13 minute read
A Quiet Force for Change
By Sandra Guzmán // Portraits by Rebecca Sasnett
History has an elegant way of gracing even the most modest heroes among us. In the fall of 1952, a happy and confident 14-year-old Edward Carroll Jr. walked into Friends Seminary quietly, becoming the first Black student to attend Friends in more than a half of a century. ➤
The Baltimore-born son of four generations of Methodist ministers broke a 166-year old tradition of racial segregation two years before the U.S. SupremeCourt’s landmark ruling of Brown v. Board of Education that declared racial segregation of children in public schools was unconstitutional.
Carroll, who is now 83 years old,reflects on this watershed moment inhis life with judicious humility.
“I think my story at Friends is morea Friends story than it is mine,” hesays thoughtfully. “I certainly wasnot a star student or a star athlete,though I was a star at being social,”he chuckles.
Carroll retired after a five-decade career in broadcast journalism, public relations and service with theAir Force National Guard. He lives with his wife on a ranch in Rio Rico,Arizona, located on the U.S.-Mexico border. He takes long walks with his dog, enjoying the cool morning desert air as he reflects on the richness of his long and textured life.
“I see myself as a relic,” he laughs.
He was born during the Great Depression when Franklin D. Roosevelt was president and has lived to see a dozen more take the oath of office. A witty raconteur, Carroll loves to share family tales and adventures. He has lifelong love and respect for history, which was cultivated at home and nurtured at Friends.
Because of his deep reverence for history, the father of two rejects any attempt to lionize him for the significant role he played at the School even if it happened during a time when the nation’s public schools were racially segregated and the country was deep in the throes of profound upheaval over racial inequality, including the racial caste system known as Jim Crow. His integration came at a time when Black teenage boys were lynched for looking at white girls, and Black protesters fighting for human dignity and rights were met with fire hoses and state-sanctioned violence. It was a period of deep racial unrest not unlike the Black Lives Matter protests of the last decade and the Summer of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor.
In fact, just as Carroll began his sophomore year at Friends, Black school children in the South were being bombed, spat on, cursed, and pelted by white racist mobs violently opposed to racial integration in “their” schools. In comparison, Carroll’s integration was wholesome.
While he hardly considers himself the “Jackie Robinson of Friends,” Carroll appreciates the deeper story of what he represents in the narrative of an institution wanting to fulfill its moral promise.
“This was not so much a principal or the School’s leadership wanting change, this was faculty, students and parents moving Friends out of the elite white school to a more Quaker model,” he says. “The push to have Black students resulted in me coming, and in the process, destroying the myth.”
According to Carroll, the principal at the time, Alexander Prinz, was known as a stone cold racist who refused to allow Black students into the School. But a small and passionate anti-racist group of parents and faculty raised money to provide tuition for four years to a Black student. The story he was told is that the group met with the Principal and told him, “You will do this.”
“I heard that one of Principal Prinz’ objections to accepting Black students was, ‘What will we do about our dances,’” cackles Carroll. “My being at Friends gave them power to set the direction of the School to where it is now.”
Change did not happen quickly, and racial integration hobbled for decades. Carroll was the only Black student during his entire four years.
An Outing to a Negro Baseball Game Alters His Future
Until this day Carroll doesn’t know how he was chosen, but the one thing he knows for sure is that attending Friends was engineered by his father, Edward G. Carroll Sr., a third generation Methodist minister with deep roots in Maryland.
“My father took me to an HBCUNegro Baseball League exhibition game at Yankee Stadium, and he ran into one of his friends, a Black executive, who told him Friends had an opportunity for a young Black student,” he says. “My father took down the information and ran with it.”
Carroll’s parents did not sit down with the teen at the kitchen table and frame this as epic, historic or even groundbreaking.
“It was presented as a great opportunity.” He adds, “And indeed it was.”
A Three-Generation Minister’s Son
It is fair to say that the story of racial integration at Friends starts with Edward Jr.’s parents, Phenola and Edward Sr. The family lived in Morgan Park, Maryland, a neighborhood adjacent to the campus of the historically Black college in Baltimore, Morgan State University. He was raised in a neighborhood populated with Black intellectuals and professionals, the same neighborhood that produced United States Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, jazz legend Chick Webb and portraitist Joshua Johnson, among others.
Carroll Sr. was deeply involved with the Student Christian Movement and preached gospel and liberation theology.
“My father was an integrationist all his life,” he noted. “As a minister you expect nothing less—he welcomed and ministered anybody and everybody.”
Carroll Sr. graduated Morgan State University and Yale Divinity School when he was 23 years old, and after graduating from Union Seminary had a distinguished career as a minister eventually serving as Methodist Bishop of New England from 1972 to 1980. The elder Carroll also devoted much of his scholarly life to writing about racial integration, so it’s no surprise that his son would end up quietly making history.
“I have a piece that my father wrote decrying segregation in the Methodist church,” he shares. “In many ways, it was his mission in life.”
His mother, a trained teacher who stayed at home to care for Edward and his younger sister Nansy, also graduated from Morgan State University two years after her husband. She exposed him to books and museums, and the family lived a comfortable middle class life taking annual vacations to a humble cottage located on a sprawling 165-acre waterfront coop property in Ontario, Canada.
When Eddie was eight years old, his father was recruited for a job at YMCA New York headquarters, and the family moved north, purchasing a brownstone in Harlem, one of the only places where Black families could purchase homes at the time.
Carroll was enrolled in Downtown Community School, a racially integrated experimental school. Traveling daily from Harlem to the East Village exposed young Edward to the multi-dimensional and vibrant life of the City. He lived an integrated life and played with Black and white children. His parents exposed him to the world and made sure he knew he had his rightful place in it.
A Great-Grandson of The Born Free Generation
Carroll loves to share the powerful story of his paternal great grandfather and great uncle born to a free African woman on the eastern shore of Maryland, a region known as Little Mississippi. While she was free, her husband, and the boy’s father, was enslaved.
“My great grandfather and his brother were bonded out by their mother when they were children to buy the freedom of their father,” Carroll explains.
The boys became house child servants to the family they were bonded to, and one the daughters of the house took to teaching them to read, which was illegal at the time. When they turned 21 years old, they moved to Baltimore to start a new, free life.
His great grandfather went onto graduate from Howard University, and his great uncle from Morgan State, followed by the seminary. Both men had full careers as ministers in Baltimore’s Methodist church. They too made quiet history a century earlier.
Ed Carroll in his Advanced Dramatics class.
“My great uncle was in the first class of ministry that were allowed to be full-fledged ministers,” Carroll says.“Before that, Black ministers were allowed to be “exhorters” or preachers, but they had to work under white ministers.”
The women in Carroll’s family, trained teachers, also attended college at a time when opportunities for women—and Black women in particular—were slim to non-existent.His paternal grandmother graduated from Howard University in 1902.
The Debonair Teen Who Loved to Sing
Inspired by the interview, Carroll dusted off 70-year-old yearbooks, an endeavor he describes as cathartic.
“The memories extruded have taken me back to the best four years of my life,” he says joyfully, eager to share cherished memories.
During his freshman year, Carroll remembers showing an interest in chorus to his music teacher who instantly took an interest in him.
“My first year I sang ‘Sweet Little Jesus Boy’ at the Christmas concert, and my reputation was set,” he recalls.“Being neither a striver nor a prima donna probably endowed me with some attractiveness, accessibility, and star power.”
There were two incidents in the four years that stick out in Carroll’s mind as racially charged moments that dissipated soon after they happened.
He says a teen named Peter Schrag, “a good-looking blond dude,” punched him out of the blue one afternoon during recess. Several classmates jumped in to separate them and someone suggested they shake hands. Carroll says he extended his hand but Schrag tried to pull him to the ground.
“At which point Harlem takes over and my right fist shoots into his face and cuts his lip,” he recalls.
Schrag was taken to the hospital, and the next day Principal Prinz saw Carroll in the hallway and told him,“We don’t fight in our school,” to which Carroll brazenly responded, “Ok and I don’t either.”
“I just let it go,” he says. “I never found out what caused Schrag to do that, but after that we were congenial.”
During his third year at Friends, Carroll asked a classmate to accompany him to a school dance, and the next day she told him that her father would not give her permission because he was Black.
“But she whispered, ‘Don’t worry, I will meet you there,’” he laughs.
During Reunion 2017, Ed, second from left, posed for a photo with former classmates and current students. From left: Jared Bowers-Hodges ’17, Ed, Stephen Chinlund ’51, Gretchen Dumler ’56,Jayson Pitagorsky ’17, Lucy Bryant ’17 and Matteo Boria ’17.
On American Racism and Other Demons
“My color exposed me to the under belly of this country,” says the proud veteran.“My birth certificate says colored. The kernel of slavery in the founding of our nation corrupts our striving for a better nation.”
For Carroll the stain of slavery should serve as a driving force for the realization of the promise embedded in the founding documents.
“In my American history course I was able to read the Federalist Papers and the Constitution,” he recalls. “I remember being taken by the preamble, ‘We, the people in order to form a more perfect union…’ Till this day, I am inspired by this idea.”
Black people, he says, live or die by the goodness of our governments, which is why he believes it’s in the best interest to vote and to stay active in shaping our government.
Following his graduation from Friends, he enrolled in Ohio Wesleyan University’s ROTC program to fulfill a lifelong dream to be an Air Force fighter pilot. Two years later he learned he was colorblind, ending his future piloting dreams. He graduated with an officer rank and would go on to serve on and off in the Air Force NationalGuard for the next 20 years, serving as public affairs officer for the D.C. AirNational Guard for nearly a decade.
Carroll credits Friends for opening a new lens through which to view religion. Although a minister’s son, grandson and great grandson, he was free to choose what to believe in, and during a world religion class in his junior year he found it.
“I learned about the concept of yin and yang, and in my teenage brain that rang as truth,” he says. “There are these competing forces in life which contain a little of the other. The Tai Chi symbol for me is like the cross for Christians. It’s the closest thing I believe in.”
Let Me Be a Force for Change
A few weeks before his graduation from Friends, Carroll was surprised to learn that his father was chosen to deliver the commencement address. His father quoted Shakespeare and Longfellow and ended with Miriam Teichner’s prayer, “God Let me be a Force.”
“…Please go let me do my share, God—let me be aware.”
While the confident teenager may not have been wholly aware in 1952 of the enormity of what he represented to a school striving to be more perfect, it does not mean that history forgets the humble heroes who quietly do the good work.
“Friends,” says Carroll, “was the last best community I belonged to, my four years there mean the world to me.”
While Ed Carroll was not the first Black student to attend Friends Seminary (by all accounts, he was the third), his admission to the School was a significant first step toward real integration.
Students and parents began petitioning the Board to admit students of all colors and creeds in the mid-1940s. In May of 1944, nine students from Friends presented one such petition (as part of their work with the newly-formed Interracial Youth Committee), stating, in part:
“Equality of Opportunity for racial and minority groups is as essential to the creed of the United States as the Bill of Rights is to the Constitution. It is with the attainment of this goal that we, at Friends Seminary, are concerned. While full democracy may not be achieved for many years to come, this does not mean that we should relax our efforts when we feel that there is room for improvement in our immediate surroundings. It is for this reason that we, the undersigned, wish to express our opinion...favoring the admittance of members of all races, as well as religious bodies, to the great opportunity of education here at Friends Seminary.”
Such petitions and conversations continued at Friends until when, in 1950, a group of students and parents came together to create a scholarship for the admission of a Black student to the School. Ed Carroll '56 was the recipient of that award.
Who, then, were the first and second Black students to attend Friends Seminary? Records show that both were admitted around the turn of the 20th century. In 1892 the Board admitted Clara Louise Lawson, though not by unanimous approval. How long Clara attended is not clear. Then, in 1905, Alston Burleigh was admitted to Kindergarten. The Friends Seminary-Burleigh connection continues to this day.
Alston’s father, Harry T. Burleigh, was the first Black soloist at St. George’s Episcopal Church (across 16th St. from Friends Seminary), and would remain so for over 50 years. In the fall of 2020, as a service learning project associated with their goLEAD class, Friends fifth graders engaged in a postcard-writing campaign to have the portion of 16th Street between Third Avenue and Rutherford Place renamed “Harry T. Burleigh Place.” This campaign was undertaken in partnership with the Stuyvesant Park Neighborhood Association. On December 17, 2020, the City Council approved the petition.
Harry T. Burleigh
“It was an honor for Friends Seminary to participate in this effort to honor a man who must have looked over our campus many years as he made his way to St. George’s,” Principal Bo Lauder said.
ABOUT THE WRITER
Sandra Guzmán is an award-winning feminist writer and documentary filmmaker. She was a producer of The Pieces I am, a critically acclaimed film about the art and life of her literary mentor Toni Morrison. She is the author of the non-fiction book, The New Latina’s Bible. Her work explores identity, land, memory, race, sexuality, spirituality, culture, and gender. She is married to Willie Perdomo ’85.
