Judith Bainbridge | Greenville News

More than 1,600 Sterling High School students were left school-less when Greenville’s oldest (and for more than a half century, only) black high school burned to the ground fifty years ago.

According to Sterling historian Ruth Ann Butler, students were dancing at a Senior Class party on Friday night September 15, 1967, when a disc jockey announced that “An emergency has occurred. . . . leave the building quickly and calmly as possible. “

Outside they watched, many in tears, as firemen from both the Parker District and the Greenville Fire Department struggled to put out the flames. The owner of an adjacent store had noticed smoke at 10:15. When firemen arrived just minutes later, the conflagration was already out of control.

It had started in a social studies classroom in a wing, spread to a chemistry laboratory and had already swallowed up school offices. The Parker Fire District chief commented that the cause might have been arson, but there was no way of telling.

He pointed out that a fire the previous March had begun in the same general area of the school, and that several instances of school vandalism had occurred recently, which might suggest that the fire was deliberately set.

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On the other hand, the wing where the fire started was at least 50 years old, and the school district had recently allocated $500,000 to upgrade the school, including the wiring. The mystery of the fire’s cause, though, was not nearly so concerning to the students, teachers, and ultimately to the School District of Greenville County, as what to do with the suddenly homeless students.

Beginning the following Monday, they were separated by classes and assigned to community sites while the School Board decided their fate. The eighth grade went to Tabernacle Baptist Church; the 9th grade to Israel Metropolitan; sophomores to Allen Temple; juniors were at Phillis Wheatley and seniors at the new (segregated) Birnie Street YWCA.

The disaster created both educational and civil rights issues. The educational ones came first: within a week after the disaster, in a special called meeting, the board assigned all Sterling students to all-black Beck High School near Nicholtown for the remainder of the year.

It would mean double sessions—regular Beck students would attend in the morning; Sterling students, it was initially proposed, would have classes (and supper) between 2:15 p.m. and 7:45 at night. (Eventually the times were changed to 1 p.m. to 7 p.m.) The combined student body would total 2,100, a number that could be handled. Transportation from Sterling to the new school would be provided.

Several black speakers pointed out that both Greenville and Parker High Schools were much nearer Sterling than Beck was, but officials ignored that point.

Almost no one was happy with the temporary arrangement, although it was accepted as a stopgap measure. The NAACP and others in the community argued that the students should immediately be assigned to the junior or senior high school nearest to them, in effect integrating the entire system in a single day. Rebuilding the school, they argued, would perpetuate segregation.

Students, teachers, and the Greenville News hated that idea.

In the weeks that followed, school board members, who would make the decision, waffled, caught between conflicting views and possibilities, none pleasant nor acceptable to everyone. They looked at buildings at recently abandoned Donaldson Air Base, but it would take far too much time and money to re-fit the place for student occupation.

But they could not rebuild the school on its Jenkins Street location. Aside from costing more than $2 million, there was no way that federal money could be used to erect a segregated facility. Indeed, Greenville was then operating under a Freedom of Choice decree, with about 150 black youngsters attending predominantly (overwhelmingly) white schools.

While the Board weighed alternatives, Sterling’s former students acted. On November 13, between 600 and 700 of them, some carrying signs saying “Destroy Sterling High School and You Destroy Us,” marched on the School District offices on Camperdown Way. They were polite, respectful, and well prepared.

They wanted to be together, they said. They wanted Sterling (with the name intact) rebuilt. And they proposed that Greenville Junior High School be renovated to become Sterling Junior-Senior High School until a new school was constructed.

School Board Chair Bill Page was impressed with their demeanor and proposals. In early December, however, NAACP Chair A. J. Whittenburg filed suit in federal district court to have the students assigned to the predominantly white schools nearest their homes and thus immediately integrate Greenville schools. Their attorneys’ brief also warned that renovating the old junior high school for Sterling would perpetuate segregation.

Robert Martin heard the suit in December. School Board attorney E. P. Riley defended the Board’s actions. NAACP attorneys were Greenvillian Donald Sampson and Mathew Perkins and L. C. Jenkins from the NAACP Columbia office. On February 4, Martin denied their request for an injunction, ruling that since Sterling students could transfer to white high schools (as 44 of those displaced by the fire had already done under the Freedom of Choice decree), then using the junior high would be legal.

So late in February, the School Board unanimously agreed to rename the old Junior High on Westfield Street Sterling Junior-Senior High School and spend $115,000 to renovate it for fire safety. Its students would move in September 1968 to the new million dollar school on East North Street that would become the new Greenville Junior High.

The Board decided not to use the old Sterling name for a new high school currently being constructed south of Interstate-85 because white parents would not be likely to choose it, naming it Southside High School instead.

When 157 Sterling-at-Beck students graduated in June 1968, the Greenville News covered their Municipal Auditorium ceremony in detail, with summaries of the Honor Students’ graduation talks.

That fall, Sterling students began studying at the old Junior High.

But the Class of 1969 was the last to graduate since, in February 1970, Greenville schools finally integrated under court order. Its all-black high schools, Sterling, Washington, Lincoln, and Beck, closed, and their students and teachers scattered among the county’s previously predominantly white schools.