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Today their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren attend schools and colleges based on their ability and hard work, rather than the color of their skin.

They play sports in mixed teams, read their lessons from brand-new textbooks, and choose what subjects to study, whether it is language or science, math, physics or chemistry.

They can hope for an Ivy League college, a doctorate or a job in any field, as long as they are qualified, willing and able.

But in Frederick County, it was the generations of black students and teachers who came before that paved the way to get where we are today.

From students in one-room schoolhouses who sat in threes in desks made for two, to those at Lincoln High School who used hand-me-down textbooks discarded by white schools and the first students who walked into the integrated Frederick High School only to be shunned, bullied or neglected, they all paid in full cost of school integration.

This is how some black residents remember their Frederick County school experience in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s.

The one-room schools

When Henry Brown started teaching at the Della School in the south part of Frederick County in the 1930s, black students started their education in one-room school houses where they attended grades one through seven. The facilities were bare-bones, the lessons were basic, and teachers did whatever they could to create a foundation for their students.

There was no gym class, just recess. There were no lessons on music or art. The main focus was teaching reading, writing and arithmetic.

"We had a curriculum we had to follow," remembered Brown, who is 94. "The things kids learn now are much more advanced."

As a teacher, Brown had more duties than most teachers today. When he started working at the school, fresh out of teacher's college, Brown had help.

But after a year, he was expected to educate on his own nearly 35 students in grades one through seven. He had to separate students by level and teach them in small groups. Discipline in Brown's classroom was essential and Brown had to run a tight ship.

"My name would get around," he said with a smile.

With no extra help at the small schoolhouse, Brown was a teacher, a principal, a custodian and a clerk. His first job in the morning was to open the school and start the big stove to warm his classroom. At the end of the day, he had to clean up after the students.

"I was the janitor and everything," Brown said with a laugh.

Brown didn't mind that, but after a few years when he started building a family, his tiny salary and the 12-mile distance to work started getting to him. He looked around for other options. But there were no better jobs in education in the area and eventually started working at a brickyard, where he made enough to support his family.

"It just got to the point where I just couldn't move up," he said.

But he never lost his respect for education. When his children grew up he pushed all of them to take all the available advanced classes at Lincoln High and then made sure they all went to college.

"With college education, you just go up," Brown said. "There is no doubt about that."

Lincoln High School

Until the late 1920s, in Frederick County had no high school for black students. If black students wanted to go beyond the seventh grade, they had to go to Washington, Baltimore, Virginia or to Stork College in Harper's Ferry.

John Bruner, who went to Stork College himself, understood the need for a high school. He petitioned the school board, and in 1922 was able to start Frederick's first high school – a one-room church on All Saints Street.

Students from that school later were transferred to the new Lincoln High School. Students came from all parts of the county to attend classes there, and the school soon became an institution for the black community in Frederick.

But it still had its limitations.

Compared to Frederick High School, which had languages and 11 grades, Lincoln only went up to grade 10. And as they went through the school, students had to follow tracks that prepared them for crafts and agriculture, rather than sciences and more advanced academics.

Janet Foreman, 81, who graduated from Lincoln High in 1946, said she didn't realize the shortcomings until Bruner's granddaughter, Betty Bruner, came to Lincoln High from a school in Baltimore.

Betty didn't try to study to hard, but seemed to know already everything that was being taught at school, Forman said. When she asked her why, Betty said her school in Baltimore had covered that material long before.

There were also other discrepancies, Foreman remembered. The school had no football team. Students at Lincoln studied from used old textbooks, handed down to them by the white schools. There were two typewriters in the entire school, and one of them actually belonged to a teacher who would lend it for classes, Foreman remembered.

Once Foreman asked the principal why they don't study languages like Frederick High School, she was told that there was no point since most students from the school would most likely go on to hand-on jobs rather than academics.

"I know I may get in trouble for saying it, but I still remember this," she said. "Can you imaging how that made me feel?"

Yet, Foreman's memories of her time at Lincoln are mostly positive. She remembers her teachers working hard to give students the best education they could despite having limited resources.

But for students like Foreman, there were other barriers too.

After graduating from Lincoln, Foreman hoped to go to nursing school. But for her single mother, who supported four children by washing clothes, it was impossible to find $400 to pay for that.

"To her that was just like I asked for a million," said Foreman.

The ‘guinea pigs of school integration'

Joy Hall Onley remembers the day in 1958 when she and another 12 black students — three 11th-graders and nine 10th-graders — became the first to enter Frederick High School. Hall was 15, and she was terrified.

Hall remembers walking up the stairs to the school, amid angry looking white parents.

"We had all seen on TV what happened in Little Rock," she said. "We had seen those problems ... but they had police and the National Guard. We had no police in Frederick. They just spit at us and called us names."

The integration of schools in Frederick County came late, and it was not a smooth process. It was most rough in high schools, which were the last to be integrated.

The plan was simple: select the students with the highest grades at Lincoln High School and send them to Frederick so they could finally start to experience the same advantages, classes and services as white students.

But for the first students to go through that process like Hall, that was a traumatic experience. "We knew we were sort of the guinea pigs, we were pioneers," Hall said.

While she said she knew what she was getting herself into, there were also things that attracted her to Frederick High. Here she could study a language, take more advanced courses and increase her chances to go to a four-year college.

"The highest degree that you could get at Lincoln was a general degree," said Hall who had plans to go to a four-year college. "And Frederick High School was a top school. It was the number one school in the county."

Hall and the other students from Lincoln stuck out at Frederick High. They were separated and put in different classes. They knew no one and suddenly had to take much more advanced material than they had ever studied before.

And many of the Lincoln students felt lost and abandoned, at least in the first year. "For me Lincoln was home and Frederick High School was that foreign place," she said.

And of course there was prejudice and racism from both teachers and students. Hall remembers a time when she and another student graded each other's tests and had the same answers. But the teacher gave Hall a C- and A to the white student.

"I was so upset about that," she said. "I cried and cried."

Sylvia Cleckley, another of the 12 black students who went to Frederick High in 1958, had even a worse experience. When it was time for the girls to take shower after gym, one of the white girls at the school came to ask her if she had a tail.

"I said: Do you see a tail?" Cleckley remembered.

But Cleckley, who was not chosen by Lincoln teachers but had asked the principal to allow her to go to Frederick High, was determined to make friends and not let any of that get to her.

"When I got there, the kids called me all kinds of names," she said. "But I knew why I was there. I wanted to get an education and I wasn't going to let that stop me."

Over the next few years, things got better, the integration became easier, remembered Hall. But even with all the problems and pain of that first year, she said she would have still made the same choice.

"The kids have so many more opportunities today than we ever had," she said. "We were the guinea pigs but we were also the pioneers. I like to think that we were able to make it better for the ones after us."

E-mail Margarita Raycheva at mraycheva@gazette.net.