Gregory Freeman: Fifty-One Years Ago, A Young Black Girl Here Made History. P-D 4/19/1998

Headline: FIFTY-ONE YEARS AGO, A YOUNG BLACK GIRL HERE MADE HISTORY
Reporter: By Gregory Freeman

Publication: ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
Last Printed: Sun., Apr. 19, 1998
Section: NEWS ANALYSIS, Page: B1, Edition: FIVE STAR LIFT

A FIRST STEP
For young Gloria Waters, the fall of 1947 was special.
She was a giddy freshman, excited about starting high school for the first time.

Others were excited about her too, for reasons she didn't realize initially.
Gloria, along with another student, were the first two blacks to attend Rosati-Kain High School.
In a dramatic move, Cardinal Joseph E. Ritter had announced that all parochial high schools in the area were to be integrated immediately. Seven years before the Supreme Court outlawed separate schools. Decades before the city's public schools were desegregated.

Gloria didn't know it, but many eyes were upon her on her first day of school. She was part of what some considered a major experiment.
"I didn't even realize that anything special was going on, " she said. "We were treated the same as everyone else."
Well, almost the same. The press watched the girls closely, and Gloria got a phone call after her first day of school from one of the papers, asking how the day had gone. "I think I probably disappointed the reporter because I didn't have any trouble at all, " said Gloria, who is now Gloria Waters White.

She surely didn't disappoint the nuns who had helped to prepare her for this monumental first step.
   White, the oldest of seven children, was the daughter of a Baptist minister who died in a car accident along with four of her brothers and sisters when she was 8. After the accident, the family moved in with White's grandparents in Wellston.
   Because her grandparents and her mother worked, she became a boarding student at St. Francis' Girls Home, a Catholic elementary school in Normandy.
   She embraced Catholicism. "I wasn't Catholic, but we got a Catholic education, and I enjoyed that, " she said.

After Ritter called for schools to be integrated, the nuns at St. Francis chose Gloria as the best black student to enroll in Rosati-Kain, in the Central West End.
She faced two obstacles: she wasn't Catholic, and tuition at the school was beyond the family's means. But the sisters assured her that they would help with the tuition and, after pleading with her mother, White got permission from her mother to become a Catholic.
White suspects she was chosen because she was accustomed to whites. "We lived in Wellston, and in those days, before there were all sorts of big suburban malls, Wellston was the shopping mecca, " she said. "Everyone went there, so being around whites wasn't new to me."

Some opposed White attending Rosati-Kain. In fact, when school opened on Sept. 2, about 30 white students who had previously registered chose to go to other high schools rather than attend school with blacks.
   Still, the nuns and teachers at the school worked to make sure White's experience was a normal one. "We were never there just to go to school and leave at the end of the day, " she said. "They worked to get you involved in school activities. And if I had sisters who, if I looked like I was having difficulty with subject matter, would take me under their wings to help me. I looked up at the wonderful sisters and adored them."
   Ritter made sure there was no trouble. When one nun made an unkind remark to White about too much attention being paid to the issue by the news media, she was removed from the school.
   And although many of her classmates had never seen an African-American before, they were kind and supportive.

White retired last year as Washington University's vice chancellor for human resources after 30 years at the school.
In recent years she's worked with the Delta Sigma Theta sorority to build 15 homes in 10 days through Habitat for Humanity. She served on the St. Louis school desegregation advisory committee in the 1980s. She's a volunteer with the Red Cross and is active in many other activities. Scholarships have been named for her at both Rosati-Kain and Washington University.

And on Sunday, at 10:30 a.m., the little black girl who nonchalantly integrated the high school will be the guest speaker at its alumni homecoming program.
"Color never mattered at Rosati-Kain, " she said. "I got a good Catholic education, and I'll always be grateful for it."

Daniel Schesch - Webweaver

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