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HIGH POINT — At William Penn High School, the curtains over the stage were heavy burgundy velvet, like a king’s robe.

Before integration sent the first two Penn students, Miriam and Brenda Fountain, across town to white schools 50 years ago this Tuesday, Penn was the city’s black high school before closing in 1968.

Up until then, when the lights went down in the auditorium, the curtains were all that stood between the students who performed on this stage — including a young 1930s sax player named John Coltrane — and the wider world Penn opened up to them.

In the case of Mary Lou Blakeney, a 1962 Penn graduate, that world was Atlanta, nursing school and then a life about as far as she could have imagined from a crooked street on High Point’s east side: Santa Barbara, Calif.

So when Blakeney moved back here in 1996, her first trip down Washington Drive should have prepared her. The block that was once a vibrant center of black commerce next to William Penn was now a carcass of a neighborhood, left for dead without a decent burial.

Inside the abandoned portion of Penn, the stately auditorium, she found shattered glass in the hallways. The once-polished stage was a study in neglect.

“The curtains were hanging in tatters. All the seats in the auditorium were gone,” she said. “It was if somebody had come in and been in a rage and broken everything that they saw. It hurt.”

What Blakeney did next might have come from her nurse’s training, or too many episodes of “CSI.”

Like an evidence technician at the scene of a crime, she tore off a sample of the tattered curtains and put it in a Ziploc baggie in her purse. She chipped a piece of peeling paint off the auditorium wall and did the same.

The future at-large city councilwoman walked out of the vacant school and into the daylight. She would be back.

* * *

Children learn history by dates carved in granite cornerstones. They memorize and read them back, like train schedules.

1893: Quakers purchased land to build High Point’s only school for educating freed black people, and later named it after William Penn, champion of religious tolerance.

1959: Reflecting the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision, and similar moves in Mecklenburg, Greensboro and Winston-Salem, the High Point school board accepted 17 applications from black students to all-white schools and approved two.

The Fountain sisters began school Sept. 1.

But the thing about those icons, those dates on the calendar we observe on the big, round anniversaries, is that they don’t account for all the days and years in between.

For example, there is a 66-year gap between the time the Quakers bought the land and the Fountain sisters became the first two black students to cross the color barrier that ran like an invisible electric fence through High Point.

And there is the question of what happened to Washington Street — which planners optimistically renamed “Drive,” as if to stop the urban flat-lining.

Finally, how did the bus get to what feels like the end of the line? And that is, the entrance to Penn-Griffin School for the Arts, a racially balanced magnet school that since 2003 has drawn middle and high school students from High Point and Jamestown to one of the most depressed pockets of the city.

“It took such a long, long time,” says Dot Kearns, the former school board member and Guilford County commissioner. “And it goes all the way back to the beginning.”

For Kearns, the beginning was a phone call she answered in the middle of ironing clothes in her laundry room in 1972, the height of the furor over busing: Would she like to serve on the school board?

Longtime board member Perry Little, the black dentist who had escorted the Fountain girls to school in 1959, had resigned, and Kearns was being appointed to fill his seat.

What followed was a tumultuous period in local schools, always the tool for social change, always the battleground for community frictions.

On the one hand, history demonstrated that governments typically acted only under court order. For example, local author Glenn Chavis discovered that the City of High Point had never itself educated black residents until the state ordered it to do so in 1923. According to meeting minutes, the Quakers were on contract with the city to provide so-called “colored” education until then.

“If it wasn’t for the Quakers, black folks wouldn’t have gotten an education,” said Chavis, who attended Penn. “There was nothing.”

But even court orders were not the end-all, and that explained the long, slow decline that Blakeney found so shocking upon returning to Washington Drive in 1996.

The courts could decree integration and cross-town busing to achieve racial balance, but no court could decree where families had to live.

Consequently, what was to follow was decades of white flight from cities like High Point and Greensboro into newer suburbs in the county, and black flight, as well.

By 1968, the school board voted to close Penn, arguing that any attempt to integrate it would end in violence. By the mid-1970s, the school was condemned, and Kearns recalled walking vacant, vandalized hallways, knee-deep in glass, birds flying through the windows.

A group of citizens, black and white, raised $400,000 to have the building swept and reroofed. But it would be another 20 years, and many late-night redistricting battles, before it would reopen as a magnet under the merged Guilford County Schools.

At the end of the first day of school last week, a half-century after the Fountain girls left this place for the other side of town, Dot Kearns walked the halls with principal Shelley Nixon-Green, a saxophone player and Coltrane fan with a master’s in music.

The wooden seats were back in the auditorium, the dance studio floors polished. Two guitar classes practiced Mel Bay chords, and a drawing class worked on human profiles.

Kearns recalled a white parent who had promised never to allow his daughter to go to school in this neighborhood. He recently called her back.

“Dot, I’ve called to eat crow,” he said. “Griffin is the best middle school my daughter has ever been to.”

For Kearns, these are the milestones along the road that led here, a road she began when she answered the phone in her laundry room, standing over an ironing board, getting the wrinkles out.

First, there had to be a mandate to serve the poorest children equally. But then, many more things had to happen, wrinkle by wrinkle.

“It was a matter of people getting to know each other, and now, this is an integrated school open to all types of students,” she said.

The sturdy walls had a new coat of paint, the grounds were spruced up, and through the high old Georgian entry with the arches and the lamp lights, a new class of students had finished day one, 2009.

“This is a success story for integration,” Kearns said. “I always imagined it.”

Contact Lorraine Ahearn at 373-7334 or lorraine.ahearn@news-record.com