Montgomery School Superintendent Meets with MoCo Training School Alumni for Historical Research

Montgomery County School System Superintendent Dr. Ronda Hightower met with several alumni of the Montgomery County Training School on Oct. 22 in the Montgomery County Board of Education office to determine a timeline of the school’s history.

The group came together following the Montgomery County Board of Education’s decision to exchange the old Montgomery County Training School for $148,000 worth of scholarships from Brewton-Parker Christian University during a called meeting on Oct. 16. The college reached out to the school system about acquiring the gym, with tentative plans to renovate the building for use by the college’s wrestling team.

According to Dr. Hightower, the building would still be made available for use by local community groups, and attendees of the Oct. 22 meeting, such as Charleston Livingston, are also in contact with Brewton-Parker in hopes of giving the repaired building a name reflecting its history.

Dr. Hightower invited the group to the office to speak about the Montgomery County Training School as part of her efforts to document the school’s history so it may be preserved and shared with the community.

“The Board of Education is just committed to three things with the Montgomery County Training School, and that is to protect the history, to honor the history and to share the history,” said Dr. Hightower.

She suggested multiple ideas for presenting the history of the school, including placing plaques in the renovated building, raising banners in the Montgomery County High School gym representing the old school’s sports teams and reciting the history of the school alongside presentations of the scholarship funds. Dr. Hightower also received a 1970 yearbook from another alumni which she plans to scan and make available digitally.

The Montgomery County Training School can trace its origins to the aftermath of the American Civil War. According to Betty McLendon, in the 1860s and 1870s, Black churches founded throughout rural areas formed the basis for local schools for Black children in the era of segregation.

“Wherever there was a group that built a church, they also built a school,” said McLendon.

In the early 1950s, schools in Montgomery County, then including what is now Toombs County and Wheeler County, began consolidating, with Mount Vernon servicing the northern part of the county and Uvalda servicing the south. According to McLendon, school buses were introduced to the area around this time.

The Montgomery County High School would be built in 1956 to serve the county’s northern half of Black children, and a similar building was built in Uvalda for the southern half. The white school was known as the Mount Vernon-Ailey High School.

In 1959, the schools would be renamed, with the white school gaining the Montgomery County High School name it holds in the present day and the Black school becoming the Montgomery County Training School. The Uvalda school would cease operation soon after and fold its students into the Training School.

According to the alumni, the school did not receive enough state or federal funding to operate, so staff, students and community members supplemented their funds by selling coconut pies and candy apples.

Between 1959 and 1961, the Training School’s gymnasium was built through a combination of prison and community labor. The gym would then serve as the home of the school’s sports teams, the Tigers, until the school’s end of operation.

The Tigers achieved several athletic milestones during the school’s operation, with the girls’ basketball team winning the Georgia Interscholastic Association (GIA) Class B state championship in 1965 and placing second in 1969, and the school’s football team won the state championship in 1964.

The school also had a notable track and field team which performed well in GIA events. 

Montgomery County schools began desegregating during the 1967-1968 school year, four years after the passing of the Civil Rights act. The Montgomery County Training School remained in operation until 1970, when the county fully desegregated and students were moved to the Montgomery County High School.

Following integration, Livingston claims students who previously played under the Tiger banner refused to play under the Montgomery County High School’s team banner, the Rebels. 

“The Black students wouldn’t play, wouldn’t take the court, because they didn’t want to play under the rebel side,” said Livingston.

Discussion among school staff and a suggestion from June Fountain resulted in the school abandoning the Rebel branding and rechristening the school teams as the Eagles.

The group agreed one meeting would not be enough to fully discuss the school’s history, agreeing to meet again so they could collect information, as well as invite other alumni to attend and give their recollections. Livingston suggested the process could be divided into at least three meetings “touching on the beginning, you’re going to touch on the middle and then we’ll touch on the end.”

“We have to include other people because their ideas and suggestions may just be more overpowering than ours,” said Diane Lane. “I need to know more about it. You all need to know more.”

The group agreed to collect more information, with Dr. Hightower planning to search through court and Board of Education records, and reconvene on November 5.