Pender elementary school renamed to honor origins

BURGAW, NC (WWAY) — In Pender County, an elementary school is returning to it’s roots. Burgaw Elementary School officially changed its name to C. F. Pope Elementary Thursday, honoring its origins as an all black school from 1892 to desegregation.

In the more than 125 years the school has existed, it’s housed Burgaw Institute (a boarding school for black children partnered with a local church), Burgaw Colored High School, and C. F. Pope High School, named after one of the school’s first and most celebrated principals.

“And I feel like this is our heritage,” said Arnold Moore Sr., a Burgaw resident. “Because, I tell you, so many great things happened here. This was the biggest black school that there was.”

Moore said the school has molded countless Pender County residents into who they are today.

According to Moore, “99 percent of the blacks in this area and around the area, they went here.”

Residents like Cheryl Wilson Beatty attended C. F. Pope all their childhood. Beatty did so with hand-me-down books inherited from white schools. She said C. F. Pope taught her she could learn, work, and be whoever she wanted to be, hand-me-downs or not.

“12 years. I attended first through twelfth grade,” Beatty explained. “I was the last class to graduate from here. It just means so much, this is where I learned about life.”

Beatty has worked since 2003 to help change the name, and for her, Thursday felt like finally coming home.

“This was like a gathering place to us. And it was home to us. And we all new one another basically. So it just means a lot to us, it’s like our homestead.

Pender County is honoring the past by bringing a community together in the present.