by Janet Walker
Chapter Forty-Seven
BECK VS. HAINES
Few things in the world of metro Atlanta high-school sports generated as much excitement as did the rivalry that existed between L. Carlton Haines High School and the combined athletic force of Langston and Beck academies. At its base, it was a competition between classes—black affluence versus black poverty, privilege versus disadvantage, descendants of mixed-race wealth versus heirs of field-hand struggle. But it was more than that. The Beck-Langston and Haines competition was a battle between a marvelously designed athlete and a staggering dethroned inner-city champ who was hell-bent on recapturing lost glory.
L. Carlton Haines was conceived during a ménage à trois between white segregationists, black integrationists, and the federal government. Following the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education decision, which declared it unconstitutional for blacks and whites to receive public education in separate facilities, Atlanta’s city leaders, many of whom were white segregationists, panicked. They needed immediately a strategy that would distract black integrationists from the pursuit of infiltrating all-white schools. So the leaders petitioned the state for funds to build a massive high school for blacks in downtown Atlanta, one newer than the then 30-year-old Booker T. Washington High School, located west of the city. The state approved, and L. Carlton Haines High, named after a noted black educator, was born. The facility, completed in 1957, worked just as the segregationists hoped it would. Not only did it give Atlanta’s black youths an appealing place to matriculate, it assured that the bulk of them would remain separate from white students—important more at the high-school level than in lower grades, because in high school black testicles swelled, and Atlanta’s city leaders wanted to protect their white daughters from the burgeoning desires of young black males.
During the same year, Ariel Place Homes, a federal housing project, was completed in downtown Atlanta on property that surrounded L. Carlton Haines. Ostensibly designed to provide affordable living arrangements for blacks, Ariel Place, like many of the New Deal and post-war housing projects, was constructed to ensure the continuation of housing segregation. With a massive population of the city’s blacks inhabiting the new project, and with the children of these families attending the new high school, Haines immediately attained the cream of Atlanta’s black student athletes and became a sports powerhouse. For twenty years after their birth, the Haines Jaguars were, with few exceptions, city and state champions in the three major sports—football, basketball, and track and field. Many Haines athletes went on to college careers, and three of them—two football players and a male track star—achieved national fame.
By 1978, however, the strength of the Haines athletic program had weakened considerably due to the hemorrhaging away of its best athletes. This hemorrhaging occurred for four reasons. First, busing took top-achieving students from black schools to white. Second, as other housing opportunities became available to them, many black families moved out of the city and into the suburbs. Third, smaller black inner-city high schools had sprung up after the construction of Haines, and these offered better student-teacher ratios, which conscientious parents desired. The fourth reason for the weakening of Haines was its association with Ariel Place Homes. While the housing complex had provided, in the early years, an instant pool of athletes for Haines, it also ensured that the school was identified as a “project school,” a ghetto institution, which did not sit well with the teachers and preachers whose children attended Haines. Hence, those who could afford it sent their children to Catholic and other private schools not associated with a notorious neighborhood. By 1978, the loss of numbers was clearly evident, and that, coupled with the effects on its students of malnutrition, drug use, disruptive home lives and economic blight, took L. Carlton Haines out of the race for athletic greatness. It remained in this unfit state until 1984, when a running back named Jermaine DeSalle led his team to their first football championship, and their first championship of any kind, in seven years. Invigorated by DeSalle, the school’s administrators, coaches, and students—and the surrounding Ariel Place community—became excited again about the Jaguars. Haines did not disappoint. In 1985, DeSalle took the football team to the state championship, where they finished first, and in basketball, DeSalle and an outstanding rookie named Dominique Walker battled the reigning city champs, Armstead Jackson, and won.
With three new championships under its belt, Haines entered the 1986-87 season heady with confidence and basking in the praise it received in the pages of the Journal and Constitution and from the mouths of newscasters. That year, its football and boys’ basketball teams won the state titles, the boys’ track team won the city finals, and the girls’ basketball team defeated Beck in the semi-finals and Jackson in the finals to secure the city trophy. Haines girls’ coach Audrey Evans declared that for the following year, she would repeat her victory and secure the state championship, as well.
She did not bet on the vengeance of Grace Gresham-Nelson.
The births of Beck and Langston were carefully planned events conceived through a marriage of rich white men, middle-class black women, and the United Methodist Church. The Lawrence Benjamin Beck School for Coloured Girls was established in 1906 in Atlanta by Adams Beck, son of an antebellum Georgia planter and a man who had become wealthy during the Civil War by secretly investing in a Pittsburgh steel mill that supplied materials to the Union Army. After the war, 22-year-old Adams returned South and, much to his family’s chagrin, married a young mulatta from Charleston, South Carolina, Charlotte Hall Montague, whose family was of some means. Adams and Charlotte resided in Charleston and had three children, Adams Jr., Allison, and the baby Lawrence Benjamin. When the infant was accidentally run over by his family’s coachman and killed, Charlotte became so grief-stricken that Adams moved the family to the Beck homestead in Fulton County in 1871, where they remained for the rest of their lives. Despite his family’s disapproval of his wartime activities and marriage, Adams inherited a small portion of his father’s wealth, which included stock in the Georgia-Pacific Railroad. The couple used this money to open a school, which they named after their deceased son.
Adams Beck’s philanthropy wasn’t an entirely selfless act. While Adams Jr. and Allison, like their mother, assimilated into white culture, the Becks’ youngest daughter Anna married an African American man from a prominent black Atlanta family. Anna insisted on identifying as black and sent her daughter Amelia to public school with other blacks. Concerned by this, Adams Beck Sr. financed the building of a private school for the cultured class of black girls so that his seven-year-old granddaughter could matriculate in an environment he thought worthy of her breeding. Adams worked with two white missionaries of the United Methodist Church, Amelia Clarisse Shepherd and Sarah Jane Norton, to establish the school. He also enlisted the aid of black clubwomen, most notably Mary Shepherd Post and Clara Adams Lightley, who became part of the teaching staff at the school. The clubwomen inculcated in Beck students the responsibility to uplift their race by embracing Victorian morals, behaving as proper European ladies, and perfecting the art of domesticity.
Beck soon became the premiere day and boarding school not only for upper- and middle-class blacks in Atlanta but for those across the country. Three of Adams and Charlotte’s granddaughters were graduates of the school. Two, including Amelia, returned to teach after the first World War. Amelia’s daughter and granddaughter were Beck graduates and teachers; the daughter became the school’s first black female assistant principal, in 1978.
Throughout its history, Beck maintained a neutral stance in race relations. When the Civil Rights Movement began in the fifties, the school officially remained apart from the fray, knowing that its sponsor, the United Methodist Church, would not approve of such political involvement. But some Beck students defied the administration and entered the struggle, anyway. Beck similarly disdained the Black Power Movement of the sixties but did in 1965 remove the word “Coloured” from its na
me. In 1980, after a long student campaign, its full name was officially dropped (since Lawrence Benjamin Beck had been the white grandson of a slave owner) and it became, simply, Beck Academy.
Because reverence for Victorian notions of womanhood formed the foundation of the Beck philosophy, athletics were virtually non-existent at the school for the first fifteen years of its life. Cheerleading as Beckettes for their brother school was the only public form of athleticism Beck girls were encouraged to enjoy. In 1921, the school added an intramural tennis program and, soon thereafter, swimming and volleyball, but the girls still did not compete against other schools. That changed after World War II, when basketball, as well as track and field, completed the pentagon of sports at Beck. The girls were dubbed the Lionettes, and the school competed against other girls’ teams from black public schools in the Southeast. The field of Beck competitors increased when, in 1970, the fingers of desegregation loosened enough to allow black and white schools to compete against each other. Then, Beck found itself facing also white private, independent and parochial schools, but still it never achieved outstanding results in the world of athletics and, in fact, was often derided for having teams of girls who were too soft, too girly, too pampered to be taken seriously.
The Robert S. Langston Boys Academy was established in 1911 as a belated response to Beck. At the urging of Post and Lightley, the black clubwomen who insisted that the Negro race would never flourish if its young men did not also embrace Protestant work ethics and morality, the United Methodist Church established the school with the help of a Northern banking and railroad magnate after whom the school was named. Langston was constructed on property adjacent to Beck, but the schools remained separated by a high fence. Both enforced Methodist teachings, Victorian etiquette, and strict curfews, but the boys enjoyed more freedom than their female counterparts. Their curfew was an hour later than the girls’; they were not required to sign, upon matriculation, a morals clause promising to remain chaste until graduation; and they enjoyed a full athletic program from the start. Tennis, football, track and field, swimming and basketball were instituted immediately; golf and fencing were added later. From its formation in 1911 until 1970, Langston competed exclusively against black public schools—first, because it was illegal to do so against whites, and secondly, because, like Beck, Langston had no local private counterparts. Although never considered a powerhouse, Langston enjoyed modest athletic success, securing state championships in 1951, ’58, ’65 and ’75. However, it lay dormant, almost forgotten in the sports arena, until 1987, when its sister school surprised the world by suddenly emerging as an athletic lioness clothed in prowess and grace.
When Tracy Sullivan became a Beck student in the fall of 1990, its Lady Lions basketball team had defeated the Haines Lady Jaguars three times in the city championships and was the two-time national champ. Beck’s male counterpart was state champions two years running in football and basketball.
The people of Haines were filled with mixed emotions when it came to Grace Gresham.
They wanted to like her, because they loved her husband. Jazz Nelson ruled in Ariel Place Homes as much as Air Jordan and Magic Johnson. But despite their devotion to him, the fact remained that Jazz Nelson’s wife wasn’t for Haines—she was a general in the opposing army, and she was the main reason Beck-Langston had become such a thorn in the side of L. Carlton Haines. So despite their love for her husband, despite the fact that she had won the hearts of their parents when she earned gold for the U.S. in Montreal, despite the fact that male and female students admired her physical beauty—the Haines young people were not fond of Grace Gresham. Desired her, yes, and respected her, for sure, but they didn’t particularly like her. And they were helped along in this respect because to them, Jazz Nelson’s wife appeared to be every bit of the arrogant, privileged bourgeois bitch they loved to hate.
And so naturally they directed this dislike at her twelve followers.
Because they were not in the same school district, Atlanta Public School’s Haines High and the independent Beck Academy, which coordinated its athletics schedule with the Fulton County School System’s, met only four times a year—during the basketball Christmas tournament and at the city football, basketball and track-and-field championships. Depending on the season, the Haines fans would wait until a Lion scored a touchdown that especially hurt the Jaguars, or until a Lady Lion stood at the free-throw line about to sink a crucial point, and then they would cup their hands around their mouths and sing, “O-ree-oh! Oh-ooooh-Oh!” It was a bastardization of the chant sung by the fearful animal-like men who guarded the witch’s castle in the 1939 Hollywood movie The Wizard of Oz, and a few years ago some ingenious Haines fan had decided that an altered version of the lyrics would make a good threat at games played against the Oreos. So now, whenever it came down to the final moments in a Beck-Langston and Haines match, and it looked as if the Lions were going to win (which was always the case with the Grace Girls), the Oreo chant became fierce and accompanied by rhythmic foot-stomping on the bleachers. The stomping was an imitation of the drumbeats to which the witch’s guards marched, a batch of five quick stomps and one extra-hard stomp (boomp bah-boomp bah-boomp…BOOMP!), followed by six more quick stomps and another powerful one (boomah boom-boomp boom-boomp…BOOMP!)—a rhythm the audience might have found catching had it not carried an ominous meaning. The meaning was this: If Beck-Langston won both the boys’ and girls’ games, someone could pay when the event was over. Payment might come in the form of a fistfight between two fans, or the chucking of rocks at the departing academy buses. The Grace Girls had never been physically assaulted by the Jaguars, but they had increasingly become the objects of boos and verbal insults as they strode into and out of the Haines gym.
This meant that despite the fact that she had grown up with them and had, until then, been a part of them, the Haines fans were not fond of Tracy Sullivan—at least, not on the night of the season’s first Jags-Lions basketball battle. Because as far as they were concerned, Tracy had committed an unforgivable sin, and then had compounded it: She had left Haines to attend Beck and was now playing and winning for the Oreos. So on the third Saturday of December, ten days before Christmas, when the five starting Grace Girls broke from the huddle and headed back onto the playing floor, the Oreo chant started immediately. Immediately, and they were still only in the first half. And right away—her face warm and damp from embarrassment, her throat constricted by emotion—Tracy walked to the free-throw line and wanted to cry.
She knew they were chanting about her.