An atrium at the Lawrenceville School in New Jersey renamed after the school’s first two Black students is seeing its first school year, which started this week. Students will walk through the Battle-Fitzgerald entrance and atrium, which honors Lyals Battle and Darrell Fitzgerald and celebrates the boarding school’s progress in racial diversity.
In the atrium, they’ll have the chance to view memorabilia from the alumni behind glass cases and read a plaque on the wall that recounts the history of desegregation on campus after the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954.
But while boarding schools like Lawrenceville across the United States are now some of the country’s most diverse educational institutions, many of these schools were reluctant to open their doors to students of color decades ago.
A little over 150 years after it was first founded, Lawrenceville admitted Battle and Fitzgerald in the fall of 1964 — a decade after the Supreme Court’s landmark desegregation ruling in Brown . A letter written by the new president of the school’s board in the spring of 1964 noted that Lawrenceville was the last of the major independent boarding schools, which include Phillips Exeter Academy, St. Paul’s School and Phillips Academy Andover, to open its doors to a student of color.