Delayed, not denied
At 83, senior is finally graduating from lifetime of racism and hardship
Staff writer
It wasn’t that Julia Clark, who loved choir, gym, and fractions, didn’t like school. It was as if school didn’t like Julia.
Her recollection of 1950s Wichita North High School is a lot of “hurt.”
Teachers refused to call her “Julia,” and instead harshly used “Straughter,” her maiden name.
She slumped in her desk with embarrassment when a teacher demanded she stand and recite Shakespeare in front of her class – a largely white group, some sniggering and calling her racial slurs.
After she gave birth to a boy and got married to a handsome former Marine the summer of 1959, between her sophomore and junior year, she explains, “I went to the school and I told them that I wanted to finish my classes.”
She didn’t get past the office. The principal told Julia school was over for her.
But, the principal was wrong.
Clark, now 83, has finally finished high school. She’s a member of the Centre High School graduating class of 2026.
Proudly beaming, she says she expects to don cap and gown Sunday and cross the commencement stage to the cheers of four generations of her children, grand-, great-, and great-great-grandchildren.
She’s never been to Centre High School. But for the past two years, sitting in her throne-like living-room chair with a laptop, she attended Kansas Online Learning Program classes administered by Centre.
In an interview on the porch of her southwest Wichita duplex, Clark — who thinks she’s one of only a couple of her 17 siblings to get a high school degree — talked about her accomplishments.
Alternately issuing belly laughs and wiping tears from behind her thick glasses, she described a tough but good life raising six children who— “Every last one of them,” she emphasized — graduated from high school.
(There would have been two others, she pointedly noted, crying softly: a stillborn child taken from her before she was able to see it; and Clayton, who at age 9 in 1973 was found by his sister hanging by a rope in a tree – suspiciously like a hate crime, but never solved by police, she said.)
After watching her own parents balance responsibility for 18 children with jobs as a hotel bellhop and a house cleaner, she aspired to go to school for nursing or cooking.
But without a high school diploma, she worked in a pawn shop and a coin laundry to help her husband, a construction worker, support the family.
Two years ago, her youngest daughter, Karen Clark, inquired about how her mom could get her degree.
The family was surprised to discover that she quickly, easily, and without charge could start classes online.
“Vickie said, ‘you can start now,’ ” Clark recalls, referring to Vickie Jirak, KOLP coordinator at Centre.
She started at the sophomore level in August, 2024, and took 24 classes, one at a time in as a quick as a month each, using her daughter’s laptop though the school would have issued a free Chromebook if she’d needed it.
The first class was possibly the biggest hurdle.
“It was about financial math,” she said. “God, that was hard. I’m glad we got done with that.”
She doesn’t remember too many specifics about the class, but she came away with this wisdom: “I learned how to make sure that if I ever had to go to school, I put my head in the book and read everything first, and then do it. I know that now. I sure do.”
Her daughter, Karen, 55, would hover nearby, sometimes reading class content to her mom aloud or helping her understand assignment directions.
When it came to tests, whether it was English, science, history, or math, Clark was on her own to poke laptop keys.
She doesn’t know her grade-point average. She simply had to get at least a 60% exam score to pass a class. She said she usually scored between 70% and 90%.
But in sweet redemption almost 70 years after refusing to stand up and recite Shakespeare, she got a 95% in her last class, which focused on Shakespeare’s “Hamlet.”
She gave big credit to the soft touch of Centre staff members who would check in to encourage her when they didn’t see progress being made on courses.
When Jirak “wouldn’t see you doing any work on there, she’d say, ‘You’re getting behind. Move up.’ I’d catch up.”
Clark knows exactly what she’ll do with her diploma: Frame it and put it “right on the wall,” she said, jabbing a finger at a blank spot facing the front door.
“Somebody come through the door, they can see it.”