Memories of Class, Race, and Gender Divisions: Immediate Pre- and Post-Desegregation Years (1950–1969)

Abstract

In the 1950s and 1960s, Miller High¹ students attended a school that had been twice renamed and relocated, and rebuilt several times.² Its history extended into the early decades of the twentieth century and was punctuated by landmark investments, one of which in the 1930s transformed Miller Town’s older 1914 high school building into the “most modern and best equipped educational plant,”³ to be modernized yet again in 1960 as the population grew. Throughout its transmutations, it remained a “Main Street” high school, an integral part, both structurally and culturally, of Miller Town, where many of its white middle-class teachers and administrators lived and students could easily cross paths with school authorities on streets, in grocery stores, and in churches. One of the oldest high schools in Baltimore County, Miller High of the 1950s and 1960s was also the only one within a twenty-mile radius, a lone educational establishment in the middle of farm country. One alumnus recalled: “There was a farm behind the high school, and every now and then the cows would get out in the fields… you had to watch out where you were running.”⁴