Marin exhibit honors Black achievers from Tam High

A new exhibition in Mill Valley celebrates the accomplishments of notable Black students and staff members from Tamalpais High School.

The exhibit, titled “Breaking Through: Black History at Tam High, 1910 to the Present,” is free and open to the public. It is at the Mill Valley Public Library at 375 Throckmorton Ave.

“This is about people who left Tam and went on to do great things,” said Marin City author and historian Felecia Gaston.

“We also wanted to address race relations: I’ve been reading recently that we’ve got these issues going on at Tam,” she said, referring to an incident last year involving a student video that included a racial slur. “Well, it was also going on in the 1960s — they brought in Project Breakthrough to add Black staff and tutors as a support system.”

Gaston is curating the event with Natalie Snoyman and Ted Mann, archivists at the library.

An opening reception for the exhibit is scheduled for 5 to 7:30 p.m. Tuesday at the library.  Some of the figures featured in the exhibit are expected to attend.

By focusing on the Black graduates of Tam High, which has a predominantly white student population, the curators say they are using a case study that reflects a much larger historic timeline for the country as a whole.

“The exhibition concurrently documents the evolution of race relations at Tam High and how they mirrored broader social and historical developments,” Snoyman said.

She said the history line runs from “the birth of Marin City in the 1940s through the Civil Rights Movement of the ‘50s and ‘60s, and, more recently, the Black Lives Matter movement and the response to the 2020 murder of George Floyd.”

Since January, Snoyman and Mann, with consultation from Gaston, have been combing through Tam High yearbooks, photos, newspaper articles, oral histories, biographies, videos and other historical resources on the experiences and accomplishments of African American students at Tam High.

“Tam High is such a bridge between Mill Valley and Marin City,” Snoyman said. “It’s where a lot of these students meet — sometimes for the first time.”

The exhibit includes William L. Patterson, who graduated in 1911 and became a pioneering civil rights leader; renowned musician George Duke, a 1963 graduate; and Honor Jackson, a 1966 graduate who was a defensive back in the National Football League.

The exhibit also includes Marin City families whose children attended Tam High. Some, such as civic leader Terrie Harris-Green, a 1967 graduate, and her son, Play Marin founder Paul Austin, a 1994 graduate, are still active in the effort to expand equity and diversity in Marin.

“What the exhibition documents is both a Marin County story, with specifically local contours, and, at the same time, very much a larger American story,” Mann said in an email. “The experience of the Black community in Southern Marin since the 1940s is, in many ways, a microcosm of what was taking place at the national level.”

Royce McLemore, a 1960 graduate and Marin City civic leader, and her granddaughter, doctoral candidate Malachia Hoover, a 2008 graduate, are also featured.

It also highlights Tam High faculty and staff such as Henry Marshall, Jewel Barrow, Bettie Hodges and Barbara Morgan.

“This exhibit will provide a platform and forum for multiple generations of Tam High’s Black community — as well as the larger Marin community — to learn, connect and help shape our collective future,” Snoyman said.

Kendra Pollack of Mill Valley, a longtime volunteer in the Tamalpais Union High School District, the Mill Valley School District and Marin City, said she supports the exhibit as a way for children to connect with and learn about diverse groups, starting in elementary school.

“I think it’s important to learn about the history and the diversity, the problems that they had all the way back in the ’50s and ’60s,” she said.

“It’s still going on — I’m learning to pay attention,” Pollack said. “We need to do better, and we need the school districts to continue the work and to do more.”

Snoyman said the show’s opening is timed to coincide with the 57th anniversary of the original 1967 Breakthrough Day at Tam High. The event was an initiative to address racial tensions and segregation on campus and in the community.

Later, there was Project Breakthrough, an educational program organized by Lanny Berry from 1968 through the 1970s.

“In some regards, you see these very disheartening repetitions: The racist graffiti that appeared at Tam in 2017 and 2021, for example, had numerous precursors, from the early 1960s through the late 1990s,” Mann said.

“These point to the ways in which we haven’t come nearly as far as we’d like to think we have,” Mann said.

The exhibition runs through April 30. The library’s hours are 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Monday through Thursday, 10 a.m to 5 p.m. Friday and noon to 5 p.m. Saturday and Sunday.