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Before the March, There Was a Graduation: Benjamin Mays, Mabel Hull, and Lincoln’s Class of 1950

Writer: Terrill Gosa
Terrill Gosa
5 days ago
12 min read

Updated: 14 hours ago


Dr. Mays (right of Robert F. Kennedy) at the White House with Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.


Graduation has its own kind of electricity. The last days of school suddenly become occasions for remembering everything: the friends, the teachers, the games, the songs, the jokes that will make very little sense to anyone who was not there.


For Lincoln High School’s Class of 1950, that familiar excitement came with an extraordinary guest.


On Friday, May 26, the graduates would hear from Dr. Benjamin E. Mays, president of Morehouse College—a man whose influence would reach into the heart of the American civil rights movement.


Mabel M. Hull, Wheeling’s remarkable Black woman columnist, introduced him to the city in the Sunday newspaper five days earlier.


And among the young people preparing for that evening was Beverly Jean Pervall.


My grandmother.



The Beverly whose name, alongside my grandfather Eugene’s, now gives our Foundation its identity.


There are discoveries that deepen a research project. Then there are discoveries that make you stop, look again at a familiar photograph, and realize that someone you loved stood much closer to a great unfolding story than you ever knew.


This is one of those discoveries.


Mabel’s Headline Opens a Door

“Dr. Mays Graduation Speaker,” the headline announced.


Beneath it came the particulars: the Morehouse College president would address Lincoln’s graduating class at 8 p.m. on May 26, 1950, in the Wheeling High School auditorium.


A date, a place, a speaker. The kind of announcement a reader might have glanced at over Sunday breakfast before turning the page.


Seventy-six years later, it opens an entire world.


Hull gave Mays a substantial introduction. She presented an author, lecturer, scholar, and college president whose accomplishments deserved the attention of her readers. His photograph appeared with the column, and his credentials stretched across education, religion, international gatherings, and public service.


For the families of Lincoln’s seniors, this was the man who would help mark their children’s passage into adulthood.


For us, it is a meeting of stories we have been following for years: Black education in Wheeling, the community life Mabel Hull preserved, the institutions that nurtured civil rights leadership, and the family whose memory inspired the Eugene and Beverly Stradwick Heritage Foundation.


All of them converge on one graduation.


A Man Who Had Already Crossed a Great Distance

Mays arrived in this story carrying a life that could itself have served as a lesson in perseverance.


Born in rural South Carolina to parents who had experienced slavery, he pursued an education in a country that placed obstacles before him at nearly every turn. He graduated from Bates College in Maine in 1920, earned his master’s degree at the University of Chicago in 1925, and completed his doctorate there in 1935.



Hull traced much of that journey for Wheeling’s readers. She recalled his earlier work as a teacher and minister, his service with the Urban League and YMCA, and his leadership of Howard University’s School of Religion before he became president of Morehouse in 1940.


By the time Lincoln invited him, he had spent nearly a decade leading one of the nation’s great Black colleges.


Under the heading “World Connections,” Hull carried her readers beyond the United States. India, Sweden, England, and the Netherlands appeared in her account of conferences and responsibilities.


She reported that Mays had spoken at more than one hundred American colleges. Her profile also noted six honorary degrees and recognition for his work in racial understanding and education.


Imagine what that résumé placed before a graduating class in segregated Wheeling: a Black scholar whose intellectual life crossed oceans, whose leadership commanded respect, and whose education had opened doors far beyond the circumstances of his birth.


Hull understood that her readers deserved to see the full measure of him.


The commencement invitation was already an honor in 1950. Time would make its significance even greater.


The Man Behind a Voice That Would Change America



Two years before Beverly and her classmates graduated, another young person had completed his studies under Mays’s leadership.


His name was Martin Luther King Jr.


King graduated from Morehouse in 1948. During his college years, Mays’s chapel addresses, example, and conversations helped shape his understanding of faith and public responsibility. King would regard him as a spiritual mentor.


That relationship was already underway when Mays became Lincoln’s commencement speaker.


The Montgomery bus boycott was still ahead. So were the March on Washington, the soaring familiarity of “I Have a Dream,” and the years when King’s voice would travel into homes around the world.


But the patient work behind that voice had begun.


Mays belonged to the generation of educators and religious leaders who cultivated the ideas, courage, and moral confidence that the movement would draw upon. His own encounter with Mahatma Gandhi in India in 1936 helped inform his understanding of nonviolence. His educational leadership challenged the limits segregation tried to place around Black possibility.


In 1963, he would deliver the benediction at the March on Washington. In 1968, he would eulogize King on the Morehouse campus.


Those later moments give the Wheeling announcement a remarkable resonance. Here, years before those monumental gatherings, was Mays turning his attention to a small graduating class in the Upper Ohio Valley.


Lincoln’s young people were part of the world he was working to enlarge.



Seventeen Young People, with a World Ahead of Them

Open the 1949–50 edition of The Lincolnite, and the celebrated speaker gives way to the people at the center of the occasion.


Seventeen senior portraits look back at us:


  • Beverly Jean Pervall

  • Charles Lee Dillon

  • Dorothy Louise Goodwin

  • Jessie Louise Jackson

  • Anna Estell Jackson

  • Emanual Rogers

  • Shirley Mae Atkins

  • Anna Yvonne Ruth

  • Willie Mae Park

  • Ovell Cornelia Bush

  • Mary Belle Sinclair

  • Kenneth Edward Parker

  • Marion Drucilla Newman

  • Thomas Elsworth Gordon

  • Delores Edwina Shelton

  • Dora Mae Bishop

  • Eugene Hairston


Their photographs have the unmistakable dignity of a senior yearbook: carefully chosen clothes, thoughtful poses, smiles that range from exuberant to reserved. Each face interrupts the distance between “the past” and a living person.


The class officers were Willie Mae Park, president; Jessie Louise Jackson, vice-president; Ovell Cornelia Bush, secretary; and Delores Edwina Shelton, treasurer.

Their class history remembered an original group of thirty. By senior year, seventeen remained from that group; a newcomer from Buckhannon briefly brought the number to eighteen before another departure left seventeen again. Behind that changing number lies a reminder of how much a graduation represents: years of effort, decisions, changing circumstances, and the long work of getting to the finish.


The students had filled those years with far more than lessons and examinations.


Charles Dillon and Emanuel Rogers played football. Eugene Hairston contributed to the band and athletics. Kenneth Parker joined the school’s athletic achievements. Marion Newman, Jessie Jackson, and Ovell Bush lent their voices to musical life. Mary Belle Sinclair and Dora Mae Bishop participated in the Junior Town Hall discussion group and appeared on the radio.


There were majorettes, a prom, student government, Hi-Y, Y-Teens, performances, and academic prizes.


This was the world Beverly inhabited: a school full of sound, movement, responsibility, competition, and friendship.


It is a gift to recover that fullness.


Beverly with a Megaphone

One yearbook line brings my grandmother into especially vivid focus.

In the class will, the seniors wrote:


“Beverly Pervall’s prowess as a cheer leader is handed, along with her megaphone, to Victoria White.”

Beverly with a megaphone.


For a grandson, that is a wonderful discovery.


We know our grandparents through the years in which our lives overlapped with theirs. We know their voices at the dinner table, their advice, their habits, their ways of making a home.


An old yearbook reaches back beyond all of that and introduces us to someone their friends knew first.



Here is Beverly as a classmate. A cheerleader. A young woman with school spirit and a presence worth commemorating.


The class history also recalls her serving as secretary during the group’s first year. In the prophecy, her classmates pictured her pursuing business education and putting her knowledge to work:

“Beverly Pervall, who went to business college,In a high class office, displays her knowledge.”

There is affection in these glimpses. They suggest how her classmates saw her: capable, engaged, and ready to make her way.


It is easy to look at the portrait and see the grandmother we would eventually know. The yearbook asks us to linger with the young woman she was then—with her own friends, her own accomplishments, and her own future still taking shape.


And on her graduation evening, Benjamin Mays was the distinguished voice chosen to help send that future on its way.


The Class of 1950 Predicts the Class of 1960

Mary Belle Sinclair’s “Class Prophecy” is a delight.


With a wink and a rhyme, she looked ten years ahead and imagined what adulthood would hold for her classmates. Her opening promised to reveal what would happen by 1960.

Shirley Atkins would become a portrait painter so accomplished that even Rembrandt’s glory might fade beside hers. Charles Dillon would become a doctor. Emanuel Rogers would sell real estate, and Kenneth Parker would make his fortune as a Wall Street broker.


Delores Shelton would become a registered nurse. Mary Sinclair pictured herself as the head dietitian in a New York hotel. Ovell Bush would travel over land and sea, helping people in distress.


Anna Jackson and Anna Ruth would become journalists, uncovering worthwhile stories. Jessie Jackson would write, and Marion Newman would fill the radio airwaves with song. Eugene Hairston would put his clarinet to profitable use at musical “hot spots.”


Other predictions mixed careers with marriage, domestic life, and the cheerful teasing classmates earn from one another.


What a range of possibilities these students placed on paper.


Art. Medicine. Nursing. Journalism. Finance. Music. Travel. Business.


The prophecy gives us Black teenagers in Jim Crow Wheeling looking beyond the boundaries around them and trying adulthood on for size. Some of the humor carries the gender expectations of its time. Some of it is simply the pleasure of imagining a friend in a grand future.


Its closing lines invite us into their hopes:

“And now you’ve heard what we expect to do,Will these things happen? We hope so, don’t you?”

Across the decades, the answer comes easily.


Of course we do.


The next question is irresistible: where did each of those lives actually lead?

A Little Mischief Belongs in the Archive, Too

The class will makes clear that Lincoln’s seniors could take a joke.


To the juniors, they bestowed their senior dignity, wit, brilliance, good looks, and charming manners. Having established their considerable generosity, they distributed more personal treasures.


Thomas Gordon left his ability to sleep in class to Donald Coles. Emanuel Rogers passed along old shoestrings and his agility as a dancer. Jessie Jackson handed her Latin knowledge to Elizabeth Pearson. Eugene Hairston bequeathed his clarinet mastery to Donald Perry.


Delores Shelton gave Jeanette Saunders her “be-pop talent” and urged her to put it to extensive use.


And Beverly handed Victoria White that megaphone.


There is something deeply welcome about finding this much laughter in the record.


So often, the history of Black education reaches us through struggles over access, resources, buildings, and unequal treatment. Those stories are essential. Here, alongside them, are the pleasures of being young: having a reputation among your friends, teasing someone who falls asleep, celebrating a beautiful voice, finding a way to say goodbye without becoming too solemn.


These students had built a world together.


The class will also reached beyond the school. To the community, the seniors left the influence they had been for “the honorable and better things of life.”


They could laugh at themselves and still believe they had something meaningful to contribute.


That combination feels like a fine beginning for adulthood.


A Segregated School with an Expansive Vision

Lincoln’s Class of 1950 graduated four years before Brown v. Board of Education. The school remained part of a system that separated children by race.


Yet its students’ writing is filled with belonging, ambition, and an insistence on a future.


The yearbook explains that maroon symbolized the courage with which they intended to face life and its struggles. White represented the purity of their ideals. Their flower was the American Beauty rose.


Their graduation ceremony would take place in the Wheeling High School auditorium. That detail creates a striking image: Lincoln’s Black graduates celebrating an educational milestone in a space belonging to the city’s white high school, even while their everyday schooling remained separate.


Into that setting came the president of Morehouse, an institution whose work demonstrated the depth and reach of Black intellectual achievement.


Mays’s career challenged the gap between America’s democratic promises and its racial practices. His educational vision encouraged students to think seriously about their responsibilities and the society they would help shape.


Beside that vision, Lincoln’s prophecy and class history become especially moving. The students imagined themselves entering professions, serving others, creating art, and making their voices heard. They were preparing for lives larger than the categories segregation assigned them.


The country had placed limits around their schooling. The yearbook shows how much life flourished within—and looked beyond—those limits.


Mabel Hull Was Keeping the Door Open

This story reaches us through the work of another person whose importance grows with every recovered column: Mabel M. Hull.


Readers following our Foundation’s exploration of her writing will recognize what makes her work such a treasure. Hull recorded people as members of a living community. Schools, churches, clubs, musicians, young people, visiting speakers, and civic organizations appeared in her columns as parts of a world worth knowing.


In this installment, she made sure Wheeling knew who was coming to Lincoln’s graduation.

Her account treated Black educational achievement with seriousness. It gave Mays space, credentials, and a photograph. It invited readers to recognize the stature of the guest and, through that invitation, the significance of the occasion.


At the end of the same column, Hull turned to the Blue Triangle Branch of the YWCA. She announced its twenty-ninth annual meeting, identified executive director Cornelia Williams, and named Mrs. Earl Evans of Moundsville as the guest speaker.


The meeting’s theme was:

“A Better World Begins With You.”

How fitting that those words appeared alongside the profile of Lincoln’s commencement speaker.


Graduates preparing to step forward. Women gathering for organized community work. An educator whose influence would help shape a movement. A journalist making sure these activities entered the public record.


Hull preserved the connections that make a community more than a collection of addresses.

Now her column allows us to see those connections again.


The Motto That Followed Them Out the Door

The Class of 1950 chose a motto that could have stood comfortably beside Mays’s entire life’s work:

“Today’s intentions are tomorrow’s deeds.”

Their class poem, signed “A. Jackson,” remembered friendships, good times and difficult ones, work and play, and the steady anticipation of commencement. Its final stanza offered a promise:

“And now the final day is here,When we must leave our school so dear,May we be loyal in all we do,To you, dear Lincoln, we shall be true.”

The students also understood the importance of leaving something behind. Their class history proudly identified them as the first Lincoln class since 1920 to have a yearbook.

Its dedication was to the Class of 1950:

“And to all who have gone before.”

They were looking forward while acknowledging the people who had made their progress possible.


That is a familiar feeling at our Foundation.


When Research Brings Your Grandmother Home

The Eugene and Beverly Stradwick Heritage Foundation exists to preserve, research, and share the African American history of Wheeling and the Upper Ohio Valley. Much of that work involves finding the relationships between records: a name in one source, a photograph in another, a passing newspaper notice that suddenly becomes important.


This discovery brings those relationships close enough to touch.


Mabel Hull’s column preserves the occasion. The yearbook preserves Beverly and her classmates. The history of Benjamin Mays reveals the remarkable national connection.


Together, they give us a young woman with a megaphone, seventeen seniors with a future to imagine, and a commencement speaker whose influence would echo through some of the most consequential years in American history.


For our family, there is an additional tenderness in it.


The woman whose name we honor was once a student preparing to leave Lincoln. She stood among friends who teased one another, sang together, held office, won prizes, and imagined the people they might become. Long before her grandchildren knew her, she had already taken her place in this story.


The Foundation allows us to return to that moment—and to bring her classmates with us.


Their names belong here. Their laughter belongs here. Their ambitions belong here.


So does Mabel Hull, whose work kept the occasion from slipping quietly out of view.


And so does Benjamin Mays, whose presence connected a Wheeling graduating class to the larger work of education, dignity, and freedom.


“Today’s intentions are tomorrow’s deeds.”


In 1950, Beverly and her classmates carried those words toward their futures.


Today, we carry their story toward ours.


-T


Sources and Notes


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