Documentary on Desegregation
of Great Mills High School
Brings Hidden Local History to Screen

Press Release #09-127

(St. Mary’s City, MD) June 1, 2009 — St. Mary’s College of Maryland professor Merideth Taylor has produced a documentary film on the desegregation of Great Mills High School that will premiere in the high school’s auditorium on June 18 at 7p.m. “With All Deliberate Speed: One High School’s Story,” will run about one hour and give voice to those who experienced the desegregation process at Great Mills High School between 1958 and 1972.

“We found that many students at Great Mills are unaware that their schools were ever segregated,” said Taylor. “And it may surprise even older folks to learn or remember how segregated the county once was.”

The screening of the film will be followed by a panel discussion and refreshments. Panel members include Joan Groves, who was one of the first two black students to enroll at Great Mills after her parents sued the school system in 1958 to force integration. The panel will include former teachers and students, both white and black, who were at Great Mills during these years.

The documentary is based on 18 oral histories drawn from over thirty interviews with former teachers, administrators and students collected by Taylor with the assistance of students and teachers at Great Mills. To mark the 50th anniversary of the landmark Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court ruling, in the spring of 2004 Great Mills students who had helped with these interviews presented an original theatrical work based on the oral histories. The documentary grew out of Taylor’s sabbatical project in 2003-2004 involving Great Mills High students and teachers.

“What will come through clearly are the contrasting perspectives,” says Taylor. “Partly, this is because of the nature of oral histories and memory. People remember things differently because of the values they place on those memories. For some it was a positive time, and they were not always aware how different it was for others who had a more negative experience.”

Before desegregation, there were two public high schools in southern St. Mary’s: George Washington Carver for African Americans and Great Mills for whites. However, with the Supreme Court ruling of Brown v. Board in 1954, the schools were required to desegregate. Another ruling in 1955, Brown II, demanded schools desegregate “with all deliberate speed.” St. Mary’s County began to make plans for desegregation, which met with resistance – Southern sympathies ran deep in the county. It wasn’t until Joan and Conrad Groves’ parents filed suit in 1958 that African American students actually entered the “white” schools. Taylor documents this entire turbulent time period, through the racial tensions that rose in the early 1970’s.

A grant from the PNC Foundation Legacy Project and the Maryland Humanities Council made the documentary possible. Additional support for the documentary project came from St. Mary’s College in partnership with St. Mary’s County Public Schools and the Unified Committee for Afro-American Contributions.

St. Mary’s College of Maryland, designated the Maryland state honors college in 1992, is ranked one of the best liberal arts schools in the nation by U.S. News & World Report and Kiplinger’s. The Princeton Review named it a “best value college” in its 2009 edition. Founded in 1840 as Maryland’s “monument school” commemorating the state’s first capital, SMCM is the state’s only public honors college, offering “an Ivy-level College with a public-school price tag” (Newsweek).

Some 2,000 students attend the college, which has the highest graduation rate for all Maryland public colleges and universities, and an SAT average for student admissions of 1252. The school’s waterfront campus along the St. Mary’s River in Southern Maryland is home to the 2009 National Intercollegiate Sailing Association Co-ed champions.

“Ending a Century of Segregation: One High School’s Story” was made possible by a grant from the PNC Foundation Legacy Project with support from the Maryland Humanities Council (MHC). The MHC is an affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in the documentary do not necessarily represent those of the PNC Foundation, the MHC, or the NEH.

Joan Groves was the first black graduate of Great Mills High School.
Her story is documented in the new film, “With All Deliberate Speed: One High School’s Story.”
Groves is now retired and lives in Landover, Md.

Also available: Former Great Mills student Zora Siemasko holds a photo from her graduating class in 1957, with "not a dark face in the group.” When Siemasko first went to college, she said having black peers "was an eye opener to me"; The Beacon, an old St. Mary’s County newspaper, featured a story on the Groves’ admittance to Great Mills High School; Taylor’s documentary depicts the local side of the desegregation process. In this Library of Congress photo, St. Louis NAACP members protest the segregation of their schools; photo from 1958 of the Groves children waving goodbye to their parents as they leave for school; scan of a 1958 article with headline "Integration of Schools Begins at St. Mary's" with The Evening Star (newspaper) header.

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St. Mary's County NAACP
Establishes Claudia Pickeral Memorial Scholarship

Former Maryland Congressman and president of the NAACP Kweise Mfume delivered the annual Carter G. Woodson Lecture on March 10 at St. Mary's College of Maryland (SMCM). The talk was titled "Racism, Sexism and Anti-Semitism (Old Wine in New Bottles)."

Mfume represented Maryland's seventh congressional district from 1986 to 1996, serving on the Ethics Committee and the Joint Economic Committee of the House and Senate. He successfully co-sponsored and helped to pass the Americans with Disabilities Act and strengthened the Equal Credit Opportunity Law. Mfume was unanimously elected as President and Chief Executive Officer of the NAACP in February of 1996 and served there for nine years, during which time he negotiated for and successfully secured the NAACP's official United Nations status as a Non-Governmental Organization (NGO). Throughout 2008 he served as national surrogate speaker for the "Obama for America" Presidential campaign.

The annual Carter G. Woodson Lecture honors the father of African-American History. Woodson was an author, editor, publisher, historian, and founder of the Journal of African American History, which he started in 1915. Past speakers in the Carter G. Woodson Lecture Series have included Tony Brown, Donna Brazile, Lonnie Bunch, and Kurt Schmoke.

St. Mary’s County NAACP receives U. S. Congress and U. S. Senate Concurrent Resolution honoring NAACPs100th Anniversary

111th CONGRESS
1st Session
S. CON. RES. 3

Honoring and praising the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People on the occasion of its 100th anniversary.

IN THE SENATE OF THE UNITED STATES
January 28, 2009

Mr. DODD (for himself, Mr. REID, Mr. LEAHY, Mr. LEVIN, Mr. CARDIN, Mr. HARKIN, Mr. MENENDEZ, Ms. LANDRIEU, Mr. KENNEDY, Mr. BENNET, Mr. KERRY, Mr. BROWN, Mr. DURBIN, Mr. SCHUMER, Mr. LAUTENBERG, Mr. LUGAR, Mr. BAYH, Mr. WYDEN, Mr. CRAPO, Mrs. BOXER, Mr. VOINOVICH, Mr. REED, and Ms. MIKULSKI) submitted the following concurrent resolution; which was referred to the Committee on the Judiciary

CONCURRENT RESOLUTION

Honoring and praising the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People on the occasion of its 100th anniversary.

Whereas the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (referred to in this resolution as the ‘NAACP’), originally known as the National Negro Committee, was founded in New York City on February 12, 1909, the centennial of Abraham Lincoln’s birth, by a multiracial group of activists who met in a national conference to discuss the civil and political rights of African-Americans;

Whereas the NAACP was founded by a distinguished group of leaders in the struggle for civil and political liberty, including Ida Wells-Barnett, W.E.B. DuBois, Henry Moscowitz, Mary White Ovington, Oswald Garrison Villard, and William English Walling;

Whereas the NAACP is the oldest and largest civil rights organization in the United States;

Whereas the mission of the NAACP is to ensure the political, educational, social, and economic equality of rights of all persons and to eliminate racial hatred and racial discrimination;

Whereas the NAACP is committed to achieving its goals through nonviolence;

Whereas the NAACP advances its mission through reliance upon the press, the petition, the ballot, and the courts, and has been persistent in the use of legal and moral persuasion, even in the face of overt and violent racial hostility;

Whereas the NAACP has used political pressure, marches, demonstrations, and effective lobbying to serve as the voice, as well as the shield, for minority Americans;

Whereas after years of fighting segregation in public schools, the NAACP, under the leadership of Special Counsel Thurgood Marshall, won one of its greatest legal victories in the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954);

Whereas in 1955, NAACP member Rosa Parks was arrested and fined for refusing to give up her seat on a segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama--an act of courage that would serve as the catalyst for the largest grassroots civil rights movement in the history of the United States;

Whereas the NAACP was prominent in lobbying for the passage of the Civil Rights Acts of 1957, 1960, and 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Fannie Lou Hamer, Rosa Parks, Coretta Scott King, Cesar E. Chavez, Barbara C. Jordan, William C. Velasquez, and Dr. Hector P. Garcia Voting Rights Act Reauthorization and Amendments Act of 2006, and the Fair Housing Act, laws that ensured Government protection for legal victories achieved;

Whereas in 2005, the NAACP launched the Disaster Relief Fund to help survivors in Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas, Florida, and Alabama to rebuild their lives;

Whereas in the 110th Congress, the NAACP was prominent in lobbying for the passage of H. Res. 826, whose resolved clause expresses that: (1) the hanging of nooses is a horrible act when used for the purpose of intimidation and which under certain circumstances can be criminal; (2) this conduct should be investigated thoroughly by Federal authorities; and (3) any criminal violations should be vigorously prosecuted; and

Whereas in 2008 the NAACP vigorously supported the passage of the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act of 2007 (28 U.S.C. 509 note), a law that puts additional Federal resources into solving the heinous crimes that occurred in the early days of the civil rights struggle that remain unsolved and bringing those who perpetrated such crimes to justice: Now, therefore, be it

Resolved by the Senate (the House of Representatives concurring), That the Congress--

(1) recognizes the 100th anniversary of the historic founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; and

(2) honors and praises the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People on the occasion of its anniversary for its work to ensure the political, educational, social, and economic equality of all persons.

http://www.opencongress.org/bill/111-sc3/text