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Charity Ray Remembers the Long Ride to Education
by Nicole Robinson & Mee Vang
Charity Ray
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Charity Ray recalls being a young high school student, waiting at 7 o'clock in the morning for the public bus to take her from Mars Hill to Allen High School in Asheville. This was in the early 1950s, during the time of Jim Crow Laws, when black passengers were forced to sit in the back of the bus and to stand if there were not enough seats.
Often the bus was crowded, which meant that she would have to stand, holding her heavy textbooks, for the entire hour-long ride. "It wasn't the bus company's fault; it was the law at the time," said Ray.
She recalled an incident that happened on the bus one morning when the bus driver hit a pot hole which caused her head to hit the top of the bus. "I had to go to the doctor. It really punctured the top of my head. He gave me a headache. So he stopped and got me some BC. (aspirin). I will never forget that. Anyway, he was a nice person."
Ray looked at her experiences on the bus as an opportunity, not as a hardship. She would not have gone to high school at all if her friend and neighbor Viola Barnette had not lobbied for the buses that took black children to school in Asheville. Black children were not allowed to attend the much closer all-white high school in Madison County.
Ray spoke recently about Viola Barnette and about her own educational and personal experiences over the past fifty years.
"I enjoyed going to school. When you're younger you don't look at those things as problems," Ray said. The hardship was back at home doing chores.
When she reached Asheville, she walked to Allen High School. Allen was an all-girls, private, boarding school, but Charity did not board there. The school was an old house when she went to school there. The students were all black, but there were both black and white teachers. She graduated in 1955 with 30 classmates.
During that time period, black students in Mars Hill went to Long Ridge School, which went up to eighth grade when Ray was a student there. It had only two classrooms in it and no indoor bathroom. Barnette and Ray's mother both wanted a bathroom to be put in the school or for a new school to be built. But they were told it would cost the county too much to build a new school.
Mt. Olive Church today
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Ray remembers Viola Barnette as very kind and always helping someone out. When Charity was growing up, her family was very close to Viola Barnette's family. Barnette helped the local Mount Olive Baptist Church, and she visited the sick. Ray recalls seeing Viola Barnette once a week at church. "I always went to the elderly people because I knew I was going to get wisdom from them," said Ray. She respected Viola Barnette most for her honesty.
The community was one where "everyone raised everyone else's children," said Ray. Mount Olive Baptist Church was the center. Ray and her family farmed. She recalls, "You didn't realize there was any kind of need because we always had plenty to eat."
Ray recalls a special time in her childhood when everybody met at the bottom of the hill by the river and washed clothes. "The younger people got the wood, and they had the iron pots that they built the fire under, and they boiled their clothes and used the lye soap, of course, that they had made themselves."
Ray works now as a Curriculum Librarian Coordinator in the Nash building at Mars Hill College. She continues to live in the Mars Hill community.
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