At the same age that tennis star Coco Gauff turned pro, her maternal grandmother Yvonne Lee Odom was making history, desegregating Palm Beach County schools as a student.
In 1961, while preparing to captain the basketball team at her all-Black Carver High school, a 15-year-old Odom was selected to leave her school to attend an all-white school. She was to be the first Black student to attend Delray Beach’s all-white Seacrest High School.
On September 25, 1961, her first day at Seacrest, there was heavy security. Seven years before this, the U.S. Supreme Court had desegregated public schools in the Brown v. Board of Education case.
Following that ruling, the NAACP started searching for brilliant Black students to attend all-white schools. In Delray Beach, Odom’s father, Rev. R.M. Lee, who was the pastor of St. John Missionary Baptist Church in Boynton Beach, believed that his daughter, a student-athlete who was also good in academics, was the ideal candidate to integrate Delray schools.
Odom’s dad and school officials later chose her to be the first Black student at Seacrest. At 10 a.m. when she arrived at Seacrest on September 25, 1961, students, numbering about 1,000, were already in class. Besides tight security, there was heavy traffic outside when her student “buddy,” Paula Adams, walked her to class hand in hand, according to The Palm Beach Post.
The local newspaper headline at the time read, “Negro Student Integrated Quietly At Seacrest High.”
“And I look at it like a Jackie Robinson,” Odom recently described that moment to WLRN. “Jackie Robinson was not the best ballplayer among all the African Americans that played the sport, but he was the best, they felt, that could endure the insults, which they knew were coming,” she said.
She recounted how school administrators told her to use the faculty bathroom in order to protect her.
“And I refused that. I told them, I’m using the same restroom everybody else is using,” Odom told WLRN.
The school also didn’t want her to ride the school bus and join physical education classes for the same reason.
“They didn’t put me in a PE class. Now, that, I didn’t have a choice initially. But later on, I went to my counselor myself – told her, look, you got to put me in a PE class. Remember, I told you I was an athlete. And so they did that. But my feelings were of confidence.”
All in all, Odom’s first day at Seacrest was uneventful, even though one student called her the n-word, according to The Palm Beach Post. “They were polite but apprehensive. This was the unknown,” she said.
Odom had four Black classmates by 1964 when she graduated. She went on to study for a degree in elementary education from Florida Atlantic University and a master’s in reading from Nova University. She became a teacher at Carver Middle School and married her high-school sweetheart from Carver High, Eddie Odom Jr. Becoming a well-known community leader and former athlete, Delray Beach honored her in 2023 for her 45 years as an educator and her role in the city’s history, including founding the Delray Beach American Little League, a local baseball organization for Black kids in the city.
And now, due to Coco Gauff’s achievements, Odom’s community has given her other titles.
“Oh, people say, oh, that’s Ms. Odom granddaughter, because people knew me in the community – all the people I taught and everything and Little League, football and all that kind of stuff. And then it got the reverse, so now I’m known as Coco’s grandmother (laughter).”
This year, Coco Gauff honored her grandmother and her hometown of Delray Beach in her New Balance collaboration, the Coco Delray sneaker, launched in March.
By featuring Odom’s voice in a short video promoting the release, Gauff reciprocated the love to someone who played a pivotal role in her life.
The 21-year-old tennis star earlier praised her grandmother during a U.S. Open press conference.
“She always taught me to process every situation with kindness and understanding, and I think for her to go through what she did during that time is something that I think what I do – putting out a tweet or saying a speech – is so easy compared to that.
“So that’s why I have no problem doing the things that I do. And she’s the – always reminds me that I’m a person first instead of an athlete.”
