Walter M. Williams High School - History

History

On October 27, 1949, the school board announced its decision to name the facility "Walter M. Williams High School." It was constructed as the successor campus to Burlington High School.

The school was built on the site of the former Piedmont Country Club. "The land the school is on was once a golf course; hence, the name Country Club Dr. About ... 42 acres auctioned off in September 1945 or 1946. Walter Williams bought the land from the estate of Ben May. The clubhouse (now a house) sits across from the stadium.".

The stadium on the site, presently known as Burlington City Schools Stadium, was dedicated on Veteran's Day, November 11, 1949. The field house was also completed in the late 1940s.

Construction began on the main building in 1949. Two cornerstones flanking the base of the front stairwell, one reading "AD" and the other "1949" attest to this fact (the cornerstone contains a sealed copper box including financial records and newspaper clippings from the period of the school's construction). The 1951 graduating class from the former Burlington High School graduated on the stage of the Williams High School Auditorium in the spring of 1951, some three months before the new school officially opened.

Williams High officially opened its doors on September 5, 1951, with an enrollment approaching 1,000 (today, it has a student body approaching 1300, and in the early 1970s surpassed 1700) and a staff of 43 (as of November 2008, the school has a combined certified and classified staff of 124). The first student to arrive at school that day was Roger Cheek, who thus might be compared to Carolina's Hinton James, and be considered Williams' "first student." Jack Lindley was the first student body president.

What is now Spikes Gymnasium was completed by the opening of school in September 1955. The "Spikes Spaz" are the student supporters of Williams High's basketball teams, named for the gym's namesake, and patterned after the "Cameron Crazies" of Duke University. Prior to the completion of the gym, students in P.E. classes showered in restrooms adjacent to the cafeteria. The showers remain intact to this day. The gym was the scene of the highest points scored by any one player in the 1960s when Pistol Pete Maravich played against the Bulldogs while a student at Raleigh's Needham B. Broughton High School. The gym was the scene of a pivotal event during the period of integration.

During the 1956-1957 school year, classrooms in the west wing on the Ground Floor served as overflow space for fifth grade students from nearby Hillcrest Elementary School.

Prior to the school district merger between the Burlington City Schools and the Alamance County Schools (creating the Alamance-Burlington School System in 1996), Williams was one of two high schools in the former Burlington City Schools district, along with Hugh Cummings High School, which was constructed in the early 1970s to accommodate the expanded student population at Williams. Prior to integration, Williams was historically white, while Jordan Sellars High School across town was historically black. The period surrounding integregation at Williams is documented in the book Black Coach.

Elvis Presley performed at Williams on February 15, 1956, at 8:00pm. Other performers scheduled for the two hour performance included Justin Tubb(son of Ernest Tubb), Benny Martin, and "Mother Maybelle" Carter with June Carter (later June Carter Cash). Though little more is known about the concert itself, it is known that he stopped at Brightwood Restaurant on Highway 70 en route to Greensboro after the concert, where he ordered a burger and a glass of milk. The booth where he sat has been preserved with a portrait overhead. The waitress who served him that night still works there. Buddy Rich also performed at the school in the 1950s. Poet and novelist Flannery O'Connor has also appeared at Williams, along with author Timothy Tyson, who wrote Blood Done Sign My Name, 2005 summer reading selection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the inspiration of a movie by the same title released in the 1980s. William C. Friday, president of the University of North Carolina from 1956 to 1985, was the featured speaker at an awards assembly in the 1980s. Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel has also spoken at the school. Judge Henry Frye, the first African-American chief justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court also spoke at the school, as has Lonice Bias, mother of University of Maryland basketball player Len Bias.

Prior to the completion of the "Tobacco Road" stretch of Interstate 85 through Alamance County in 1960, US Route 70 (which runs concurrent with Church Street) was a major east-west route, placing the school on a major thoroughfare, which most likely led to the academic landmark becoming very familiar with east-west travelers.

In the fall of 1960, ninth grade students began attending what was then the newly opened Turrentine Junior High School. Ninth graders did not attend Williams again until after the former Jordan Sellars campus was no longer used as a ninth grade center. Following a 1971 desegregation order which sought to eliminate racial segregation at Sellars Gunn, ninth grade students were sent to Sellars Gunn. Eventually, the Jordan Sellars campus transitioned into a campus to house alternative educational programs in 1995, and both Williams and the Hugh M. Cummings campus returned to a four year format in 1982.

Like many cities in the south, Burlington experienced tension during the period of integration in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Prior to the appointment of Evans as head coach, a sit-in was held on the front lawn to communicate concerns about a lack of diversity on the cheerleading squad. Following the sit-in, a march to the school district office was held. This period in history was explored in Daniel Koehler's documentary Burlington: A City Divided, which was featured at the Reynolda Film Festival at Wake Forest University in the spring of 2010, at which director Spike Lee, known for his films on themes of social justice, was the featured guest speaker (http://www.yesweekly.com/article-9004-reynolda-film-festival-remains-true-to-its-vision.html).

The 1975-1976 school year marked the national bicentennial, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the opening of Williams, and the fiftieth anniversary of the school's yearbook, the Doe-Wah-Jack, as it had been the name of the yearbook at the former Burlington High School. According to Gillespie, yearbook staff members who saw the word on a local stove found out that the name is an American Indian word meaning "the first, the best". The name was submitted to student and was chosen as the name of the yearbook (V. Gillispie).

In 1986, a fire in a chemistry lab caused several thousand dollars worth in damage. Three football coaches who were in the building took turns crawling along the floor to put the fire out (Wilmington Star News).