was in the Class of 1972.

Reid’s family moved to Fort Bragg in 1968, her military dad having returned home from the Vietnam War. Reid was one of the Bragg youths who picked Ross’s name out of the jar. The random selection meant that she and even friends who lived next door in her Anzio Acres subdivision attended different high schools.

“They sent three different school buses to every housing area on Fort Bragg to three different high schools,” she says.

Of Reid Ross, she said with a laugh: “It was the first air-conditioned school I had ever been to.”

Reid remembers the school as still being majority white.

Still: “There was less tension than there was anywhere else. I know Charlotte had a really hard time with desegregation, and Wilmington even worse."

Reid was an organizer of her class’s 50th reunion held last November. There, she delivered a speech about what was going on nationally and locally when Ross opened.

“Reid Ross faculty, staff and students showed the rest of North Carolina how public school desegregation could work,” the written version of the speech said. “IT WORKED.”

Reid believes the reason is that many of the children of military servicemembers at Fort Bragg, who comprised a large share of the student body, many of whom had already attended non-segregated schools overseas.

Rivalries

Reid, coming from elsewhere, was not initially aware of the sports rivalries that the advent of Ross had created.

But Joseph Singleton, who played football and basketball for Ross, knew. He is the second youngest of eight children in a family that lived in the North Hills subdivision off Country Club Drive.

“My older brothers and sisters went to E.E. Smith,” he said, adding that his younger brother wound up attending both schools.

He said the friendly rivalry between Smith and Ross siblings still goes on now: “They pick at us and talk about how big their reunion is. We tell them, we’re taking small steps.”

But back then, Singleton said when it came to football, “You were told you don’t lose to E.E. Smith.”

Under legendary head Coach John Daskel, they did not — except once, in the ‘69 or ‘70 season, Singleton remembers. He himself played for the 1981-82 team that won a N.C. High School Athletic Association Division II state title.

“Forty-something years later, we’re actually getting a ring,” he says.

He credits Ray Williams, a former Ross athlete, class of ’82, who became a standout football and baseball player at Clemson University, for spearheading the effort to get the championship rings.

“All of a sudden one of the companies said, ‘We'll do that for you,’” Singleton says, adding that there will be commemorative jerseys as well.

Singleton said the basketball team, where he played point guard, held its own during his time there, but the sudden death of their center, David Foy, who collapsed in a Saturday workout, took a toll on the team during Singleton’s junior year.

“Even to this day, when I contacted most of the guys from the team, some of their first words were, ‘Have you heard from David Foy’s family?” Singleton says.

Sweeps and travel

Pinkney, who along with Daskel is a member of the Fayetteville Sports Club Hall of Fame, played football, basketball and baseball in the Cougar colors — white, orange and “Carolina blue,” as he says.

He would later play defensive back for East Carolina and would make the university's sports Hall of Fame. He played five seasons in the NFL with the Detroit Lions and Baltimore Colts.

He remembers well the spirit in the locker rooms at Ross.

“There were some great athletes,” he said and also praising Daskel. “It was just some guys who could just flat-out play, and you had Coach Daskel and his staff. It just seemed like the kids wanted to win.”

He remembers sweeping Smith in football.

But when it came to Ross’s other rival, Terry Sanford, it was “always back and forth. We would win one year, they would win one year.

“The rivalry at the time was city schools. It was friendly rivalry. We were always neighbors and knew the kids that was going to different schools. It was fine.”

Donna Currie, who lives in Raleigh and works in technology sales, was a cheerleader at Ross in the class of ’83, as well as a member of student government, and recalls her favorite time was during the playoffs.

“You got to travel farther and stop at a nice restaurant on the way to the game,” she says. “That was always fun and exciting, the perks of going to the playoffs.”

Independent study

Varsity girls' sports were not offered when Angela Reid attended Ross. She did play intramural volleyball, a great love of hers.

She was a member of the Spanish Club and the National Honor Society.

Reid was one of seven children; she would later attend Duke University. At Ross, she says: “I was the nerd. I pretty much enjoyed school, period. I lived in the library, because I was an avid reader, have been all my life.”

She said a history teacher in her junior year, Coach Sonny Basinger, was influential.

“He was my driver’s ed instructor that summer before,” she recalls.

He told her and her classmates they would not get the information they needed to know on the Civil Rights era in the textbooks. He assigned them independent study.

“That was awesome,” she said. “There were several of us in his class, in different classes, who kind of got together and decided what we were going to investigate.”

A good vibe

Currie said many of the other students and parents had military ties like herself, and that helped create a friendly place.

“They kind of ‘got it’ that you were a military kid,” she said. “They were always so accepting and so nice.”

She said she is looking forward to seeing people at the reunion she has not seen since high school.

Pinkney also remembers a real good vibe among students, faculty and staff at Ross, where the longtime principal was Jack McGinley.

“I don't remember but two fights,” he said, and a third incident where someone who was not a student made trouble.

He continued: “It was a family atmosphere. Kids knew why they were at Reid Ross. Every student was trying to be peaceful every day.”

Myron Pitts can be reached at mpitts@fayobserver.com or 910-486-3559.

This article originally appeared on The Fayetteville Observer: Alumni of Fayetteville's Reid Ross High School return for reunion