Annual celebration at Rogers High School has a long legacy of promoting and making Black history

The 1970s dawned with promises of hope and healing following the bloody, turbulent times of the previous decade. As the country celebrated the hard-fought successes of the American Civil Rights movement, a history teacher at Rogers High School initiated a program to promote Newport’s Black heritage and to honor distinguished members of the city’s Black community.

The first Rogers High School Black History Month Assembly was held in February 1972. Two awards — one named in honor of a 19th century abolitionist and prominent Black businessman in Newport, and the other bearing the name of the first Black physician to practice in the city — were presented, starting a tradition that has continued for more than 50 years.

Dr. Michael N. Browner, Jr., remembers the sense of pride that buoyed him across the stage when he and classmate Kelly A. Tyler were named co-recipients of the Dr. Marcus F. Wheatland Award during the 1993 assembly at Rogers. Students and faculty, elected officials, local clergy, and members of Newport’s Afro American community filled the high school’s expansive auditorium, where Shirley A. Cherry received the George T. Downing Award in recognition of her dedication to civic causes and community work.

The annual assembly has honored more than 100 students and adults over the years, but Browner is the only one to receive both the Wheatland Award, presented to an outstanding student, and the Downing Award, which recognizes an adult who exemplifies good citizenship and dedication to the community. Twenty-eight years after Browner was named the recipient of the student award, he was presented the 2021 Downing Award. By then he had earned a doctorate degree in education and had enjoyed a long career as asocial studies teacher at Thompson Middle School, where he was named principal in 2023.

“I was proud to receive the George T. Downing Award as an educator,” he says. “It’s something I’m really proud of.”

Hayward Eugene Corry — known as Gene to fellow Rogers faculty members — planned and produced the school’s inaugural Black History Month Assembly in 1972, before Browner was born. Channing Memorial Church and Community Baptist Church were early supporters of the event and continue to fund a college scholarship created sometime after student Gregory Jenkins was named the first recipient of the Dr. Marcus F. Wheatland Award. Oliver Burton was the first community member to receive the George T. Downing Award.

“It was his brainchild,” Miguel “Mike” Lopes says of Corry, a history instructor whose classes included discussions of race relations and the Afro American experience. Lopes, a guidance counselor, joined Corry in 1973 and worked on the committee tasked with planning the annual assembly and selecting the award recipients. It is believed to be the longest-running high school assembly in the country honoring Black history and heritage.

When Corry retired from teaching, Lopes became chairman of the steering committee and held that role until after the 2023 assembly. By then the event was formally known as the Rev. Robert L. Williams National Black History Month Assembly at Rogers High School. The name was changed to honor the late Rev. Williams, a former pastor of Community Baptist Church and an early supporter of the event.

“It’s a labor of love,” Lopes says of the assembly. “It’s important that we share the community’s Black history and help minority students get some well-deserved recognition.

”After the 2016 assembly, Lopes and several other longtime committee members told a reporter from The Newport Daily News they hoped some younger members of Newport’s Black community would become involved. Former mayor Paul Gaines, now deceased, was 84 at the time and spoke of the need for fresh ideas and new perspectives. Many committee members were in their seventies or eighties, he said, and had been involved since the assembly’s inception.

“We need some new ideas, new thoughts and changes in the program. We’ve always done basically the same program,” said Gaines, Newport’s first Black mayor and the recipient of the 1982 George T. Downing Award.

Victoria Johnson was the principal at Rogers from 1997 to 2003, years after she graduated from the high school and later taught physical education there. She was the first Black woman to be appointed principal of a high school in Rhode Island and, like Gaines, oversaw the Black History Month Assembly evolve into a community event she says reflects the values of Rogers students, faculty and staff.

“This is Rogers High School, where they know the importance of diversity, where there is respect and honor for every body,” says Johnson. She is the recipient of the 2004 Downing Award and continues to serve on the planning and selection committee. During an interview at the 2016 assembly, she expressed confidence in the event’s future, noting the commitment of committee members as well as the pastors and the congregants at Channing Memorial and Community Baptist churches.

Lopes’ confidence in Veronica Perkins Mays, recipient of the 1979 Wheatland Award , and Frank Newsome, who received the award when he was a senior at Rogers in 1991, enabled him to step aside two years ago after 50 years on the steering committee. “I knew it was time,” he says. “I had to find young people to take on the responsibility.”

Mays and Newsome are aware and respectful of the assembly’s history, says Lopes, as well as the local and national history it is intended to celebrate and promote. They made their debut as the assembly’s co-chairs last year.

One exciting change, Mays says, is the inclusion of St. John the Evangelist Church, which joined Channing Memorial and Community Baptist churches last year to sponsor the Dr. Marcus F. Wheatland Award and contribute to the scholarship that accompanies it.

Mays smiles as she shares her most vivid memory of the 1979 assembly when she, at 17, received the award. It included a $50 gift coin to Cherry & Webb, a popular women’s and children’s clothing store — long since gone out of business — that operated on Bellevue Avenue, in the spot where CVS Pharmacy is located. There was no college scholarship then, it was added sometime later, but Mays remembers being thrilled with the gift coin, which seemed exorbitant at the time.

The 2025 Black History Month Assembly was held Friday, February 7. It took place in the Rogers cafeteria because the auditorium was razed as part of the construction plan for the new high school. With far less seating available, the audience was limited to upperclassmen and invited guests, although the event was livestreamed throughout the school, which resorted to online virtual assemblies throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.

Newsome, the other half of the new leadership team, is a behavior specialist and longtime coach at Rogers, where he was a star athlete as a student. He’s spent a good part of his life at the high school and is fiercely loyal to the institution and the students it seeks to educate.

“You know what our strength is? It’s our diversity,” he says. “I found out really quick when I went to school [Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Florida] that I am super lucky to grow up where I did.

“We didn’t have the tensions other places did. Maybe it’s because we’re somewhat insulated. Maybe we figured it out before everyone else did.”

Unlike admission to college or most scholarships, students don’t apply for the Wheatland Award. Teachers, counselors, and coaches — those who interact with students most and know them best — nominate candidates based on their personal character, involvement in school, community, or church activities, and other criteria. Academic performance and volunteer work are considered, but neither is a deciding factor, says Mays. “Some kids have to work to contribute to the household and may not have time to volunteer,” she explains.

The list of students and adults honored at the Rogers Black History Month Assembly since 1972 reveals barely a degree of separation between several award recipients. They include Newsome and his son, Max, who are among those in the parent-and-child group. The Dr. Marcus F. Wheatland Award was presented to the younger Newsome, presently a senior majoring in business at Coastal Carolina University, in 2021, exactly thirty years after his father received the same award.

Coincidentally, 2021 also was the year Max Newsome’s seventh-grade social studies teacher received the George T. Downing Award. That recipient, of course, was Dr. Michael N. Browner, Jr., the first to receive the Wheatland Award as a student and the Downing Award as an adult.

“The sky’s the limit,” the principal tells his middle school students.“ Anything is possible with hard work and perseverance.”

The Men Behind The Names

GEORGE T. DOWNING was born in New York City in 1819 and arrived in Newport in the 1840s. He built Sea Girt House on Bellevue Avenue, across from Touro Park, in 1854-55. The expansive, multistory structure housed Downing’s residence, a restaurant, his catering business, and “accommodations for gentlemen boarders.” A suspicious fire destroyed the building in 1860, but Downing used a $40,000 insurance payout to build a larger structure on the site, which came to be called The Downing Block.

He was an abolitionist, active in the Underground Railroad, and campaigned with Frederick Douglass to secure full civil rights for formerly enslaved people. Downing used personal funds to support his nearly 10-year quest to integrate public schools in Newport and throughout the state. He is among those credited with the General Assembly’s overwhelming vote in 1866 to outlaw separate schools, ending legalized educational segregation in Rhode Island.

After the Civil War ended, Downing became immersed in other reform efforts, including labor organizing. He played a vital role in the formation of the Colored National Labor Union in 1869.

Downing died at his Newport home in July 1903 and is buried in the city’s Island Cemetery, located at 30 Warner Street. The Boston Globe called him “the foremost colored man in the country” and praised him for seeking liberty and equality for all Americans, regardless of skin color.

Downing was inducted into The Rhode Island Heritage Hall of Fame in 2003.

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DR. MARCUS F. WHEATLAND was the first Black physician to practice medicine in Newport and one of the first health care providers in the United States to master the use of the X-ray machine and use it to diagnose and treat patients.

Born in the British West Indies in 1868, he attended private schools on the island of Barbados before moving to the United States at the age of 19. After graduating from Howard University in 1895 with a degree in medicine, Wheatland bought an X-ray machine and opened a medical office on John Street in Newport.

As his reputation spread as an expert in the science and use of X-rays, Wheatland was invited to share his knowledge with various medical organizations. In 1909 he gave a lecture at the National Medical Association’s annual meeting in Boston. That led to his election as its president, followed by a seat on the association’s executive board.

Working with the Newport Association for the Relief and Prevention of Tuberculosis, Wheatland fought to stop the spread of disease among city residents. And in addition to his medical service, the doctor fulfilled his civic duty by serving on the Newport City Council.

When he died in 1934 at the age of sixty-six, The Newport Daily News published his obituary with this opening sentence:

“The life of the late Dr. Marcus F. Wheatland should be an inspiration to every boy, white or colored, who believes he has no chance to succeed.”

Wheatland is buried in Island Cemetery in Newport. Sixty years after his death, the city changed the name of West Broadway to Dr. Marcus F. Wheatland Boulevard in his honor. He was inducted into the Rhode Island Heritage Hall of Fame in 2017.