Though a half century has passed, John E. Lawrence can still recall the teachers who touched his life as he was growing up in the community of Walltown in Durham, N.C.
There was Cleo Russell, his first-grade teacher at Walltown Elementary School. And Russell’s mother, Cora Russell, the principal. There was Thomas Davis, who taught biology, one of Lawrence’s favorite subjects, at Hillside High School. And there were professors and doctoral students at Duke University — where his father, Harry Lawrence, worked for 46 years — who encouraged his love of science.
“Even today, I can remember all of my teachers because of the impact that they had on me,” said Lawrence, 69. “I think that contributed a lot to the success that I have had. My teachers always stressed and my father always stressed that if you get a good education, no one can take that away from you.”
Lawrence would go on to become the first African-American principal at a predominantly white high school in Tallahassee, taking the reins at Godby in 1973, only three years after full desegregation occurred in Leon County following court battles.
He grew up during a time when teachers still made house calls. But it was also a time when black students were bussed past white schools to black-only schools. He can remember the insults and nasty words shouted by some of the white students as his bus went by their school.
“It didn’t feel good,” he said. “But I didn’t internalize it. I had a goal I wanted to accomplish. And that was not going to keep me from what I wanted to do.”
His mother, Lucille Lawrence, passed away when he was 1. That left his father in charge of making sure young Lawrence kept up his grades and went over his vocabulary words and multiplication tables after school.
“Dad would say, ‘Where are your words?’ And he’d say, “Go and study,’” Lawrence recalled.
His father, who worked as a custodian in the biology building at Duke, encouraged him to walk around the building, exploring classrooms and even sitting in on lectures.
“They would let me come in the lab, and I would see the frogs and snakes and look into the microscopes,” Lawrence said.
His father helped him get a job in the 10th grade in one of the biology labs at Duke. He made about a dollar an hour carrying out duties that included feeding beef livers to the frogs. He’d watch the college students dissect frogs, and he eventually got to dissect one himself. Through contacts at Duke, he was allowed to compete in what had been a white-only state science fair and took home first place for his project on developmental abnormalities in frogs.
He graduated from North Carolina Central University, earning a bachelor’s degree in biology, and took a job as a chef in Atlantic City, where he’d worked summer jobs before to earn money for school. One day when he was manning the grill, he got a phone call from Freeman Lawrence, principal of the original Lincoln High School in Tallahassee, offering him a job as a biology teacher.
Lawrence accepted, arriving in town in 1963. His first Sunday here, he went to St. Mary Primitive Baptist Church on Call Street and saw a young woman, Virginia Landers, speaking during a youth-day event. They dated, and two years later, married.
He came to Godby — a new high school — as a biology teacher in 1966.
“I came with the idea that I was going to be the best biology teacher, and I felt eminently qualified to teach,” he said. “And as I did teach, both the black students and the white students and the parents sensed that.”
Lawrence was appointed assistant principal at Godby in 1969 and principal in 1973, presiding over a student population of 2,300 and a staff of 125 teachers.
State Sen. Bill Montford worked as assistant principal under Lawrence before going on to elected posts as county commissioner and school superintendent. Montford said Lawrence was an exemplary leader and educator and a role model for students and staff.
“There was never any doubt in anybody’s mind that the children were always his focus,” Montford said. “He was stern and fair and led Godby through some difficult times. And he always did it with a sense of professionalism. And he always had the ability for people to know that his heart was in the right place.”
Lawrence went to work for the Florida Department of Education in 1978, eventually becoming bureau chief of adult and community education. He worked with Florida A&M University to support a graduate program in adult education and traveled several times to Washington, D.C., meeting with the first President Bush and First Lady Barbara Bush.
Lawrence, CEO of consulting firm JVL Education, Inc., and his wife have two children, John Edward Lawrence II and Jason Earl Lawrence. They also have two grandsons, John Lawrence III and Justin Lawrence.
He is humble when looking back at his trail-blazing career.
“I was one among many who worked to have as smooth a transition as possible (during desegregation),” he said. “I don’t single myself out as a special person — I just did my job.”
Posted By: Siebra Muhammad
Sunday, February 20th 2011 at 3:49PM
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