On Friday, the Columbus Municipal School District will hold a ceremony at Franklin Academy to celebrate the second of the city’s two landmark events in the history of public education.
At 4 p.m. former Franklin Academy students, school officials and local and state dignitaries will gather in front of the school on Third Avenue North for a program and monument unveiling to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the school, the first public school in Mississippi.
The event comes after CMSD celebrated another milestone in education in October, the 155th anniversary of Union Academy, which in 1865 was among the first public schools in the state to serve Black students.
Those years — 1821 and 1865 — loom large in the city’s prominent role in the story of public education in the state.
But there is another year and another story that connects the stories of Franklin Academy and Union Academy that is less familiar.
In the fall of 1965, five years before Lee High School was integrated, Tommy Jamison, along with his three younger brothers, Curtis, Larry and Perry, and first cousins, Calvin, Dwight and Gary Doughty, became the first Black students to attend Franklin Academy. But it was never the plan for just one family to integrate the school, Tommy said.
“There was supposed to be other (Black) students going to Franklin, but their parents decided at the last minute not to go through with it, unfortunately,” Tommy said. “So it was just us.”
Six of the seven kids transferred from Union Academy. The seventh, Perry, entered Franklin as a first-grader.
The decision to transfer to Franklin was more practical than pioneering, Tommy said.
“Franklin was only about a five-minute walk from where we lived,” he said. “But it was a 45-minute walk to Union Academy. When it’s cold or raining, that’s a pretty long walk for a little kid.”
For the Jamisons and Doughtys, that first year at Franklin had its ups and down. The boys often felt isolated and, at least at first, were greeted with hostility from the white students.
“All of us have our own experience and memories about that first year,” said Tommy, who as a sixth-grader spent only one year at Franklin before moving on to middle school at Joe Cook.
“My parents didn’t say too much about it,” Tommy said. “They just told us to be respectful, not to get into any fights and we’ll see how it goes.”
The memories of that first day at Franklin remain fresh in Tommy’s mind 56 years later.
“It was hard to forget,” he said. “My parents took me into the school and we went to the principal’s office to get registered. My parents left then. The principal, or maybe it was the vice principal, escorted me to my homeroom. I remember when they brought me into class, a few of the students were very combative, telling me I didn’t belong there and to go home. It was frightening to me. There weren’t any Black teachers there and no, quote-unquote, support system. It was just me, my brothers and cousins trying to figure out things on our own.”
Tommy did have two things going for him, though: his warm personality and his academic prowess, much of which he attributes today to his teachers at Union Academy.
“I was an A and B student at Union and continued to be an A and B student at Franklin,” said Tommy, who went on to earn his electrical engineering degree at Mississippi State, retiring after 40 years with General Electric two months ago at age 65. “I have to give credit to my teachers at Union. They prepared me well.”
Going to Franklin ‘was alright’
After that chilly first-day reception, Tommy began to fit in.
“Things drastically improved as the school year progressed,” he said. “I made several friends and some of those friends I’m still in touch with today. I was also fortunate enough to have a very good teacher, Ms. Woods. I think her first name was Virginia. She helped me every way she could. I didn’t feel she treated me any differently than the other kids. That was a big part of the reason I was able to learn. I was very fortunate to have her as my teacher.”
In the classroom, Tommy felt comfortable, but there was another part of the school day when he felt very much isolated and ostracized.
“One of the parts to the school day that was disheartening was lunch time,” he said. “I spent a lot of time eating by myself. You sit down at a table and the other kid gets up and goes somewhere else. How are you supposed to feel? I’m just an 11-year-old kid. I didn’t understand what was happening. When I told my parents about it, they told me to focus on my school work, which is what I did.”
For Perry, being different seemed to be a blessing as a first-grader.
“I had never been around any white kids until that first day of school,” Perry said. “That was probably true for the white kids, too. They probably never saw too many Black kids. So everybody looked different to me and I looked different to them. But most of (the white kids) liked me because I was different. At that age, kids don’t see color as anything but color. It wasn’t until third or fourth grade that that changed. But those first two years I never had any problems, really.”
Calvin Doughty entered Franklin as a second-grader. Unlike his cousin, Perry, he said he did encounter some hostility from his white classmates.
There was one exception, however, in a little white girl who welcomed him.
“Her name was Elizabeth,” Calvin said. “I can’t remember her last name, but she was my friend. I remember every day she would bring an apple and a milk to school for me and my cousin. It probably sounds like a little thing, but it was really good to have a friend. It meant a lot. It made school OK.”
Calvin’s brother, Gary, also a second-grader, said his Franklin experience was “OK.”
“We went to church down there at the bottom and we played in the bottom with some of the white kids we wound up going to school with,” Gary said. “So that made it better since we knew a few of the white kids.”
The Doughtys attended Franklin for only one year before transferring back to Union Academy for the 1966-67 school year.
“It didn’t have anything to do with Franklin,” Calvin said. “After that year, we moved and we were closer to Union. Going to Franklin that year was alright.”
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
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