New Jersey Boarding School Honors Legacy Of First Black Students: ‘This Is A Big Moment In The History Of The School’

Lyals Battle and Darrell Fitzgerald integrated The Lawrenceville School in 1964.

The Lawrenceville School, a boarding school in New Jersey, has named a new atrium in honor of its first Black students, Lyals Battle and Darrell Fitzgerald.

The duo, who integrated the school in 1964, are now commemorated with the Battle-Fitzgerald Atrium. The space will showcase a plaque and memorabilia from alumni, highlighting the school’s commitment to honoring its history and progress in diversity. According to CBS News, the plaque features a recounting of the school’s work to engender diversity following the landmark 1954 Supreme Court ruling desegregating schools in Brown v Board of Education.

Boarding schools in general were once racially stratified, including Lawrenceville, which did not admit Black people until 10 years post-Brown. Boarding schools often did not want to integrate, repeatedly justifying their desire not to integrate by citing that as independent institutions they were not subjected to federal education requirements or mandates.

“As I’ve thought a lot about it—the resistance on the part of the school—I think it’s important that we take some collective responsibility,” Steve Murray, Lawrenceville’s head of school, told CBS News. “But I think it in part reflects societal attitudes. I think that there was the country’s acceptance of Brown v. Board of Education and actually acting on it.”

The school’s atrium was previously named after Edwin Lavino, the president of Lawrenceville’s school board from 1947 to 1963, who was an opponent of the desegregation of the school. Although the school did eventually desegregate, Khalil Johnson, assistant professor of African American studies at Wesleyan University, said that the institutions that integrated, including Lawrenceville, did not have any structures in place to support Black students.

“For the students, their very presence on these campuses changed what these campuses were like,” Johnson told CBS News. “The schools didn’t have in place any of the kinds of cohort building or ways of assimilating and accommodating students who were not from the traditional background that they were used to serving. They thought that we could just have these students come, and they would adapt and everything would be fine.”

According to Fitzgerald, although he and Battle were the only two Black students on campus, their teachers expected the same of them as they expected of the other students.

“They understood we were alone by ourselves, but this was still the school, and you’re going to be held to the same standards as every student in that school,” Fitzgerald said. “Lawrenceville changed us and we changed that school forever. I had prayed to God, let me let me live long enough to see the dedication, because this is a big moment in the history of the school to have our names on that entry to the Tsai Field House and that atrium.”