Bringing history to life at Hillcrest Elementary

Sandy Schubert has long taught her fifth-grade class at Hillcrest Elementary a unit intertwining the Civil War and segregation.

Along with the Underground Railroad, Emmett Till and Martin Luther King, Schubert tells her class of the Elgin's own racial tension in the 1950s, '60s and '70s.

Still, she said, "they were getting all of this from my perspective - a white woman's."

Wednesday morning, Schubert's class had a visitor who experienced racial segregation firsthand.

Ernie Broadnax, a lifelong Elgin resident, told Schubert's 27 spellbound students that when he grew up, blacks were not allowed to swim in the South Elgin quarry, or in Wing Park's pool.

Blacks, he said, were not allowed to work at the Elgin Watch Factory, try on clothes in city department stores or eat in certain restaurants.

"There was no black nothing," he said. "No black teachers, no black principals, councilmen, just black students."

Nearly a century after the first African-Americans arrived in Elgin in 1862 - his great-great-grandmother among them - Broadnax said many of the city's blacks sill resided on Hickory, Fremont, Gifford and Ann streets.

As a child, he said he watched the Ku Klux Klan march up Dundee Avenue on alternating Saturdays. He watched Klan members tar and feather his 16-year-old cousin, Preston, and try to run him out of town.

Attending Elgin High from 1949 to 1953, he was one of eight African-American students.

A basketball player at Elgin Community College, Broadnax recalled instances where he was told to head back to the bus and wait for the rest of his teammates as they ate a postgame meal.

As the years passed, he said, the quality of life for the city's black residents improved.

According to "Elgin: An American History" by E.C. Alft, in 1968, the first black was appointed to the police department, and a subdivision whose developer had opposed sales to nonwhites was integrated. The first black school administrator was hired in 1970. Low-income housing conditions improved.

Still, he warned the class, when it comes to segregation, there "doesn't always have to be signs."

As for Schubert's class, the living history lessons will continue. Next week, she said, students will be visited by a longtime school lunch worker who grew up in the segregated South.

"This really helps us bring the lessons alive," principal Duane Meighan said.

Lesson: Man recounts segregation in Elgin