Merrill High School was a public

secondary school A secondary school describes an institution that provides secondary education and also usually includes the building where this takes place. Some secondary schools provide both '' secondary education, lower secondary education'' (ages 11 to 14) ...

in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, operated by the

Pine Bluff School District Pine Bluff School District No. 3 (PBSD) is a school district headquartered in Pine Bluff, Arkansas. The district has 10 schools with over 3,800 students and 500 employees. The headquarters are the Jordan-Chanay Administrative Center in Pine Blu ...

. It was one of four high schools that served black students in the Pine Bluff area until the public schools were integrated in 1971.

History

Originally known as Merrill School, it was named for Joseph Merrill, a philanthropist from New Hampshire. In 1886 Merrill sold a two-story house and some adjoining land to the Pine Bluff School District, and donated money to African-Americans to remodel the house into a five room school. Newspaper editor and publisher

Jesse Duke Jesse Chisholm Duke (March 7, 1853 – January 23, 1916) was a religious and political leader in Alabama who established and edited the Baptist '' Montgomery Herald'' newspaper and served as a Selma University trustee. He advocated for civil rig ...

was one of the people recruited to teach at Merrill School by Marion Rowlamd Perry Sr. Part of the school later burned, and was restored by the

Works Progress Administration The Works Progress Administration (WPA; renamed in 1939 as the Work Projects Administration) was an American New Deal agency that employed millions of jobseekers (mostly men who were not formally educated) to carry out public works projects, i ...

in 1939.

Dollarway School District Dollarway School District No. 2 (DSD) was a school district headquartered in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, United States. With over 1,600 students and employing more than 300 educators and staff, the district had three active school campuses at the end o ...

(DSD) sent older black students to Merrill High, as DSD did not have its own high school for either black or white students, - Cited page 359. until

Townsend Park High School Townsend Park High School was a segregated, all-black high school in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, operated by the Dollarway School District. As a result of the lawsuit ''Dove v. Parham'', it was eventually merged into Dollarway High School. History Prio ...

opened in 1955. - Cited page 360.

Athletics

Merrill won back-to-back National Championships in Lamar Allen's freshman year of 1932 and again in 1933.

Notable people

* Lamar "Buddy" Allen, baseball player, football player, coach *

Joseph Carter Corbin Joseph Carter Corbin (March 26, 1833 – January 9, 1911) was a journalist and educator in the United States. Before the abolition of slavery, he was a journalist, teacher, and conductor on the Underground Railroad in Ohio and Kentucky. After th ...

, an educator who served as the first principal of the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff from 1875-1902. After he was fired in 1902 he became principal of Merrill * Chris Mercer, the first African-American deputy state prosecutor in the South, one of the "six pioneers" who integrated the University of Arkansas Law School. *

Cleo Miller Cleophus Miller (born September 5, 1951 in Gould, Arkansas)"Cleo Miller."
''www.nfl.com.'' Retrieve ...

, professional football player *

Raye Montague Raye Jean Montague (née Jordan; January 21, 1935 – October 10, 2018) was an American naval engineer credited with creating the first computer-generated rough draft of a U.S. naval ship. She was the first female program manager of ships in the ...

, US Navy engineer, created first computer generated draft of a naval ship

References

{{authority control Schools in Pine Bluff, Arkansas Public high schools in Arkansas Historically black schools Merrill High School alumni