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This week's column

There was a corner room in the old Dudley High School where Mrs. Blanche T. Grant taught us 10th-grade geometry.

Mrs. Grant was a delicate, grandmotherly little woman who'd rap us on our knuckles with a ruler if we misbehaved.

We'd grimace in mock pain as she delivered the punishment. Some gave themselves away by overacting. But Mrs. Grant didn't seem to mind. She probably realized she couldn't inflict much pain on boys and girls much bigger than she. It was the thought that counted.

So it is with the remade Dudley.

The new campus has been delivered as promised: bigger and better than before, and preserving the old while embracing the new.
For Dudley alums such as myself, it's no small pleasure to drive past the sprawling Lincoln Street campus that now resembles a little college, with its imposing brick facade and shiny new glass.
It didn't come easy.

The original plans for the new Dudley had involved an entirely new Dudley. That meant the historic old main building, built in 1929, would have been torn down in favor a new one.

Personally, I didn't mind. For all the fond memories I'd had in those classrooms I liked the plans Charlotte architect Harvey Gantt had conceived for a brand-new main building.

My sister Wanda saw it another way. Wanda reined as Miss Dudley High School during her senior year there and Her Highness wanted the old main building preserved.

So did her husband Tony, who played football and Dudley and commanded the Air Force Junior ROTC squadron.

They wouldn't even think about doing that to Grimsley (which in the beginning had been the city's white high school while Dudley served black students) they argued over Sunday dinners at my mother's house. Why do it to Dudley?

Even Mama turned on me, taking sides with Tony and Wanda. At one of several community meetings on the issue of a total or partial do-over at Dudley, the woman who brought me into this world voted to kick me out.

Smiling a motherly smile, he mouthed the words from across the room: "You're gonna have to leave."

Fortunately, the motion to expel all media from the meeting failed.
Over time, it became clear that more Dudley boosters favored keeping the old building than razing it. With help from Preservation Greensboro and Preservation North Carolina, they also disproved school administrators' assumption that maintaining the old building was too expensive. The school board relented.

And four years later, Dudley students returned to the new campus last week. They couldn't help but be dazzled by what they saw.
This building also says clearly to a community that has felt neglected over the years: You are important. You deserve the best we can provide.

The facility clearly is the most impressive in the entire school system. But the reconstruction has only begun. Dudley is struggling academically. It lags in student achievement scores and it has taken on an unfair stigma of inferiority.

It wasn't always this way.

Until the Greensboro City Schools desegregated in 1971, it was where most of us attended school in Greensboro if we were black.
Sons and daughters of doctors and lawyers and college professors attended class alongside sons and daughters of construction workers and janitors. The teachers were stern and relentless.

We were proud and confident and ambitious.

We need to get that back, and I mean in more ways than this year's state basketball championship.

The ingredients are there, most notably a strong, caring new principal in Phyllis Martin, who I met when she was principal at Jackson Middle School.

There's also new excitement in the community and among volunteers.
Give Superintendent Terry Grier credit on this one. He has taken his share of lumps in recent months. But from the very beginning he insisted that the new Dudley should be no less than "state-of-the-art."

One final note: It has bothered me that so many Dudley boosters and volunteers had come out so forcefully over the building issue, then faded into the background when that fight had been won.
They're needed now more than ever. Dudley can be what it was, and much more, with their help.

Let's harness that enthusiasm and build new traditions in those freshly painted labs and classrooms.

Now that Dudley has a new face it needs to restore its old soul.

Contact Editorial Page Editor Allen H. Johnson at ajohnson@news-record.com

Posted by Allen Johnson on April 10, 2005 4:19 AM | Permalink

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Thinking Out Loud

Thinking Out Loud

This week's column

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