Alice Pearl Brumfield spent her days as a student at South Pike High School in isolation.
When she rode the bus, other students would rather stand during the trip than sit next to her. She ate lunch alone. If she sat next to another student in the cafeteria, they would get up and wait for another table to open up.
After her prom, she was told that a sheriff deputy’s car followed her and her prom date home to make sure they were safe.
“It was very traumatic,” Brumfield said. “I was socially isolated. No one talked to me.”
“We weren’t mean to her, we just didn’t have anything to do with her,” said Connie Richardson, a fellow classmate.
Most of her high school years were spent at then-Eva Gordon high School until she volunteered to be integrated into South Pike High for her senior year.
Though her younger brother also volunteered to go, he was a freshman, making Brumfield the only black student in her class.
In 1967 she became the first black student to graduate from South Pike.
“We had been told that her family was paid big sums of money for them to come to school down there. We didn’t know that she volunteered to come down there and that she thought that many other children would come to school with her,” Richardson said.
At graduation, Brumfield didn’t receive the honorary gold drape for her good grades. School officials told her they were not certain of her grade point average.
But on Saturday night, at her senior class’ 40th reunion, Brumfield had a different experience with her classmates.
They gathered at La Mariposa Cafe in Magnolia to eat, socialize and listen to music.
And Brumfield received her honorary gold drape from South Pike Superintendent Dr. Bill Gunnell.
Brumfield said she was relieved to finally come to a class reunion. She postponed a trip back to her home in California to attend the reunion, her first with former classmates.
The students at Eva Gordon didn’t invite her to past reunions because she didn’t graduate there. Brumfield, who has spent most of her adult life in California, was never able to make any other South Pike reunion, though she had been invited.
Richardson and other students said they wished things had been better for Brumfield, but integration was a tough issue for them, too.
“We didn’t know what was going to happen. It was a very tense time. We tried to keep a low profile and not make anyone upset,” she said.
Brumfield and two other classmates, Mike Holmes and Patsy Brumfield Giles, went out to lunch in July. The group reconciled, and Brumfield held no grudges.
“It was nice of them to seek me out and apologize, and that took a lot,” she said.
Brumfield said she never really dealt with the emotional part of her time at school until she went out to lunch that day.
“Forty years later I dealt with it,” she said.
