CLOSING THE BOOK ON HALLOWED HALLS

Brown High: Rich in history, the school that marked the beginning of desegregation in Atlanta willl graduate its last class this week.

By Ellen Whitford

On Friday, when the last exam is taken and the last locker slams and the last student sprints from Joseph Emerson Brown High School in that familiar last-day-of-school exuberance, the school's bright blue doors will close, and so will a chapter in history.

In this city of transplants, the three-story red brick building on Peeples Street in the heart of West End is a unifying element, and a badge of belonging. It is one of the city's oldest schools and the site of the historic first step to desegregate Atlanta Classrooms.

"This school is Atlanta" said Mary Lloyd Stinchcomb (class of '56), whose mother attended the school in its first incarnation, as a junion high. "You go anywhere in Atlanta and if you say you went to Brown, you'll meet people who went here to."

Mrs. Stinchcomb and about 400 other former Brown students flocked to the school Sunday to wander the banana-colored halls, seek out old homerooms and lockers, and reminisce. A few sneaked into classrooms and scrawled messages on chalkboards to high-school sweathearts.

It was one part multigenerational reunion, with shrieks of delight as graying alumni rediscovered classmates after 30 years, mixed with two parts fond farewell.

The school, named after Georgia's governor during the Civil War, has graduated three generations of Atlantans since it was converted to a high school in the fall of 1947. The building was constructerd in 1923, was a junior high school from 1924 through the spring of 1947.

The decision to close came in December from the Atlanta Board of Education, after several years of uncertainty. Student enrollment, which in earlier years had topped 2,000, has been dropping for a decade. This year ended with about 540 students.

But for hundreds who leafed through musty, yellowing yearbooks and relived the glory days of football championships and adolescent pranks, the decision is a disappointment.

"I just hate to see anything with this much tradition come to an end," said David Wise ('61). Brown High was "like a family," he said, echoing dozens of other former students. "It sounds simple, I guess, but it was good people."

For several years, Brown produced championship athletic teams and was once known for its excellent academic programs.

Students from Cascade Elememtary School will fill Brown's classrooms through 1994, while Cascade is demolished and rebuilt. But after that, no one can say what will happen to the Jacobean structure.

If the building is designated as surplus, the Board of Education can vote to sell or lease it. As one of West End's historic buildings, the school cannot be demolished unless its owners show they can't make a profit on it, or it is deemed unsafe.

The sentimental influx that filled the hallways Sunday began last week. Larry Greer ('53) and his wife, Elevoyce Vandiver Greer ('55), of Dawsonville, were there for one last look around.

"My husband and I courted in these halls," Mrs. Greer told a stranger. His locker was toward the south end of the first floor, hers was toward the north. "I can still smell my old tennis shoes," she said.

For many Brown alumni, the memories are simple and sweet, football games and final exams and formal dances and romances that blossomed, or failed to.

But for a few, the memories have a sharper edge.

In 1961, at the cusp of civil rights awareness, Atlanta moved to desegregate its classrooms. Brown was one of four Atlanta high schools chosen to begin the process.

Similar efforts in Little Rock and New Orleans had been met by howling mobs. Nearly 300 reporters descended on Atlanta to chronicle the event.

There was no violence.

But there were bomb threats, a heavy police presence and tension.

Kim King ('63), president of the junior class that fall, remembers: "It was am awkward time. We, as students, were under a microscope...You could say it was a frightening time, because of the attention and the expectations."

And for Madelyn Nix and Thomas Welch - the school's two black students who were escorted to and from school by officials, it meant isolation, ostracizm and sometimes frank hostility.

From the vantage point of 30 years, Mr. Welch, now a Boston real estate developer, can reflect on his time at Brown as "an interesting social experiment."

But his feelings about his alma mater are different from those of many of his classmates. He remembers teachers who were solicitous, and who forbade racist remarks. He remembers perhaps half a dozen students who were friendly, although they weren't his friends.

But he also remembers that for Ms. Nix and himself, there were no extracurricular activities, no football games, no senior trip. After-school events were prohibited because officials feared violence might erupt. Callaway Gardens, the student chosen senior trip site, would not accept blacks.

The two black students had only each other. At lunch, they sat alone, surrounded.

"It was not a nurturing enviornment," Mr. Welch recalled. "As much as I would like to forget it, I remember the class where all the students were allowed to push their desks as far away from me as possible."

He also remembers a winter afternoon: ROTC training was over for the day. He was standing in line, waiting to put away his rifle, when the boy ahead of him turned and spat on him and yelled a racial epithet.

Mr. Welch said his allegiance was to civil rights, not to Brown High. He finds it more significant - and poignant - that less than a decade after he graduated in 1963 the school had become virtually all-black.

The transition was swift and dramatic, as was the change in West End. In 1968, almost all the faces in the Brown yearbook were white. By 1971, almost all were black. The next school year the students voted to discard the Confederate Rebel mascot, the Dixie fight song, and the colors - blue and grey. They became the Jaguars and changed the colors to blue and white.

Today, the metamorphosis is complete. There are about 535 black students at Brown. Three are white.

One of them, Sam Underwood, 17, said he felt uncomfortable at first, but his anxiety quickly dissolved. "I've got gobs of friends," he said "People treat me just like any other guy."