New Jersey's Lawrenceville School honors legacy of its first Black students: "We changed that school forever"
An atrium at the Lawrenceville School in New Jersey renamed after the school's first two Black students is seeing its first school year, which started this week. Students will walk through the Battle-Fitzgerald entrance and atrium, which honors Lyals Battle and Darrell Fitzgerald and celebrates the boarding school's progress in racial diversity.
In the atrium, they'll have the chance to view memorabilia from the alumni behind glass cases and read a plaque on the wall that recounts the history of desegregation on campus after the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954.
But while boarding schools like Lawrenceville across the United States are now some of the country's most diverse educational institutions, many of these schools were reluctant to open their doors to students of color decades ago.
A little over 150 years after it was first founded, Lawrenceville admitted Battle and Fitzgerald in the fall of 1964 — a decade after the Supreme Court's landmark desegregation ruling in Brown. A letter written by the new president of the school's board in the spring of 1964 noted that Lawrenceville was the last of the major independent boarding schools, which include Phillips Exeter Academy, St. Paul's School and Phillips Academy Andover, to open its doors to a student of color.
Many boarding schools pushed against integration
Many boarding schools pushed back against integrating students of color, and noted they weren't subject to federal education requirements and mandates. But Lawrenceville realized times were changing and it needed to move towards integration.
"As I've thought a lot about it — the resistance on the part of the school — I think it's important that we take some collective responsibility," Lawrenceville's current head of school, Steve Murray, said. "But I think it in part reflects societal attitudes. I think that there was the country's acceptance of Brown versus Board of Education and actually acting on it."
Before Battle and Fitzgerald were admitted, the school's board of trustees had resisted desegregation. Murray said trustees were likely worried about alumni and donor reactions. According to the atrium's plaque, it wasn't until a change of leadership on the board in 1963 that spurred real change.
Sixty years after Battle and Fitzgerald stepped foot on campus for the first time, Murray said the school, in reckoning with its history, renamed an atrium and its entrance after the two men. The long-standing atrium was previously named after Edwin Lavino, the president of the school's board from 1947 to 1963, who resisted segregation.
"For the students, their very presence on these campuses changed what these campuses were like," Khalil Johnson, assistant professor of African American studies at Wesleyan University, said.
The implementation of Brown v. Board was slow. It took more than a decade for many public schools across the country to desegregate. Decades later, many school systems still are not fully integrated, the U.S. Department of Education's 2023 federal data shows increasing trends of resegregation in public schools, attributable to court oversight of desegregation ceasing in the early 1990s.
Although the court's ruling didn't apply to private schools, states later passed their own laws prohibiting discrimination in all settings.
"We certainly took longer, and I think we need to own that we've been trying to be more transparent and learn from that," Murray said.
While Johnson emphasized the significance of Battle's and Fitzgerald's decision to be the first to integrate the then all-White school, he said that at the time, these schools lacked the appropriate resources to support Black students.
"The schools didn't have in place any of the kinds of cohort building or ways of assimilating and accommodating students who were not from the traditional background that they were used to serving," Johnson said. "They thought that we could just have these students come, and they would adapt and everything would be fine."
Two Black students out of hundreds on campus
They were the only Black students in their respective classes and two out of hundreds on campus, but Fitzgerald said they weren't treated differently by their instructors.
"They understood we were alone by ourselves, but this was still the school, and you're going to be held to the same standards as every student in that school," he said.
Both men also said many of their classmates didn't think twice about being alongside them, but some remained aloof throughout high school. Battle remembers being called the n-word once.
"There was a third group that I think in some instances resented me being there — didn't think that I belonged," Battle said.
Classmates like Tom Gallagher, who befriended Battle at Lawrenceville, were curious. Gallagher went to an all-White private Catholic grade school outside of Philadelphia and had never met a peer who was Black. He said much of his understanding of the Civil Rights Movement was informed by their friendship.
"I didn't have a clue who Martin Luther King was, really, other than a name in the newspaper," Gallagher said. "I said: 'What's this all about?' He quietly and very eloquently described the Reverend King's philosophy of social protest and the injustices foisted upon Black Americans."
A report by the UCLA Civil Rights Project in 2018 showed private schools across the country still lagging in diversity, and where White students continue to have the most "isolated intergroup experiences." Yet in the decades since Battle and Fitzgerald graduated in 1967 and 1968, respectively, private schools have, to an extent, witnessed increasing racial and ethnic diversity.
Today, 55% of Lawrenceville School's student body of about 800 is non-White. The school boasts graduates such as former Connecticut governor Lowell Weicker and current Vice Chairman of Alibaba Group Joseph Tsai.
"Lawrenceville changed us and we changed that school forever," Fitzgerald said. "I had prayed to God, let me let me live long enough to see the dedication because this is a big moment in the history of the school to have our names on that entry to the Tsai Field House and that atrium."
