Names That Carried the Future

Lincoln School’s Graduates, 1885–1950

Near the bottom of the final alumni page in Lincoln School’s 1950 yearbook is a name that is history to Wheeling—but family to me:

Beverly Pervall.

My grandmother was one of 18 members of Lincoln School’s graduating Class of 1950. She would later marry her high school sweetheart, Eugene Stradwick, another Lincoln alumnus. Today, their names stand together as the name of the Eugene and Beverly Stradwick Heritage Foundation.

Seeing my grandmother’s name in this remarkable record fills me with pride. But as my eyes move backward through its pages, I am reminded that her achievement belonged to a much larger legacy.

My gradmother's actual graduation photo above is one of our prized keepsakes in the EBSHF collection. And it means the world to me that we have it.

The yearbook traces Lincoln School’s graduates from 1885 through 1950—65 years of African American students pursuing education through some of the most turbulent and transformative periods in American history.

These pages contain more than an alumni list. They document generations of determination.

The First Names: 1885

The record begins with four members of the Class of 1885:

Theopolis Thompson. Annie Amelia Williams. Henry Norris. John Turner.

They graduated only 20 years after the Civil War ended and slavery was abolished in the United States. Reconstruction had ended just eight years earlier. The constitutional amendments that abolished slavery, established citizenship, and protected voting rights were still relatively new promises—and those promises were already being attacked.

The parents or grandparents of some of these early graduates may have known slavery firsthand. Yet here stood a new generation earning diplomas and preparing to build lives in freedom.

Consider what that represented.

Education had once been deliberately withheld from enslaved people because literacy and knowledge were understood as sources of power. By 1885, these four Black students in Wheeling had completed high school.

Their diplomas were personal achievements, but they were also declarations of possibility.

Learning While Jim Crow Rose

As Lincoln School’s classes continued through the 1890s, segregation tightened its grip across the country.

In 1896, the Supreme Court’s decision in Plessy v. Ferguson gave constitutional protection to the fiction of “separate but equal.” In practice, separate was almost never equal. Black schools were created because Black children were excluded, and they frequently operated with fewer resources and fewer opportunities than those provided to white students.

That same year, Lincoln School graduated Eliza Johns, Leila Dolan, Martha Smith, and Mamie Kent.

Their names now sit beside one of the most infamous years in American legal history. The nation moved backward, but these students moved forward.

Year after year, families continued sending their children to Lincoln School. Teachers continued teaching. Students continued studying. Graduates continued stepping into the world with knowledge that no discriminatory law could take from them.

A New Century, an Unfinished Promise

The Class of 1900 entered a new century filled with both promise and contradiction.

America was expanding its industries, cities, technologies, and influence. Automobiles began transforming travel. Telephones connected distant communities. New inventions altered everyday life.

But racial violence, disfranchisement, and segregation remained firmly embedded in American society.

Against that background, Lincoln School kept producing graduates.

Some classes were small—occasionally only one or two names. That does not make their achievement smaller. It makes each name appear even more determined.

Imagine being the only listed graduate in your year. Imagine carrying not only your own hopes, but the expectations of your family and community. Imagine completing your education while society repeatedly communicated that your ambitions should be limited.

These students refused that limitation.

War, Migration, and a Changing America

The Lincoln classes of the 1910s and 1920s came of age as the country confronted World War I, the Great Migration, the influenza pandemic, racial violence, and enormous social change.

Black Americans served their nation during World War I while the military remained segregated. At home, hundreds of thousands of African Americans left the South in search of greater safety and opportunity, reshaping cities and communities across the country.

In 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment prohibited denying the vote on the basis of sex, although many Black women continued to face discriminatory barriers to the ballot.

That same year, Lincoln School graduated Mabel Blanche Campbell, Edward William Waters, and Ellis Christopher Yates.

The following year, ten more names appeared.

These students inherited a changing nation, but they were not simply observers of that change. As graduates, workers, parents, veterans, church members, professionals, and community builders, they helped create it.

Achievement During the Great Depression

The Class of 1929 graduated as the United States stood at the edge of economic disaster.

The stock market crashed that fall, beginning the Great Depression. Families across the country faced unemployment, hunger, displacement, and uncertainty. Black workers were often among the first dismissed and the last rehired.

Still, the graduation lists continued.

The classes of the 1930s grew larger. The names filled more space on the page. During years of national hardship, Lincoln School remained a center of learning, discipline, friendship, culture, and hope.

Every diploma earned during those years represented perseverance—not only by the student, but often by an entire family.

Parents made sacrifices. Teachers worked with limited resources. Churches and neighbors encouraged young people to continue. Students balanced responsibilities that may never have appeared in a yearbook.

Graduation was not an individual victory alone. It was a community achievement.

The World at War Again

The graduates of the early 1940s entered adulthood as the United States became involved in World War II.

Some Lincoln alumni entered military service, joining others whose names appear on the yearbook’s World War II Honor Roll. They served a country whose armed forces were still segregated and whose promises of freedom remained incomplete at home.

Those who remained in Wheeling also contributed—as workers, caregivers, parents, community members, and supporters of the war effort.

During the war years, the graduation lists continued to grow. Even as the world confronted destruction on an almost unimaginable scale, young Black students in Wheeling continued preparing for the future.

That faith in the future is one of the most powerful messages preserved in these pages.

America Approached a Turning Point

By the late 1940s, the country was beginning to change in visible ways.

Jackie Robinson broke Major League Baseball’s modern color barrier in 1947. In 1948, President Harry Truman ordered equality of treatment and opportunity in the armed forces. Black veterans and civil-rights advocates were demanding that the democracy defended abroad become a reality at home.

Then came 1950.

The Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education was still four years away. The Montgomery Bus Boycott was five years away. The March on Washington, the Civil Rights Act, and the Voting Rights Act remained more than a decade in the future.

Lincoln School was still segregated.

Yet 18 students reached graduation that year. Among them was my grandmother, Beverly Pervall.

She and her classmates could not know everything the coming decades would bring. They could not know all the barriers that would fall or how long the struggle would continue.

But they were prepared to meet the future.

From Beverly Pervall to Beverly Stradwick

My grandmother’s name on this list is deeply meaningful to me.

Beverly Pervall and Eugene Stradwick met as students at Lincoln School and became high school sweethearts. They later married, raised six children, and spent their lives in Wheeling. They believed in education, family, generosity, and community service.

Their story grew from the same foundation represented by every name in this yearbook: the belief that knowledge could create opportunity, strengthen families, and prepare the next generation to go farther.

Their names now belong to a Foundation dedicated to preserving the history of the community that helped shape them.

That is not merely a family honor. It is a responsibility.

Every Name Is a Beginning

When we read an alumni list, it is easy to think of graduation as an ending—the completion of years of study.

These pages invite us to see it differently.

Every name is a beginning.

Every graduate carried lessons from Lincoln School into a family, workplace, church, neighborhood, military unit, college, profession, or community organization. Their education traveled with them. It influenced the children they raised, the people they served, and the futures they helped make possible.

They succeeded through Reconstruction’s shattered promises, the rise of Jim Crow, Plessy v. Ferguson, two world wars, the Great Migration, the influenza pandemic, the Great Depression, and the earliest breakthroughs of the modern civil-rights movement.

They did more than endure history.

They made history.

The Future They Made Possible

Today, we can look at these pages and see how far their courage traveled.

The students of 1885 could not have known that a descendant of Lincoln School alumni would one day establish a foundation devoted to preserving their stories. My grandmother could not have known, when she graduated in 1950, that her name and Eugene’s would someday represent an organization committed to safeguarding African American history throughout Wheeling and the Upper Ohio Valley.

But that is how legacy works.

One generation learns. Another preserves. Another builds. Another dreams even bigger.

The greatest tribute we can offer these graduates is not simply to admire what they accomplished. It is to continue what they began—to value education, preserve their stories, defend historical truth, and create opportunities for those who come after us.

If you recognize a relative or family name on these pages, we invite you to share that story with the Foundation. A photograph, diploma, letter, memory, or oral history could help us recover the life behind a name.

From the four graduates listed in 1885 to Beverly Pervall and the Class of 1950, these alumni left us an extraordinary inheritance.

Their names tell us that progress is possible.

Their lives remind us that hope is an action.

And their example challenges us to keep walking toward a future worthy of everything they overcame to reach it.

-T

Historical Terminology Note

This article includes historical terms such as “colored” and “Negro” when quoting original sources or identifying organizations as they were known at the time. These terms reflect the language and racial conditions of their era; their inclusion is not an endorsement of their use today.

In our own narrative, we use Black and African American, as appropriate. We preserve historical wording to document the past faithfully while honoring the dignity, humanity, and experiences of the people whose stories we share.