Bench Warmer: Ruth Ann Butler takes a moment to rest in the house that she transformed into the Greenville Cultural Exchange Center.
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Ruth Ann Butler is fired up. She says she just gave the best speech of her life, at a school board meeting. Her rousing oratory on the reason she believes the current Sterling School (an elementary school and gifted center on the site of the old Beck Academy off South Pleasantburg Drive) needs to change its name was controversial to be sure, but Ruth Ann believes it was totally necessary. And besides, it’s just not like her to be quiet if she believes something is worth a fight.
Though she may not be the most well-known graduate of the original Sterling High School, which counts among its former students the Rev. Jesse Jackson, Ruth Ann is one of many alumni who feels passionately about preserving more than simply the memory of Greenville’s first African-American public high school, which was located just west of downtown. In 1967, at the height of the civil rights movement, Sterling was burned to the ground. “It was the consensus of all the graduates that there needed to be another high school to carry that name.” Unfortunately, she says, all their petitions were ignored.
After desegregation, she points out, with her dark eyes flashing, the five all-black high schools in the county were no more. What’s worse, she says, was that their names were lost as well. “Think of it. We cannot go back for a reunion. [Graduates] are coming back here to look for their heritage, can you imagine?” Ruth Ann maintains that an elementary school cannot “bear the history and heritage” of an institution that meant so much to so many.
Time will tell whether her efforts will be successful. But right now, from where she sits—on the sofa of the Greenville Cultural Exchange Center, which she presides over as executive director—she offers this prediction: “Eventually the school will rise again.”
Sterling High School is not the only pet project taken on by this formidable woman. A former history teacher in the Greenville County school system, she says she’s always had a certain zeal for preservation and the meticulous research it requires, beginning with her studies in high school.
“I hated to miss a day of school,” she reminisces, broadly sketching the outlines of what is clear was a definitive milestone in the life of a young African-American woman at a time when being one meant invisibility at best, or harassment and hatred at worst. “While we were at Sterling, we were not considered second class. Our teachers only accepted the best.”
As an example, Ruth Ann spins an amusing yarn about missing questions on a test from having to study from a second-hand textbook with torn-out pages. The teacher promptly handed the test back and told her that excuses were simply unacceptable. “You go find a book that don’t have the pages torn out,” she finishes with a throaty chuckle. The result? “In Benedict College, I took the freshman math test and scored higher than anyone else. I attribute that to Sterling.”
She may give credit for self-esteem and academic achievement to Sterling, but Ruth Ann admits she might not have made it through college at all if it weren’t, in part, for some divine intervention. The Butler family boasted ten children (five are still living). Ruth Ann was the ninth. In 1963, her Baptist preacher father still had three of those siblings in college. So Ruth Ann left school and came back to Greenville to work as an assistant for the mother of another famous Greenville educator, H.O. Mims.
Miss Soule, as Ruth Ann called her, enjoyed her young aide immensely but knew instinctively that the young woman needed to go back to college. So she got on the phone with the president of Benedict. “I want you to find some money for this child,” Miss Soule demanded, according to Ruth Ann’s recollection. “I didn’t realize how special that was until I graduated,” she says, clasping and unclasping the freckled fingers in her lap.
Far from taking it for granted, Ruth Ann worked hard during her final trial in the classroom under the tutelage of William Fleming, another veteran of the Greenville County school system. And though she was in his classroom to learn how to teach, she also got an unexpected course in how to do research. As Fleming urged his students to stoke the fires of intellectual curiosity, Ruth Ann said it worked on her, too. “He motivated me, and taught me to question every bit of information to make sure it was legitimate.”
Fast forward a couple of decades to 1982. Inspired by Roots, the television miniseries, Ruth Ann was determined to teach genealogy. Confessing, “I had no idea what I was getting into,” with a breathless laugh at her own naïveté, she marched over to the library to get some pointers. Armed with nothing but a clipboard, a pen, and a burning desire to uncover the shadowy past of her ancestors, Ruth Ann also interviewed all of her older relatives. (“Most of them couldn’t tell you nothin’,” she says with a disapproving cluck of the tongue) including her great aunt in Philadelphia, Cora Butler Lane.
But eventually, the floodgates opened and the frustrating trickle of information became a rising tide of rich stories. Ms. Lane was raised by her grandmother, a former slave on General William Butler’s plantation in Edgefield, S.C. In short order, Ruth Ann discovered that this grandmother, Easter Butler, who lived to be 105, was a full-blooded Cherokee who birthed sixteen children with her husband Simon, an African brought to the United States.
Through the extraordinary effort and hours of painstaking research, Ruth Ann says she came to recognize how important it was to preserve the oral histories of other families descended from slaves. A visit to an African-American museum in Tennessee sealed the deal. Ruth Ann would step away from teaching, determined to provide a resource for the black population of Greenville.
Once again, she had only the slimmest thread of a plan, a clipboard, and her ever-present tenacity. But that didn’t stop her from sketching out a strategy and cobbling together $10,000 from local government to establish the Greenville Cultural Exchange Center. She found an old home around the corner from Bon Secours St. Francis’ downtown campus and immersed herself in collecting an extensive catalogue of artifacts, in addition to oral histories and records for African Americans who want to research their family histories.
She’ll look you in the eye and proclaim it was a labor of love with such fervor, there is no doubt she means it, but truth be told, maintaining the center was an uphill battle. Financial support came in fits and starts, and the idea was slow to catch on. Then the worst happened. In 2001, the city of Greenville announced plans to condemn the building, citing structural damage. Without an infusion of tens of thousands of dollars for repairs, the little historic home that had become the showcase of African-American culture for the region would be torn down.
Weaker souls would have thrown up their hands and walked away. Not Ruth Ann. The woman who started a museum with no idea how to operate one, and who had no experience directing a nonprofit, did what she does best: research. Then, she dug her heels in and raised $70,000. It was enough to save the Greenville Cultural Exchange from imminent demise.
Rick Owens, chairman of the Greenville County Historic Preservation Commission, chuckles when he thinks about the effort his friend and colleague puts forth in the name of preserving African-American culture. He pronounces her “quite the energetic young lady,” but is quick to point out Ruth Ann’s firsthand experience of the civil rights era. “She is out there preaching and living and helping people understand. She’s trying to take it to the next generation, the ten- to twenty-five-year-olds.” But more importantly, he says, the citizens of Greenville, as well as in the rest of the country, are just beginning to understand the implications of that turbulent time. “It is slowly becoming apparent that we’ve lived in one side of history,” he says, noting that the experiences and anecdotes of African Americans who lived through it “bring the richness of the other side of the story.”
Today, the humble exterior of the Cultural Exchange Center belies the wealth within. In the front room, simple glass cases house such artifacts as the patinaed forceps used by Greenville’s first African-American obstetrician, the rubber-tipped, wooden prosthetic that supported Peg-Leg Bates’ rise to tap-dancing stardom, and piles of photographs, some framed, of prominent African-American Greenvillians, such as the black-and-white glossy of Jesse Jackson, fully outfitted in football attire, to commemorate his days as quarterback of the Sterling High School football team.
Ruth Ann also maintains a research library open to visiting scholars, students, and the public and a resource center that displays the achievements of local African Americans dating back to the late 1900s that includes a handbill advertising the benefits and services of the nascent Phyllis Wheatley Center along with extensive documentation of its founder Hattie Logan Duckett; the tattered biography of the Rev. Minus (founder of Sterling); news articles; tape recordings; letters and more.
Ever the careful researcher, Ruth Ann is most proud of her contribution to get both the Richland Cemetery and the Allen Temple A.M.E. Church on the National Historic Register. Her exhaustive work caught the eye of Tracy Powell, head of the state archives in Columbia. “I got the biggest compliment,” she says, kicking her heels up from their place in front of the sofa. “He said there are three great researchers in the state, and you are the top.” Not one to rest on those laurels, she announces quickly, “My desire is to become one of the best researchers in the nation.”
She’s well on her way, says David Arning, a principal with Palmetto Preservation Works, who worked with her on the Richland Cemetery nomination. Richland, one of Greenville’s first African-American burial grounds located just off Stone Avenue, contains the graves of many prominent citizens as well as fine examples of Victorian and West African funerary traditions. Despite gravesites fallen to disrepair and many of the cemetery deeds lost in a fire, Ruth Ann reconstructed as much information as she could through countless hours combing through obituaries and talking to families. “Probably her greatest asset as an historian is simply her passion for the subject, which is what drives her and others around her to work so hard to recognize and preserve it,” said Arning.
Ruth Ann can’t help but concur. She throws up her hands, if only to admit, “I’ve got a bad reputation. I don’t give up easy.” |
