Greenville Magazine - August 2008 - (Page 54) a look back Morethan a Name The Legacy of Sterling High School BY LYDIA DISHMAN Sterling High School principal J.S. Beck and teacher Wilfred Walker board a bus for Atlanta. from Greenville: Woven from the Past by Nancy Vance Ashmore. J 54 Greenville MaGazine | auGust 2008 ust like many graduates of the now defunct Sterling High School, Ruth Ann Butler, alumna and director of the Greenville Cultural Exchange Center feels, “Sterling High School lives on, in those who walked its halls and benefited from the lessons taught within its walls. A large part of the older black population of Greenville County continues to identify with the site.” Which is probably why there were so many disgruntled Sterlingites when the school board announced that it would name their newest school, constructed on the site of the old Beck Middle, Sterling. Richard Walton summed it up in a piece he wrote for the Greenville News in January of this year. “They said they tried to tell the school board, but, as usual, they didn't listen.” For those devoted to its memory and legacy, Sterling is more than a name; it is a symbol of community. By the time you are reading this, the new Sterling School will have ushered in its first class. But the original was established over a century ago by the Reverend D. M. Minus, pastor of the John Wesley Methodist Episcopal Church and son of slaves. A.V. Huff in his History of Greenville noted, “though blacks faced increasing discrimination in the age of segregation [in the 1890s] they responded by establishing the Greenville Academy.” This academy would serve the growing community living in the “suburbs” – a piece of land developed on what had been CampWetherill along Dunbar Street. After the charter was received from the Secretary of State in October of 1896, the trustees made arrangements with the officers of the John Wesley Church to open the school in the lecture room of the church. Minus took on the job of president of the new school for eighty history
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