MEANWHILE LIFE WENT ON FOR THOSE WHO REMAINED AT THE ECKSTEIN SCHOOL

While parents struggled to provide the best educational opportunities for their children, day to day school life went on at Eckstein much as it had for previous generations of students.

In 1952 Eckstein, had 89 students in kindergarten through grade 8.

For the students life was filled with homework, friends, sports, clubs and all the other “important” things of childhood. In 1950 the school operetta was The Adventures of Pinocchio. Ernestine Henderson was Eckstein’s spelling champion in 1952.

Lillian (Harvey) Griffith and her sister Betty attended Eckstein in the 1950s. Lillian says:

“I wouldn’t trade the experience of attending Eckstein School for anything. The school was in our neighborhood, which meant that you had parents up and down every street. The teachers took a personal interest in our lives. All us students were like one big family. We had our problems and we worked through them in a forgiving and loving way it also help that most of us went to the Mt. Zion Baptist Church that was only a block and one half east.”

Mayor James Carruthers and School Board President Roland Richardson denied that the custom of Negro children attending Eckstein School and white children the Congress Avenue School was, in any way, an effort to segregate pupils. They said that the system of separate grade schools had been agreed upon many years ago by all concerned. The Eckstein School had been built near the homes of most colored people of the community, and designed especially for the Negro citizens of Glendale. They pointed out that both Negro and white children attend Glendale High School together.

Glendale officials had asked Hamilton County Prosecutor C. Watson Hover for an opinion on the legality of current school assignments.