Albert Joyner Stepped Forward For Integration

albertjoyneroldfortelem.jpg
Look magazine published this documentary photo of Joyner with Richard Greenlee and Thomas Lowder, two of the five African American children trying to enter Old Fort Elementary School, August 24, 1955. The man with the cane is Col. Daniel Adams, a local inventor who supported the black community and sought redress for the destruction of its school.

By Rob Neufeld

On August 24, 1955, when five black Old Fort children—Richard and Norma Greenlee, Thomas Lowder, Audrey Logan, and Teresa Murphy—went to integrate Old Fort Elementary School, they stood alone. The planned escorts—two local men and a Black Mountain preacher—had backed out, apparently, but Albert Joyner was watching from his window.

“I wasn’t involved,” Joyner said in an August 2009 interview with Kim Clark of the McDowell County Oral History Project. “I came here from the eastern part of the state. And if you weren’t born here, you were an outsider.” He’d moved from Pendleton in 1952 to work at the Oteen VA Hospital.

But, he says, “The Lord took my hand” that morning. Joyner looked out his window and saw the children and put on his best suit and went out to lead the children to the schoolhouse doors.

 

“There wasn’t nothing but white,” Joyner recalled. Hundreds of white
police officers and citizens thronged the approach. The county school
superintendent, Melvin Taylor, met Joyner on the steps.

“Integration would not be begun this year,” Taylor said.

The previous year, the Supreme Court had ruled that schools must be
integrated “with all deliberate speed,” but the state legislature had
directed schools to stay racially separate until issues could be worked
out in court.

In the meantime, young black children, whose school had, controversially, been demolished in 1950, had to go to Marion.
Black people had great reason to live in fear of white people, Joyner
elaborated. The two men who were supposed to have escorted the children,
but didn’t, were fired from their factory jobs. Black men who in the
past had bought new cars had been fired, too.

“You get what they have,” Joyner said, referring to white folks. “Your employers told you, ‘We don’t need you.’
Whereas Joyner had a bank account in Pendleton, he couldn’t get one in
McDowell County. Black folks used the post office for banking, Joyner
said.

“You always had to be under them,” Joyner added. “Yeah, that’s how it was.”

If a black person stepped out of line, Joyner related, “They’d have shot
you in the foot, or something. Nobody would have said anything, and if
they had, they wouldn’t have gotten anywhere.”

Joyner learned from a man whose grass he cut that some black folks had
offered to take care of Joyner for being a trouble-maker. “No, no need
of doing that,” an official had responded.

“That’s the way it was then,” Joyner intoned.

When the black students’ case went to court, Joyner was the one who
represented them, standing with their lawyer through one appeal after
another. It would take several years for McDowell County schools to be
fully integrated.

Not long after his initial stand, Joyner was taking his sister to the
bus stop in Old Fort when, the oral history project reports, a “white
railroad worker, W.W. Arney, said some harsh words to Mr. Joyner and
knocked him into the fountain.”

“I got beat up bad,” Joyner said. “The police came out there and asked,
what did I try to start? I called the sheriff, and he said he’d be up
there in the morning. I said I might not need him in the morning. I
might be dead…That’s what that place was.”

The coda to this story inspired people at the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Prayer Breakfast last month, when Buncombe County Commission Chair
David Gantt related what he’d learned from his assistant, Ellen
Pfirrmann, who is also a partner of Kim Clark on the Oral History
Project.

“In a touching postscript, years later,” Gantt said, “Mr. Arney was a
patient at the VA Hospital. And…his nurse was Albert Joyner.”

old_fort_children 1950.jpg
Old Fort children protested the closing of their elementary school in 1950,
as captured in this photo in the September 21, 1950 McDowell News.

Arney had lost his leg in a car accident, and “I treated him nice,”
Joyner said. “I didn’t get mad at nobody.” One time, he asked Arney who
it was who had tried to take those kids into the school—for Arney didn’t
recognize him—and Arney said, “It’s nothing really important now.”

Ironically, the policeman who had been at the scene of the assault on
Joyner also became a patient at the hospital. Joyner took care of him on
a number of occasions, often involving the messiest jobs.

As he was dying, the man wanted to give Joyner money, but Joyner
declined. “I want you to have it,” the sick man insisted. “And I took
it,” Joyner confessed. “I didn’t know what he was thinking.”

After the man’s death, Joyner went into a filling station, where he
discovered that the policeman’s wife also wanted to compensate him.

“His wife came out and said, ‘We’ll take no money from him,’” Joyner
related. “So I wouldn’t go there anymore. It (the offering) wasn’t
obligated to me. The Lord took him,” meaning it was all in His hands.

Rob Neufeld writes the weekly “Visiting Our Past” column for the
Asheville Citizen-Times. He is the author of books on history and
literature, and manages the WNC book and heritage website, “The Read on
WNC.”