Editor’s notice: This story initially revealed in 2023.
As Coco Gauff wows the tennis world and stirs delight in her Delray Seashore hometown, it is honest to say she stands on the shoulders of her grandmother, who had a big position within the city and the nation’s historical past many years in the past.
On the similar age Gauff turned professional, Yvonne Lee was breaking down the limitations of segregation. It was 1961. Lee was common and good, had been named to the upcoming homecoming court docket and appeared ahead to being captain of the basketball group at her all-Black Carver Excessive. However then the 15-year-old was given a frightening task.
Headed into the subsequent fall, she was to be the primary Black pupil to attend Delray Seashore’s all-white Seacrest Excessive Faculty.
Gauff has talked about her grandmother, Yvonne Lee Odom, and her expertise because the tennis star spoke out on points similar to Black Lives Matter.
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How did U.S. Open, Wimbledon tennis star Coco Gauff’s grandmother turn into the primary Black pupil at Delray Seashore’s Seacrest Excessive?
That first day Lee went to Seacrest — Sept. 25, 1961 — safety was tight, for good motive.
The U.S. Supreme Court docket had dominated in 1954 in Brown v. Board of Training that segregated faculties have been unconstitutional. Within the wake of the ruling, the NAACP started searching for Black college students who can be good candidates to attend all-white faculties.
By November of that 12 months, the primary, 6-year-old Ruby Bridges, and her mom have been met with crowds yelling viscious slurs as they have been escorted by 4 federal marshals right into a New Orleans elementary faculty. New Orleans required Black college students to move an examination. Ruby did. Norman Rockwell in 1964 would have fun her braveness with a portray titled “The Downside We All Dwell With.”
Lee’s father, the late Rev. R.M. Lee, pastor of St. John Missionary Baptist Church in Boynton Seashore, thought his daughter was an ideal candidate — she was gifted in teachers in addition to sports activities.
“We have been making an attempt to get the highest children so they might not say we have been dumb,” he stated.
Lee had attended all-Black Carver Highschool her freshman 12 months. (Carver and Seacrest would later merge to turn into Atlantic Excessive Faculty for the 1970-71 faculty 12 months.) Lee was the primary pupil to combine a faculty in southern Palm Seashore County. When her Carver classmates realized the place she can be going, they inspired her.
“We’d like you to do that,” they informed her.
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What occurred to Coco Grauff’s grandmother on the primary day at Seacrest Excessive?
Whereas faculty integration was prime information of the day, Lee downplayed the potential drama.
“I used to be simply going to highschool,” she later informed The Palm Seashore Publish. “I wasn’t afraid. In the event that they informed me to combine, I used to be going to combine.”
She arrived at 10 a.m. when the opposite 1,000 college students have been already at school. Site visitors had been blocked exterior. She met her pupil “buddy,” Paula Adams, who walked her to class hand-in-hand. Lee additionally spoke with principal Robert Fulton within the college lounge. He was a “good man,” she informed the Boca Information in 2002.
At the moment, Fulton’s title adorns the college district headquarters, the Fulton-Holland Instructional Companies Heart. Sharing that billing with Fulton is Black lawyer Invoice Holland, who filed a lawsuit in 1956 when a West Palm Seashore elementary faculty refused to let his son attend.
Lee stated other than college students gawking, her first day was uneventful. “They have been well mannered however apprehensive. This was the unknown.”
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At Carver, Lee had been chosen to steer the basketball group, by coach C. Spencer Pompey. However at Seacrest, she agreed to not play any sports activities or trip the college bus as a consequence of security considerations — although her absence from sports activities did not final.
When Seacrest officers additionally directed her to make use of the toilet within the college lounge, she refused.
After faculty that day, she stated, one pupil referred to as her the n-word.
Yvonne Lee Odom’s profitable profession in training, which she would move on to her kids
By the point Lee graduated in 1964, she had 4 Black classmates. She would go on to earn a level in elementary training from Florida Atlantic College and a grasp’s in studying from Nova College. She taught math at Carver Center Faculty and married her high-school sweetheart from Carver Excessive, Eddie Odom Jr. A number of of her kids additionally grew to become academics, together with Coco Gauff’s mother, Candi.
Her son, Eddie Odom III, turned down a draft decide from the Seattle Mariners to pursue a university training.
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Yvonne Odom and her husband based the Delray Seashore American Little League to increase the game to children in largely Black neighborhoods not coated by the opposite league.
“I realized rather a lot about her tales,” Gauff informed the Miami Herald in 2020.
Yvonne Lee Odom says she, too, realized from her personal expertise.
“By attending Seacrest for 3 years, I discovered that persons are folks, it doesn’t matter what. You have acquired the nice, unhealthy and ugly, whatever the race.”
Editor’s notice: A earlier model of this story had the wrong 12 months of the Brown v. Board of Training resolution.
Holly Baltz is the investigations editor at The Palm Seashore Publish. You may attain her at [email protected].