Bill Dixon remembers going to school in a wooden shack where students went to the bathroom outside and washed their hands in the snow.
That was at the segregated school on the corner of Charles and Church streets in Westminster, before all Carroll?s black students moved to attend Robert Moton High School on South Center Street, now the Robert Moton Center.
“It was like the Taj Mahal,” Dixon said of the Moton school. “We had bathrooms. We had showers. We had an actual gymnasium.”
Now, Dixon and his former segregated classmates are back at the building that housed Moton High after the county gave their organization, the Friends of Robert Moton, office space to honor black history.
The county spent $4 million to renovate the center. It also houses the Recreation and Parks Department, the Board of Elections and the nonprofit Change Inc., which helps developmentally disabled people.
Friends of Robert Moton members hung black-and-white pictures of segregated graduating classes in the hallways and showed visitors around at the building?s official opening this week.
“That?s my basketball team, right there,” said Sidney Sheppard, the school?s first physical education teacher and basketball coach. He had to travel the Eastern Shore to fill out a 20-game schedule against segregated teams, he said.
Dixon, president of Friends of Robert Moton, was most proud of the picture of his mother, Maymie Dixon, hanging in the lobby. She was head of the school?s parent-teacher association.
He said the building in the ?50s and ?40s was still worse than what white students had — but it didn?t matter to him.
“It was a place where you could get an education, and that?s the most important thing,” he said. “You?ve got to remember, we spent years here. So to us, it?s coming home.”
And by giving Friends of Robert Moton an office, the county is showing progress in race relations, Dixon said.
