An old racial incident in Haddon Heights intrigues scholar
On May 12, 1971, a fight among white and black female students set Haddon Heights and Lawnside on edge. The high school in mostly white Haddon Heights, attended also by students from historically black Lawnside, was evacuated, and closed for two days; 16 students were disciplined, and virtually the entire Lawnside enrollment marched in protest and boycotted classes.
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On May 12, 1971, a fight among white and black female students set Haddon Heights and Lawnside on edge.
The high school in mostly white Haddon Heights, attended also by students from historically black Lawnside, was evacuated, and closed for two days; 16 students were disciplined, and virtually the entire Lawnside enrollment marched in protest and boycotted classes.
After generating days of newspaper headlines, the tensions subsided. The school soon closed for the summer, and after a few years, the story seemed all but forgotten.
But a Canadian graduate student whose mother was a junior that year at the school is writing his master's thesis about the relationship between blacks and whites within the school, and in the two neighboring communities back then.
"I think people want to know what happened," says Jason Romisher, 37, whose grandfather Norman Kellaway served as mayor of Haddon Heights in 1972.
"I'm sure Haddon Heights High School now is much more egalitarian than it was then," Romisher says, noting that yearbooks of the era show perhaps one or two black teachers.
"This history happened," Romisher adds. "And it should be discussed."
His mother, Nancy Kellaway, agrees, as does her former Heights classmate Linda Shockley, now president of the Lawnside Historical Society.
Although neither witnessed the incident, they vividly remember the atmosphere in the school at the time.
"I had a sense that something was wrong," Kellaway, 62, tells me by phone from suburban Toronto.
"I felt the school was divided. In the cafeteria, it was divided. But that was accepted, and not really talked about."
Says Shockley, 62: "If there was trouble, it always seemed like it was the black kids who got suspended. Nothing ever seemed to happen to the white kids.
"We looked like we went to school together. We were physically in the same building. But we [black students] had no voice."
After arriving in South Jersey on July 4, Romisher, who is studying at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, began interviewing local residents and examining materials in historical societies and university archives.
People familiar with the historical relationship between Heights and Lawnside are welcome to email him: jromishe@sfu.ca.
"The media reports of the time are vague," he notes. "I haven't found a statement from the school board about how the concerns of the students were addressed."
And as he talks to current or former Lawnside and Heights residents who remember the event, Romisher is struck by the persistence of rumors.
"One guy told me that someone had been hit with a chair. Others thought someone had been pushed through a window. My mother heard there had been a knife fight," he says.
"I'm interested in the difference between what people remember and what actually happened. That's why I would like to see the police reports and the school board minutes."
I meet Romisher at the Haddon Heights Library, where director Chris Walter says researchers make frequent use of the local history collection, newspaper archives, and shelves of high school yearbooks.
"I'm in the vacuum-cleaner stage," Romisher says. "I'm trying to find out everything I can."
An only child of divorced parents, he grew up playing football in suburban Toronto. He taught history at a Canadian high school for 13 years before deciding to pursue a master's degree in history.
Romisher received a $17,500 Canadian government grant to work on the thesis, which he plans to begin writing this fall. He hopes to get it published as well.
Says Heights resident and former library director Bob Hunter, 69, who has connected Romisher with several interview subjects: "It's important for us to learn from history, so we don't make the same mistakes. It's not about stirring things up."
Although "everything happening in Canada and the U.S. concerning relationships between blacks and whites" has Romisher's mother a bit concerned about her son's project, she's proud of the work he's doing.
"We need to know. We need the documentation, so we're not engaging in foggy memories," says Shockley, who oversees the Lawnside Oral History Project.
"We all can benefit from honest, scholarly reporting - documented, footnoted, with references," she adds.
"This is a valuable project."
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