A rich, but disappearing legacy: remembering Black boarding schools: a tradition obscured by desegregation's impact

Black Issues in Higher Education, August 14, 2003 by Ronald Roach

Delphine Patton Sneed, an arts instructor at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County, graduated from Palmer in 1968 in a class of 48 students and recalls her time at the North Carolina school as a transformative one. "It was absolutely the best thing my parents did for me. It was really a life-altering experience;" Sneed says.

She says she was a shy, awkward teenage girl who had grown up in the South Bronx before her mother sent her off to Palmer as a 10th-grader, paying annual tuition, room and board fees of $1,200.

"I went to Palmer very shy, gangly and nerdy. By the time I graduated, I was Miss Thing. I had developed into quite a socially aware young lady," Sneed says.

Sneed says the interaction with her classmates and teachers who were from all over the nation and overseas stimulated her to excel academically and develop self-confidence.

As a board member of the Palmer Memorial Institute in its later years, Epps recalls that the school had great difficulty with raising funds to sustain the school's economic model. "It was a small school that had at most 200 students," she says, adding that fund-raising efforts could not keep pace with rising costs associated with maintaining dormitories, dining facilities and academic buildings.

Lacking the national network that its founder Brown had relied on when she ran the school and hit with a fire that destroyed the main academic building, school leaders had to close the school in 1971, according to Epps.

By the 1980s, Palmer alumni and former teachers had organized a foundation to establish a museum on the site of the old school, according to Tracey Burns-Vann, the director of the Charlotte Hawkins Brown Museum. The state of North Carolina designated the Palmer campus as an official state historic site, the first recognizing Black history in North Carolina.

"It's a wonderful resource for North Carolina," Burns-Vann says.

In Beaufort, S.C., alumni of the Mather school recently met in Hilton Head Island for a reunion of the formerly all-girls academy that became coeducational in the 1960s.

Reuben of North Carolina Central says she attended the school just two years before returning home to Sumter, S.C., where she integrated a formerly all-White public high school. She credits the Mather experience for helping her develop the self-confidence she would need during the experience of integrating an all-White school.

Reuben recalls that the racially mixed Mather teaching staff had high expectations of students and they encouraged student ambitions to attend college at the nation's most competitive institutions.

The school's founder, Rachel Crane Mather, established the school, which would bear her name, in 1867 under the auspices of the American Missionary Association. Over time, both a highly regarded accredited high school and junior college would flourish at the Beaufort campus. The junior college, established in 1954, was coed from the start while the all-girls boarding high school went coed in the early 1960s. Both the high school and junior college closed in 1968, and Mather junior college students and archives were accepted by Benedict College in Columbia, S.C.