The Final Six Classes: Lincoln High School at the Threshold of Brown. 90 years of Determination.

A remarkable collection of graduation records from 1951 through 1956 captures the final years of Wheeling’s segregated Lincoln High School—and the young people who experienced a constitutional revolution not as an abstraction, but as a change in their classrooms, friendships, and futures.

Court decisions are remembered by dates.

School history is remembered through names.

Billie Jane Burress. Lillian Gordon. Jimmy Lee Bass. Donald Turner. Austin Hudson. Rose India Kinney.

These are among the students whose names appear in a newly assembled collection of records preserving Lincoln High School’s final six graduating classes: 1951, 1952, 1953, 1954, 1955, and 1956. These against the larger fact - 610 high school graduates of Lincoln High School and 90 years of determination.

Some pages are typed. Others are handwritten. They record examination results, class averages, rankings, home addresses, and lists of prospective graduates.

Read separately, they may appear to be ordinary administrative documents.

Read together, they become a remarkable timeline of American history—and the final chapter of a public school story that had begun in Wheeling nearly 90 years earlier, in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War and the abolition of slavery.

The first three classes graduated while the legal challenge to segregated public education was making its way toward the United States Supreme Court. The Class of 1954 completed its senior year during the spring in which the Court declared school segregation unconstitutional. The Class of 1955 attended Lincoln as the Court considered how desegregation should be carried out.

Then came the Class of 1956—the students who were given a choice.

They could transfer to one of Wheeling’s formerly white schools according to the district in which they lived, or they could remain at Lincoln and complete their education in the school that had taught generations of Black children.

Those appearing on Lincoln’s final class list chose to stay.

When the new school year began in the fall of 1956, Lincoln was closed as a school for every grade, from elementary through high school.

There would never be another graduating class.

A public school born during Reconstruction

To understand what ended in 1956, we must remember what began in 1866.

The institution later known as Lincoln was not created as a private charity, a missionary school, or the personal project of one benevolent individual. The historical record establishes that Wheeling’s Board of Education created the city’s public Colored School in the fall of 1866 and supported it through the city’s public-school system and tax revenue.

This distinction is essential.

The Civil War had ended only the year before. Slavery had been constitutionally abolished in December 1865. Across the country, formerly enslaved people and free Black communities were insisting that freedom had to include education.

In Wheeling, the Board of Education responded by establishing a public school for Black children. It was segregated, but it was nevertheless a traditional public school: created by public authority, financed with public money, and administered as part of the city’s school system.

Its first teacher was John W. West, a Black educator whose work provides a direct connection between Wheeling’s local school history and the national work of Reconstruction.

West submitted the monthly educational reports required by the Freedmen’s Bureau. These reports placed Wheeling’s school within the Bureau’s nationwide system for monitoring the education of Black students following emancipation. The reporting relationship did not mean that the Freedmen’s Bureau founded or financed Wheeling’s school. Rather, it documented the progress of a school already established and funded by the city.

A visiting federal education official reported in 1867 that Wheeling had a good schoolhouse, properly furnished, and a good school taught by “Mr. West, a colored man.” The report specifically observed that money from the city school tax had been “fairly divided with the colored people,” building the schoolhouse and paying its operating expenses.

That statement is extraordinary.

Only a short time after slavery’s destruction, Black children in Wheeling were attending a publicly financed school taught by a Black educator, with expenses paid from municipal school taxes.

The arrangement remained segregated and unequal, but it represented an institutional commitment that distinguished Wheeling from many communities in which Black education depended almost entirely upon churches, missionaries, charitable societies, or the Freedmen’s Bureau.

John and Robert West

John W. West did more than teach.

He advocated for the growth of the school and for the employment of another qualified Black educator—his brother, Robert.

In an April 1867 handwritten letter to federal school official Mr. Kimball, John recommended Robert as a teacher. The surviving letter is remarkable not only for what it says, but because it preserves the actual cursive handwriting of Wheeling’s first Black public-school teacher.

Robert West was subsequently hired by the Wheeling Board of Education later in 1867.

Within approximately a year of the school’s establishment, the two brothers were teaching together. Their presence offers a powerful picture of Black professional leadership during Reconstruction: two educated Black men instructing children, building an institution, completing federal reports, and participating in a public-school system only a short time after the end of the Civil War.

The school’s history therefore began with public responsibility and Black agency working together.

The Board of Education created and financed the school.

John W. West became its first teacher.

Robert West joined him as the second instructor.

Black families entrusted their children to them.

That documented history is more meaningful—and more powerful—than the later legends that sometimes replaced it.

Dr. Hupp: not the founder, but a courageous ally

Another figure belongs in this history, although his role must be described accurately.

Dr. John Cox Hupp did not found Wheeling’s Colored School. The school had already been established by the Board of Education, financed with public tax dollars, and placed under John W. West’s leadership.

Dr. Hupp’s true contribution came later, as a prominent white physician and public advocate who used his influence to support improved educational opportunities for Wheeling’s Black children.

His authentic record requires no embellishment.

In 1873, Black residents crowded into Dr. Hupp’s office to present him with an unusual and deeply significant honor: a gold-headed cane. The inscription read:

“Presented to Dr. J. C. Hupp by the colored citizens of Wheeling.”

The accompanying resolutions credited Hupp’s “unflinching stand” before the Board of Education in support of improved school arrangements. They honored him for the principle of “Equal Rights and Justice to all.”

Hupp responded with a sweeping defense of public education.

“Education broad, sound, and correct is the price of liberty,” he declared.

He described free schools as “the strong pillars of our civil liberty and of our republican institutions.” Looking toward a more just future, he envisioned “the empire of learning opening to all conditions of life, without distinction of race, or color, or previous condition of servitude.”

Those words were spoken less than a decade after emancipation.

They also anticipated the central question America would still be struggling to answer when Lincoln’s final classes entered school many decades later: Would public education truly be open to all without distinction of race?

The cane was therefore more than a gift. It represented the Black community’s recognition of an ally who had stood publicly for their children. It also demonstrated that Wheeling’s Black residents were not silent recipients of charity. They organized, passed resolutions, honored their allies, and stated clearly that education was “first in importance” during their transition from bondage to freedom.

John W. West represents the school’s Black professional leadership.

Dr. Hupp represents principled allyship.

The Wheeling Board of Education represents the public institution responsible for establishing and funding the school.

Each belongs in the story—but each must be remembered for the role the evidence actually supports.

Six classes and a changing country

The first of the final six records belongs to the Class of 1951.

It is an Essential High School Content Battery sheet dated April 19, 1951. Twenty-two Lincoln seniors—including Billie Jane Burress, Donald Emery, Joseph Holston, Patricia White, Robert Lee, Rosa Lee, Carlton Saunders, Emma Wingo, and others—were evaluated in mathematics, science, social studies, and English.

Standardized scores and national percentile rankings were entered beside their names. A separate optional column contains IQ figures for some students.

That document reflects the educational system in which Lincoln students were expected to prove themselves. They studied within a segregated school while being evaluated by standardized instruments developed outside their community. Their achievements were reduced to scores, percentiles, averages, and rankings, even as the larger society restricted where they could attend school.

Yet their names remain.

The 1952 record is more personal. Written in careful cursive, it ranks members of the class according to their academic averages. Lillian Gordon appears first, followed by classmates including Clyde Jones, Rosie Savage, Barbara Ann Kent, Pauline Wiggins, Robert Burress, Elva Law, Aretta Overton, and Laura Mae Sigmon.

The handwriting gives the page the feeling of a working school document—something once handled by a teacher or administrator who knew the students as people rather than statistics.

The 1953 list identifies prospective graduates and includes their home addresses. Jimmy Lee Bass, Charles Earley, Ned Johnson, and James Henry Law III appear among the young men. Rose Bryant, Blanche Dowd, Eva Mae Dreher, Cecelia Galloway, and Beatrice Holston appear among the young women.

The addresses show that Lincoln’s students came not only from Wheeling, but also from Warwood, Triadelphia, Wellsburg, Power, and surrounding communities. Lincoln served a Black student population extending far beyond the neighborhood immediately around the school.

These were students approaching graduation while one of the most consequential legal cases in American history unfolded.

The litigation that became Brown v. Board of Education began in 1951. The consolidated cases were argued before the Supreme Court in December 1952 and reargued in December 1953.

While lawyers debated the constitutionality of segregation in Washington, Lincoln’s students continued attending classes, completing assignments, taking examinations, and preparing for graduation in Wheeling.

They were living inside the system the Court was being asked to dismantle.

The Class of 1954

The Class of 1954 record lists 24 students, along with their academic averages and class rankings.

Donald Turner appears at the top of the list, followed by Eugene Bland and William Burress, who shared the same average. The record also preserves the names of Billye Matthews, Wyza Wingo, Mildred Stewart, Shirley Frazier, Delores Taylor, Harold Lee, Dorothy Collier, Luther Early, and their classmates.

It is difficult to look at that page without thinking about what happened on May 17 of their senior year.

On that date, the United States Supreme Court issued its unanimous decision in Brown v. Board of Education. The Court declared that separating children in public schools solely because of race violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

“Separate educational facilities,” Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote, “are inherently unequal.”

Those words overturned the constitutional foundation upon which schools like Lincoln had been required to operate.

But the decision did not erase Lincoln’s importance.

Lincoln existed because Black children had been excluded from Wheeling’s white schools. Within that unjust system, Black educators and families built an institution that became a source of learning, leadership, culture, discipline, friendship, and community pride.

The Class of 1954 therefore stood at a complicated threshold.

The legal order that had assigned Donald Turner, Mildred Stewart, Shirley Frazier, and their classmates to Lincoln was finally declared unconstitutional. At the same time, the school in which they had formed relationships and developed their identities faced an uncertain future.

Their graduation celebrated a personal accomplishment. It also marked the beginning of the end of the only school many of them had ever known.

The Class of 1955

The following year brought another stage in the nation’s transition.

On May 31, 1955, the Supreme Court issued the decision commonly called Brown II. Rather than establish a single national deadline, the Court instructed federal judges to oversee desegregation “with all deliberate speed.”

Those words produced dramatically different results across the country.

Some school districts began making changes. Others delayed for years. Still others openly resisted. In many communities, Black children and their families carried the burden of forcing school systems to comply with a constitutional right the Supreme Court had already recognized.

Against that national background, Lincoln’s Class of 1955 completed its education.

Its surviving record lists 20 students and their four-year academic averages. Austin Hudson, Robert Scott, Jean Gordon, Danny Jones, Patricia Abrams, Jean Lewis, Maceo Hamlin, Joyce A. Law, Philip Hicks, Glenda Donaldson, Mary Scales, and others appear on the page.

The phrase “four-year averages” is especially meaningful.

These students had entered Lincoln when segregation remained firmly embedded in law.

They graduated after that legal foundation had been destroyed.

Their four years of high school crossed two constitutional eras.

During their freshman year, the school system could legally require them to attend a separate Black school. By graduation, that compulsory separation had been declared unconstitutional.

The building had not moved. Many of the teachers and students may have remained the same. But the legal meaning of the institution had changed forever.

The Class of 1956 chose Lincoln

The most poignant record in the collection may be the last one.

Unlike the longer typed lists from earlier years, the Class of 1956 appears on a short handwritten page. Among the names are Rose India Kinney, Romaine Dent, Bernestine Alberta Sams, Frances Ann Bryant, Betty Mae Kent, and James Berry.

Its size reflects more than an ordinary variation in enrollment.

For the 1955–1956 school year, Lincoln’s seniors were permitted to choose whether to complete their education at Lincoln or transfer to the formerly segregated white school serving the district in which they lived. Some of their classmates transferred.

The students on this final Lincoln list stayed.

We should be careful not to assign a single motive to all of them. The document does not tell us why each student made that decision. Their reasons may have been different.

But we can imagine the questions they faced.

Would they leave familiar teachers during their final year?

Would they separate from friends with whom they had grown up?

Would the formerly white schools welcome them?

Would they be treated fairly?

Would their academic records be honored?

Would they be safe?

Would transferring provide new opportunities—or simply make them responsible for navigating an institution that had excluded Black students only months earlier?

And perhaps the most personal question of all: after spending years working toward a Lincoln High School diploma, did they want to finish what they had started?

Choosing Lincoln did not necessarily mean choosing segregation. It may have meant choosing continuity, trusted teachers, lifelong friendships, community identity, or the dignity of graduating from the school that had nurtured them.

Integration represented a constitutional right. Exercising that right, however, did not require students to deny their affection for Lincoln.

The final students could believe in desegregation and still love their school.

From John W. West to the final class

The distance between 1866 and 1956 can be measured in years, but it can also be measured in people.

At the beginning stood John W. West, teaching Wheeling’s first generation of Black public-school students and sending monthly reports into the Freedmen’s Bureau’s national records.

Beside him eventually stood his brother Robert, whose employment John had encouraged and whose appointment expanded the school’s Black teaching staff.

Nearby stood Dr. Hupp, advocating before the Board of Education and declaring that education should extend across barriers of race and previous enslavement.

At the other end of the story stood Rose India Kinney, Romaine Dent, Bernestine Alberta Sams, Frances Ann Bryant, Betty Mae Kent, James Berry, and the other young people whose names appear on the final handwritten page.

They were separated from John and Robert West by approximately nine decades, but they belonged to the same institutional story.

The West brothers helped begin the work.

Generations of teachers, students, families, and community advocates sustained it.

The final class carried it across the threshold of desegregation.

More than a closing

After the final class completed its year, the Ohio County school system closed Lincoln for all grades. When children returned to school in the fall of 1956, there would be no first grade at Lincoln, no elementary classrooms, no high-school seniors, and no seventh graduating class in this sequence.

The closing brought compulsory school segregation in Wheeling to an end.

That was a necessary and historic advancement. Black children could no longer be legally assigned to a separate school simply because they were Black. They gained access to schools, courses, facilities, and opportunities from which previous generations had been excluded.

But progress and loss can occupy the same moment.

Desegregation opened doors, yet the process also ended an institution that had served Wheeling’s Black community since Reconstruction. Lincoln’s students entered schools that had formerly excluded them, while the school built around their community disappeared.

That tension deserves honest acknowledgment.

The injustice was not that Lincoln’s Black teachers, students, and families had failed. The injustice was that the law had required their school to exist separately in the first place.

Lincoln’s closure was therefore both an ending and a beginning: the end of a segregated institution and the beginning of a difficult new chapter in which Black students would have to claim their rightful places throughout the public-school system.

What the records cannot tell us

These six records give us names, averages, rankings, addresses, and test results. They do not tell us what students said to one another in the hallways after the Brown decision.

They do not record the conversations around family dinner tables.

They do not tell us whether students felt hopeful, apprehensive, angry, relieved, proud, or uncertain. Most likely, many of those emotions existed at the same time.

The records cannot describe the final assembly, the last senior class photograph, the final walk through the building, or the moment the doors closed as a school.

They cannot tell us how the students who transferred were received at their new schools. Nor do they reveal whether the students who remained ever wondered what their final year might have been like somewhere else.

Those stories must be sought through oral histories, family papers, yearbooks, photographs, school-board records, and the memories passed from one generation to another.

The documents do, however, allow us to say something important:

The transition from segregation to desegregation was not merely a change in law or policy.

It was a lived experience.

Young people had to walk through it.

The last class was not the end of Lincoln

A school is more than a building, and its history does not end when its doors close.

Lincoln continued through its graduates.

It continued through the knowledge they carried into colleges, military service, businesses, churches, professions, households, and civic organizations. It continued through the educators who had prepared generations of students for opportunities the larger society too often denied them.

It continued through the friendships formed in its classrooms and through the stories families told about what the school had meant.

The Class of 1956 occupies a singular place in that legacy.

Its members were the last students permitted to say that they completed their education at Lincoln High School. They remained during a year of transition and uncertainty, knowing that their class would probably be the last.

They did not choose the segregated system into which they had been born. They did choose how they would complete their journey through it.

Their graduation was therefore more than a commencement. It was a farewell to one era and an entrance into another.

Preserving all six classes

Together, the records from 1951 through 1956 transform a national story into a Wheeling story.

The Class of 1951 graduated as the litigation that became Brown began.

The Classes of 1952 and 1953 attended Lincoln while the constitutional challenge moved through the courts.

The Class of 1954 graduated during the spring in which segregation was declared inherently unequal.

The Class of 1955 completed school as the nation confronted how the decision would be implemented.

The Class of 1956 made a personal choice during the transition—and became Lincoln High School’s final graduating class.

These records are tremendous artifacts because they preserve history at the scale at which it was actually lived: one student, one family, one classroom, and one graduating class at a time.

The Supreme Court changed the law.

School boards changed assignments and buildings.

But students lived the change.

Their names deserve to be remembered—not simply as the final classes of a segregated school, but as young people who stood at one of the most consequential turning points in the history of American education.

The story began in 1866 with public tax dollars, a newly established school, and John W. West standing before Wheeling’s Black children as their first teacher.

It grew through the work of Robert West, generations of educators, determined families, Black community leadership, and allies such as Dr. John Cox Hupp.

It reached its final Lincoln commencement in 1956, when a small group of students chose to complete the journey together.

610 high school graduates and 90 years of determination.

Lincoln High School closed.

Its story did not.

-T

Sources and research note

The principal sources for this post are the surviving Lincoln High School class records for 1951, 1952, 1953, 1954, 1955, and 1956; Wheeling Board of Education records; Freedmen’s Bureau correspondence and educational reports concerning John W. West and the Wheeling school; the 1867 federal report describing the city-tax-supported school; and the 1873 newspaper account commonly titled “A Doctor Caned.”

The students’ possible emotions and motivations are presented as informed reflection, not documented statements by individual graduates. Names have been incorporated from the publicly recorded class lists, but individual grades, IQ figures, and standardized-test results have not been associated with students in the narrative.

Additional historical context: National Archives—Brown v. Board of Education; Library of Congress—Brown II, 349 U.S. 294; Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture—Freedmen’s Bureau Records; West Virginia University—Implementing Brown v. Board of Education in West Virginia; and Ohio County Public Library—Lincoln School, Wheeling.