Black Parents, Angry Over White Appointment, All but Shut Down School System : In Liberty, Miss., the Lament Is About Bobcats, Hornets and a Principal

LIBERTY, Miss. — In small towns across America, fall Friday nights are traditionally reserved for football fever. But in a remote, rural corner of Mississippi, two gridirons are knee-deep in pale, yellowing grass.

No bands have strutted, no cheerleaders have cheered, no burly helmeted youths have raced up and down bright stripes of green and white this autumn. The 1988 Liberty High Bobcats and Gloster High Hornets never took the field.

Angry black parents, protesting the appointment of a white principal at Gloster High School, all but shut down the county school system earlier this fall, ending the season before it even began.

The boycott was especially effective because in Amite County, population 12,000, blacks make up 80% of public school students. Most white families, as in other Southern states, send their kids to private “segregation academies.” Indeed, part of the objection to the new principal is that he sends his children to an all-white private school.

Sad Day at Liberty

“Those white schools are having their football season and it’s sad, especially for the children, that we aren’t having ours,” Clarence McDowell, Liberty’s principal, said recently as he surveyed the forlorn football field and dilapidated pile of wooden bleachers euphemistically known as Bobcat Stadium.

McDowell, a short, soft-spoken man, stared silently at the field for another moment and added: “The school superintendent canceled football here at Liberty and over at Gloster High because of the boycotts. It didn’t have to happen, but neither side would give.”

The two sides in question are the Amite County School System, headed by Supt. Maurice Foreman, and the Concerned Citizens for Better Education Committee, a group of black parents led by J. C. Patterson, whose two children and three stepchildren attend public schools in Liberty.

The Concerned Citizens coalesced after Foreman announced that Robbie Robertson, the white assistant principal at Gloster High, would succeed Gloster’s retiring black principal this fall. Robertson’s children attend a private, all-white academy just over the line in neighboring Wilkinson County.

A Fight Is Brewing

“It’s bad enough that they passed over qualified black applicants to hire him,” said Patterson, a 39-year-old farmer and construction worker. “But we just aren’t going to allow them to push us out and put in a man who thinks his children are too good to attend public schools.”

The citizens committee initially staged a 2-week boycott against the white merchants of Gloster and Liberty, populations 1,200 and 700, respectively.

Liberty Mayor Gerald Miller acknowledged that the boycotts hurt business. “The economic conditions around here are not that great. We’re dependent upon oil and timber, so we need everybody to pitch in and support the county,” he said.

When classes began Aug. 27, the boycott shifted to the county’s four public schools, two elementary and two high schools. Black children were taught in makeshift classrooms set up in churches.

Attendance Low

Gloster High, with 350 students, was completely shut down. At Liberty, with an enrollment of 600, only 50 students, mostly whites, attended class.

“We called off the boycott at the beginning of October, after the Justice Department agreed to investigate,” Patterson said. “Right now, we’re waiting to see what happens.” Investigators have visited several times but Justice has yet to release a report or make recommendations.

Patterson said Robertson’s ouster is not the group’s only demand. The parents also want better courses, more black administrators, new school books and improved facilities.

“The books are a crime,” Patterson said. “Many of them are outdated and were discards from other counties.” He said Liberty High was “a dump and a rat trap.”

This fall’s walkout was the second major school boycott in Amite County.

Court Bars Segregation

In 1977, after the first boycott, the system was placed under federal court order to cease segregating students by sex and to follow various racial guidelines, one being that there would be at least two black principals.

“But the order was dropped in 1984 (after school officials said they’d met guidelines) and the schools have gone downhill ever since,” Patterson asserted. “Now, of the 10 administrators in the county system, only one, Clarence McDowell, is black. And he is thinking about retiring because he gets no support from Maurice Foreman, the white superintendent.

“Then, too,” he added, “Foreman keeps hiring white teachers, including people who send their children to private schools. And, on top of that, our children’s test scores have been dropping every year.”

Foreman acknowledged Patterson’s claims but said he had hired white teachers to try to attract white students. “But even with these hirings, whites still make up only 33% of the employees in our school system,” he said. He said more than 60% of Amite County teachers are black.

‘Private-School Crowd’

Foreman, who is elected, also admitted that high school test scores are weak. “It’s true that we’re way below the national (ACT) average,” he said, and 20% of the 11th graders failed the state literacy test last year. But he blamed what he called “the private-school crowd.”

“This was the last county in America to operate a public school system that had boys and girls going to separate schools,” he said. “We lost a lot of whites in 1970, when we had to integrate, and lost a lot more in 1977, when we were ordered to drop the separate sexes plan installed in 1971.

“Until recently,” he said, “the county Board of Supervisors was dominated by the private-school crowd; they wouldn’t give me anything but the bare minimum (tax) millage to run the schools.”

Since the law governing control of county budgets was changed 2 years ago, he said funding has improved.

“We’re starting to make progress,” he said. “We’ve got a new Vo-Tech school and our elementary schools are in good shape. What we need now is a new, consolidated high school . . . . It doesn’t make good sense to operate two small high schools 20 miles apart.”

Rejects Support

The dispute has stirred racial feelings, but neither side welcomed a march through Liberty by a band of white supremacists on Oct. 15. Their leader, Nationalist Movement founder Richard Barrett of Jackson, said they supported Robbie Robertson. Robertson, however, said he wanted no such champions.

“I didn’t ask for their support,” he said. “I don’t know them and I want nothing to do with them.”

In an interview in his high school office, Robertson acknowledged the problems caused when he was chosen from among three black and four white candidates.

“This puts me in an uncomfortable position,” Robertson said. “The blacks didn’t want a white principal. It made them mad when I was appointed, and then they used the fact that I send my children to private schools as an excuse to stage their boycotts.”

When asked why he chose not to patronize the public schools, he replied: “I just don’t care to say.”

Robertson said he’d experienced much less friction at school from students than he had expected. Patterson, however, said about 100 students--almost a third of Gloster’s enrollment--had transferred after the boycott to Liberty High, where McDowell is the county’s sole black principal.

Meanwhile, there is little joy in Amite County on Friday nights.

“We should be getting ready for our big game with Gloster, our archrival,” McDowell said.