Hattie Wyatt was hired as a Nursery Teacher in 1942, when the school was only a year old, and taught there for 36 years. She was not only the first Black teacher, but she was the earliest of the cadre of long-time employees whose example shaped the culture of the school. “This is somebody I try to channel every day,” says long-time Stage I Teacher Colleen Shelton, who started as Hattie’s assistant. “She just accepted children for who they were, where they were and what they were doing. She connected with every single child all the time.”

Hattie was from Jackson, Mississippi, and had earned her degree in education at Jackson State College (now University). After teaching for several years in Meridian, Mississippi, she decided to move north. She ran into barriers in Michigan, including obstacles in transferring her teaching certification, a tight job market, and racial prejudice. George and Annemarie hired her as a nursery school teacher and also to take care of the Roepers’ son, Tom, when he was born in 1943. Over the years, Annemarie gave Hattie credit for attracting many Black families to Roeper, who found her presence and status reassuring.

Always elegantly dressed and well-coiffed, Hattie was a pillar of the school and of camp, where she worked every summer. It was deeply traumatic when she died suddenly right after Christmas break on Jan. 9, 1978, when a case of flu turned into pneumonia.  Hattie was 67. Many still remember her memorial assembly held during school in the Big Dome, which was covered in the Detroit News. For many students, it was their first significant brush with mortality. Her devoted husband, Ray, who was a Detroit real estate broker, died soon after.

While Hattie was Roeper’s first African-American teacher, it’s impossible to think of her without thinking of her twin sister, Lucy Donald, who was hired in 1943. Although Lucy had her teacher certification, too, she worked at Roeper as a cook. She cooked meals for the students and also for the Roeper family. Lucy was Head Cook and Nutritionist of a bustling kitchen located in Hill House (called Main Building, then), a space that was the heart of the school in many ways. The small room next to the kitchen was a lounge over the years for bus drivers, teachers, and students, who filched bacon and cookies. She oversaw serving lunch, as well, and knew the students and their particular likes and dislikes.

Making lunch at Roeper was no small job. In the 1970s, when the school enrollment was around 550 students, she would oversee a small staff that made lunch for 650, including faculty. A math whiz, Lucy would calculate out the meals and rarely have any leftovers. She started teaching Home Economics classes in 1950 and was a sought-after math tutor. Lucy’s care for the school was immense. In 1958, Lucy came into a small inheritance and made a gift to the school to use for scholarships. Lucy retired in 1979, a year after Hattie passed away. She died September 27, 2003, at the age of 93.

Sheila Tanner Cain was the first African-American student at Roeper when she entered in 1955 at the age of 2. Her entrance to the school made Roeper the first independent school in Michigan to integrate. Her mother, Dr. Natalia Tanner, was a pioneering Black pediatrician who had gotten to know Annemarie through an informal child development study group that met in Detroit. Sheila’s father was Dr. Waldo Cain, a Black surgeon in Detroit. Sheila attended Roeper through ninth grade and then transferred in 1968 to Cass Tech in Detroit for high school. It was not uncommon for Black students to transfer to Detroit high schools. Although the Roepers were disappointed to lose the students’ participation in the community, they understood their desire to be with a larger Black community, particularly in the politically active 1960s and 1970s.

Roeper had several buses in those days, and starting at age 3, Sheila rode the bus from her home in the Russell Woods neighborhood of Detroit as it picked up students all the way through Birmingham. In a 2010 interview, she talked about how fun the bus was, particularly in the 1960s when the talk got more political. “If you didn’t watch the news the night before, you really didn’t have much to talk about on the bus,” she said.

A dancer and an actress all through her time at Roeper, Sheila became part of the Children’s Touring Theater at Cass. Sheila went to the University of Michigan as an undergraduate and also for law school, graduating in 1978.  She specialized in maritime law and joined a firm in New York City. She stayed only a few years in New York and returned to Detroit in the early 1980s, where she resided for the rest of her life. Sheila passed away in Michigan on April 14, 2020, at the age of 66 as the result of complications from multiple sclerosis. 

Dr. Alfred E. Thomas, Jr., was the first Black governing member of Roeper. When the Roepers relinquished ownership of the school to a trust in 1956 as part of its conversion to a school for the gifted, they created an Advisory Board. They asked Dr. Thomas, a parent at the school, to be on the inaugural Advisory Board.  Dr. Thomas was a prominent Detroit surgeon, hospital owner, and activist. One of the classrooms in the Quad Building is named for him as thanks for a donation he made to that building project.

Dr. Thomas was born in Birmingham, Alabama, and received his medical degree from Meharry Medical School in Nashville, Tennessee. During WWII, he was a flight surgeon for the Tuskegee Airmen. and saw service in Liberia as part of the first racially integrated unit assigned to overseas duty. His physician father, Dr. Alfred E. Thomas Sr., had come to Detroit in the 1920s and established hospitals to serve Black patients in the segregated medical system that existed at the time. Dr. Thomas Jr. founded two more hospitals and a convalescent home. He was also active with the Detroit NAACP chapter and was one of the founders of the Fight for Freedom Fund dinners, an event that is still the largest sit-down dinner of its kind. He served on the first Human Relations Committee of the Detroit Police Department and numerous medical and hospital commissions.

Dr. Thomas’s grand imagination was one of his most memorable characteristics.  Recognized as one of the 50 wealthiest African-Americans in America at one time, his greatest delight was in extravagant gifts and parties.  For many years, he threw an end-of-year party for the Roeper staff on his private seven-acre island in the Detroit River. When his stepdaughter married, he hosted the reception on that island, with music by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, as part of a wedding featured in Ebony Magazine (p.88). “One of my keenest recollections of him is the look in his eye on the many times when he spontaneously took it on himself to provide some extraordinary experience for a group of children,” said his daughter Linda Thomas ‘68*. “He enjoyed inspiring wonder and delight.”

Dr. Thomas was a collector of African-American art and contributed to the collection at the DIA. He also bred American saddlehorses, Black Angus cattle and dogs. His wife, Marion Stubbs Thomas, was the founder of Jack and Jill of America. Sadly, he passed away too soon in June 1968 at the age of 59.

Thom Waters, a Roeper parent, professor and education administrator, served as not only the first Black Chair of the Board of Trustees but also as the first Chair after George Roeper. Until 1973 the school’s governing structure was a small group of Trustees (George, Annemarie, and one other) that held the decision-making power and an Advisory Board that brought in differing perspectives and expertise. In 1973, the school community asked for increased access to decision-making and more diversity.  The number of Trustees was increased from three to five, and Thom Waters and Algea Harrison, a professor at Oakland University who was also Black, were selected as the new Trustees.

In 1974 the school had its first ISACS accreditation review. It was recommended that the school create a larger, independent Board and that George step down as Chair.  The Advisory Board was dismantled and the number of Trustees increased, and Thom was elected to become the Chair of the first independent Board of Trustees at the school. “It was a big honor to replace George,” said Thom in an interview. “One of the proudest things of my life.”

Thom, whose oldest son, Eric, attended Roeper for many years, had a philosophical and questioning mind and had early on formed a close connection with George and Annemarie.  “We were like family,” he said. As a child, he had attended a Major Work school in Cleveland, which was an early program for the gifted that shared some of Roeper’s philosophy. Like the Roepers, he was fascinated with the intersection of education, society, psychiatry, and race. He was a professor at Wayne State University, a consultant in race relations and active with programs such as New Detroit and Detroit Model Neighborhoods.  One of his most important educational endeavors was as professor and Assistant Dean at Monteith College at Wayne State University, an experimental college-within-a-college that used an interdisciplinary liberal arts approach to tackle new subjects, such as Black, Latin and Labor Studies.

Thom served as Chair until 1983, during the challenging period when the Roepers retired in 1979 (George) and 1980 (Annemarie). As someone with a long affiliation with the school, a deep affinity for the Roeper Philosophy, and close relationships with the Roepers, he was a critical steward for that momentous period.

Ernestine Sanders shattered several glass ceilings, often with a velvet hand that belied her astonishing skill set and commitment to excellence. Her tenure at The Roeper School began in 1977 as a M/US English Teacher. She became Assistant Director of the Middle/Upper School in 1987 and led the Middle School as Roeper’s first African-American administrator until her departure in 1993. Ernestine was also the first person of color to lead the Roeper Summer Day Camp, a role she held from 1985 to 1993, during which she helped diversify the staff and expand summer offerings.

Ernestine’s leadership style was noteworthy for its ease, elegance, and cheerfulness. In the halls of the Birmingham Campus, she would customarily be found at the top of the main stairway, welcoming students and staff while inconspicuously taking enrollment attendance and instilling a warm and gracious welcome. She added intellectual substance to the school’s 50th anniversary celebration by chairing the Sharing the Leadership conference in November 1991, featuring keynote speaker Ernest Boyer, the former US Commissioner of Education and a prominent reformer as President of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.  Not the least of her contributions was also lovingly guiding her own future Roeper alumni, Paul Sanders ’92 and Rebecca Sanders ’95, though the program. (Her oldest son, Rob, a gifted pianist, attended another school.)

Following her successful turn at Roeper, Ernestine moved on to become Executive Director of Education at Cornerstone Schools, where she applied many of the same principles that drive a Roeper education. The Cornerstone organization, an innovative network of schools in Detroit, is an important member of Detroit’s educational landscape, and Ernestine continues to demonstrate her light and powerfully effective style as Principal at Lincoln-King High School.