First black student returns to Lafayette High School after 61 years

Helen Caise Wade integrated Fayette County schools when she went to Lafayette High School for summer school in 1955, just a year after the Brown vs. Board of Education ruling ordered the desegregation of public schools.

But in her mind, the only hero of the story is her father, John Caise, who ran a successful construction business until that summer.

He didn’t go to high school because he had to work as a sharecropper with his father. So John Caise was determined his two daughters would get an education. He built his own business, one that quickly disappeared as soon as word got out among white employers that his daughter was at Lafayette.

“He could not get a job sweeping the streets here in Lexington,” she told a group of students at Lafayette on Wednesday. “They literally stripped him of a way to make a living for us.”

When Wade told her father she would quit Lafayette, he said no.

“He said, ‘You will not quit because in our family, we’re not known as quitters,’” Wade recounted.

For the next five years, John Caise lived during the week in Erlanger, where no one knew him and he could get work. His wife and daughters saw him only on weekends.

Wade finished her American history class that summer and returned to Douglass School, which served black students in grades 1-12. After graduation she attended Kentucky State University and the University of Kentucky before getting a job teaching social studies in Cleveland, where she worked for 30 years. Wade moved back to Lexington about a year ago and came back to Lafayette for the first time Wednesday.

She told a rapt audience of about 120 students that she read newspapers as a student and had read about Brown vs. Board of Education.

“I was a little brash,” she said. “They said I had a right to go; I said I want to go to Lafayette,” which was near where she lived.

“I didn’t know what I was doing, but I knew I had a right to go.”

Fayette County Public Schools did not officially desegregate all of its schools until a court order forced it in the 1970s.

Wednesday’s event was organized by counselor Danielle Easley and sophomores Chamique Cowan and Taleah Gipson as part of Lafayette’s Black History Month celebration. Wade told them she preferred smaller crowds, so she spoke twice Wednesday and will speak twice more Thursday.

Superintendent Manny Caulk, Fayette’s first black superintendent, attended one of Wednesday’s talks.

“I wouldn’t be here if wasn’t for the bravery and courage of Helen,” he said. “This is more than black history, this is our history.”

Wade said she took a tour of Lafayette and loved seeing the diversity so absent from her own experience. But she urged the students to keep working to improve race relations.

“You young people, it is your job to get this right,” she said. “We tried, but we haven’t done it.”

Wade also lectured students of all colors to take advantage of the education given freely to them.

“So what I’m saying to you is don’t get in these streets, don’t throw these books aside, don’t get into extracurricular activities” that aren’t related to school, she said. “Use your heads because somebody in here might be a president, might be a doctor, you might be a principal — you might be at Lafayette High School as a principal — but use your minds, be comfortable in your skin. ... Do you understand?”

When Wade finished, the students gave her a standing ovation.

“It’s nice to know we have that history here,” said senior Anthony Mays. “It was nice to have her here.”

Junior Esther Filyk was even more enthusiastic, calling the talk “amazing.”

“It was really inspirational to work harder and so something with my senior year and not slack off,” she said.

This story was originally published February 24, 2016 at 4:58 PM with the headline "First black student returns to Lafayette High School after 61 years."