Montgomery Man Recalls Rough Spots of Racial Integration

George Barnes, one of the first blacks to sit among white students in Maryland, saw fights and cat-calls give way to racial cooperation in his Poolesville school. (Newsline photo by Daina Klimanis)

By Daina Klimanis

Maryland Newsline

Wednesday, May 5, 2004

LAYTONSVILLE, Md. - On George Barnes Jr.’s first day at Poolesville School in 1956, the shy eighth-grader was confronted by a crowd of people blocking the entrances. The mob wanted to keep Barnes and other black students out, in defiance of the Montgomery County School Board’s decision to desegregate the school.

Police ultimately ordered the crowd away from the school. Barnes and a handful of other blacks attended classes as demonstrations against the racial integration went on for days.

For Barnes, who was among the first black students to sit amid whites in Maryland classrooms, the situation was so tense that a police escort watched over him on the school bus and in hallways. White students threw things at him constantly and fought him frequently, he said. Racial comments and slurs were everyday banter.

But during his five years at the school, the harassment diminished, Barnes said. Meanwhile, he learned to stand up for himself and his friends; the amount of abuse he was willing to endure decreased.

“I was very timid when I came out of elementary school,” Barnes said. “When I got out of high school, I wasn’t timid any more.” He laughed. “I couldn’t be.

His life is quieter now. At 60, Barnes lives in nearby Laytonsville and operates senior assisted living homes. He said he retired from his job at the Montgomery County Department of Recreation in 2002 so he could devote more time to his business.

But looking back on the years following the Supreme Court decision on Brown vs. Board of Education, the decision that forced school systems to integrate, Barnes recalls a tumultuous era that changed the attitudes of people throughout the town.

By the time he left for college, black students were more accepted, he said.

“It helped build a level of respect,” he said. “When I left, we were pulling together and trying to win championships.”

Integration in Poolesville

Barnes had lived in the Poolesville area since birth. During his childhood, Poolesville was a small town of a few hundred people where families knew and usually respected each other, he said.

But Poolesville’s integration—a year after the county’s first efforts to desegregate in 1955—was a transition many whites in town did not welcome. People threatened Barnes’ family, throwing trash in their yard and burning crosses on the lawn, he said.

“We’d have to clean up the yard every morning,” Barnes said. “People would drive by, shout obscenities, blow the horn, most of the night.”

His family went on the defensive. Barnes said his uncles would wait downstairs, shooting warning shots into the air as they tried to keep vandals away.

Barnes’ mother, Frances Barnes, remembers this as a terrifying time for the family. She was especially concerned for her younger children. George was the oldest of five children living in that house.

“It was just frightening,” Frances Barnes said. “We always tried to keep the children close to home…. I remember chasing the kids at night if they would go anywhere. I would chase them home.”

This tension continued into 1957, when Connie Morella, who would later become a congresswoman, taught English and civics in Poolesville. Parents and students would demonstrate outside the school to protest integration, she said. They’d say it went against the Bible or against tradition. Buses would come to school empty because so many white parents kept their students home.

“The people in Poolesville were all wonderful people,” Morella said. “The parents were great, they would invite me to their home for dinner. But they just couldn’t understand integrating people from different races.”

The demonstrations and harassment were part of what George Margolies, staff director of the Montgomery County Board of Education, called the “fits and starts” of school integration in Montgomery County. Some communities were much more accepting of integration than others.

“For the most part, the school system embraced the board’s decision, but the rubber hit the road when the … individual communities had to confront the integration,” Margolies said.

The hostility was directed at just a few students. Barnes said he was one of eight black students entering Poolesville, though newspaper accounts at the time said 14 black children were enrolled at the school. A Montgomery County Public Schools document written several years after the integration pegged the number at 16.

Despite the stress, Barnes was able to remain calm, Morella recalled. She taught at Poolesville from 1957 to 1958.

“He was one of those students who tried to do everything he was supposed to do, knowing that he was not only representing himself, but representing the whole group,” Morella said.

In Turmoil, a Refuge

During rough times, Barnes found solace in the close-knit community that gathered in the area’s black churches. After school, instead of walking three miles home through mostly white neighborhoods, Barnes and his black schoolmates would go to Elijah United Methodist Church. He would do homework there until an uncle picked him up in the evening, Barnes said.

“I could go there on Wednesday night [youth group] meetings and be with a group of people who feel the same way,” Barnes said. “We had to be together. It had to be a group effort. 

For three years, Barnes did not participate in the school’s extracurricular activities. Things began to change his junior year, when he began playing on the school’s basketball, soccer and baseball teams. Working with white students with the common goal of winning, they developed a camaraderie.

“When you become part of a sports team, the people on that team start to build respect for each other, and then they kind of look out for you,” Barnes said.

Barnes began going to school with confidence. He fought back when people harassed him. He said he got a beating during his first fight, but in his second he fought well enough to make people keep their distance.

“It gave other people a little courage to step up to the plate,” Barnes said. “Just generally beating up on African Americans took a backseat.”

After school, Barnes began spending with white students as well as his black friends.

Out of Conflict, Lasting Effect 

After Barnes graduated from Poolesville in 1961—part of a class of 37—he studied biology at the University of Maryland, Eastern Shore, where most students at the time were black.

His first few years, he struggled. He thinks the harassment he got in high school kept him from developing good study habits.

“I was not allowed to accomplish as much as I needed to accomplish as far as grasping knowledge,” he said.

But Barnes also found that the courage he gained during his years at Poolesville would serve him even after graduated from college in 1966. When he worked in the Montgomery County Recreation Department, he had the determination to take a stand as a union representative, he said.

“I became a person who, once I made a conviction and decided a course, then I pretty much decided to take that course,” he said. “I’d take on issues just knowing it’s the right thing to do – alone.”

Banner photo courtesy Joseph Douglas Collection, Kansas Collection, Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas Libraries 

Copyright © 2004 University of Maryland Philip Merrill College of Journalism