Edmond Wysinger – a little-known south Valley resident – just wanted to enroll his son in the best school he could find. After being turned down, he fought a fight that would change education across the Valley and beyond.

It’s a pursuit of history and culture that has kept research historian Michael Smith gathering knowledge about his community for years.

“My wife is German-Italian – my daughters are mixed. So it was important to me to show them the culture of Tulare County.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a walk through a cemetery can be a wealth of information.

What appeared to be one of the most insignificant, barely legible stones may very well have been the biggest gem of them all.

In 1849, Edmond Wysinger was a slave part of a group traveling from South Carolina to the town of Grass Valley.

So what brought him west? It was the California Gold Rush.

Edmond, along with his German slave owner and others worked at the surface mines.

Eventually he saved $1,000 and bought his freedom. Once free, he traveled south – stopping in Merced where he would meet his future wife Pernessa. The couple married in 1862, and they settled in Visalia.

The Civil War would end in 1865, but another battle was in its infancy – and Wysinger was about to be an unwitting soldier.

Wysinger, a laborer and part time preacher, had eight children – six boys and two girls. He always stressed the value of education.

His children’s first formal education came at what was known as the Visalia Colored School. Writings housed at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C. were by Mervyn Shipley. They describe the first place where African-American children were being educated – it was in a barn of a black farmer.

Within a year, the teacher – Mr. Scott – would purchase an acre of property and open a private school in town. A few years later, it would be annexed into the Visalia School District.

Meanwhile, construction was underway across town for the Visalia School. This campus was only for white children of the town’s roughly 2,800 residents.

A historical marker sits just behind the town library.

In the years that followed, state laws evolved and required school facilities for whites and non-whites to be equal. A quick glance at both and the contrast couldn’t be more apparent. The policy was a dream deferred.

“I can give you a shack and call it a school and build a mansion and call it a school, too – they’re not equal,” Smith said.

The inequality prompted Wysinger to attempt to enroll his son Arthur into the Visalia School in 1888.