Working Wednesday: Beuna Nell Crew at Fairmont High School

(This looks like a long one, but there are lots of photos!)

Beuna Nell Crew was the daughter of my 2x Great-Grandmother Scoatney (Scott) Cooper’s younger sister, Lula (Scott) Crew. She was a graduate of Spelman College, with a degree in Biology, and, like her mother – also a Spelman grad – she’d taken her education and decided to pour in back into her local communities as a teacher.

1959-60 Yearbook of Fairmont H.S., Griffin, GA. Courtesy of Mike Kendall and the Griffin-Spalding African American History Project Facebook page. (See Note Below.)

From 1938 to 1945, Beuna taught at the Monroe Colored School in Walton County, Georgia, not too far either from the city of her education, Atlanta, nor from the community of her birth, Lithonia. For about three years, I lose Beuna in the mists and mysteries of time, but she pops back up again in 1948. Now, she’s in another rural town, this time south of Atlanta and Lithonia, called Griffin, in Spalding County.  

Map showing location of Griffin, GA in relation to Beuna Nell Crew's previous home. Created using Google Maps.

What’s she up to? You guessed it: teaching!

From at least the 1948-49 school year to the 1964-65 one, Beuna teaches at a school for Black children known as Fairmont High School for most of its existence. Over the years – almost twenty – she teaches Biology, Chemistry, and Health. In the 1961-62 school year, she is even the Chair of the Science Department! Check out these two pictures from her classroom that year:

1961-62 Yearbook of Fairmont H.S., Griffin, GA. Courtesy of Mike Kendall and the Griffin-Spalding African American History Project Facebook page.

But that’s not all she did: she spent many years as the Senior Class Advisor, was the National Honor Society Advisor for a time, served as Chair of the Athletic Committee at one point, and also produced the school’s yearbooks! She was a busy woman, and truly poured herself into Fairmont High School. In fact, her students recognized that even when she was only a few years into her teaching career there. Check out this dedication to her in the 1953-1954 yearbook! (Yes, she oversaw production of the school’s yearbooks. No, they were not always dedicated to her!)

1953-54 Yearbook of Fairmont H.S., Griffin, GA. Courtesy of Mike Kendall and the Griffin-Spalding African American History Project Facebook page.

 

About Fairmont High School

But, wait, let me tell you a quick bit about the school itself. Fairmont High School was originally built in 1929 as a Rosenwald School, a school built in significant part through the funding of philanthropist (and co-owner of Sears, Roebuck, and Company), Julius Rosenwald. Distressed and angered by the terrible conditions – or complete absence – of schools for Black children in the south in the [time period] and inspired by work and soon, friendship, of Booker T. Washington, Rosenwald invested in building simple but modern schools for Black youth across the south, ultimately funding over 5,000. (Beuna’s mother Lula even tried to get one in their town, Lithonia – I’m still digging into that story.) And Rosenwald refused to provide sole funding; both Black and white members of the local communities needed to contribute.

The school in Griffin was built on 10 acres of land on – literally – the other side of the tracks from Griffin’s main commercial district. This was in the Fairmont neighborhood of the city, which, according to the Our Legacy museum currently in development at the site of the old school, was “the first neighborhood in Griffin, GA where African-American men and women could purchase a plot of land to build a home.”  It had only been developed two years before the founding of the school, in 1927. Most of its residents were employed in either the textile or farming industries or worked for Pomona Products Company (a pimiento pepper company), or worked in service fields supporting the folks in those industries.

By 1948, the first year I can find Beuna there, the school had changed its name to Vocational High School. Here’s a picture of the 1948-49 school year faculty.

1948-49 Yearbook of Fairmont H.S., Griffin, GA. Courtesy of Mike Kendall and the Griffin-Spalding African American History Project Facebook page.

By 1949, the building had added a new wing and an auditorium/gymnasium. That year, the name changed to Fairmont High School. There were more additions and renovations in the mid-late 1950s – see below for a comparison photo from before and after renovations done around 1957-1958 - and again in 1964. All of this would have taken place while Beuna was there.

 

1957-58 Yearbook of Fairmont H.S., Griffin, GA. Courtesy of Mike Kendall and the Griffin-Spalding African American History Project Facebook page.

Miss Crew at Work

So, what was Beuna like as a teacher and advisor at Fairmont High School? Let’s see what the students remembered about her at the time! When they jotted down their teachers’ “Words of Wisdom” in the 1949-50 yearbook, “Miss Crew” was known for a pretty mild admonishment: “Now you know better than that.” For a sensitive student, though, that might have cut! (Though probably not as much as Mr. Chambliss’ “Shut up or I’ll throw you out that window.” Honestly, though, he might have been a fun teacher!)

1949-50 Yearbook of Fairmont H.S., Griffin, GA. Courtesy of Mike Kendall and the Griffin-Spalding African American History Project Facebook page.

In the same yearbook, the students wondered “What Would Happen If?” the teachers did – or didn’t – do certain things. For Beuna, it was “Couldn’t sling down zeroes?”. Whew! Was she a tough grader, great at math, or maybe both? Probably both.

1949-50 Yearbook of Fairmont H.S., Griffin, GA. Courtesy of Mike Kendall and the Griffin-Spalding African American History Project Facebook page.

A couple of years later, in 1953-54, apparently Beuna’s regular saying was “Sit down class; we must go in a huddle; we have important business to discuss.” I like it – there’s an air of adventure and problem-solving! Seems appropriate for science.

1953-54 Yearbook of Fairmont H.S., Griffin, GA. Courtesy of Mike Kendall and the Griffin-Spalding African American History Project Facebook page.

Now, I already shared one yearbook dedication to Beuna with you, but here’s another. It truly seems her students appreciated her.

1957-58 Yearbook of Fairmont H.S., Griffin, GA. Courtesy of Mike Kendall and the Griffin-Spalding African American History Project Facebook page.

That feeling seems to have lasted well after graduation, and to stretch beyond folks who were her students. Mike Kendall, founder of the Griffin Spalding African American History Project wrote of Beuna’s work on the school yearbook and the class histories they contain,

“The information contained in [them] is invaluable in our effort to document our Story. With no disrespect to any of the other historic educational figures in our Story, Ms. Crew, in this one person’s opinion, is the sine qua non to the success of Vocational/Fairmont. From a historian’s perspective, the only other person who did as much to document our Story is James Banks Gray, Sr. We can never thank these two people enough.”  

 

And here’s what one former student said about the teachers overall, in an oral history interview collected by the Griffin African American Oral History Project in 2017:

“Fairmont High School to me was like a prep school. We had very professional teachers who were concerned about us as young black students, and they wanted the best for us. If you look in any of the Fairmont yearbooks -- and I have started a collection of them -- you will find that we were all well groomed. They wanted us all -- we dressed alike. In the choral pictures, all of the young ladies, your legs were crossed the same. If you had on gloves -- the hair, the dresses were all made the same. The young men dressed a certain way. We wanted to show that we were good and decent people and so our activities, we were outstanding in everything that we did. We -- wherever we went, it was first place whether it was in sports or chorus or dramatics. The teachers were -- they were young teachers themselves. A lot of them were just out of college and so they made us want to do the best we could there. And the record will show that even now that most of us have continued to go on to uphold those standards” (Cheryl Head Rashied, 00:06:00-00:09:00).

 

Now, our memories are always filtered through a number of lenses, so we have to be careful about taking everything as 100% accurate. But you certainly get the sense that Fairmont’s teachers cared about their students, and that Beuna was right there with them.

There is so much to explore re: Beuna’s time at Fairmont High School that I won’t even try to put it all in one post. I’ve scheduled the next Photo Friday to be about her time there. And next Wednesday, I’ll post a quick-follow up to this one that shows how our ancestors can show up in unexpected ways. More might pop up in the future, so don’t forget that you can always search for her name in the search box on this blog.

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Meanwhile, do you know anything about Beuna’s time at The Griffin Rosenwald School / Vocational High School / Fairmont High School? If so, drop your note in the comments below!

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Note: The Griffin-Spalding African American History Project is a treasure trove of information about Black life in the city of Griffin and county of Spalding in Georgia. It currently exists as a Facebook page with several decades worth of Fairmont High School yearbooks and other materials, plus newspaper articles and photographs on a variety of subjects spanning about a century. If you want to see what Beuna's community life was like in Griffin, this is a place to look! Many thanks to Mike Kendall for his assistance as I researched for this post.

I also have to shout our Morgan Cantrell, curator of the developing Our Legacy: The Griffin-Spalding African-American History Museum, for pointing me towards Mr. Kendall. And many thanks to Drew Todd of the Griffin Spalding Historical Society for pointing me towards Ms. Cantrell!