Deja Vu All Over Again 0
The American Civil Liberties Union had demanded that the Itawamba County school district allow senior Constance McMillen to attend with her girlfriend. A school district policy requires that dates be of the opposite sex.
Back when I was a young ‘un, a little law called the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed.
In my Jim Crow county, three things happened immediately.
One: Some parents organized an all-white private school. Such schools were called “seg academies.” Those students who went to the “seg academy” slowly drifted out of the lives of those of us who stayed in the public school.
Two: The public schools started to lurch unwillingly towards racial integration. Fortunately, where I grew up, the leadership recognized that racial segregation of public schools was done for and decided the only choice was to make integration work.
One black girl joined the senior class of the white high school the next year. About a dozen black girls and boys joined the junior class the year after that (my junior year). And so on.
Of course, no white kids were sent to the black high school, not for many years.
And
Three: The prom was canceled.
It remained canceled for years for fear that some little black boy might want to dance with little some white girl.
Parents are still punishing children with the parents’ hate and fear.
Some random thoughts:
Another thing that happened were that the “white” and “colored” signs came down in public buildings. After that, the health department building where I worked for three summers had four public restrooms in the waiting room: two for men and two for women; it took me a while to figure out why there were four. Silly me.
The white seniors my senior year had a prom (a “junior-senior” prom was not part of tradition). It was organized by white parents and held at a local fire hall. No black students need apply. I went. After all, it was Our Way of Life ™; it felt a little funny but I did not at the time realize how wrong it was.
I am certain that the black kids who were selected for the white high school in those first years were carefully chosen as students who could still perform well under the inherent pressure of the situation. So far as I ever saw, none of them were ever mistreated in any way by white students. It was a very small school, fewer than 500 students in grades 8-12. Nothing stayed a secret.
Some of the white teachers (my brother will know who I mean) had a more difficult time adjusting than did the students. Some of them didn’t adjust and took retirement as soon as they could.
In about a decade (I was living in Northern Virginia by this time so don’t know exactly when), “full integration” came along. What had been the black high school became the junior high; what had been the white high school became the senior high. This was a common pattern across the South: the mascot and team name of the white school lived on as varsity; the mascot and team name of the black school lived on a junior varsity.
The “seg academy” is still there, still private. Its website contains a statement of non-discrimination, but the pictures of their athletic teams at their website contain no black or brown faces that I could see. A second seg academy that started up a couple of years later ultimately went out of business.
News link via Eschaton.
Also published, in abridged form, at the Great Orange Satan.
