It wasn’t their choice to leave the school that educated their parents and older siblings but the last undergraduates at C.M. Eppes High School continue celebrating the lessons learned and strength gained from their alma mater.
The celebration continues today with the start of the 44th annual reunion weekend of the Greenville Industrial-Eppes High Alumni Association. This year’s theme, “It Takes a Village,” looks at the power that came from the community that Eppes served.
“We think about our community. We lived together and worked together, we played together,” said Lola Thompson, the association’s financial secretary. “We were strong and growing and vibrant in that village. It takes everyone working together. We’re just connecting and empowering each other.”
Over the years, the association has worked to gather stories of the school’s teachers and its graduates. In recent years there’s been a new interest in the last class of juniors, sophomores and freshmen who attended the school in 1968-69 before integration moved them to J.H. Rose High School.
Thompson said her class, the junior class of 1969, started a project to document the memories of their classmates and teachers with an emphasis on what happened after integration. Organizers distributed a questionnaire, and small groups of alumni participated in a television broadcast that recorded their discussions about integration that aired on GPAT, Greenville Public Access Television, Optimum channel 23.
“Some of us haven’t seen each other in a long time,” she said. “We wanted to start conversations and tell and write our own stories. A lot of our classmates had died … We wanted to collectively start gathering our information.”
The conversation continued last week when Thompson, her husband, Bobby, and nearly a dozen other people gathered at the C.M. Eppes Alumni Cultural & Heritage Center in the C.M. Eppes Recreation Center, to talk about their experiences with integration.
Muriel Jones Hines was a member of the last freshman class at Eppes.
“It was heartbreaking because we didn’t have a choice,” she said during the gathering on June 25. That heartbreak was compounded when Eppes School burned in 1970, likely because of arson. Hines said there was a time when some people hoped they could return to the school, but when it was destroyed they knew it would never happen.
Hines called herself a bad girl who found herself fighting white classmates for no reason.
Where she once walked to school and was monitored by neighbors, she had to take the bus to Rose and no one watched what she was doing. That resulted in her only attending class 80 days out of one 180-day school year.
Hines said the trouble she got into because of fighting and missing classes caused her to graduate a year after her freshmen classmates. She eventually attended a historically black college, as did her daughter and granddaughter, and worked in health care for more than 30 years.
Hines said with older generations of Eppes graduates dying, younger generations need to participate in the association and carry on the school’s legacy.
Lola Thompson’s life changed direction because of integration.
“I had plans for life. I thought I was pretty smart in school but I ended up letting the whole (senior) year pass by,” she said. While many of her Eppes classmates went to college, she didn’t want to deal with school after spending one year in integrated classes.
“When we got to Rose High School the first thing I heard that day was ‘OK all the n-----s from Eppes High School, raise your hand.’ I was like, what, you can’t do this,” Thompson said.
She had been the captain of Eppes cheerleading squad but when she tried out for the Rose squad, she was initially rejected, only to later be appointed because there were arguments about no Eppes cheerleaders being selected and the worry about how the students would respond.
Thompson said she felt like a token.
Thompson eventually attended and graduated from Shaw University. She was also working at East Carolina University and took some classes there because the school paid for it, but thought it was important to get a degree from an HBCU.
“Both experiences were good, but nothing is as good as that HBCU experience,” Thompson said. “I learned a lot and grew a lot with that.” She later got a master’s degree from ECU in adult education with a certification in community college instruction. She is now pursuing a doctoral degree in sacred studies.
“That is because of me working out all the pain, all the disappointment and realizing our class was called to be trailblazers, history makers. We opened doors for people to start coming together in eastern North Carolina,” Thompson said.
Several other speakers didn’t attend Eppes but are supporters of the alumni association, such as Greenville City Councilwoman Tonya Foreman.
“I didn’t think this was going to be as emotional for me as it was today, listening to you all talk,” Foreman said. “I am that next generation and I remember the pathways that led to what I am doing today.”
Foreman is the founder of Citizens Advocating for Racial Equity and Equality, a nonprofit organization that advocates for equality by pursuing opportunities for growth and development in housing, jobs and food security in minority communities.
“None of what you went through, while it may have been a struggle, and the racism and things you experienced and we still experience today, it was not in vain and we still need you,” Foreman said.
Thompson said she and other Eppes alumni want to continue discussing the impacts of integration.
“We are trying to show the contributions we made. We want to show the community there are some great things that came out of integration even though it was hard for us,” Thompson said in a later interview. “Trailblazing is painful. A lot of us fought but friendships were built. But I ended up making friends with some of the cheerleaders. We got people who became doctors, we got people who became lawyers, engineers, different things, business owners.
“We broke open a fountain in this eastern North Carolina area … it’s a good thing we worked through … it helped us prepare the other generations,” Thompson said.
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