Between Goal Posts of Hope: The Role of an Integrated Football Team in Amicable School Desegregation in a West Virginia Coal Town

Mountains of Hope, a local non-profit organization with a vision of developing youthful leadership through celebrating diversity in Mount Hope, West Virginia, has launched an interracial oral history project to document a remarkably harmonious school desegregation in the coalfields of southern West Virginia soon after the Brown vs. Board of Education decision of 1954. In the absence of direction from the State Department of Education at the time, a progressive local school system achieved this landmark socio/racial/educational integration in a small coal town appropriately named Mount Hope near Beckley on the New River. Its residents had come originally from local hillside farms, the coal and cotton fields of northern Alabama, and many corners of Europe to populate this small working town, which poet James Still observed as a "nearly classless society." There, neighbors of different races and ethnicities intermingled in work places underground and came into frequent contact in shared public spaces and shops in town. Until 1960 they lived in segregated communities which butted up against one another, but that didn't stop children of varying complexions from visiting each others' homes across segregated community lines. Recorded recollections from local residents as well as distant voices from the wider diaspora of graduates (1950s through 1970) are casting light on challenges, disappointments, opportunities, and wide-spread satisfaction with the resulting changes, including a championship football team with players of many races and ethnicities. In today's presentation we will hear eye-witness accounts of that compelling transition as it played out on the football field.