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Public schools honor pioneer in St. Mary's integration
Groves Briscoe and her brother entered Great Mills in 1958
Friday, Nov. 27, 2009
 Click here to enlarge this photo Staff photo by JESSE YEATMAN
Joan Groves Briscoe speaks at a school board meeting Tuesday night where she was recognized for her efforts in desegregating St. Mary's public schools as the first black student to graduate from an integrated public school.
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Fifty-one years ago Joan Groves Briscoe and her brother walked into Great Mills High School as students, the first African-Americans to do so.
Joan Briscoe graduated a year later, taking the first major step toward desegregation in St. Mary's public schools.
Briscoe was honored Tuesday night by the St. Mary's school board and Superintendent Michael Martirano. The celebration included music by the Great Mills High School choir.
The situation "really hurt us, but we got through it," Briscoe said. She acknowledged her family as well as the black community that encouraged her and the white community that knew things needed to change.
She said Tuesday's celebration was the first official recognition of her efforts by the school board or NAACP. Briscoe said she was happy to see the variety of faces of students at the school now and the changes that have swept the county and the nation since her pioneering steps through the school a half-century ago.
"You're in the midst of history here," Martirano told the young students and others in the crowd Tuesday.
In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court, in Brown v. Board of Education, ruled that segregation in schools must end. Another ruling in 1955, Brown II, demanded schools desegregate "with all deliberate speed."
There were several segregated high schools in St. Mary's County during this time, including George Washington Carver, which was for black students, and Great Mills High School, which was for white students.
Change was slow to come to St. Mary's after the Supreme Court rulings.
In 1956, the county school board adopted a plan, to be implemented in the fall of 1957, for gradual integration on a voluntary basis in the elementary grades, where administratively feasible.
William Groves, on behalf of his children, Joan and Thomas Conrad Groves, was determined to defend the right to an equal and integrated education and followed up on an earlier dismissed lawsuit, with the help of NAACP lawyers, to win a case and appeal by the county school board.
Protected by a court order, on Sept. 4, 1958, Briscoe and her brother, Conrad Groves, entered Great Mills. Joan Groves became the first black student to attend and graduate from a desegregated school in St. Mary's.
However, the desegregation was short lived.
After Conrad Groves left the school and enrolled in an all-white Ryken High School in Leonardtown, black students did not enter the halls of Great Mills in any significant numbers for nearly a decade.
St. Mary's public schools maintained a segregated "dual" public school system until the fall of 1967.
Wayne Scriber, president of the St. Mary's County NAACP, was one of the students who went to Great Mills in the late 1960s. He presented a resolution Tuesday night from the NAACP to Briscoe.
Scriber said earlier in the day he thought about all of the emotion and fright he felt during that tumultuous time, even though there were many other African-Americans integrating the school.
When he tried to think of how Briscoe and her brother must have felt, "The closest I could come was multiply my feeling times 10 and that probably didn't come close to what you felt."
Martirano, school board members and others thanked Briscoe for her courage and for leading the way to desegregation in St. Mary's.
"You are the Ruby Bridges of St. Mary's County," said Mary Washington, referring to a young black girl who helped desegregate schools in Georgia.
Washington said she too, like so many African-Americans, experienced racism as a young student when she had to walk an hour to school even though there was a white school around the corner from her home in Georgia.
"We have come a long way," Washington said. "Fifty years later Great Mills High School is the most culturally diverse school in the county, and it all started with you."
