Editor’s note: This story originally published in 2023.
As Coco Gauff wows the tennis world and stirs pride in her Delray Beach hometown, it’s fair to say she stands on the shoulders of her grandmother, who had a significant role in the town and the nation’s history decades ago.
At the same age Gauff turned pro, Yvonne Lee was breaking down the barriers of segregation. It was 1961. Lee was popular and smart, had been named to the upcoming homecoming court and looked forward to being captain of the basketball team at her all-Black Carver High. But then the 15-year-old was given a daunting assignment.
Headed into the next fall, she was to be the first Black student to attend Delray Beach’s all-white Seacrest High School.
Gauff has talked about her grandmother, Yvonne Lee Odom, and her experience as the tennis star spoke out on issues such as Black Lives Matter.
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How did U.S. Open, Wimbledon tennis star Coco Gauff’s grandmother become the first Black student at Delray Beach’s Seacrest High?
That first day Lee went to Seacrest — Sept. 25, 1961 — security was tight, for good reason.
The U.S. Supreme Court had ruled in 1954 in Brown v. Board of Education that segregated schools were unconstitutional. In the wake of the ruling, the NAACP began seeking Black students who would be good candidates to attend all-white schools.
By November of that year, the first, 6-year-old Ruby Bridges, and her mother were met with crowds yelling viscious slurs as they were escorted by four federal marshals into a New Orleans elementary school. New Orleans required Black students to pass an exam. Ruby did. Norman Rockwell in 1964 would celebrate her courage with a painting titled “The Problem We All Live With.”
Lee’s father, the late Rev. R.M. Lee, pastor of St. John Missionary Baptist Church in Boynton Beach, thought his daughter was a great candidate — she was gifted in academics as well as sports.
“We were trying to get the top kids so they could not say we were dumb,” he said.
Lee had attended all-Black Carver High school her freshman year. (Carver and Seacrest would later merge to become Atlantic High School for the 1970-71 school year.) Lee was the first student to integrate a school in southern Palm Beach County. When her Carver classmates learned where she would be going, they encouraged her.
“We need you to do this,” they told her.
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What happened to Coco Grauff’s grandmother on the first day at Seacrest High?
While school integration was top news of the day, Lee downplayed the potential drama.
“I was just going to school,” she later told The Palm Beach Post. “I wasn’t afraid. If they told me to integrate, I was going to integrate.”
She arrived at 10 a.m. when the other 1,000 students were already in class. Traffic had been blocked outside. She met her student “buddy,” Paula Adams, who walked her to class hand-in-hand. Lee also spoke with principal Robert Fulton in the faculty lounge. He was a “nice man,” she told the Boca News in 2002.
Today, Fulton’s name adorns the school district headquarters, the Fulton-Holland Educational Services Center. Sharing that billing with Fulton is Black attorney Bill Holland, who filed a lawsuit in 1956 when a West Palm Beach elementary school refused to let his son attend.
Lee said aside from students gawking, her first day was uneventful. “They were polite but apprehensive. This was the unknown.”
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At Carver, Lee had been chosen to lead the basketball team, by coach C. Spencer Pompey. But at Seacrest, she agreed not to play any sports or ride the school bus due to safety concerns — though her absence from sports didn’t last.
When Seacrest officials also directed her to use the bathroom in the faculty lounge, she refused.
After school that day, she said, one student called her the n-word.
Yvonne Lee Odom’s successful career in education, which she would pass on to her children
By the time Lee graduated in 1964, she had four Black classmates. She would go on to earn a degree in elementary education from Florida Atlantic University and a master’s in reading from Nova University. She taught math at Carver Middle School and married her high-school sweetheart from Carver High, Eddie Odom Jr. Several of her children also became teachers, including Coco Gauff’s mom, Candi.
Her son, Eddie Odom III, turned down a draft pick from the Seattle Mariners to pursue a college education.
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Yvonne Odom and her husband founded the Delray Beach American Little League to extend the sport to kids in mostly Black neighborhoods not covered by the other league.
“I learned a lot about her stories,” Gauff told the Miami Herald in 2020.
Yvonne Lee Odom says she, too, learned from her own experience.
“By attending Seacrest for three years, I found that people are people, no matter what. You’ve got the good, bad and ugly, regardless of the race.”
Editor’s note: A previous version of this story had the incorrect year of the Brown v. Board of Education decision.
Holly Baltz is the investigations editor at The Palm Beach Post. You can reach her at hbaltz@pbpost.com.
