News

Film on desegregation highlights black families’ passion for education

Melinda Lowrance recalls growing up in Hendersonville’s African-American schools and later integrated classrooms in the 1950s and ’60s during filming of David Weintraub’s documentary.

By Bill Moss, Published: June 12, 2024

Ten years after Brown v. Board of Education, Hendersonville’s city schools began to desegregate, first by selecting a few black children to “pioneer” the integrated classroom experience alongside white kids.

The next year, 1965, marked the real beginning of desegregated schools in the city, and that history will come alive early next year in a new documentary film by David Weintraub in collaboration with Ronnie Pepper and others involved in the city’s Black History Research Group.

Telling the story of the mid-1960s requires a much longer journey, to the modest schoolhouses that served the African-American community as far back as the 1870s.

“Part of the story is commemorating the 60th anniversary,” Weintraub one morning before embarking on one of two dozen or so recorded interviews for the project. “I think even more of the story, as I’m learning it from these elders who’ve been through it, is the quest for education among the black community that goes back generations and the diversity of education that existed — the small, one-room schoolhouses. There were eight of them throughout Henderson County in the 1900s, the 1920s. There was the Sixth Avenue School, which was the big elementary school. Ultimately in the ‘50s there was the Ninth Avenue School and then integration in 1965.”

The memories of the interview subjects enliven the experiences in both of those mid-20^th century schools. As the elders speak, Weintraub finds in this film-making endeavor, as he has in his other oral history projects, many more layers reveal themselves.

“Integration was a positive thing because now people had access to books that hadn’t been dog-eared and were not 20, 30 years old,” he said. “But something was lost as well. That close, deep connection that people had in the community, the identification and the pride of being in a black school that was teaching black students with black teachers, and the caring that existed.

“A lot of the elders are telling me that (after desegregation) they kind of felt like they were now in an institution as opposed to being home, being with family. Given the pride and high standards that many of the black teachers had in the black schools, when they did integrate, they didn’t feel like they were behind. In fact, in some cases, the former students told me they thought they were ahead of the white students because there was a fairly rigorous standard in the schools that they went to.”

Like Weintraub’s films on the Great Flood of 1916, moonshining traditions, Cherokee culture and other Appalachian topics, the new documentary “starts with research, making connections with people who are purveyors of this history, or the keepers of the flame, as I call them,” he says.

The interviews — along with “B-roll” footage of African-American schools that are still standing, newspaper clippings and family photos — will produce 20-30 hours of film that Weintraub will distill into a 30- to 40-minute film. He aims to debut the film on Martin Luther King Jr. Day in January.

Tattered textbooks, hand-me-down band uniforms

One “keeper of the flame,” Melinda Lowrance, sat for an interview in April in the vestibule of Contemporary First Missionary Baptist Church on Harris Street. President of the Henderson County NAACP and a district director for the North Carolina NAACP, Lowrance was recently appointed to the Hendersonville City Council.

“I’m an activist, a troublemaker but also a unifier,” she says.

Growing up in the Pilgrim family, the owners of a funeral home that served the African-American community, Lowrance recalled a disciplined childhood where parents and neighbors emphasized education at home, at church and at the old Ninth Avenue School.

Because she attended kindergarten at church, “By the time I got to first grade, I was already on the second grade level as far as reading and writing,” she says. “It was always mandatory within our home that you read a book and you were able to express yourself in reading and writing.”

She attended Ninth Avenue for eight years, enjoying a supportive climate that gave kids “a sense of security and a sense of belonging,” she says. “There was a mentor relationship. And trust me, if you did something in school, your family knew before you got home. There was a double whammy because the Sunday school superintendent was also my third grade teacher. She lived down the street from us, so there was no escape.”

While teachers were dedicated and demanding, textbooks were tattered and outdated and other supplies were always second-hand, too.

“We didn’t even have new band uniforms,” Lowrance tells Weintraub. “Our uniforms were hand-me-downs from Hendersonville High. Our instruments were the same way. Our parents purchased them from the used instrument store.”

Lowrance was luckier than some of her peers; her family had the means to subscribe to periodicals and newspapers.

“The only way you got information that was current was by reading the newspaper or magazines,” she says. “At that time, it was always in my home — Jet, Ebony magazine —so that you could be current on what was going on in the black community.”

Searching for more ‘show’

Weintraub describes the documentary form as “show then tell.” Like his other films that take place years before cameras were common, he recognizes that finding the visuals is a challenge.

“It was tough during the 1916 flood film and it’s certainly tough for this film,” he says. “In a poor community, who owns a camera?”

The elders’ stories so far have been rewarding and revealing.

“I’ve just been blown away about the educational level, the passion that people had, the memories that people had about education,” he says. “There was this thread that went through their family’s history. So we’re not lacking for people telling the story. We’re lacking the ‘show’ but somehow it’ll all come together.”

Asked who he envisions as the audience for the documentary, Weintraub responds that it’s everyone who desires an unvarnished look at the past.

“Anybody who cares about history, anybody who cares about understanding the truth instead of myths about our history, the black community that has not been shown the respect that they deserve.

“Who built this community? It was all of us. It wasn’t just white people,” he says. “And so we’re kind of re-putting back into history what should have been there to begin with.”

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Filmmaker David Weintraub is seeking visual resources from the African-American education experience here in the 1950s and ’60s, including photos home videos, “even stories.” To contact Weintraub or to support the African-American education documentary visit saveculture.org.