Native Washingtonian Earl P. Williams, Jr., moved to the Kalorama Triangle in the fall of 1954 as a young child. Seven months earlier, on May 17, 1954, the landmark Supreme Court case known as Brown v. Board of Education desegregated public schools in the United States. A companion case, Bolling v. Sharpe, desegregated public schools in the District of Columbia.
The following reminiscences are edited and condensed from materials he provided to the Association of the Oldest Inhabitants of DC, the DC History Center, and a 2024 oral history interview with current students at today’s Oyster-Adams Bilingual School, his former elementary school.
In the fall of 1955, I presumed that I would attend nearby John Quincy Adams Elementary School at 19th and California Street. But when my father took me there in early September 1955 to register me, the principal told my father and me that I couldn’t attend Adams because it was overcrowded. She then told us that she was also the principal of James F. Oyster Elementary School but that it was a mile away—in Woodley Park—and that it was all white. She asked my father if the latter would be a problem. His response was “I’m sending my boy to school to get an education, not to socialize.”
My journey through Oyster from kindergarten in September 1955 to graduation in June 1962 was unique for an Afro-American in the DC Public School System at that time. I was in the first handful of black children who attended Oyster, which was predominantly white. (Asian-American pupils were in the minority, but they were considered “white.”) I recall that two black girls graduated shortly after I started in kindergarten. One black boy left after kindergarten. I was the first Afro-American child at Oyster School to complete all of the grades after Bolling v. Sharpe had desegregated DC public schools in 1954.
My perspective on fitting in with America is complicated. This is deepened by the fact that, although born in Georgetown, my first home was in rural Prince George’s County, Maryland. My family moved to the Eckington neighborhood of Northeast DC when I was a toddler, and then to the Kalorama Triangle in the fall of 1954. This set me up for my attendance at Oyster in Woodley Park from 1955 to 1962.
When I started at Oyster in kindergarten, when the schools were desegregated after the Supreme Court said that black and white schools were unconstitutional, not only were black children allowed to go to the white schools to get a better education, but every white school had to have a black teacher or a black librarian or some black professional. So when I started [at Oyster], there was a black teacher. Her name was Betty Brooks. She had taught at a school called Green Acres in Bethesda. She took a federal civil service exam—that’s a government exam—and back then DC didn’t have a mayor, we didn’t have a city council, we had three men running the city called commissioners. The President picked them and back then if you worked for the DC government it was the same as working for the federal government. So: She was a teacher, but she took an exam to be in the DC school system. And the principal who picked her, who was my principal, a woman named Florence Cornell, said “come in for an interview.”
Miss Brooks was very forward thinking. She made us want to come to school. We had two reading groups: one group called Cardinals and the other group called Blue Jays after the birds, and I was in one of those two groups. I was one of the better readers; my mother had homeschooled me before I started at Oyster. Miss Brooks took us on field trips, not as many as you go on now, and she baked every Friday. You could smell something cooking and baking in the halls. Miss Brooks had our spring 1956 kindergarten class picture put on a book of matches, which further made me feel extra special to be in her class.
The next black teacher I had was in 1959. Her name was Virginia Moss Morgan. She had us do a term paper to graduate. When I graduated from the sixth grade, I had to write a term paper, otherwise I wouldn’t graduate. And I had to have footnotes just as if I were in college.
I’m sorry to say that after I left home, most of my school pictures from Oyster School, which had remained at home, were lost or fell into neglect. My kindergarten class picture of June 1956 and other pictures from kindergarten are gone. Ditto for my graduation picture from June 1962. So, this James F. Oyster School Safety Patrol picture from the spring of 1961 is the closest thing I have. I was in fifth grade. I’m in the second row at the far right.
My father ran a press at the U.S. Government Printing Office at night, but he was the janitor of the apartment building where we lived in the Kalorama Triangle at 19th and Mintwood Pl. Neither of my parents attended college. So, not only was I one of the few—and sometimes the only—Afro-Americans at Oyster, but I was from a working-class family, not a white-collar family.
Hence, I was an outlier because I was a product of four societies: black/working-class v. white/professional. Because of these reasons, I would like for the Oyster School video to be disseminated broadly because it comprises the history of public education, the District of Columbia, and the civil rights movement.
After Mr. Williams graduated from Oyster, he went on to Gordon Junior High School, which is today’s Hardy Middle School, before graduating from St. John’s College High School. He is a graduate of the University of Maryland, College Park. He shared memories of his experiences at Gordon with local researcher Carlton Fletcher, at GloverParkHistory.com. Portions of the interview conducted by Oyster-Adams Bilingual School’s staff and students can be accessed here. We’re grateful to Mr. Williams for sharing his lived experience, and to the students and faculty of Oyster-Adams for documenting it, as we commemorate the 70th anniversary of the end of legal segregation in DC schools.
Does your family have a post-Bolling DC school experience to share?
We want to hear!
The DC History Center is planning a new exhibit! As we research the history of public education in DC, especially for Black Washingtonians, we need to hear from the folks who lived it. Stories and experiences like yours and Mr. Williams will help us tell this story.