Richard Jewell, long-serving Broughton High School principal, dies
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- Richard Jewell led Broughton High through court-ordered desegregation.
- Jewell emphasized personal responsibility, smaller homerooms, and community input.
- Broughton gained national recognition by 1984 as a diverse, high-performing school.
Richard Jewell, the longtime Broughton High principal who saw Raleigh’s oldest and richest public school through desegregation and busing, easing racial tensions while keeping a national reputation for excellence, has died.
He was 96.
“He was cherished by his students and greatly appreciated by the teachers and staff he led,” said former Wake County Schools Superintendent Bill McNeal in an online tribute. “Dr. Jewell was a humble man with an erudite character. During his tenure at Broughton High School, the unofficial title of ‘flagship’ was often applied. Many administrators across the state and country sought his wisdom.”
Defusing tension with quiet authority
Born on a farm in Virginia, one of 10 children, Jewell started out teaching vocational agriculture before rising to the principal’s office, modeling himself on the rolled-up sleeves, country-school model he knew personally.
When he started at Broughton in 1970, the school remained nearly all-white and long associated with Raleigh’s wealthy class. Facing a court order, the school system opted to integrate along a 70%-30% split, which expanded Broughton’s district into Black neighborhoods and turned Ligon High, proud and all-Black, into a junior high school.
At the time, The N&O reported, Black students had no desire to attend Broughton and many parents from Raleigh’s most powerful families did not want them there. Black students told reporters at the time that they felt ignored, while white students accused Blacks of acting unruly at assemblies as a response.
Jewell, known as “Dr. Jewell” around Broughton, led with quiet authority.
“You could feel the tension in the building,” said Roy Teel, a former assistant principal who later became Broughton’s principal, in an interview at Jewell’s retirement in 1992. “But it was Dr. Jewell’s feeling that we would continue to have these things. He does not add fuel to the fire. He knows how to stand back, survey the situation and then move effectively but quietly and calmly.”
Ligon’s football coach came to Broughton, the officers of the schools’ honor societies merged and Jewell called assemblies to keep an imperfect peace.
Blacks reported uneven discipline and feelings of being ignored. Assaults on campus continued through the early ‘70s, and Jewell once had Raleigh police supervise the last day of school. But Jewell also had both students and faculty tour one another’s neighborhoods, creating surprises on both ends.
“Schools are a little society inside a bigger one,” Jewell said at the time. “They can’t help but show the effects of the society that controls them.”
One of five great schools
News reports from his era touted Jewell’s emphasis on personal responsibility rather that strict discipline, noting how he once tore up a stack of bad reports an incoming student brought from junior high and instructed him to start over with a clean slate. The boy became a football star.
“I thought the message he gave was impressive,” Richard Murphy, a protege who became a Wake high school principal, told The N&O in 1992. “You’re expected to grow into behavior. History doesn’t mean anything.”
Along the way Jewell reduced homeroom sizes and kept students there all four years to encourage relationships. He gave both students and parents input on proposed changes, creating the Broughton Community Association out of a stagnant PTA.
By 1984, U.S. News & World Report profiled Broughton as one of five “great” and diverse schools nationwide, highlighting “more inner-city youths of moderate means attending what was once considered a school for affluent whites.”
A Service of Witness to the Resurrection will be held at 2 p.m. Tuesday at White Memorial Presbyterian Church in Raleigh, according to Jewell’s obituary.