This SC school is an irreplaceable piece of Black history. It may be too late to save it.
Rev. Kenneth Floyd still has his football jersey from his days as a student at the Whittemore schools in Conway. Soon, he fears it’ll be the only real reminder he’ll have left.
The school buildings, which formerly housed the segregated Whittemore Elementary School and Whittemore High School, face an uncertain fate.
The elementary school building is all but slated for demolition after falling into severe disrepair due to storms and years of disuse.
Soon classes won’t be held in the building that held Whittemore High School, now Whittemore Park Middle School. Horry County Schools approved the construction of a new site on El Bethel Road and the future of the current building is currently a question mark — the district hasn’t yet decided what will happen to the site.
Floyd and other former Whittemore students are distraught at the thought of demolition of their beloved elementary school.
Where others see a run-down building marred by broken windows and overrun with asbestos, they see the memories of their school days, simultaneously marked by the perils of segregation and the pride of growing up Black in Conway.
Whittemore Elementary School, constructed in 1954, was an “equalization school” meant to offer “separate but equal” education for Black and white students ahead of integration, which came to the area more than a decade later following a landmark Supreme Court ruling. For some former students and teachers, Whittemore Elementary was — and is — the heart of Conway’s Black community.
“When your heart is beating and pumping, it’s pumping life into the community,” said former third-grade teacher Doris Potter Hickman. “That’s Whittemore Elementary.”
It was the backdrop of some of their fondest memories, the breeding ground for their most cherished relationships, the reason for their solid foundations.
But the city of Conway has determined it’s too expensive to save without the help of an outside group committed to funding its preservation.
It’s estimated it would take at least $14 million to repair the two buildings on the former elementary school site, likely more due to construction costs jumping during the pandemic, according to Conway city administrator Adam Emrick.
The doom of the former Whittemore Elementary School is brewing, and some Black Conway residents fear a refrain of what they say they’ve grown used to: another landmark shuttered, razed or defunct.
School marked ‘an era where everything began to change’ for Black SC residents
“Memories, memories,” Rev. Jerry Faulk muses as he strolls around his elementary school on a sunny recent afternoon.
Faulk and his wife, Genar Flowers Faulk, and cousin Edna Bellamy DeWitt, recall everything from lining up outside the school to dressing up as icicles and planets for school plays to reading hand-me-down textbooks first used by white students.
Their memories are visceral, even seven decades since they last walked the halls as students.
Brimming with nostalgia, they rattle off each of their teachers by name, first and last.
The building isn’t particularly visually striking. In fact, it’s a bit of an eyesore now. But as former students, the three see the school as a standing symbol of Black history in Conway and Horry County.
The building, after all, was a mark of “an era where everything began to change,” Faulk said.
In the 1950s and 1960s, the school was a beacon of hope. The teachers, many of whom learned in a one-room schoolhouse and were lucky to get past elementary education, dedicated themselves to making the school their own, past students remember.
“No wooden structure, but a brick building, everybody had their own classroom,” said Flowers Faulk, daughter of former Whittemore teacher Nancy Flowers. “It’s just endless, there’s just thousands upon thousands of reasons (to preserve the school). If you didn’t grow up in the Black experience, you really don’t understand it.”
From ‘separate but equal’ to the doom of demolition
Under the 1896 Supreme Court ruling Plessy v. Ferguson, “separate but equal” facilities were considered constitutional. That meant segregation was the norm, and many students described the Whittemore school as the only place they could go.
Schools, pools, playgrounds and other public places were strictly off-limits for Black residents. The realities of growing up Black at the time of such deep racism are still enough to make Faulk shudder.
“I still wrestle with that word today: ‘segregation,’” he said.
But the school, a product of segregation itself, was also a source of pride. It was the first school built for Black students instead of being handed down or already dilapidated by the time students used it.
For a time, it was the only school for Black students in Conway.
“We accepted it as our school because we couldn’t go to any other elementary schools in Conway,” Faulk said.
Getting an education was invaluable to Whittemore Elementary students, perhaps more than it was to their white counterparts. For descendants of slaves and farm workers, education was seen as their “ticket out” of a system that kept Black residents out of certain careers, according to Rev. Cheryl Moore Adamson.
Whittemore is an example of local fallout of ‘equalization schools’
Conway Mayor Barbara Blain-Bellamy has a one-of-a-kind view of the situation.
She was a student at Whittemore Elementary during segregation. She, too, grins fondly while proudly recounting the names of her teachers and venerating the school and its impact on her life.
“My heart is every bit as entrenched in that building,” she says.
But she’s also the mayor of the city, and sees no option but demolition if the decision remains in the city’s hands. It’s her responsibility to make sure she’s making the best use of public money, and saving the building isn’t it, Blain-Bellamy said.
“Good people differ on this matter, as good people often do about any matter that we raise,” she said.
Across South Carolina, 700 “equalization schools” were built in the 1950s and the state spent hundreds of millions on the program, giving many counties their first public Black high schools, before the Supreme Court ruling in the case Brown v. Board of Education and numerous desegregation lawsuits from Black parents caused schools to integrate.
Despite their name, equalization schools weren’t equal. The quality of Black school buildings often wasn’t up to par, and in the case of the Whittemore Elementary School, the building itself simply wasn’t meant to last 100 years, according to Emrick, Conway’s city administrator.
“It was built as an equalization school, but it was built not to be equal, but to pretend to be equal,” Emrick said.
The materials were of lesser quality than those used to build white schools, and construction was done as cheaply as possible, meaning the building is harder and more expensive to preserve now, he said.
Funding hard to come by for preservation
The school building has been out of use for decades. The Horry County school district used it for administrative offices and IT services after integration in the 1970s, and the district gave the property to the city in 2018 for $1 with the intention of creating a community center on the site. Even at that point, the damage was “overwhelming,” Emrick said, and the building has deteriorated more since.
Plans for a community center were discussed publicly at the time the city acquired the property, and $300,000 in federal Community Development Block Grants from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development was considered for the process. But a cost analysis determined it would take far more than the available grant money to bring the building up to snuff, and the city decided to “defederalize” the process, Emrick said, using the $300,000 elsewhere in the community.
That left the city to find local funding for the $14-20 million project if the building was to be preserved.
“When I look at the Whittemore Elementary School, I see its twins all over southeastern America,” Blain-Bellamy said. “There is nothing unique about it, there is nothing attractive about it, it is a standard mold … that’s a part of why the building doesn’t have, for me, the kind of value that would justify spending extreme amounts of money.”
But some former students maintain it’s important to local history, even if it’s not necessarily unique in the South. A number of equalization schools are still standing in South Carolina, and some are preserved with authorization from the state Department of Archives and History. Some former Whittemore students, like Jo Ella McQueen, want to see more local Black history highlighted among the well-known national figures.
“Our children really only learn about four people during Black History Month: Martin Luther King, Frederick Douglass, and a few more,” McQueen said. “So we’re going to start teaching our children. This center is going to be about learning more about our ancestors as well.”
The city worked with Archives and History to find the best option at preserving the Whittemore Elementary School, Emrick said, but only the smaller, newer building on the property was viable at the cost estimate the city received. Under Archives and History rules, both buildings had to be preserved in order to be included in the department’s historical sites.
Because the building formerly housed an equalization school, it’s eligible for the National Register of Historic Places with the U.S. National Park Service. But it’s not currently being considered for the register given the price to renovate.
Some parts of Conway’s history are preserved
The price tag for full preservation of the building is intimidating. As it stands now, the city can’t save the building at the cost estimate from Charleston-based architecture firm Liollio, Emrick said.
To put the cost in perspective, Emrick gave an example of a proposal to relocate Conway City Hall, which would cost about $20 million. That proposal was presented three years ago, and was shot down by city council because of the price tag.
“Trying to take the biggest and most impactful building a city can possibly own and build — a city hall — and spend the same amount of money to restore a school building that is falling down to benefit a very small segment of the community … (It) would require us to spend the same amount of money that was too much to spend on city hall,” Emrick said. “It can’t happen. It was not a 100-year building. It was a temporary building.”
But some former students who have lived in Conway for decades see the lack of commitment to spend that money as an apprehension toward preserving the city’s Black history.
“It seems like those two buildings should mean something not just to us, but to the total community,” Flowers Faulk said.
They point to other parts of the city where preservation has been a priority, like the city’s iconic Riverwalk and the Burroughs School in the heart of Conway, which now houses the Horry County Museum.
“They always could find the money to renovate and do what they want on their side of town, but when it comes to our side of town … all they want to do is tear down,” Floyd said.
Conway’s Riverwalk brings in tourism dollars unlikely to come from the preservation of the Whittemore Elementary School, part of the motivation for financial investment in the Riverwalk, Emrick said.
The Burroughs School was converted to house the Horry County Museum in 2014 after a $5 million bond was designated from the county for that purpose in 2005. The project cost $6.4 million total, My Horry News reported in 2014.
Emrick pointed out that project was funded by Horry County, not the city of Conway, and speculated the cost would be much higher, and thus less feasible, if it had been done today.
Conway residents say Black history is evaporating
While certain buildings have been renovated and preserved, Black residents recite a litany of important scenes from their past that have closed, liquidated or otherwise depreciated over the years for one reason or another. A doctor’s office where the only Black doctor in town used to work, a grocery store, a pharmacy, a ballroom and a barber shop all run by Black residents — they’re all gone now.
“All we can point to is vacant lots,” Adamson said. “If that building is demolished, and if preservation is not given to Whittemore Park Middle School, we will have no educational institutions in the Black community physically.”
Emrick maintained demolition happens all over the city on a regular basis. Even buildings with strong historical and emotional value have been decimated over the years, Emrick said, as the city has grappled with its share of typical wear and tear compounded by hurricane damage and subsequent flooding.
“It’s very easy to have blinders on to things that happen in the city, especially when it’s very emotional and when you’re emotionally tied to something,” Emrick said. “But there are buildings that are demolished all the time on all sides of the city.”
Like the Whittemore Elementary building, which was severely battered following Hurricane Matthew in 2016, the city’s Fireman’s Clubhouse was ruined by Hurricane Florence in 2018. A cornerstone for the city’s fire department and greater public, it was demolished a year later, and the city lost “a little piece of Conway,” city spokesperson Taylor Newell said at the time.
Other sites rich in Black history in the area have been preserved in one way or another. Closer to the coast, students from the Myrtle Beach Colored School similarly pushed for preservation, resulting in the construction of a replica of the school used as a museum. The site was donated by Burroughs and Chapin, and the city of Myrtle Beach contributed $350,000 for the construction of the replica.
What lies ahead for the Whittemore Elementary building?
Conway city leaders and many former students are in agreement about the ideal use for the property: a community center with some sort of commemoration of the elementary school and its history. But the question is whether that center can be housed in the current building, or if a new one needs to be erected.
Adamson has already rendered the community center in her head. The first administrative room just inside the front doors would be named for A’La Perle Hickman, former principal of Whittemore Elementary. After a left and a quick right, the auditorium would be a memorial for Cecil C. Bellamy, who taught music and especially loved piano. The list goes on.
“I can imagine all my grandkids going there,” Faulk said. “Probably the word that would express from their mouth would be, ‘Wow.’”
But those who are committed to preserving the building are unwavering in their desire to enter the same doors they walked through as students, narrating anecdotes to their grandchildren with the kind of precision and evocative chronicling that only comes with the real-life setting.
The city is still halted by the millions in expenses. The emotional value doesn’t have to be tied to the literal walls and ceiling of the building, Emrick and Blain-Bellamy say.\
“The memories don’t have to vanish when a family loses their home not by choice, whether it be some destructive force of nature or whether it be some financial loss,” Blain-Bellamy said. “They don’t forget the memories that they have from that place.”
The former elementary school isn’t the ideal candidate for historical tourism, Emrick said.
The building holds extreme value to a small sector of the city’s population, but it doesn’t have the same importance to much of the rest of the city and potential tourists, almost certainly not enough to cover renovation costs, Emrick said.
As it stands, the demolition has been put on “pause,” Emrick said, following the outcry from residents hoping to keep it standing. In order to stop the demolition completely, the city would need a concrete plan from a nonprofit organization or other organized group not only funding the renovation, but ensuring it would happen in a timely manner.
If the building isn’t preserved in its entirety, there are other routes students can cling to the important history it holds. Offering alternative options, Emrick said part of the building could remain standing as a memorial, and people with ties to the building could take bricks or beams as keepsakes.
It’s the slightest glimmer of hope that those who keep the school close to their hearts will once again enter the doors of Whittemore Elementary School.
“It’s the memories when you walk down the hall, like the echoes of the past,” said Hickman, the former teacher. “You can feel and you can hear the echoes of the past saying, ‘You are because I was.’”
This story was originally published November 30, 2021 at 6:00 AM.
