East Cooper School once operated in the buildings which are Mount Pleasant Town Hall now. It has been 20 years since the bell last rung for classes there. This weekend, alumni will hold a reunion.  I was a student there from 1972 to 1974.

Our culture of racism and intellectual disengagement made dealing with the complex issues of desegregation impossible for many people in South Carolina.

East Cooper School grew out of its time as a segregated school for white children.  Newspaper articles about the school’s organization mention a private school tuition grant program which was to pay tuition with state funds, later ruled illegal.

It emerged as part of a coordinated, area effort to create a segregated, private school system. Several other local schools, some still operating today, had similar origins.   

East Cooper School opened on Sept. 3, 1964. Before it closed in May 1988, East Cooper School had admitted African- American students and attempted to put its segregationist origins behind it.

East Cooper School had one class per grade at the time I attended. Compared to a tumultuous previous year I had attended at recently desegregated Wallace Middle School West of the Ashley, East Cooper School was an island of quiet. I had witnessed vicious, occasionally racially motivated fights at Wallace. I was even in one. I also made several very good African-American friends.

The issues their parents didn’t want to talk about were getting worked out the hard way in the school yard by their children. That is the price of adult cowardice in difficult times.

We said the Pledge of Allegiance and the Lord’s Prayer at the start of each school day at East Cooper School. We were required to wear conservative clothing. The American History book then ended at 1970, shortly after the election of Richard Nixon.

East Cooper School, like much of the culture emerged from the cultural storm of the 1960s to sail across the flatter waters of the early 1970s.

The town which surrounded East Cooper School, was truly a town at the time, a smaller and quieter place. Several of my classmates had a shrimp boat as the family business. Others still farmed land which is now subdivisions along Rifle Range road. Children bicycled down Bowman and Mathis Ferry Roads, slipping on to the shoulder to dodge the occasional car.

Life had settled back into its quiet groove, at least at a school created to be a quiet groove where children were safe and happy.

Relevance didn’t completely skip the school. They hired a new eighth grade teacher, Mr. Stone, who drove a florescent orange VW Bug which declared its bold presence in the tiny faculty parking lot. It was clear Mr. Stone had been brought in to help the school deal with some of the ideas of a new world. There was also a new headmaster.

Mr. Stone apparently got into trouble when he selected Pat Conroy’s Book, The Water is Wide, as a reading assignment. The Water is Wide is the story of Pat Conroy working as a teacher on a remote island on the SC Coast at a tiny African American School. It raised “contemporary issues” which apparently our parents and the school administration couldn’t get a full agreement on about race and SC culture. We eventually all read the book anyway. I don’t think the administration read  Mark Twain’s Pudd’Nhead Wilson, which was also on Mr. Stone’s reading list.  Both books involved misunderstood teachers, neither of whom had an orange VW bug struggling with difficult school administrations in the South.

Mr. Stone should receive full credit for being one of the many teachers who radicalized me by suggesting dangerous books to read.

It wasn’t all controversy and issues at East Cooper School. School life there was almost perfectly innocent. Girls gossiped. Boys stood around hopeless of ever comprehending the why or how of what girls did. We played softball in the scraggly field where the police department building is today under the supervision of a part time coach. We watched the last Apollo Moon missions on a black and white TV. I began my mounting struggle with mathematics, found my first date and graduated eighth grade in a homemade white cardboard mortarboard at the First Baptist Church.

Mr. Stickland, the headmaster, announced the peace treaty which ended the Vietnam War at a school assembly and informed us we would be living in a nation at peace for the first time in our short lives. The first gasoline crisis struck, inflation climbed and Watergate began to percolate, but we struggled with our studies and played in the warm days in the woods and waters around our town as if the world would never change.

East Cooper School continued to operate for over a decade after I graduated. It enlarged itself, but the racial issues which created it began to recede in perceived importance.

Mount Pleasant’s public schools caught traction and began to build the massive fund-raising machines which allowed them to climb from rural mediocrity to success. My younger brother started at East Cooper, but transferred to Mamie P. Whitesides when its principal convinced my mother that Whitesides could provide a better education.

Eventually East Cooper School was forced to close for economic reasons. Undoubtedly there are bitter feelings still about that decision.  

After Hurricane Hugo, the Town of Mount Pleasant moved into its buildings and the old campus began its new life as the growing town’s municipal complex.

No ghosts prowl the old school halls where Town Hall is today. There were no horrific events which would have trapped a soul there.

However memories remain around a growing city of what a little school was like in our small town when we were young.

(William Hamilton (www.wjhamilton.com) is an attorney who lives in I’On Village. )

William Hamilton released this statement to the Moultrie News on June 1.

Two weeks ago, I wrote in my Porches to Sidewalks column that I was considering running for mayor or town council in Mount Pleasant.  I did this largely to stimulate discussion about a critical election, but it would have been dishonest unless I had been willing to actively consider a candidacy.  I have concluded I am not the best person to be mayor of our town and that other people are stepping forward who can serve the town well on council.

I would like to thank all the people who encouraged me to consider a run.  I cannot drive an automobile due to my eyesight, which makes running for office and serving as a political representative very difficult for me.  In the next two years my son will finish high school.  I want to spend as much of the time that he remains with us with him as possible.  While I enjoy dealing with complex political and social issues and represent other people as an attorney, I find representing conflicted groups of people exceptionally difficult.  I’m not good at it.  It is completely different from seeking a goal for one client.

Every citizen is obligated to consider what he or she contributes to their community, state and nation.  It is not optional to accept responsibility for the world around you.  I currently work with a number of local organizations, write extensively and do my share of grunt work at community events.  I thank the many people who join me in those efforts and hope I’m a tolerable leader and a good follower in turn.  I intend to continue to be an active citizen and hope the next election will give our town the opportunity to consider its direction in our difficult and competitive age so that our children may be able to raise our grandchildren in Mount Pleasant in an atmosphere  of opportunity, security and happiness.