Lula Tyler, Holly Grove mayor since 1994, is saddened anytime she has to come around the burned-out Holly Grove Elementary School. She and Harry Mayo, who was superintendent of the town's school system at the time of consolidation with Clarendon in 2005, are natives of the area. They attended school in the burned complex. She graduated in 1962 and he in 1964, before integration occurred.
The fire occurred on Dec. 16, 2006, and very soon afterward the Clarendon school board [which absorbed the Holly Grove School in a consolidation required by the state in 2005] sub-leased some of the old high school buildings from Kingdom Builders Ministries to provide classrooms for the displaced elementary children. The Clarendon School District had given the high school property to Holly Grove after consolidation in 2005. It in turned leased it to Kingdom Builders.
Integration of the Holly Grove schools took place in 1969-1970 and Mayo said it came about peaceably. I believe Mayo said the black students then outnumbered the whites two to one. He remembered to me that the old "white" school buses were sometimes passed on to the black school under the "separate but equal" segregated system. I already knew that it was a common practice in some areas of the state to pass on cast-off school textbooks to the black children. The shortchanging of black public schools in the segregated South has a history that sadly dates back to Reconstruction days.
The "Holly Grove Negro School" sign, which had been covered over for years, was recently removed from the arch at the front of the elementary school. Mayo said that that part of the school complex was constructed in the mid-1940s and had replaced an earlier black school which had also burned.
(Bill Sayger, director of the Central Delta Depot Museum in Brinkley, can be contacted at 589-2124)
