Endyia Jones & Matthew Ordonez | GNP contributors
It’s the early 1960s, ECU is East Carolina College, and “at the time, if you wanted to have a party it needed to be approved by the dean of men or women,” recalls ECC alum Faye Boykin. Pictures in the Buccaneer Yearbook show a clean-cut, blue jeans and T-shirt vibe, and the student body was white.
Then came Laura Marie Leary, the first Black student to enroll full time and to graduate from the college-turned-university. Today, though, few students know of her. And all that’s remembered are the few snippets that identify her as a civil rights first at ECC-ECU.
The Greenville News Project went looking for the deeper story. It found that Leary was a reluctant Civil Rights pioneer. “I had no intentions of breaking any barriers or doing anything,” she said in a 2008 oral history that’s in the digital collection at ECU’s Joyner Library.
It also found that ECC’s Black custodians looked out for Leary, and that she married Allen R. Elliot, worked for the U.S. Department of Justice, had a daughter and a son, and died in 2013.
In 2015, her daughter, Rachel Byers, helped start an annual ECU scholarship in her mother's honor. Byers did not respond to GNP’s repeated requests for an interview. Neither did the ECU Black Alumni Chapter, which holds the annual fundraiser for the Leary scholarship. GNP could not locate Leary’s son.
Obedient daughter; no choice
In 1963, Leary was living in Vanceboro, south of Greenville. Her mother and father were active in the Civil Rights Movement, and so was Dr. Andrew Best, the first Black physician in Greenville.
Leary’s parents had met with Best to discuss her enrolling in ECC. They then sternly told her of her future.
It was “a week before the beginning of school, and my father and mother came home and told me … ‘You will be attending East Carolina’,” Leary said in the oral history interview with Dr. David Dennard, the first Black professor at ECU.
Leary recalled that she attended ECC because she wanted to be obedient to her parents. While that turned her into a civil rights pioneer in eastern North Carolina, she said she “didn’t really have a choice” about it.
She initially earned her Teacher’s Certificate after completing student teaching and methods courses at ECC. When she graduated in 1966, it was with a bachelor's degree in business administration with a concentration in accounting.
Leary made it clear in her oral history that she was unaware of the meeting her parents had with Best about her future. It was her academic success in grade school made her a suitable candidate for integrating ECC.
That came up in a conversation Best had with Dr. Leo Jenkins, the then-president of ECC. Best too sat for an oral history, and in it he recalled Jenkins saying it would be “damaging” to admit a Black student who “couldn’t cut it.”
Best said that one of Jenkins’ concerns about desegregating ECC was the reaction from people who opposed against integration. But Best recalled saying that after a year, students would become more accustomed to seeing a Black woman among them.
Leary said that before classes started, she went to the Registrar’s office to pay her tuition with a check her father had given her to fill in. She was 17 at the time. In the office she was given a list of classes she would be taking. She took the SAT two days before her first class, but no one ever told her what she scored.
Leary recalled that the Registrar told her, “‘You will never make it here’.” That motivated her to at least try, she said. Still, she had no control over much of her experience at ECC: “I was just going where people told me to go,” she said in the oral history.
Not your typical experience
As far as Leary could remember, she did not have a freshman orientation. She did not live on campus during the first quarter. Her pastor at the time, Reverend John Taylor, and his wife provided Leary with a place to stay to make things more comfortable for her according to her oral history.
For the second and third quarters of her freshman year at East Carolina, she lived with her aunt and uncle. When Leary moved onto campus as a sophomore, she was never assigned a roommate until another Black student named Bernice Williams arrived at East Carolina.
Until Williams left school, she was Leary's only roommate in Ragsdale Hall.
For the most part, Leary stayed away from the dining hall. The first time she went she was shoved back and forth between two groups of students until she left. “So, I decided I would come and get what I need and go back to my room,” she said in her oral history.
Leary tried to keep to herself, but about 10 years after she graduated, she learned she was never really alone. Some of ECC’s Black custodians watched over her as she moved around campus. “There was one at the end of my dorm and there was another one stationed around the corner,” she recalled. “They had a relay going.”
One in particular stood out. Her name was Mary Taff, and she kept an eye on Leary, who would arrive early for class. Taff started inviting Leary into a storage closet where she kept a Pepsi on ice for the ECC’s lone Black student.
“She said, ‘Every day now when you come back, come a little early and come in my closet and we can just chit chat a little bit’,” Leary said. “I believe in angels, and those custodial workers were my angels, and I cannot say enough how appreciative I was of that because I was really, really afraid.”
Leary’s first homecoming was an embarrassing time. She remembered her brothers and sisters describing how they dressed up for homecomings at the Historically Black Universities they attended. Based on that, she was excited to wear her best outfit to ECC’s homecoming game.
Her aunt tailored a special suit, and Leary was very proud of it. But as it turned out, “everybody else had on blue jeans, T-shirts and they looked at me, you know, I could just see them snickering and I was so humiliated,” she said in her oral history. It was the only homecoming she attended in her four years at East Carolina.
Alone and unnoticed
Classes at ECC weren’t like her high school experience. There she was well-known and engaged in cheerleading, the debate team and other activities. She graduated as the valedictorian and was voted “Best All Around” by her classmates.
In high school, “I was a very outgoing student. I would have loved to have been involved in some things [at ECC]. I was just too scared,” Leary said.
Most of her ECC professors were “very cold” toward, she said. There was one exception: Dr. Francis Adams in the Department of English. He would at least try to be cordial toward her.
In her oral history, Leary said she was often picked on in classes. Other students called her names and even threw spitballs at her. Sometimes she was completely ignored by students and professors. Leary recalls only two students who were friendly to her.
She said there was a time when she seriously considered leaving ECC because of how alone she felt and how hard it was being the only Black student.
Before ECC, "I always felt loved, always felt I belonged, always felt a part of the group, always felt that I was somebody,” she said. “And I think when I came here my spirit was broken; it was just broken. I think intellectually, I was prepared but emotionally I was drained of … the real me.”
All of that made it hard for her to feel any pride about being ECC’s first Black student. In fact, she said, “I have been very reluctant to tell anybody I was the first Black student to enroll at East Carolina.”
Recognition at long last
After Leary graduated in 1966, she did not return to East Carolina until 36 years later. In 2002 she came back on an invitation from ECU’s Ledonia Wright Cultural Center.
She recalled in the oral history that a woman named Nell Lewis talked her into coming back for an event at the center. “I don’t know if you know Nell Lewis,” she told her oral history interviewer. “She could talk you into anything.”
In the 36 years Leary was away from East Carolina, she worked as a in an all-Black school and then relocated to Washington, D.C. There she worked in accounting for the U.S. Department of Justice. She retired from that career in 2006, according to an ECU News Services article titled, “History Maker: Laura Marie Leary.”
Leary met her husband, Allen R. Elliott, in the nation’s capital, and they married in 1971. They had two children, Rachel Marie Elliott and Reginald Allen Elliott.
In 2012, Leary returned to ECU for homecoming. It marked 50 years since the desegregation of ECU.
Leary had a part in the homecoming parade and spoke with students and other alums. She also attended her first-ever East Carolina football game, where she was presented a plaque by then-chancellor Dr. Steve Ballard and then-Chairman of the Board of Trustees Robert Lucas.
About eight months after the homecoming celebration, in 2013, she died.
Today Leary is remembered at ECU with an on-campus street named “Leary Court” and by a scholarship in her name that’s awarded to a student of color studying in a field that’s historically underrepresent racial and ethic minorities.
Jones and Ordonez reported this story for the Spring 2023 class, In-Depth Reporting Capstone.
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