Honoring Black History: Sheilah Brown
BECKLEY, WV (WVNS) — The American civil rights movement has progressed visibly in the education system, since the U.S. Supreme Court ordered desegregation of schools in 1954.
Sheilah Brown, 84, of Beckley, taught for over 40 years in West Virginia and Virginia but spent the majority of her career teaching history and physical education at Woodrow Wilson High School in Beckley.
Her experience in the education system — as a student and as a teacher — gave her unique insight into segregation and the inequalities of desegregation.
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“Growing up in Tazewell, Virginia, I attended a three-room, wooden school,” she said. “My father was the janitor at the white high school.”
She said her father often took her with him to the white high school to help with small chores. Sometimes, she said, she would toss basketballs in the large gymnasium, which her school did not have.
“I would go with him in the afternoons, and I would walk around and just be amazed at the size of the rooms, the equipment they had,” she recalled on Thursday, February 15, 2024. “Then, I would come home to an integrated neighborhood, and we would wonder, why is it we can’t go to school together?”
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She said the doctrine of “separate but equal,” which segregationists used to argue in favor of racially divided schools, was a fallacy.
White students received new textbooks, she recalled, while used, earlier-edition textbooks from the white schools were given to Black students.
“That policy was never accurate,” she said. “The schools were separate but not equal.”
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There were other forces in society which prevented Black and white students from attending the same schools, prior to Brown vs. Board of Education.
She recalled that, one night, she watched as her parents behaved fearfully, turning out the lights inside their home.
Ms. Brown said she peeked out of her window and saw a parade of vehicles, driven by people who had white pillowcases hiding their faces.
Despite the obstacles, Ms. Brown graduated from Bluefield State College in 1964 and taught for one year at an all-Black high school.
She said she was the first Black faculty member at Coalwood Junior High School in McDowell County and that, when the local school board aimed to transfer her, the parents of her students developed a system of calling the board office every 15 minutes, in protest, so that she was able to extend her time at the junior high school.
By the early 1970’s, she was married to the late Rev. Robert Brown and was teaching at Woodrow Wilson High School in Beckley, a job she said was “wonderful” and that she enjoyed.
However, it was a rough start.
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She said the school was newly built and had been recently desegregated, and there was tension.
She said Black families, along with some white families, had hoped that the new school would be named “Greater Beckley High School,” signifying a fresh and equal start to the desegregated school.
Instead, she said, Black students from nearby Stratton High School had given up their school name, sports mascots and school colors, while the name, mascot and school colors of the white students’ school were maintained.
The move sent a message to the student body, of all races.
To help students cope, she led a club called Relating to All People, or RAP, when the principal asked her to do so.
She said students of different races and different socio-economic backgrounds found the club helpful.
“It was a cosmopolitan club, made up of students of all races, and I loved that,” she said. “We were able to sit and talk. They had a platform where they felt free.”
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She said she was criticized by school administrators for once allowing students to re-enact the Dred Scott decision, in which the Supreme Court of the United States ruled enslaved Black people were property of their enslavers, along with the Brown vs. Board of Education decision, which desegregated American schools.
Despite administrators’ protests, she said, she taught history “as it appeared on the page” and did not shy away from controversial eras and topics involving race relations.
The inequalities of desegregation, in which Black students were forced to ignore their past, is a lesson West Virginia lawmakers may want to consider as they seek to ban teachers from acknowledging certain aspects of the nation’s past.
She said history should be taught “as it happened,” that students should be free to discuss and ask questions and that opinions should not be interjected by teachers or politicians.
She compared the nation to a “family,” in which some members want to hide acts by ancestors which bring shame.
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“They want to remove those bad, so-called bad chapters in American history, but that’s wrong,’ said Ms. Brown, the retired teacher who had once used second-hand textbooks. “How can we learn to improve if those things are removed from the past?”
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