Paving the Way

At the height of segregation in our region in the 1950s, three Black high schools served all of Broward County: Blanche Ely in Pompano, Crispus Attucks in Hollywood and Dillard High School in our city.

Two standout pioneer principals at these schools established strict standards, fought the powers that be for better conditions and united the Black community for support. Despite the indignities of segregation, their students fought adversity, becoming lawyers, doctors, educators, entertainers and successful community and business leaders.

The most surprising part of this was that those two standout educators became a couple: We’re talking about Dr. Joseph Ely, first principal at Dillard High and later principal at Crispus Attucks from 1937 to 1963, and his wife, Blanche General Ely, principal at what was then called The Colored School of Pompano. The school was later renamed for her. Among their many accomplishments, the Elys sponsored the first federally funded lunch program in Broward County.

The conditions the schoolchildren faced during segregation, as reported in My Soul Is a Witness by Deborah Work, were cruel: Black children were not allowed to board school buses. They were forced to walk to school. Black neighborhoods did not have sidewalks, which made walking less safe and more burdensome. In the early years of segregation, “colored schools” at all levels did not have students attend the full nine months of a typical year, while white schools did. At harvest time, Black students had to work picking beans and tomatoes for up to three months. Blacks were not allowed to use public libraries.

Dillard High’s first principal, Dr. Ely, was a highly educated man who graduated from Morehouse College and Columbia University. Born in Jacksonville, he is said to have spoken seven languages. Before Dillard, he was the principal of “Colored School Number 11,” a grammar school in Dania (now Dania Beach). He moved over when the first school building built for Black students in Fort Lauderdale was completed, with 10 classrooms in a two-story facility.

At that time, a sign on the school read simply “Colored School.” Ely quickly had the school renamed after James H. Dillard, a philanthropist and promoter of education for Black children.

Meanwhile, up the road in Broward, Blanche General, a graduate of Florida A&M University and Columbia University, after establishing her education credentials teaching in elementary schools in Hialeah and Deerfield, was made principal at the two-room Pompano Negro Grammar School. It would later become Blanche Ely High School.

When Joseph Ely and Blanche General assumed their posts in Fort Lauderdale and Pompano, the learning institutions were not yet high schools. Dillard only went up to sixth grade. Until they became full high schools decades later, students had to go as far as West Palm Beach to get a 12th-grade high school degree.

The earliest efforts to educate Black children often came in churches, lodges or homes, or through efforts like those of Ivy Stranahan, who donated land and materials to build a two-room school in 1924.

“The classrooms were crowded, the history books were hand-me-downs and the gymnasium was just an outdoor patch of hardened sand,” the Sun Sentinel reported in its coverage of the Crispus Attucks High School reunion in 1992. (If you are wondering, Crispus Attucks was an icon of the anti-slavery movement.)

“Still, Alva Drummonds wouldn’t have traded her high school for the world,” said the Sun Sentinel. “She remembers the school as one where teachers cared, parents got involved and students learned.”

“We had a real togetherness and closeness,” said Drummonds, who graduated in 1952. “Everybody on the campus, including teachers, were like family. That’s really how we got through it.”

The stories and contributions of the two renowned pioneer educators are told in the Old Dillard Museum in Fort Lauderdale and The Blanche Ely House Museum in Pompano Beach. The latter is the site of the couple’s home.

Joseph Ely is remembered as a charismatic educator with a no-nonsense approach. According to My Soul Is a Witness, he frequently reminded students, “When you educate a person, you make him unfit for slavery.”

It wasn’t until 1970 that federal law desegregated Broward Schools.