The Boys Who Integrated Lanier Jr. High Return to Tell the Story

Seated in the far-right row, third seat, is future award-winning lawyer, journalist, and author Harold Michael Harvey in ninth-grade English Class, room 122, taught by Quida Poe, who claimed to be a distant relative of Edgar Allan Poe, circa 1965.

This week marks sixty‑five years since fourteen Black boys walked into Lanier Jr. High School for Boys in Macon, Georgia, becoming the first to integrate the school in September 1965. We were children, barely teenagers, yet we carried the weight of a city’s unfinished promise.

On Friday, October 16, 2026, five of us will return to Macon to reflect on that moment in a special roundtable discussion hosted by former Mayor C. Jack Ellis at the historic Douglass Theatre. The conversation will be filmed before a live audience and broadcast on Middle Georgia Spotlight and WMUB‑TV.

The panelists — Sylvester Royal, James “J.T.” Thomas, Carlton Haywood, Earnest Lester, and I — will revisit the first day we crossed the threshold at Lanier, the year that followed, and the lessons that still echo in today’s classrooms. We were twelve boys navigating a world that was changing around us, sometimes faster than the adults could manage. Our courage was not the loud kind. It was the quiet, steady kind that comes from simply showing up again the next morning.

Mayor Ellis will moderate the first hour of the program, guiding us through the memories that shaped our lives. The second hour will open into a live audience Q&A, with a special invitation to civic teachers across Middle Georgia to bring their students. We want young people to hear these stories directly — not as footnotes in a textbook, but as lived experience from men who once sat in seats just like theirs.

As Ellis often says, “Their courage helped change Macon, and their stories can inspire a new generation to reach for the stars.” I believe that. I’ve lived that.

This roundtable is more than an anniversary. It is a chance to honor the twelve boys who stepped forward in 1965, including those who are no longer with us. It is a chance to reflect on how far we’ve come — and how far we still have to go.

Admission is free. The doors of the Douglass Theatre will open at 12:30 p.m. We hope to see you there.

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Sixty‑Five Years Later