New Jersey's Lawrenceville School honors legacy of its first Black students: "We changed that school forever"
CBSN
An atrium at the Lawrenceville School in New Jersey renamed after the school's first two Black students is seeing its first school year, which started this week. Students will walk through the Battle-Fitzgerald entrance and atrium, which honors Lyals Battle and Darrell Fitzgerald and celebrates the boarding school's progress in racial diversity.
In the atrium, they'll have the chance to view memorabilia from the alumni behind glass cases and read a plaque on the wall that recounts the history of desegregation on campus after the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954.
But while boarding schools like Lawrenceville across the United States are now some of the country's most diverse educational institutions, many of these schools were reluctant to open their doors to students of color decades ago.
Treasures long forgotten by history have been uncovered beneath the surface in underground digs or hidden away in attics or storage spaces. In the case of a rare document nearly 237 years old, it was in a nondescript squat metal filing cabinet that had been sitting discarded and gathering dust in an eastern North Carolina home for who knows how long.