News-Record.com

The settings were primitive, with outhouses instead of indoor plumbing, and nine grades squeezed into small buildings. But somehow, students learned.

One of these black schools scattered through rural Guilford County was Goshen, located near where South Elm-Eugene Street and Randleman Road merge.

For the first time since the school closed in 1951, Goshen alumni will hold a reunion on Saturday, May 20. The first session, from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., will be held on the grounds of the old school. The school building is now the fellowship hall of Goshen Church.

That night, the alums will gather at Stephanie's Restaurant on Randleman Road to hear alumnus Clarence Avant, one of the top music executives in Hollywood - "the perennial godfather of our business," singer Quincy Jones once called him.

Avant also has done some acting, including a role in the hit movie, "The Color Purple," filmed in North Carolina.

Avant ranks as the school's most famous alumni, along with the late Tom Alston. In 1954, Alston became the first black player on the St. Louis Cardinal baseball club.

It was on the ballfield behind Goshen School that the renowned Goshen Red Wings semi-pro baseball team was organized. Alston starred on the team until he began his climb to the major league.

The Red Wings eventually changed its name to the Greensboro Red Wings and moved to Greensboro's War Memorial Stadium. In a 1944, the Red Wings were tied with the Homestead Grays of the Negro Major Leagues going into the last inning. The Grays' Josh Gibson, the black Babe Ruth of his era, won the game with a long homerun over the centerfield fence.

Martha Donnell, who finished Goshen in the late 1940s and still lives near the community, says she expects 150 alumni for the reunion. They are coming from as far as Washington, D.C., Maryland, New York and, in Avant's case, California.

"Goshen School was a fun place to be," Donnell says, adding, however, that discipline was tough under F.B. Morris. He was principal from when the school opened in 1929 opened until it closed 22 years later.

To reach the school, many students endured long bus rides, with the longest from Climax, next to the Guilford-Randolph County border.

When Goshen closed, it was replaced by Rita Bullock School in Pleasant Garden. Rita Bullock disappeared in a wave of consolidations that came in the 1960s when the old county school system integrated.

Donnell says the outhouses remained at Goshen until the end.