“Unity After Separation”
After forty-five years, on Saturday March 25, 2023, the former classes of students from Lanier Junior High School Reunion will proudly share in a “Meet and Greet” of the legacy of the student body experiences as they make a pilgrimage to the grounds of the now Lanier-B F James Education Center in Hallandale Beach, Florida from 12:00 noon to 4:00 PM. These students are now Senior citizens who once lived in the northwest section of Hallandale, Ojus, Carver Ranches, and Washington Park section of Hollywood communities where they were raised together as children. The school is named after two individuals at this particular location justifies identifying their role they played in the nation and local history of Sydney Lanier and B. F. James. This Homecoming Celebration Festival is designed for “Unity after Separation.”
According to history, Sydney Lanier was a poet and a musician from Macon, Georgia who served as a volunteer in the confederate states’ army as a private. He was a southern musical performer and a Lawyer. He contracted tuberculosis when he was captured and imprisoned by the Union Army. Lanier wrote a number of lesser poems by using cracker and negro dialects during the reconstruction era in the south. Many schools and other structure bear his name. He was held in the South as the “Poet of the Confederacy.” Then, in 1972 the U.S. Postal stamps honored him as the American Poet. Sydney Lanier died of the disease at the age of 39 on September 7, 1881. The Lanier name survived over the years in Hallandale as the only school for black children under the leadership of Minister Benjamin Franklin James where he was the first teacher of black children in Broward County in Deerfield in 1903.
Minister B. F. James was a pioneer in the Halland settlement, and in 1927 the town of Hallandale was incorporated. Mr. James was the first principal of Lanier Grammar School for Black children in grades first to eight from Ojus and the northwest section of Hallandale. Mr. James raised his family and generations of his children were educated and some became teachers at Lanier. Children completing the eighth-grade parents had to provide transportation to the schools of Booker T. Washington in Miami Overtown; or Dillard in Ft. Lauderdale; while many children education ended. Later years, the school system bused Black students to Attucks to complete high school in Hollywood-Dania. After Mr. James death his daughter Janet James Miller worked at the school for many years. Mrs. Miller’s daughter Edith Miller Smith is alive and remains in area where she once taught many of these students.
As the town of Hallandale population grew it was the result of the Florida East Coast Railroad expansion; attraction of tourism to the sunshine state, as well as entertainment, agriculture, motels, hotels, and service industry. So did the black family population grew; the parents came seeking work opportunities. The school age children attended Lanier Grammar (Elementary) School; as the children population increased Chester A. Moore Elementary opened; initially for one year the Grammar children were able to attend ninth grade. In the late fifties population continued to grow. Then, Lanier Junior High School opened in 1959 and Black children were able to attend B. F. James Elementary, and Chester A. Moore Elementary School. The demographic data dictated a need to bus black children from Ojus, Carver Ranches and Washington Park of Hollywood to attend Lanier.
In 1965 Lanier ninth grade students were forced in “a No Harm, No Foul” situation to integrate white public high schools in South Broward. There was no collaboration between schools, or parents on the orientation in the transition and placement of students. Broward County School Board made a reactive emotional decision in responding to the enforcement of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The School Board decision to develop a unitarian school system created students’ apprehension an emotional dysfunctional anxiety and divisiveness among all South Broward high students. These South Broward communities lacked the political astuteness of other Black communities in Broward County demanded for more transparency and accountability and justification for the School Board desegregation decision.
The desegregation of these students was from 1965 to 1970 from Lanier Junior High School for this school aged group and the South Broward Black communities’ schools; finally closed where buildings were left neglected and abandoned for years and devalued the homeowner’s property in these communities.
These now senior citizens offspring’s lack the village environment experiences which expelled the role of the Black families struggle to improve the quality of the local communities’ quest for educational opportunities in maintaining the legacy for survival in the educational cultural war in an attempt to strengthen their family’s legacy. The Lanier Junior High school Classes Homecoming philosophy of ENTER TO LEARN, TO DEPART TO SERVE which these represent classes share in the need for “Unity After Forty-Two Years of Separation.”
Author: Irma Cohen Johnson, icohenjohnson80@gmail.com (662)417-1296
