Bonded by pain and pride, alumni of Pasco County's last segregated school gathered again in joy.
By STEVE THOMPSON
Published July 28, 2003
[Times photo: Lance A. Rothstein]
Hazel Willians, left, and Carolyn Hill exchange a big hug Friday during the Moore Academy & Mickens High School Reunion.
DADE CITY - When Jimmie Morrell left Dade City to join the military in 1954, he made his father a promise.
"I told him if I ever came back, I'd be better off than I was when I left," he said.
When Morrell finally returned in 1987, he had kept his promise, though his father had died.
"If he was able to watch, I think he would have been proud of me," said Morrell, thinking back over his life as he watched filets of mullet being rolled in cornmeal and fried.
"A lot of us became successful," he said of himself and his former classmates Friday evening at the Moore Academy & Mickens High School Reunion.
They swatted mosquitoes and escaped the drizzle under shelters at Naomi Jones Pyrancantha Park on Martin Luther King Blvd.
Over plates of fried mullet, baked beans, corn pudding and hush puppies, they talked of recent events and of times long past.
These graduates went to Dade City's black high school at a time when blacks and whites couldn't share a bathroom, couldn't eat together at a restaurant and couldn't study in the same classroom.
They remember those times not with bitterness, but with nostalgia, and with pride for having surmounted the obstacles.
"If you were black, you just didn't take things for granted," Morrell said. "You had to go out and fight for it. You had to use the best that you had."
The struggles that they faced together during segregation helped create bonds that keep these graduates returning year after year, many from as far away as North Carolina and New Jersey.
This weekend's reunion was the sixth in six years. Some of the attendees remembered having occasional reunions as far back as in the 1970s.
"It's the opportunity to see friends I haven't seen in 20 and 25 years," said Solomon Tharpe, who came from Tampa. He graduated in 1966.
One of his friends was conspicuously absent this year: Charles "Bo" Harrison.
Tharpe was a receiver on Mickens' football team when Harrison was quarterback. Harrison, a Pasco sheriff's lieutenant, was fatally shot while sitting in his patrol car June 1.
"It's strange being here without seeing him," Tharpe said. "He didn't miss a year."
One of the school's first graduates, Lillian A. Calhaun, was there Friday evening. She and two other girls made up the first graduating class of 1940.
The school was started in the early 1900s by a local black barber who could hardly read or write. At that time, Pasco County had no schools for black children.
In 1939, the school's first teacher, J.D. Moore, donated to the county his property on Whitehouse Avenue where Moore Academy was finally built.
In 1952, Moore Elementary School was built on what is now Martin Luther King Blvd.
The high school students remained at Moore Academy until 1956, when Mickens High School was built beside the new elementary school.
It was named for Odell K. Mickens, who had been the academy's principal for many years and went on to become Dade City's first black mayor.
Mickens High School's last class graduated in 1970, the year before Pasco High School was fully integrated.
"I was relieved because I didn't have to go into those different surroundings," said Marilyn Perkins Sampson, who graduated that year. Her friends who were sophomores and juniors went to Pasco High School the following year.
"It was really emotional wondering how my friends would be accepted," she said.
But Sampson and the other graduates spent Friday evening remembering the good times. And, on Saturday, they gathered at the Moore-Mickens Education Center for speeches, songs, a play and other entertainment.
Proceeds from the events went to the Moore-Mickens Scholarship Fund, which provides college money for needy black students.
"To see all these people hugging and talking and remembering all the good times and their foundations," Sampson said. "That makes me feel good."
