“Miss Ruby,” as she was affectionately known to her students, left a significant mark on education in Mount Pleasant and the Lowcountry at large. Ruby Middleston was born in Charleston in June 1905, and graduated from the Avery Institute in 1921 and South Carolina State College in 1924. For the first few years of her career Forsythe taught at Mount Pleasant’s Laing School, but after she married Episcopalian minister William Essex Forsythe in 1928 she started teaching at the one room school attached to the Faith Memorial Church on Pawley’s Island. At the time, this was the only school available to local Black students.

 

During her career Forsythe faced opposition from the Ku Klux Klan, who she later dismissed as “insecure.” She wrote in 1989 that “[Klan members] don’t feel that they will ever reach the height of some of their own people. And then they feel that some of the blacks will suppress them or surpass them in a way and that the opportunity some have they can’t get.” She was awarded four honorary doctorates for her work, and was posthumously inducted into the Georgetown County Women’s Hall of Fame in 2015. Forsythe passed away in Mount Pleasant in 1992, and is buried on Pawley’s Island. Her granddaughter, Vaudrien Forsythe Ray, carries on her legacy at Ruby’s Academy in Mount Pleasant. 

 

For more information: Ruby’s Academy, SC Encyclopedia, I Dream a World by Brian Lanker, Georgetown Times

 

Image Credit: Sculpture by Frederick Hart