Sidney Lanier High School is a public high school in Montgomery, Alabama, United States.
History
Established in 1910 on the southern outskirts of downtown Montgomery, Alabama, the school was named for a Southern poet, Sidney Lanier, who lived in Montgomery during 1866–67.
The high school moved to new facilities in 1929 further to the south. The late Gothic Revival building was constructed 1928–1929 to consolidate the original Lanier (then in a building now known as Baldwin Magnet School, formerly Baldwin Junior High School) and Montgomery County High School (now the Cloverdale campus of Huntingdon College, formerly Cloverdale Junior High School).
The name of the new school was decided by the outcome of a football game between the two schools in the fall of 1928, which Lanier won.
Frederick Ausfeld was the architect, and Algernon Blair the contractor. The building opened for class in September 1929 and was dubbed "The Million Dollar School" due to its approximate cost.
Integration
The school was desegregated in September 1964. The first black students graduated in the summer of 1967. As late as the 1960s, the student population of Lanier was all white. In 2004, the student population included only six white students. Besides white flight, another factor influencing this change can be found in the neighborhood schools concept adopted by the Montgomery Board of Education. The zoned neighborhood surrounding Lanier – once all white – is now almost completely black.
In 2020 the school district's board of education voted to change the school's name, but in 2022 the board decided to merge the school with George Washington Carver High School (Montgomery, Alabama), and "the Lanier building will no longer be in use after the students move".
Academics
In 2006, Lanier was the only traditional public high school in Montgomery to meet federally mandated No Child Left Behind standards.
Athletics
Lanier High School has won state championships in all high school sports. In 1966, Lanier was triple state champs, winning top honors in football, basketball, and track and field. 1966 was the first of three successive state championships in football, with the school's last state championship occurring in 1968.
Football coach Bobby Wilson and basketball coach Bill Joiner led their teams in the state for most of the 1960s, winning six football (1957, 1961, 1964, 1966, 1967, and 1968) and four basketball (1962, 1963, 1965, and 1967) state championships in the large high school category.
Lanier–Lee rivalry
The Lee–Lanier rivalry in Montgomery was unmatched in the state in the late 1950s and through the 1960s. For years, Sidney Lanier was the only public school for white students in segregated Montgomery. As Montgomery's population began to increase, another school for whites was built in 1955, Robert E. Lee High. Its arrival gave birth to one of the state's biggest high school football rivalries.
Lanier won three Class 4A titles (1966, 1967, 1968) during this era, while Lee won in 1969 and 1970. After 1970, Montgomery schools would win state championships again, but never again would Montgomery dominate football in Alabama like it did in the 1960s. Racial integration and the emergence of Jeff Davis High School as a football power in 1970 diminished the Lee–Lanier rivalry.
The Lanier dynasty
Lanier started its tradition of winning State Championships in prep football in 1920, winning the first recognized state championship in Alabama. Lanier was champion again in 1922 and 1939. Later, in the mid-1950s, came the "Wilson Era" in Lanier football.
Lanier also achieved a sustained dynasty in basketball, playing in more state championship games and winning more state championships in the large high school category than any other high school from the 1920s through its most recent championship in 2001. In the early 1950s Sidney Lanier High School won the state championship in baseball 6 years in a row (1950–1955).
Famous players
Famous players at Lanier abound, but two stand out in particular: Bart Starr and Richmond Flowers, Jr.