Garnet High School Basketball Team

From left to right: (Coach) Miss Cecil Miller, Andris Anderson, Mary Rucker, Susie Carpenter, Edith Mason, Christine Webb, Frances Webster, Louise Jackson, Gertrude Johnson, Emma Ricks, Velva Jackson, ?, Elizabeth Lawson, Mildred Brown, Elizabeth Connor, and Dorothy Johnson.

Garnet High School was established in 1900 when a group of twelve African-American students in Kanawha County passed an entrance examination for high school level course work. Garnet was named after Henry Highland Garnet, a former slave that became the United States’ consul to Liberia. The first principal of the school was Charles Wesley Boyd who served from the school’s founding in 1900 until 1908 and the School graduated its first class of only one student in 1904. In the fall of 1908 Mr. John Francis James Clark, Sr. became the second principal of Garnet School which was at the time about fifty students strong, educating students for grades 1-12, and unclassified. Only a year after Principal Clark’s arrival, a separate high school building was constructed for Garnet. This made Garnet the first African-American school in the state to have a separate high school building. Garnet High School grew so fast that soon the high school building was not large enough for both the junior and senior high classes. In 1927 a separate senior high school building was established and the former combined high school was renamed Boyd Junior High School after the first principal of the school Charles Wesley Boyd. The corner of Shrewsbury and Lewis Streets was the location of the new Garnet High School situated in the heart of the African-American neighborhood in Charleston. During the school’s history, the student body was responsible for writing and publishing several school newspapers: The Echo, Skule Daze, The Garnet Herald, and The Eye. The Eye was the longest running school newspaper, beginning in 1939 and running until the school’s closing in 1956.

Sources: The Effects of Integration on Garnet High School and the African-American Community in Charleston, West Virginia by Mary Harper; James Randall Collection