The smell is what you noticed first in Georgetown, South Carolina, in early 1980s. It was omnipresent, and one of two distinct smells that stand out clearly in my mind. The only time you couldn’t smell it was when you were indoors, with the air conditioning running, or driving around the county in your car with the windows closed.

The only way to truly escape it was to drive north, up the coast, toward Pawleys Island – one of the many sea islands that dot the coastline of the Carolinas.

The smell came from the massive International Paper mill that was located just south of Georgetown's small downtown. When the paper mill was processing lumber, the smell that belched from its stacks was like rotten eggs. There’s no other way to describe it.

When I started work in the city for my first job fresh out of college, as a reporter for The Georgetown Times, I asked the county council chairman, who was also the president of the only bank in town at the time, about the smell. “Oh, you get used to it after a while,” he told me. “It’s comforting. It’s the smell of good jobs.”

I never got used to the smell, but he was right about the jobs. The paper mill was a source of stability in the small town, along with a specialty steel mill that was also located downtown near Georgetown Harbor, since it was just one of two deep-water ports along the coast of South Carolina.

It’s hard to imagine what the economy of Georgetown would look like without those two mills. It’s why the residents just accepted the smell of rotten eggs. But even with those mills providing most of the good-paying jobs in the area, I was shocked by some of the deep pockets of poverty that were tucked away in parts of the county.

There were poor, black people in some of the more remote parts of the county who didn’t speak English very well and whose children travelled by boat and bus to get to public school; and then there were the white residents of the county who mostly worked at the mills and whose children had an easier time getting to their public school. The county was divided like that. It had been for some time.

Despite the fact that there were just 40,000 residents or so, the county had two public high schools. One of them, Winyah, was nearly all white. The other, Howard, was nearly all black. The repeal of the Plessy v. Ferguson “separate but equal” doctrine that had desegregated public schools in the 1950s and 1960s in most of America had obviously not yet reached Georgetown.

USN&WR

It was like entering a time warp. Most high schools in America had gone through turmoil and forced integration in the 1960s and 1970s. Here, a decade or so later, was a small community in the south where their local property tax rates could barely cover the maintenance and costs of one public high school – and they had two of them.

The white high school had social studies books that actually had current events in them. Their science books reflected some of the findings of modern science. The white students studied “new” math. Their athletic fields were somewhat new, and maintained.

The black high school had windows that were broken, but rarely fixed outright. A black student at Howard would be hard-pressed to recognize the America he or she studied in class, because the textbooks hadn’t been replaced since the 1960s. When mechanical things stopped working, they sometimes stayed that way for weeks or even months.

Since it was my job, I started to ask white officials elected to the school board and the county council why there were two high schools in such a small town. I always got the same answer: “Always been that way.” That wasn’t a good answer, I’d say. They’d just nod.

I started to ask questions at the local school board meetings, and then at the county council meetings. I published their answers in stories about the two high schools. It clearly made the white school board and county council members nervous. They’d pull me aside after these meetings and ask me why I was pressing the issue. “I’ve always been that way,” I’d say, shrugging. “I just keep asking questions. It drove my parents and teachers crazy.”

The story started to take on a life of its own within the community. People started to get curious. Some of them started to show up at the local school board meetings and ask the same question. Why were there two high schools in Georgetown – when the local economy was so tight and everyone was squeezed by local property taxes that supported the schools?

The story started to include the local representatives for the state House and Senate seats that represented Georgetown. There wasn’t anything they could do about the situation, they said. Public schools had to pay for themselves with local property taxes. It had always been that way.

Then it reached the governor’s office in Columbia. But officials there, too, said roughly the same thing. Unless the state laws changed and local public schools were funded by new mechanisms, it wasn’t their issue. It was Georgetown’s issue. The congressman that represented Georgetown agreed. It was a local issue. It wasn’t something that could be dealt with on the federal level.

Linda Brown Smith of Topeka, Kansas.was a third grader when her father started a class-action suit in the landmark 1951 Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education.

AP

But some of the congressional staff passed the question along to the Department of Education in Washington. Why are there two public high schools in such a small town along the coast of South Carolina nearly 30 years after the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education that required desegregation of school systems?

More people, black and white, started showing up for the school board meetings, which had previously just been attended by the board and the teachers or parents who were directly affected by whatever was on the agenda. They asked the same question. Why were there two high schools in such a small town?

Some career officials at the Education Department – part of an internal task force that tracked pockets of the country that hadn’t yet met the requirements of the Supreme Court decision that said the “separate but equal” doctrine should be discontinued at local schools – started asking the question too. And they added a second one.

Even if the rural South Carolina county could somehow support two high schools, they were hardly separate but equal. The mostly white school was in considerably better shape than the mostly black school, for whatever historical reason. Why was that?

As the situation evolved from local to federal in scope, the editor kept running the stories on the front page of the newspaper – despite the pressure he was getting from local business leaders who were clearly uncomfortable with the coverage.

When the federal task force in Washington launched a formal investigation of the two public high schools, the editor ran the story with a big, World War II-era headline. The next local school board meeting was packed. It was standing room only. Lots of people wanted to speak. They wanted to know what could be done, what it meant, where it might lead. There weren’t any good answers at that meeting. There hadn’t been for some time.

Shortly after that packed school board meeting in early November1981, under cover of darkness in the middle of the night, people carried gallon cans of gasoline into the classrooms of Winyah, the white school. They set fire to the school, and nearly burned it to the ground.

Here’s how the Georgetown School of Arts and Sciences – a private prep school that opened on the grounds of Winyah more than three decades later – describes that fire on its student-run blog, The Wire:

Arson was [the] cause of a fire that burned Winyah High School on November 5, 1981. State Law Enforcement Division (SLED) said that gasoline was poured in two classrooms. Georgetown Fire Department Chief Odell Avant said the flames from the fire were as high as 80 to 90 feet. Firefighters from Georgetown, Midway, Murrells Inlet, Garden City, and Andrews came to contain the fire. The fire began in the southeast corner of the bottom floor. The administrative office, attendance office, guidance office, 13 classrooms, library, teacher’s lounge, typing room, and book room were lost. A fire was also started in the science wing, but only one room was burned. About $2 million in damage was done to the school. The arsonist has never been identified.



It’s sad, and shocking, that people were angry enough that they felt like they had to burn a school down to change things. But if any good came of that horrific incident, it’s this: The fire rallied people. Something needed to be done, now that the public school for the white kids had been destroyed. Local officials found a way to craft a new school building bond. People voted for it.

They weren’t able to reopen Howard or Winyah High School – which remained shuttered until 2013, when a group of local businesses and investors turned it into the Georgetown School of Arts and Sciences. – But they were able to build Georgetown High School within four years of the fire, and close Howard. The new public high school would serve everyone, black and white. So some good, at least, came from it.

“After purchasing this land January 1, 1866, Georgetown Colored Academy built a school here. By 1908 the old building had been torn down and a new school built, its name changed to Howard. The elementary department moved into a new structure on Kaminski Street in 1938; the high school followed in 1949. After the 1984 graduation, predominantly black Howard merged with mostly white Winyah School to form Georgetown High School.”



In neither case – not at the prep school that stands where Winyah once did nor on the commemorative marker that describes where the Georgetown Colored Academy once was – does anyone explain the role the fire played in finally desegregating Georgetown.