BLACK LEADERSHIP PROFILE: Eliot Battle

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

 

With his calm, 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 in 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 is 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. 

PROFILE UPDATES

Eliot Battle died June 11, 2013 during hospitalization after a car accident.  He was 88. His wife Muriel preceded him, dying inEliot and Muriel Battle 2003.

Eliot Battle has since been subject of a documentary film, Battle: Change From Within.

“The film is really an insider’s look at desegregation as it happened in Columbia and the personal toll it took on Battle and his family to bridge the gap between Columbia’s black and white communities,” said Michael Hicks, MU Extension film and TV producer.

Battle was an assistant principal at Columbia’s all-black Douglass High Schoo and a guidance counselor and the first black faculty member at Hickman High School in 1960.

"The 55-minute documentary tells his story through archival film footage, newspaper accounts, still photos, and interviews with former students, colleagues, community leaders, Battle’s children and Battle himself," MU Extension news reported in 2018.

“Many films about desegregation focus on conflict,” Hicks said. “What is unique about Eliot’s story and our film is his personality, his thinking and his philosophy of life that allowed him to defuse volatile situations and help everyone peacefully achieve better outcomes.”

“Fighting from within is the right way to go," Battle added in 2012. "The only way you are going to make change is to be a change agent and be in there working with the powers that be.”

The project was funded with 90 individual donations, MU Extension news reported.