‘She made me who I am.’ Remembering Ruby Green, the first Black teacher at Biloxi High

Ruby Green, the first Black teacher at Biloxi High School, passed away last month at the age of 103.

Green started work at Biloxi High during the 1967-68 school year, teaching 12th grade government. Before that, she had run a kindergarten in Biloxi for 17 years, becoming the first teacher to a generation of African American Biloxi children who otherwise had almost no pre-school or kindergarten options.

Her work reached hundreds of people who grew up to find their lives guided by her influence and inspired by her calm confidence and intelligence. Some, like retired Brig. Gen. Samuel Nichols Jr., visited her when they returned home to the Coast to see their families.

“Her legacy, it’s about the people that you touch,” Nichols said. “That’s the legacy anybody should leave if they say they love somebody. And I know that woman loved us.”

Great expectations

Born in Pennsylvania, Green and her husband, P. Irving Green, moved to Biloxi in 1947 for his work as an instructor at Keesler Air Force Base. They had three daughters: Jacquelyn, Pamela and Judith. In an interview, Pamela Green said that running a kindergarten offered her mother a way to bring in income while taking care of her own children.

“It turned out that establishing and starting a kindergarten just happened to be her way of becoming an entrepreneur,” Pamela Green said. “She probably had never thought of herself as an entrepreneur. She just knew she needed an income, and at the same time served her community by filling in a big educational gap.”

Green aimed to ensure her students left kindergarten knowing their numbers and letters and able to read a little bit. Alumni say the experiences she created gave them a sense of independence.

Gilbert Mason Jr., who would become a physician and civil rights advocate like his father, Gilbert Mason Sr., attended Green’s kindergarten. He recalled that she never used “baby talk,” speaking to young children as if they were adults.

Students who had behaved well were often allowed to walk from the kindergarten across the railroad tracks to a small store to purchase milk to drink with their lunch.

“It really was an opportunity to have a sense of responsibility, be able to handle change and give it to the proprietor like you were an adult,” Mason said. “That was a very powerful lesson that she conveyed to us in a very subtle manner.”

A landmark at Biloxi High

Pamela Green doesn’t remember a lot of discussion about her mother becoming the first African-American teacher at Biloxi High.

“It was, ‘I’m going to do this,’ and she did it,” Green says.

Following a case in which Mason Jr. was the plaintiff, a court order required the district to desegregate in 1964. The first Black first-graders began attending previously all-white elementary schools later that year.

The following year, Biloxi High was desegregated when a eight Black seniors arrived for the first day of school in September.

Alton Bankston, a white man who started teaching at Biloxi High during the first year Black students attended, said the school’s leadership recognized that desegregation meant they needed to begin hiring Black teachers.

“They felt like the next step was to integrate the faculty,” he said.

Because of uncertainty as to how the still almost-all-white student body would react to having a Black teacher, Bankston said, the school decided to implement a team teaching program. Green, Bankston and another teacher co-taught 12th grade government, working with a group of 115 seniors in the cafeteria, the only space big enough to accommodate them.

The class consisted of lectures followed by activities in smaller groups. For one lesson, the class formed a mock Congress, playing Representatives and Senators and writing legislation. For another, they held party conventions, half the class playing Democrats and the other half Republicans.

Green was immediately respected by students and colleagues, Bankston said.

“The kids just liked her,” he said. “When we broke up into groups she was in there making suggestions and recommendations, explaining exactly how it should be done.”

A few years later, Effie Trussell-Clark and several other Black teachers began working at Biloxi High. Nichols, the high school Black Biloxi students had attended, was merging with Biloxi High, and the principal told her he “immediately” needed six African American teachers.

Trussell-Clark had just graduated from Jackson State University, and Green was assigned as her mentor. Trussell-Clark was teaching 12th grade government while Green had switched to teaching 11th grade history.

“She said, ‘As a new teacher, get a command on the subject that you’re teaching,’” Trussell-Clark said. “Her advice was write out your lecture notes in a spiral tablet. She said once you write them out, you remember it better and it comes to you.”

Trussell-Clark followed that advice and saved her notes for years.

Green also described her first years at Biloxi High, when she was the school’s only Black teacher. For camaraderie, her daughter Judith Green said, she had turned to the other “outsiders”: a teacher who spoke English as a second language, and a teacher from up north.

“She advised me on how to deal with the school, but she did say that the student population in ‘68 and ‘69 were very nice and had been very cooperative with her,” Trussell-Clark said.

‘Interested in the world’

Green retired from teaching in the mid-1980s. She spent her days volunteering at the veterans hospital in Gulfport and working on committees at her church, New Bethel Missionary Baptist in Biloxi. She was a staple of the church community for more than 60 years.

Green also occasionally worked as a substitute teacher at Biloxi High to ensure she had the funds to support her passion of international travel.

Green and her husband had hoped to travel together, but he passed away in 1966.

She traveled mostly with her college roommate, often for an entire month at a time, nearly every year. She visited many countries in Europe, Israel, China, and Japan. Polaroids show her at the Coliseum in Rome, at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, and standing in the Red Square in front of St. Basil’s Cathedral in Moscow on a grey day.

Pamela Green said her mother was always “interested in the world.”

“We’d be sitting as a family watching some television show and it would reflect on some European country and she’d say, ‘Well, I’ve been there,’” Pamela Green said. “In many respects it was a highlight of her life, to be able to do that kind of travel.”

At home on the Coast, Ruby Green spent her leisure time reading books, keeping up with the news and watching movies. She especially loved Bette Davis films.

Having lived in the community where she taught for so many decades, she frequently saw former students. Some attended her church. Sometimes they happened to run into her as she was on a walk. A former student who had become a police officer once pulled her over for speeding. He didn’t write a ticket when he realized who she was, Judith Green said.

By Nichols’ estimate, 300 former students attended her 100th birthday party in 2016.

Nichols, who now lives in Virginia and is retired from the military, credits Green with helping to raise him.

“She’s the reason I am who I am,” Nichols said.

This story was originally published June 21, 2020 at 7:00 AM.