When we started this oral history project, we thought the alumni database would give us answers. After all, these were students who attended Gordon—their names should have been there.
But when we searched, we found something shocking:
The Black students weren’t in the records.
Or if they were, their contact information was wrong or missing entirely.
The institution had erased them.
So we had to rebuild history from the ground up.
The first breakthrough came from Beth Pye, Gordon’s librarian.
She pulled out the Taps—Gordon’s annuals—and we started combing through them page by page, face by face, searching for Black and Brown students whose names had been left out of the archives.
We weren’t starting with names.
We were starting with faces.
Because that was the only way to prove they had been there.
With Beth’s help, we built a list—a fragile but necessary record of the Black and Brown students who had walked Gordon’s halls but had been erased from its history.
And then, we had to find them.
One of the first people to see the list was Tammy Jones Traylor Merritt, my mother-in-law, who was already deeply involved in this project as part of our diverse advisory board. From the very beginning, she helped guide how we approached this research, ensuring we were rooted in community memory, not just institutional records.
She took one look at the list and knew exactly where to go.
She and her sister, Susan Jones Miller, started making calls.
Tammy and Susan weren’t just reaching out blindly. They had something far more powerful than records: a deep knowledge of Barnesville’s history, passed down through their parents.
Their mother, Fletcher May Jones—known to everyone as Nanny—had been the town’s midwife.
She didn’t just deliver Black babies. She delivered white babies too.
If you were born in Barnesville, there was a good chance Nanny had been the one to bring you into the world.
Their father, Rich Jones, wasn’t a sharecropper, but he had managed the field hands who worked the local farms. He knew the Black families who labored there, where they came from, and where they went.
Because of them, Tammy and Susan had access to a different kind of history—not the kind written in alumni records, but the kind carried in stories, relationships, and lived memory.
Tammy and Susan found a lot of people this way. They could hear a name and say:
• “Oh, that’s Pearl’s son—he moved to Macon, but his sister is still here.”
• “That family used to live near the mill—let me ask around.”
• “I’ll check with the church—they’ll know where she is.”
Through them, we tracked down people who had been missing from Gordon’s records for decades.
But one name stayed missing.
Gaynell Few.
We knew she was important.
We knew she had been one of the first two Black students to integrate Gordon in 1965—alongside Vanessa Sutton.
We knew their names because they were in Marion Bush’s official history of Gordon up to 1972.
But we could not find them.
For a whole year, we searched.
And then, in the second year of interviews, something changed.
That’s when Bobby Edge found out what we were doing.
He saw that we were still looking for the first two Black students who integrated Gordon.
And then one evening, out of nowhere, I got a message:
“Good Evening!..My cousin Gaynell Few Montgomery’s phone number is ….She is highly interested!”
That was it. The missing piece.
This entire process proved something we already knew:
Black history isn’t kept in institutional archives. It’s kept in the community.
If we had relied only on official records, we never would have found them.
But because of the librarian who pulled the yearbooks
Because of the advisors who knew where to search
Because of elders who carried the town’s history in their memory
We recovered what had been lost.
If this project has taught me anything, it’s this:
History is not in the records. History is in the people.
And sometimes, to find the truth, you have to go back to the hands that held it first.
