Greenwood High School (Mississippi)

Location of Greenwood and Leflore County in the state of Mississippi.

Greenwood High School is a public high school located in Greenwood, Leflore County, in the U.S. state of Mississippi. The school is part of the Greenwood Public School District.

History

Greenwood High School
Broad Street High School

Location

Greenwood, Mississippi, is a town of slightly over 15,000 residents located on the banks of the Yazoo River about 130 miles (210 km) south of Memphis, Tennessee, and about 95 miles (153 km) north of Jackson, Mississippi. The city and county are named after Greenwood Leflore, the designated leader of the Choctaw nation who ceded Mississippi land under pressure of the 1830 Indian Removal Act to the United States government in exchange for a land allotment in today's state of Oklahoma.

De Jure segregation years

Greenwood was the original home of the White Citizen's Council, a white supremacist organization established in the summer of 1954 in response to a national trend towards racial integration and civil rights for African-Americans which culminated in the landmark 1955 Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education.[1]

During this period the town of Greenwood's high school students attended Broad Street High School, the site of today's Threadgill Elementary School — including most notably in its Class of 1955 Academy Award-winning actor Morgan Freeman.[2]

Academics

In 2012 Greenwood High School was attended by nearly 770 students.[3] The school features a student-to-teacher ratio of 17.8 to 1.[3] The school nickname is the Bulldogs.

According to U.S. News and World Report, for the 2009–10 school year Greenwood High School's student body of 719 students was 98 percent of African-American ethnicity and about 1 percent European-American.[4]

Greenwood High School was one of the first two public high schools in the state of Mississippi to earn accreditation from the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools.[5]

Notable alumni

Footnotes

  1. ↑ "White Citizen's Councils Aimed to Maintain 'Southern Way of Life,'" Jackson Sun, Jackson, TN, 2003.
  2. ↑ "Morgan Freeman: Full Biography," All Movie Guide, via New York Times. Retrieved October 9, 2012.
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 "High Schools in Greenwood, MS," HighSchools.com, Retrieved October 9, 2012.
  4. ↑ "Greenwood High: Student Body," U.S. News and World Report: Education, www.usnews.com/
  5. ↑ Greenwood High School official website, www.greenwood.k12.ms.us/ Retrieved October 9, 2012.

Further reading

External links