Wayne Bare at his home in 2020, holding the first Garner High School yearbook.
BY MARGARET DAMGHANI
The 1968-69 school year was not business as usual for 11th and 12th graders at Garner High, who were starting the year in a newly built school, with a new principal and a new vice principal. A new mascot, and new school colors. Two school counselors instead of one and for athletes, new teammates.
1968 was the year Garner’s high school integrated, and unlike in most places, a group of student ambassadors and administrators took steps to make the identity of the new Garner High representative of all students, and the black and white schools from which they’d be transferring.
1968: Still Separate. Still Unequal.
In 1968, North Carolina schools were still nearly entirely segregated, and Garner hadn’t been any quicker to embrace integration than the rest of the state. Nearly 15 years after school segregation was ruled unconstitutional, school systems were relying on Freedom of Choice programs, allowing for token amounts of black students to apply to white schools, rather than committing to or believing in the importance of integration.
“We haven’t overcome all these things yet, which is disappointing,” — Wayne Bare
Garner Consolidated School (now the site of East Garner Middle School), served every grade level for black students.
Six other elementary schools and a junior high existed, as well as what is now North Garner Middle School, serving ninth through 12th grades, among the traditional white schools.
Often when school systems integrated, white schools only did so after federal mandate, forced to enroll black students while black schools were shuttered and closed down, with little to no thought given to the sentiments nor impact black students and the black community.
Garner’s New Way Forward
The efforts at a thought-out integration process in Garner, at least at the high school, were successful enough that Principal Wayne Bare and Garner High are referenced in a scholarly article by J. Michael McElreath contrasting Garner with Chapel Hill, which struggled with years of tensions after Lincoln High was unceremoniously closed and the black students joined the white students at Chapel Hill High School.
Wayne Bare.
“During that time we were fully aware that there were people in the majority group, that loosely translates to the Caucasians, who weren't excited about this because they had the perception that desegregating schools, and bringing children of whatever race they happened to be all into one school would dilute the academic progress of the school. In particular, their children."
Wayne Bare, at the time principal of the old Garner High, began meeting with acting principal of Garner Consolidated Earnest Sanders, while the new school was under construction, to discuss how to best approach integration. Bare would become Principal of the new high school, and Sanders would become Assistant Principal, developing close, positive relationships with their students. Both have been spoken highly of by students in the community.
“As we were preparing for that year, we were attempting to lay the groundwork for getting to know people and what they were accustomed to at least in the school culture, from each side of that,” Bare said. A variety of questions had to be considered. What about the different styles of cheerleading? What if the prom queen and king are different races and how will the community react?”
Students Lead The Way
In early 1968 while Garner High was being constructed, they arranged for rising 11th and 12th graders, the only grades the high school would house at first, to meet and discuss student activities and spend time at each other’s schools.
Student input was involved in choosing a new mascot, merging school colors, ensuring there would be both black and white cheerleaders, and drafting a student council constitution that said that the President and Vice President should be of different races, to represent the student body fairly.
“That is credit if I have any,” Bare said, of the student advisory groups. While he is quick to downplay the credit he receives for Garner being seen as an example of where integration went well, there were dozens of little decisions impacted by integration to be made before and after the school opened.
Applying The Lessons
Wayne Bare brought his experience at Forsyth County schools, where he had been an assistant principal. During his time there, a smaller county school merged with a larger city school, and he applied what he learned to the issue of integration.
Bare said he faced an “unbelievable amount of skepticism and fear” from the smaller county school that coaches and others would be completely looked over in favor of the city school.
That brought home the importance of bringing teachers and coaches from both schools and ignoring some prominent members of the Garner community that voiced opposition to some of the decisions, notably the hiring of the well-liked James Farris as the basketball coach.
In an effort to make the students and parents feel more secure, Bare fought for the resources to have two school counselors, Christine Toole and Betty Knox.
“I stretched things a lot money wise and was able to eventually get agreement from the superintendent’s office. We twisted as much arms as we had leverage to do,” Bare said. “The counselor [Toole] exercised a certain amount of disciplinary guidance because not only did she know the students that had come from Garner Consolidated, she knew their parents and might have taught them. I think the fact we had the two counselors there was as much of a positive thing as we could have done.”
Yearbook Dedication
“This is my bragging page. They dedicated the first yearbook to me, and that’s the dedication,” Bare said.
Pages 4 and 5 of the yearbook read:
Happiness is not an easy thing. You must be willing to work for it and to shape it for yourself. Happiness is not dependent upon complete freedom from pain, but the ability to transmute pain into power. The human self is not a gift; it is an achievement. The same is true of happiness, for it is not a static reality sprung full blown. Rather, happiness is a painfully earned progress past lions in the way, a running battle, a continuing progress. Happiness is not something that comes upon from without, but is it is something that has its fountainhead in the heart.
It is knowledge that give man a clear, conscious view of his own opinions and judgement, a truth in developing them, an eloquence in expressing them, and a force in urging them. It teaches him to see things as they, to go right to the point, to disentangle a skein of thought, to detect what is sophisticated, and to discard what is irrelevant. To have knowledge — broad, deep knowledge — is to know true ends from false and lofty things from low. To know the thoughts and deeds that have marked man’s progress is to feel the great heart-throbs of humanity through the centuries.
Change Brings Success and Tumult
Perhaps one measure of the initial success of integration could be in the amount of incidents that required intervention.
“That's a point of pride. We made zero calls to the law enforcement or our central office about any kind of disruption at school,” Bare said. “I’m not dumb enough to tell you that there were never any problems. But there was never anything that would be described as a mob fight or any type of disruption in the building.”
When no black students made the cheerleading team, Bare intervened and went back to the wishes of the student ambassadors, administratively adding one of the two black students that had tried out.
“In my opinion, there is no group of students other than possibly some athletic teams where the school representation is more visible, to the community, to people in other communities,” he said. “And on the year where we have just brought two groups of students together, what message does it send about the nature of our school not to have a single minority? We had to have some representation.”
Right Man. Right Time. Right Place.
Bare doesn’t indulge much in reflecting on if their decisions during integration and building a new school had much impact beyond the immediate, nor does he speak much about the implications of those actions in a turbulent time period in which many white people accepted segregation as reasonable.
“We haven’t overcome all these things yet, which is disappointing,” Bare said.
He also says they didn’t waste time looking at how integration was going anywhere else.
“We were attempting to have equal opportunity in school events,” Bare said. “I don’t know that I made a judgment on it being radical, but it probably was. I did it from the standpoint of caring.”
All of these decisions were complicated by the fact that while all this was happening, Garner High’s construction wasn’t completed before the first day of school. But the community banded together and got the school ready enough for classes to start.
The lessons were yet to come.
To be continued in Part 2
A theatrical interpretation of Garner High’s integration can be watched below