“This Place Was My First Home.”
How Did a School Founded as a Haven for Black Students Become Notorious for Its Decades of Underrepresentation?
By Mona Garimella and Annabel Tang
Two Class of 1970 Maggie Walker High School alumni at the front steps on November 27.
Deborah Washington Roane, a 1972 alumna of Maggie L. Walker High School.
The building that we know as Maggie L. Walker Governor’s School is the same one that Deborah Washington Roane stepped foot in 50 years ago, and yet the two schools are now somehow strikingly different. Originally founded in 1937 as a Black women’s college that later became one of two all-Black high schools in Richmond city when the school system was still segregated, Maggie L. Walker High School was a haven for hundreds of students in the city and widely known for having one of the region’s best football teams. Alumni of the school today describe a collective feeling of pride from being able to attend a school named for the revolutionary banker and businesswoman Maggie Lena Walker. “We held onto her legacy. We were a family,” said Earl Hughes, an alumnus who graduated from the school in 1970.
Things are not that way anymore. Now a governor’s school for government and international studies, Maggie Walker could not be more different from the place it once was. The school now is known for being one of the academically strongest public schools in the nation, boasting some of the country’s highest test scores and achievements. But behind the governor’s school’s academic accolades and coveted position on Newsweek’s “Best Public High Schools in America” is a long reputation of Black history gone untaught.
Before this building came to house the governor’s school—a change made in 1995—it was Maggie L. Walker High School, a home for Class of 1972 alumna Deborah Washington Roane. Roane, who was her senior class chaplain, an SCA representative, and a member of the yearbook staff, would walk two miles to get to school every day. She cites her experience at Maggie Walker as one of the most influential and valuable of her life, something you hear repeated every time you speak to alumni of the original school. Roane spoke about the lively culture of the school, the football games, the challenging coursework, and the family that she found in the building. Her experience at MLWHS eventually led her to pursue a career as a public school teacher. “I had a wonderful four years at Maggie Walker,” she said. “I always loved learning, and I wanted to help other students learn.”
At the time, though, Maggie L. Walker High School received little funding or assistance from the city of Richmond compared to white high schools in the city like Thomas Jefferson and John Marshall High School, a segregation-era impact. “We weren’t funded by the city of Richmond at all, which was very discriminatory,” said Hughes, who played football while he was there. “Everything went towards Thomas Jefferson and John Marshall. We had to maintain our own fields; the city didn’t contribute anything to the school. I lived five miles from the school and had to walk there every day. They wouldn’t even give us transportation.”
Nevertheless, the school did very well, both in academics and sports. Walker’s football and basketball teams were some of the strongest in Virginia—some football players later went on to play in the National Football League—and the school offered a variety of advanced coursework in business and science, integrating the values of the school’s namesake, Maggie Lena Walker. The school’s families were close-knit, and fostered a community within the area. “Our teachers made sure that we received the best education we possibly could,” Roane said, recalling the quality of the school and the connections that the students made.
Maggie L. Walker High School was also one-half of the famous Armstrong-Walker Classic, an annual football championship between Walker and Armstrong High School—Richmond’s only other all-Black high school—that took place the weekend after Thanksgiving at City Stadium. The classic drew as many as 30 thousand people into Richmond every year for 40 years, and was a great source of pride for the Black community in Richmond.
“It was just absolutely beautiful ... the streamers, the dress, the stadium filled with cars decorated in orange and blue and green and white ... the Corvettes, the cheerleaders ... sitting in the back ... and everybody screaming — an unbelievable sight, if you’ve never experienced it before,” said Howard Hopkins, who coached Maggie Walker’s football team in the 1970s.
“It wasn’t just a game,” added John L. Taylor III, a player for Armstrong who graduated in 1973. “It was so special. The whole city of Richmond shut down.”
The Armstrong-Walker Classic brought together thousands of Black families in the community. And Armstrong and Walker, despite being rivals, were connected for decades through their shared, unique position in the city. “If you weren’t playing Maggie Walker, you were rooting for them,” Taylor added. “Richmond back then... we were all brothers and sisters. It was an escape from what was going on in the world. It kept us grounded.”
Alumni watch as buses from the Armstrong-Walker Parade pass by. / Photo by Annabel Tang
Elementary school students wearing Walker football jerseys at the Armstrong-Walker Parade. / Photo by Annabel Tang
The Armstrong-Walker Parade passes in front of the governor’s school building. / Photo by Albert Tang
Alumni of Maggie L. Walker High School celebrate at the parade. / Photo by Albert Tang
The breakdown of the Classic eventually came when integration began in Richmond. The last game was held in 1978 due to something called Plan G, which would consolidate Richmond’s seven public schools into three, and eventually tear down the Armstrong building and relocate the high school. A crowd of anywhere from 30,000 to 43,000 turned out for the final game.
The city of Richmond is trying to bring the Classic back now, holding a reunion parade and youth football game commemorating the event at Virginia Union University in November last year. The parade brought together decades of alumni of Armstrong and Walker, marking the first official reunion of the iconic event. “It was 40 years [of memories] for one generation,” Richmond Mayor Levar Stoney said of Classic. “We’re going to create a new streak of 40 years for a new generation of Richmonders.” The environment at the parade was lively and joyful, with alumni of the high school sometimes seeing each other for the first time in years. The parade of dancers, buses, and antique cars passed by the now Maggie L. Walker Governor’s School building, where alumni waved and took pictures. “I was just so happy to be out there and to be a part of that,” Roane said about the experience. “There were so many of us there.”
Before Richmond came to fully recognize and value Maggie Walker High School, though, the school experienced numerous challenges. Integration for Maggie L. Walker High School changed not just the student body, but the culture of the school as well, as new students and teachers were reassigned and bused into the school. “Teachers were bused, and they were required to leave their schools, so they were not happy,” Roane recalled. “We were not happy. The African American students were not happy because we lost our classmates.” Roane recalled a memory from the first day of integration, stating, “I remember standing in the hallway near the entrance of the school near the bookcase on the first day. Some caucasian students were standing on the other side of the hall, and they were crying. At that point, I realized that I lost my friends to another school, but they lost their friends by coming to our school.” Eventually, though, Roane says that the students began to create a community at the school. “When integration started, we were distant. But it didn’t take long for us to realize we were all just kids. We became classmates and good friends, and I enjoyed my years there.”
After integration, Maggie Walker would have a long road ahead. After the shift in the Richmond school system in 1979 with Plan G, the Maggie Walker building shut down and remained unused for more than a decade, leaving the building to fall into disrepair. The building was only repurposed in the 1990s, when then-city councilman Tim Kaine proposed that the magnet school program be moved to the former Maggie L. Walker High School building, believing that restoring the building after years of vacancy would help reinstate civic pride within the community.
The school opened again in 1995, and would soon after be rebranded at Maggie L. Walker Governor’s School for Government and International Studies, something that many of the original high school’s alumni viewed as shameful. The governor’s school’s student body was dramatically different from Maggie L. Walker High School’s, and has largely remained that way since.
Rasheeda Creighton, a 1996 alumna of the first graduating class of Maggie Walker High School, was one of 16 Black students in a class of 64. “They did it the wrong way,” Creighton said about how the school came to be formed. “You’re in a building that was Maggie Walker High School, which used to only be one of two schools in Richmond for Black students. It was like a gentrification of the school.”
In 2001, only 7 out of the 149 accepted students were Black. The demographic makeup of the student body has shifted since then as the governor’s school has grown and evolved, but 20 years later, Black students still make up a shockingly small portion of the school. In the 2020-2021 school year, there were only 43 Black students, out of a total 752-student enrollment—making up less than 6% of the student body.
“We love this school. We were educated here. We lived here. This was my first home,” Hughes said. “But it was very unfair, what they did to this school. It hurts.”
“We are very proud of the history and the legacy of Maggie L. Walker, and what she did for the city of Richmond,” Roane added. “We were proud of Maggie L. Walker because she was Black. So when I see students that attend Maggie Walker Governor’s School, all I hear is governor’s school. You cut off the ‘Maggie L. Walker’ part.”
The governor’s school’s disconnect with the original Maggie L. Walker High School and its overall history is something that has been continually criticized by the high school’s students and alumni. Aside from one-off assemblies or lectures that students participate in that provide information about the school’s namesake, Maggie Lena Walker, the school employs no long-term or substantive curriculum about its history, which has roots in the segregated school system in Richmond and stretches back more than 80 years.
“We are who we are today because of our teachers, the administration, and the sense of family that we had in the school,” said Roane. “It was miraculous, what Maggie Walker did for the African American community. If you’re a student at Maggie L. Walker Governor’s School, you should know about that. I don’t see the connection between the governor’s school and Maggie L. Walker there anymore.”
Administrators at the school have acknowledged shortcomings with the connection with Maggie L. Walker. “We haven’t made enough efforts to bridge the gap between Maggie Walker HS alumni and MLWGS students,” Assistant Director Max Smith said, who has worked substantially on the school’s efforts to further its commitment to equity and inclusion. Last year, in light of the murder of George Floyd and renewed Black Lives Matter protests, this issue came back into the spotlight for the school. Administrators and the school’s Student Advisory Council planned a Black History Month in 2021 that included information on Maggie L. Walker, and put out old artifacts from the high school in the 1970s on display on the third floor.
Creighton does take note of the fact that the MLWGS administration took the information from alumni and the Richmond Times-Dispatch series seriously. “Defeating racism is a lifelong, ongoing experience, though. What we need to do is continually grow. I am not the person I was in high school, and that’s a good thing.”
Still, though, there is a lot left to be done. Students now have little, if any, knowledge about experiences of the old school’s alumni, and many students aren’t even aware of the governor’s school’s roots in Black history in Richmond. “They don’t need to hear it from teaching history, they need to hear it from somebody’s lips,” Hughes added, emphasizing that the governor’s school should have better communicated with MLWHS’s alumni to give their history. “Remember what the school stood for.”
When asked if the school’s administration should have done more to reach out to the high school’s alumni, though, Roane answered, “Absolutely. Absolutely. I know that some alumni have walked through the school for different anniversaries, but I can’t tell you the last time I’ve been inside the building.”
Creighton also emphasized the need for Maggie Walker’s legacy to be preserved. “The school needs to have a more holistic education for students that talks not just about Maggie Walker, but also about the businesses and other organizations who went into helping individuals like Maggie Lena Walker flourish in a world set against her.”
Like Roane, she was disappointed in the lack of revival of the legacy of Hartshorn Memorial College and Maggie Walker High School by school administration after the institution moved to Richmond. While she was at Thomas Jefferson High School, she felt that the institution had an obligation to keep the legacy of the current building alive when moving there. “Change doesn’t mean history should be buried. You can have a present day program in a space but still acknowledge the history of the space; you have to know where you came from in order to know where you’re going. The fact that the history is not taught is an abomination.”
Roane also highlights the governor’s school’s lack of diversity as something known among Black students in the region. “My nephew qualified to attend Maggie Walker Governor’s School, but he chose not to go because of the diversity,” she noted, not an uncommon trend for some Black students who are accepted. “The struggle is for African American students who do qualify. They have the GPAs, they have the test scores. But because the school is so predominately white, they choose not to go. I know they [the administration] are trying to bring more diversity to the school, but it’s just a struggle.”
“We’re holding onto the legacy because we know the sense of family that we were a part of,” Roane added. “I can’t say that for many schools today. But we knew each other’s families; our families took care of each other.”
There is no one who loves this school more than Maggie Walker’s old alumni do; you can hear it in their voices, in the way they talk about their passion and nostalgia for their high school experiences and their forever love for their alma mater. The governor’s school now has a long way to go to reconnect with its history, but the school is capable of changing its narrative. After all, Roane, Hughes, Creighton, Hopkins, and so many others—they’re all still here, hoping and fighting for a different future. “If you ever need an [alumna], I’m here,” Roane said. “If the school decides to reconnect back with us.”