BLACK LEADERSHIP PROFILE: Eliot Battle

Our top ten black leadership profiles continue with a local legend

 

A legend in the annals of Columbia leadership,  Eliot Battle shares a transformational legacy with America's great educators. 

 

With his calm, almost elegant demeanor, Battle and his wife Muriel, for whom the new Battle High School is named, laid the groundwork for a broader and more equitable distribution of opportunity, particularly with regard to education and housing during the not-so-long-ago days of segregation in Columbia.  

 

Battle started his local educational career at Douglass High School before Brown v. the Board of Education liberated education from the shackles of segregation. 

 

He eventually moved to Hickman High School while his wife went on to West Junior High and the rest of the story became easy to tell:  Eliot Battle became an example for all people by doing something all great leaders do:  overcoming adversity with aplomb, and displaying grace under pressure.