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Farming For A Better Future, page 102
(Top) Excerpt of 1930 Census Record Showing Earsie Vaughn Owning a Farm (National Archives and Records Administration via Ancestry.com) (Above) Excerpt of 1940 Census Record Showing Earsie Vaughn Owning a Farm (National Archives and Records Administration via Ancestry.com)
In the early 20th century, there were no public schools for Marshall County's or Guntersville's African American children. By the 1930s, the city of Guntersville had an elementary and high school for white children but there were only two small, community-organized schools for children of color held in churches. It was not until 1940 that the city built a public high school for African Americans by way of an agreement with the TVA which had become heavily involved in city planning due to the great impact the dam would have on the area. Known initially as Guntersville Negro High School, the school was constructed in the Lakeview community, located on the southwest edge of the city along the southern
* Indicates a Historical - Non-Extant Resource
shore of the peninsula. Later, the community gave its name to the school which became Lakeview High School. The school operated as part of the city school system until it was consolidated with the county system in the 1950s. A man named E. E. Cox, who was principal of the white elementary school became the city superintendent in charge of Lakeview High School as well.
From 1940 until the late 1960s, Lakeview was Marshall County's only public school for children of color. Students from neighboring communities such as Claysville and Warrenton, and as far away as Boaz, Albertville, and Kirbytown would be bussed to Guntersville to attend Lakeview. In 1940, the last publicly available census and the year Lakeview was built, Albertville had only 25 African American households. All of those households
lived within the city limits and all but four lived in a community on the east side of
KEY
■ COMMUNITIES CEMETERIES CHURCHES
■ PLANTATIONS
■ SCHOOLS
■ OTHER
town - an indication of extreme segregation. Only 19 households had children of an age that might have attended Lakeview High School in the 1940s and 1950s. None of the families owned farms and only about a quarter of them owned their homes. Boaz, which is even further away from the river, was a sizable town of 538 households in 1940. But it only had 17 African American families, few with schoolaged children, and none of which owned property or farmed. The rural area surrounding Boaz was exclusively white.
The nearby communities of Claysville and Warrenton were not much different. Claysville, across the river from Guntersville, had few African American families in 1940. Some of them had school-aged children and none of them owned their own land. Warrenton also had few families of color and only four of them owned
a farm in 1940: Charlie Jordan, William Staten,
Greenberry Staten, Sr., and Greenberry Staten,
1
Jr. The low population of African American households reveals why there may have been a lack of concern for the creation of a public school. However, the presence of the TVA drew some men of color to Guntersville to work on the dam. The Authority's policy of hiring local workers in proportion to the local population and of providing resources the communities lacked appears to have greatly helped the African American community of Marshall County.
In the late 1960s the schools were integrated and African American students from Lakeview were sent to the white schools in Guntersville or their hometown affecting the enrollment of Lakeview. The senior grades at Lakeview were discontinued and in 1969 the school closed its doors. The building sat vacant for five years until the city decided to demolish the old school. However, before a contract could be finished for the demolition, the abandoned and vandalized building caught fire and burned on Thursday July 25, 1974. - (4630)