by Lois Szymanski, photography by Nikola Tzenov
Gray scenery slid past outside the moving bus. Bill Hudson leaned his face against the cold glass window and pulled his coat tight around him. It was a brisk winter day in the 1950s.
The bus had no heat, and the ride to school was long — more than an hour on winding country roads to Robert Moton High School in Westminster.
Hudson, now 86, remembers those long rides as a teenager. “For me, the bus ride was 34 miles from Sykesville, to Johnsville, to the Baltimore County line, and back up to Westminster, picking up other children along the way,” he recalls. The kids huddled together for warmth, but they were glad for the transportation. The county didn’t provide bus service for Black students until the late 1930s, when Robert Moton’s principal, George Crawford, joined parents in buying a bus by raising money through PTA fundraisers.
After many miles, the bus arrived at the cinder block school. “The exterior walls of the school were the same as our interior walls, solid block. The outside was always painted yellow,” Hudson remembers. “The white schools were built of brick or stone with interior walls hung. We were given cinder blocks with yellow paint.”
The History
Named for Robert Russa Moton, a nationally recognized Black educator and early-20th-century civil rights leader, Robert Moton High School holds a central place in Carroll County’s history. The first school bearing his name opened in 1930 at the corner of Charles and Church streets in Westminster, supported and furnished by the local Black community, which also established a library and parent-teacher association.
In 1948, a larger concrete block school with a gymnasium was built nearby at Charles and South Center streets, serving as the only high school for Black students in Carroll County until school integration in 1955.
“For me, the bus ride was 34 miles from Sykesville, to Johnsville, to the Baltimore County line, and back up to Westminster, picking up children along the way.” — Bill Hudson, class of 1959
In 1976, the current Robert Moton Elementary School opened on Washington Road. In 1972, alumni of the Robert Moton High School established the Former Students and Friends of Robert Moton High School.
The group is committed to preserving history, helping overcome social challenges and promoting education. Hudson currently serves as the organization’s president.
The organization works to highlight the accomplishments of the school’s alumni and honor the principals, teachers and support staff who provided an enriching experience for the students. Since 1972, they have provided an annual scholarship to a Carroll County student to help them continue their education at a college or university.
Surrounded by photos and memorabilia from the old Robert Moton High School, Hudson speaks softly yet with conviction about a museum he envisions that will share the history of the county’s only Black high school and the stories of those who attended. He’s hopeful that this is the year this vision will come to fruition. “That [creation of the Friends group and awarding of scholarships] was our first adventure,” Hudson says. “Now we are on our second adventure, the museum.”
In recent decades, the former school building served various county functions, including housing the county’s Department of Recreation and Parks, Health Department and, more recently, the Board of Elections.
While the Former Students and Friends of Robert Moton High School group was allowed to use meeting space in the building, the county had long cited limited space as an obstacle to creating a museum. That changed last year, when the Board of Elections relocated, creating sufficient space to move the museum conversation forward.
The Value of a Museum
For a population facing inequalities in nearly every aspect of life, the school provided a pathway to a better life. Ernest Thomas, now 85, says he loved attending school there and his teachers. “Most of those teachers lived in the communities and went to church in the communities,” he says. “They taught Sunday school, coached sports and watched out for their students.”
Even as a child, Thomas was always taught to be aware of his surroundings, but he said his community worked to keep the children safe. Racism was part of daily life. “It was in my mind, but I never got angry about it,” he says. “In the community, we took care of each other back then. The church was the foundation.” Hudson remembers the school books they used — discarded books from students in white schools.
“Our parents paid the same taxes, but we didn’t get the same benefits or education,” he said. “The books were beyond dilapidated — books they could no longer use. Many were missing pages.”
Former Robert Moton High School student Irene Brown recalls the state of the textbooks in her interview for the Robert Moton High School Project (see sidebar at right): “You would have maybe the introduction, and then maybe you’d go to page five or 10, and maybe the next page wouldn’t be there again.” Carroll County Commissioner Tom Gordon III has been a vocal advocate for the museum, saying these stories are important to tell.
“Photographs, documents and artifacts from the school’s early years would help bring those stories to life,” he says. “Personal accounts such as recorded interviews, letters or student work would make the experience especially meaningful by connecting history to real people and lived experiences.”
Hudson hopes visitors to the museum will get a sense of what it was like for Black children in Carroll County.
“We will display the routes that the bus drivers took to get us to school,” he says. “We want to have a plaque with all of Carroll County’s African Americans who served in the armed services and photos of the teachers who were instrumental in teaching us. We will have seven busts of some of the most memorable teachers and the principal.”
Currently, he’s on a mission to collect artifacts to display, “items like uniforms for the marching band, report cards and learning materials,” he says.
The Robert Moton High School Project
In 2009, Gayle Sands, a teacher at Northwest Middle School in Taneytown, worked with a group of her sixth graders to create The Robert Moton High School Project. Intrigued by the decades-old photos hanging on the walls of the Department of Recreation and Parks building — the former Robert Moton High School (RMHS) — her students set out to understand what those photos represented and ultimately to honor the students who walked the halls of the school.
This small group of sixth-grade historians conducted research and interviewed Robert Moton’s former students, culminating in the creation of a website documenting everything they learned, including timelines, interview transcripts and photos.
“It is appropriate that today’s young people tell this story of yesterday’s students so that this generation may know what the generations before have accomplished. It is with the highest respect that we honor the memory of Robert Moton High School,” notes a statement on the website.
Steve Johnson served as the assistant supervisor of instruction for Carroll County Public Schools when the website launched in 2009. In comments related to the project, he stated, “The students, teachers and staff of Robert Moton High School … operated in an era of transition in our country, from a time when ‘separate but equal’ was the law of the land to a time when civil rights for all, regardless of skin color, trumped that discriminatory practice.
The students and educators of Robert Moton High School have a lot to teach us about education. Nowhere in our history can you find individuals more committed to a quality education than those in the RMHS community.” The website has not been updated since 2010, but it remains a treasure trove of rich historical information, much of which may come to life in some form in the proposed museum. Learn more at Moton-Project-CCPS.PBWorks.com.
Alumni and Their Legacies
In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that segregation in public schools was illegal in Brown vs. Board of Education. Hudson said he remembers parts of the county resisted integration.
“Carroll County was one of the last counties in Maryland to integrate,” Hudson says. “Within the county, Sykesville was the last town to integrate. The forefathers of Sykesville said that before they would allow us to come in, the school would burn down. Well, the school burned down.”
Hudson said most Black students didn’t want to go to schools where they weren’t wanted. “None of us applied to go,” he says. “We wanted to finish at Robert Moton. This was our school.”
Many graduates of Robert Moton High School found success in the years that followed, Hudson says. He worked for the state of Maryland for 35 years at the former Springfield Hospital, retiring as administrator and equal opportunity officer.
After serving in the U.S. Army as a medic, Thomas became a business manager at the former Mark Twain School in Montgomery County. He then opened a barbershop and now preaches at a church. Hudson has been surprised by those who have stepped up to bring the museum to fruition.
“As we began this museum project, I’ve had a lot of people that I didn’t expect to come forth and say, ‘I want to help you.’ It has been enlightening,” he says. Hudson said it’s important for kids to see “what their forefathers had to do to make things right.”
“We need to bring the past to the forefront in a positive manner,” he adds. “I hope the museum will be a representation of the true history of African Americans here in Carroll County and their education, that it will bring about more equity among the races and that it will put Carroll County in line with surrounding counties when it comes to documenting our history.
“History is how we judge each other to make it better for everyone,” Hudson continued. “Here in Carroll County, there is very little history on African Americans, the positive and factual history. We want to let others know how it was, how we overcame the difficulties and how we overcame being treated as not second-class citizens, but more like third- or fourth-class citizens. The museum will do that,” he says.
Learn more about the museum project on the website of the Former Students and Friends of Robert Moton High School: FormerRobertMotonHighSchool.org.
