1 Playing Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

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Playing Dr.Jekyll and Mr.Hyde

I’ve done so much with so little for so long, I think I can do anything with nothing at all. —Ulysses Byas

On July 1, 1957, the possibilities that lay ahead for Ulysses Byas were as new and fresh as the recently completely Buford Dam he passed on his drive fifty-three miles north of Atlanta. His destination was Gainesville, where he and his family would join the thirty thousand residents in a city that dubbed itself the “Queen City of the Mountains.” The setting was idyllic. Nestled in the shadows of the 750,000-acre mountainous terrain of the Chattachoochee National Forest, Gainesville offered to the north and west the crispness of the cooler mountain air and, slightly south, the arid heat of Lake Lanier, a newly created lake already touted as the new vacation spot for locals and vacationers. Among the nine surrounding counties, Gainesville was the prosperous center for retail sales. It imagined its future as being guided by “intelligent, determined people, with solid plans for constructive, prosperous and continued growth.”1

Byas entered Gainesville having accepted the position as the new professor at the newly renovated, self-contained Fair Street High School for black children. He believed the city and the new position held promise. The salary was better than the salary he had received the previous four years as principal of the Hutchenson Elementary and High School for black children in rural Douglas County, just west of Atlanta. Moreover, his new school was considered by many blacks to be among the best high schools for blacks in the state of Georgia. In the 1930s, when many blacks were without high school education across the state, Gainesville supported a high school for blacks through grade eleven, which was then the final grade of a high school education in Georgia. By 1958, the total value of the school property was $878,467.87, and the school had been featured in the Georgia journal for black teachers, the Herald, as an exemplar of educational activity. Compared with some black schools in adjacent counties and other geographic regions in Georgia, particularly