Neighborhood fights to save 'last vestige' of Greenville's Black community against gentrification

As Black neighborhoods in Greenville County struggle for survival against growth and gentrification, one group is fighting to save what some people call the "last vestige" of Greenville's Black community - a school that once was the only option for Blacks - and make it an anchor in the neighborhood.

Lillie Akali does not want the redevelopment occurring along Anderson Road to someday overtake the fenced-in Fuller Normal school.

The school, which opened in Greenville in 1923, provided education to Blacks near and far during public school segregation. It's still educating children, though in smaller numbers, and on a campus with buildings and grounds in need of a revival. 

Akali and others said developers have expressed an interest in buying the property. She doesn't want to see "apartments and little houses with pink doors and poodle dogs" on there anytime soon.

She is part of a grassroots effort to raise $500,000 and solicit sponsors to kickstart the upgrades that would enhance the campus and reinvigorate the school.

“We need our buildings updated, our grounds done, everything to be done so we that look like a school where parents choose to send their children,” Akali said.

Without such revitalization, she and others fear the school will just disappear.

"What we're trying to do is save the school," said Carol Hill, whose sister and late wife attended Fuller Normal.

Fuller Normal once had as many as 200 students, but now its enrollment is down to 104 students in K3 to 5th grade. It lost about 80 students due to the pandemic, according to Etheleen Lawson, Fuller Normal's director.

Despite this, Bishop Patrick Frazier of Fire Baptized Holiness Church of God of the Americas, which operates the school, said that Fuller Normal is not in danger of closing. But the church cannot afford to make needed repairs and upgrades at this time, he said.

“We’re not uninformed about what’s going on at our campus,” said Frazier, who lives in North Carolina. “We don’t like it that way, but at the present time, everything being what it is, it’s just difficult to get that done right now.”

Frazier said he understands the concerns of the Greenville community which, like cities and communities across the nation, have already lost a number of its historic Black institutions. The one cited most often in Greenville is the former all-Black Sterling High, which was a public school that was destroyed by fire in 1967.

"That's where the community has come in to help us," he said. "We’re very grateful for that and hopefully, with the combining of resources and outreach, we can accomplish some things beyond just the restoration of just Fuller Normal."

History of Fuller Normal

The school was established as the Fuller Normal & Industrial Institute in 1912 by the late William Fuller Sr.

Fuller, who was from Mountville near Laurens, had been a Methodist minister who joined the predominately white Fire Baptized Holiness Church group in 1898. The two races met together until "prejudice began to rise between them," according to a November 26, 1960 article in The Greenville News.

“We had to divide, so we became the Colored Fire Baptized Holiness Church,” said Cleve Ann Mack, a graduate of Fuller Normal.

Later, “we dropped that 'Colored,' " she said.

Fuller founded the Colored Fire Baptized Holiness Church in Greer in 1908, the church website said. It became Fire Baptized Holiness Church of God of the Americas in 1926. 

Fuller established Fuller Normal in 1912 in Atlanta, to initially educate ministers. He recognized that many of the people who were being called into the ministry did not have a high school education, Frazier said.

The school later moved to Toccoa, Georgia.

For a long time, all of the boarding students at Fuller Normal were young men, Frazier said. Fuller made the strategic decision to move the school to Greenville to keep the students safe.

Before settling on farmland off  Anderson Road (also State 81), the school was in Greenville's Cripple Creek community, near the Southern Railway.

Fuller Normal was moved to its current campus in 1950. Added to the campus afterward was its main building, the Caroline Williams Phelps Hall, that housed administrative offices, an auditorium, dormitories and classrooms; the Emma Wright Fuller Hall, which also  house a dormitory, library, a chemistry lab and classrooms; the J.E. Fuller Youth Center; and a chapel, New Zion Fire Baptized Holiness Church, according to Frazier and a September 3, 1986 archived article of The Greenville News.

Fuller Normal was initially established to educate ministers from across the country, Mack said. The boarding school later opened to educate all Blacks.

For many of them, Fuller Normal was the only option, said Akali, who grew up in Greenwood.

“Public schools wouldn’t allow our children to go to their schools," she said. "If you didn’t have a hub of your own, you didn’t get educated.”

Fuller Normal then became “the vestige that children could go to,” she said. Even when public schools integrated, Fuller Normal became a refuge for Blacks when they were suspended from school, she said.

“They would come here and continue their education so when they were allowed back in public school, they wouldn’t lose a beat,” she said.

Fuller Normal received a charter to operate as the Fuller Normal Advanced Technology School. A building was constructed for this new venture, which launched in 2005, information from the school said.

Because of funding issues, it became the desire of members of Fire Baptized to operate the school as it had for almost 100 years, the school said. The school's board members voted to relinquish the charter to what has now become Legacy Charter School, the school said. Fuller Normal's charter school venture ended in 2010.

Today, Fuller Normal largely educates children whose families cannot afford to pay for a private school and "to help students who need a little more attention," the church said on its 2019 Form 990, an Internal Revenue Form that provides information about a tax-exempt organization

The school's revenue in 2019 included $210,000 in contributions from the church and $202,000 from a program within the state Department of Social Services, according to the 990. After expenses were covered, the school was left with $33,000 in net assets, according to the filing.

The church has frozen Fuller Normal at its current enrollment, but "we would like to see it go back to where it was, a school with 12 grades,” Frazier said.

But right now, he said, the school is unable to even hire teachers with proper certification.

“We need a grant or something to even recruit certified teachers because right now we can’t compete with public schools,” Lawson said.

What can Fuller Normal do to thrive?

Fuller Normal is a place with so much history and it should have a promising future, said the Rev. Dr. James Williams, who attended the school.

"Along with what’s going on now with the displacement of families in predominantly Black neighborhoods, here you have a historical site with acreage in a prime location where redevelopment is taking place," he said. "It's really something that the whole community should be fighting together to maintain."

Williams said his Fuller Normal experience is the foundation for his graduation from Voorhees College, Clemson University and Erskine Theological Seminary.

Williams attended Fuller Normal from first to seventh grade. At the time, schools in Greenville County were segregated and Fuller Normal was one of the only private educational entities here, he said.

The school, Williams said, “allowed us to be exposed to things that normally one would not perceive at that level because we had students there from all over the South and North; New Jersey, New York, Georgia, Alabama.

“They brought with them a very diverse experience," he said.

He called the school a beacon of light for many students, particularly for those who may have been disenfranchised from the regular educational system and maybe even the second chances for some to continue their education.

 "There was security," Williams said. "Parents felt their children were safe in that very nurturing and caring environment."

There was also a lot of  "delayed pride of realizing you attended a historically Black school in a time when that was not an option for many, and the fact that the founder was a visionary at that time to even seek land and to seek opportunities to build institutions of learning," Williams said.

Williams, who went on to graduate from the former Sterling High School, believes the fight to grow and survive shouldn’t be Fuller Normal’s alone.

“It should be the whole community really fighting together to maintain that legacy of support,” he said.

For Fuller Normal to survive and thrive today, it has to have a magnet that will be a draw students and parents, Williams said.

Like other private schools, Fuller Normal competes with charter and magnet schools that are state-funded and designed to draw students, while it is primarily funded by a church with limited resources, he said.

"One of the things that has to be at the forefront is they (Fuller Normal)  have to be able to articulate the vision as to where are we going, what is the plan," Williams said.

As an alumnus, Williams said he can have a vision, but that vision has to align with the sponsor of the school, the church that has, in his words, "endured through the years to provide this service and the opportunity for students in the Greenville area to have that education, that culture, that exposure."

Fuller Normal supporters start grassroots effort to raise money

Years ago, parents whose kids attended the school and alumni did things to help make it a success, Hill said. 

Today, he and other members of the grassroots effort say the school suffers from, among other needs, lack of promotion to attract donors to the school.

The school had an alumni group that met monthly and were doing things to help promote the school, members of the grassroot effort said. There also used to be an annual event that brought people in from the outside, Hill said. 

"We got distracted and lost our way," Hill said. "We don't know what happened, but once  you lose momentum, it's hard to get it back."

Many consider Fuller Normal one of Greenville's "best, well-kept secrets."

The grassroots group, which includes alumni, current and former staffers, church members, and community leaders, have a variety of ideas they believe could return the school into a beacon for future generations.

Along with restoring buildings and grounds, they'd like to see an addition of sports teams and live sports events to help the school compete with faith-based schools in the area. Hill said he'd like for there to someday be a junior college on the campus.

The group is asking for donations to be made to the Emma Wright Fuller Foundation, which supports the school.

Additionally, Akali is hoping to put the school and its historical significance before athletes and celebrities interested in giving back.

Her list includes NFL Buffalo Bills cornerback Josh Norman, who raised more than $1 million to help open a teen center in his hometown of Greenwood, according to The MinorityEye.

Akali also mentioned the likes of Tyler Perry and Oprah Winfrey, whose charitable foundation supports organizations around the world.

“The function of the school is suffering more and more,” she said. “We need it to stay. We really need it to stay."

Fire Baptized is an old church, supported mainly by senior adults, though there are younger, faithful members, Frazier said. Many in the church were hurt by the 2008 recession and have yet to recover, he said. That's makes it difficult to fund repairs, he said.

The school's main building, with its damage exacerbated by an improperly installed roof, has left a financial burden, too, he said.

The $500,000 the group of Fuller Normal supporters want to raise will not cover the cost to completely restore that building. And repairs are needed campus-wide.

The current school, he said, is operated in modular buildings which were not made to be bricked in, but they are. 

At one point, the church was given an estimate cost of over $3 million to rehab the two older buildings. And before the pandemic hit, the expense to maintain the campus, cost anywhere from $17,500 to $24,000 a month, he said.

Still, Frazier said, the church's desire is to have a campus that looks as good as anybody else's, he said.

Frazier said in some ways the denomination's churches took a financial leap forward rather than backward, providing enough money to cover needs.

But as the saying goes, when it rains, it pours, said Frazier, describing the mounting needs at Fuller Normal.

“We’re not looking down,” he said. “We’re looking up. We’re going to get it done. We’re grateful for those who want to come alongside and help us. We welcome them.”