Yes, ‘it’s time to stop kicking us in the butt’

It was an eye-catching headline — but why?

“It’s time to stop kicking us in the butt,” Earl Campbell said at a Beaufort County Board of Education meeting Feb. 21.

I was stunned to read that language.

Campbell is a quiet, gray-haired man not known for a sharp tongue or emotional outbursts. He’s been on the board 26 years, representing the poorest reaches of northern Beaufort County.

And why would the Rev. James E. Moore of the Mt. Carmel Baptist Church in Dale use threatening words to the school board? Do as I ask, or I will do everything in my power to see that a future school bond referendum gets defeated, he said.

These two men, along with school board member Bill Payne of Hilton Head Island, are pushing for an auditorium for Whale Branch Early College High School in Seabrook. The school was built in 2010 amid great controversy — a decade after being approved by voters in a bond referendum that gave us a new Bluffton High School and much more.

Seven years after it was built, and 17 years after it was approved, the county’s high school serving primarily African-American, low-income students is the only one in the county that does not have an auditorium.

With a $70 million high school just opening its doors in Bluffton, the inequity for Whale Branch is indeed a butt-whipping.

“You would not take that if (the situation existed) in Hilton Head,” Campbell told the board. “... I am very angry. I’ve been angry for a long time because of the abuse we have taken in this county.”

Now the picture starts to come into focus. This has been a long time coming.

Deep roots

Both Campbell and Moore earned respect the old-fashioned way — they were in the military.

Campbell served 20 years in the U.S. Army, coming home after his first tour as a combat medic in Vietnam only to be told he couldn’t be served coffee in a public business because he is black.

He was a child of Hilton Head Island. He attended a one-room schoolhouse for black children at Honey Horn. His teacher was Earline Frazier, wife of the late Arthur Frazier, an entrepreneur, ferryman, and preacher who marched on Washington on that hot August day in 1963.

Campbell then lived with his grandparents in Grays Hill and has been there ever since. He attended the Port Royal Agriculture and Industrial School, founded in rural Burton in 1901 by former abolitionist and prominent Beaufort citizen Abbie Holmes Christensen. It was called the “Shanklin School” after its longtime principal. It offered education beyond grade school for blacks because neither the state nor county would do it.

Moore left his segregated home town in Georgia for the U.S. Marine Corps. In 27 years, he rose to gunnery sergeant, and then was the first African-American sergeant major at Marine Corps Recruit Depot Parris Island. And he married a Marine Corps sergeant major, Gwendolyn Lee Moore.

In addition to leading an active church since 1988, Moore serves as the national chaplain for the Montford Point Marine Association of the blacks who integrated the Marine Corps and served in World War II. In 2012, they were recognized by Congress with the nation’s highest civilian honor, the congressional gold medal.

Moore also is chairman of the Sheldon Township Community Support Partnership, an all-volunteer effort to address myriad social and economic problems of the area served by the Whale Branch high school.

‘Put it to rest’

Plenty of good reasons exist to put off building an auditorium at Whale Branch.

The school board just voted to spend $4.4 million for a second gymnasium at the school, something all the other high schools in the county already have.

And after forking out so much money for May River High, the school district has limited borrowing capacity for an auditorium tagged at $12 million.

Some still cling to the idea that the Whale Branch high school isn’t needed at all and could be folded into Battery Creek High.

Others say the auditorium was specifically turned down by voters in a November referendum. Funding it by a different method would be an end-run around the voters, they say.

But Moore points out that the auditorium and gym were approved by voters in 2000. And it’s nonsense to say that nothing on the defeated list of projects can subsequently be addressed by the school district.

Superintendent Jeff Moss told the board this about Whale Branch: “The overriding question you may have is can you do the projects (financially). The answer to that would be yes.”

But the Whale Branch projects were not originally among almost a quarter of a billion dollars worth of capital projects the board put before voters last November. But in June, five months prior to the public vote, both projects were added and they were on the defeated ballot.

Moss told me in an interview last week the auditorium at Whale Branch has been in the district’s capital long-range plan. He said he’s heard about it since he became superintendent four years ago, and, “I think equity is extremely important. All schools are supposed to be identical in terms of program.”

He cites a different program that gives every student an iPad as his strongest stab at equity in the schools. “That really levels the playing field,” he said.

Moss said the auditorium question is not easy.

“We also have a lot of other needs,” he said. “We need to add classrooms right now at River Ridge Academy (in Bluffton). It’s a question of where it would rate in priorities. I would like to satisfy needs for classroom space first, obviously. But I have done a lot of research on Whale Branch, and it appears to be a 17-year battle. It is time to put it to rest.”

Never equal

Hints about the “butt-kicking” outburst came from reading Pat Conroy.

I was looking last week at the three years he taught in Beaufort County before he got fired and then blew the whistle on how unequal education was in this county in his 1972 book, “The Water Is Wide.”

That era, when the county’s “freedom of choice” movement was shoved aside because the federal government said it would not fund a segregated school district, helps explain Campbell’s angst.

In his era, they knew that the “equal” black schools got hand-me-down books and that parents had to raise money for a school bus. They knew the black kids wore old athletic uniforms, had teachers with lesser credentials, and not supposedly in as much a need for a classic education as the white kids. They knew that in 1950, Beaufort County spent $188 per white student and $72 per black student.

When full integration finally came, it was the black high schools that were closed. They saw the black principals become assistant principals. They saw construction pop up at the old black high school as soon as it became a junior high with white students.

They saw a county opt for split sessions at the formerly all-white high school to achieve integration, even though it could mean black kids riding a bus longer than they were in school.

They saw the Supreme Court declare segregated schools unconstitutional in 1954, only to be largely ignored until August 1970.

And the whole time, plenty of “good reasons” flowed to put off equity in education.

So, why did the distinguished gentlemen get so upset over the lack of a Whale Branch auditorium?

My guess is that it’s because they’ve seen this movie before.

From the balcony.

This story was originally published March 5, 2017 at 4:29 PM with the headline "Yes, ‘it’s time to stop kicking us in the butt’."