For natives of the 21st century, the milieu of the 1950’s likely seems strange and foreign. The fastest car of the day, the Ford Thunderbird, hit maximum speeds of 75 miles per hour, low-speed by today’s standards; drivers paid a tantalizingly low 18 cents for a gallon of gasoline; and, probably most shocking of all to a present-day observer, the forced segregation of blacks and whites was commonplace, a vestige of the foregone era of slavery.
Last weekend, members of The Roundup tried to bridge the gap between 2011 and 1955. On December 2, 2011, five staffers traveled to St. Louis to interview Charles Edmond ’58, a retired school administrator and the first black student to graduate from Jesuit College Prep.
The interview was pursued as part of junior Payton Maher’s series on Jesuit integration. Maher’s series will explore the series of events that led to Jesuit admitting its first black students in 1955; by admitting Edmond and Arthur Allen ’59, Jesuit became the first school in Dallas to desegregate.
Maher, Clark Durham ’12, English teachers Sheryl Row and Michael Degen, and history teacher Fritz Asche traveled from Love Field Airport early Saturday morning for an 11:00 a.m. meeting in St. Louis with Edmond and his wife. Over breakfast, The Roundup staffers picked Edmond’s brain on his experiences with segregation and integration.
In the interview, Edmond discussed his experiences at Jesuit and the background work that made his groundbreaking enrollment possible. He talked about the culture shock he experienced being the only black student in his class while acknowledging the fair treatment he was given by his classmates and teachers.
For more on Edmond’s interview and the incredible story of Jesuit’s integration, check out the series by Payton Maher set to be published on Martin Luther King Day.
1955: Jesuit High School and the Struggle for Civil Rights – A Three-Part Series
