Freedom's Children (6 page)

In the summer of 1960, it was decided by all the family members after my mother passed that I should [leave Detroit and] come home to Montgomery. When I came to live here, I'd get on the bus with my grandmother. She would always go to the back and I would always plop right up front. You know, we had won a victory and all. One day there were no people on the bus and I went to the back with my grandmother. I called her “Mommy.” I said, “Mommy, why do you sit in the back? You worked so hard, and you all walked.”

She said, “Darling, the bus boycott was not about sitting next to white people. It was about sitting anywhere you please.”

Following page:
The Little Rock Nine, with officers of the NAACP.

In 1954, in a case called
Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka,
the United States Supreme Court ruled that separating the races in schools deprives Negro children of equal educational opportunities. “Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal,” Chief Justice Warren wrote. In addition, he said, school segregation creates in minority children “a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone.” The Court declared school segregation laws unconstitutional.

The decision stunned and enraged southern segregationists. In March 1956 a group of U.S. Senators and Representatives from the eleven states of the Old Confederacy signed a statement called the “Southern Manifesto.” In it, they declared their opposition to the Supreme Court decision and urged that schools fight any attempts to integrate. As a result of resistance by segregationists, which was sometimes violent, most southern schools were not integrated until ten to twenty years after the Supreme Court decision in the
Brown
case.

Black children's experiences in segregated schools differed widely. In some classrooms, teachers were hesitant to talk about civil rights for fear of antagonizing the white establishment. In others, teachers instilled in their students a pride in black achievement. As in all schools, segregated or integrated, some teachers repeated past lessons so that few were inspired and most were bored. Others challenged their students to think, to stretch. As Claudette Colvin said of her teachers, they were “pricking our minds.” The young people who tell their stories in the section on segregated schools reflect the full range of this experience.

In every black school, the students knew that their facilities and materials were inferior to those in white schools. “You really felt the second-class citizenship in the educational system,” says James Roberson, himself a former school principal. “Never receiving a new textbook was quite revealing to me. Our books were from white schools, and used. You always got books with marks in them.”

But despite the limited resources, black children in segregated schools were at least in a safe environment. Their first experiences of integration were startling by contrast. Although none of them anticipated warm welcomes, neither did they expect the depth and extent of the hostility they encountered from white students and often teachers. Yet they persisted, and in that persistence exhibited an extraordinary strength and single-mindedness of purpose.

We heard about the
Brown
decision, but with our schools being segregated, many teachers were very afraid to really discuss things. We did have some who were outspoken and willing to talk with you and let you know exactly what was going on. I will never forget Mrs. Maggie Hrowbuski in elementary school. One day when the World Series was about to start, she asked the class, “Who are you pulling for?”

And the whole class said, “The Dodgers! The Dodgers!”

She asked, “Do you know why?” Everybody went blank. It was probably something you heard your parents say. Then she gave us a lecture on Jackie Robinson. I will never forget that. She was a very dedicated person, and she believed in teaching us about our own people. When she got through lecturing us on Jackie Robinson and how the Dodgers were the first team to allow a black to become a member, well, then we knew why we were rooting for the Dodgers.

We had Negro Education Week in school, where your teachers would assign you a task of finding something that was done by a “colored” person. That was the term used then. Black kids had very limited knowledge of blacks' contribution to this society. The teacher would list famous people, and always heading the group would be George Washington Carver. You can imagine that if there were only ten or fifteen names on the list, and there are maybe thirty to thirty-five students, George Washington Carver and the peanut goes around many times. Everybody is sitting there bored, and the next year you come back and it's right back to George Washington Carver and the peanut again. I can remember from the time I can remember being in school, we dwelt on the peanut.

We went to a rural school. There was one teacher, Henry Boyd, who taught first through eighth grades, all in one room. He was black. We had to walk about three miles to school. When we got there, we had to do chores. We had one big potbelly stove that was in the middle of the room, and we had to get the wood for the stove. Because we didn't have a water supply, we had to go to a spring, which was about a mile away, to pick the water up and bring it back. We got fresh spring water every day.

There was not even an outhouse for the boys. Just the woods. I think there was an outhouse for the girls. And of course there was no electricity, so if it was stormy or dark outside we had to use an oil lamp. We also had to clean up in the afternoon because there was no such thing as a janitor.

Mr. Boyd was a history teacher. He talked to us about Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois. He talked to us about blacks who had been involved in early struggles. It made us proud. He was kind of an orator and a very colorful character. He had a way of making history come alive.

I was in a segregated school—Booker T. Washington High School. I remember how we as students wanted to talk about what was going on in Montgomery. And how the teachers were in some instances discouraging us from bringing up the discussion. As I think about it in retrospect, they were nervous about losing their jobs. I mean, in Montgomery at the time the only professional jobs you had were teacher or preacher. You could count the number of black lawyers or doctors in the city.

I remember an incident while I was in high school. I had an opportunity to participate in an oratorical contest, sponsored by the Montgomery Improvement Association, which was the movement organization at the time. I had as my coach my high school English teacher. She was a brilliant woman. She knew Shakespeare and all of that. But I was familiar with what would win in the oratorical contest. It was a contest on the movement. She wanted me to write a speech which was mild, non-confrontational, with non-movement language in it. Just a nice high school piece. I knew that that wouldn't make it. What I did was I wrote a speech which I knew would be in the running. When I was with her, I practiced her speech. When I got by myself, I practiced my speech.

On the night of the contest when I got up there, I forgot both speeches, and I broke down and started crying. I just cried and cried, and walked off the stage. It was a real tension for me. I had love and respect for my teacher, but at the same time there was something on the inside of me which was driving me.

The following stories are about those black students who were the first to integrate all-white schools. With every attempt at integration, there was resistance from segregationists. For Ricky and Pat Shuttlesworth, the violence was so great they never even entered the school they were trying to integrate. For the others who were able to enroll, there were taunts, even attacks, by other students, and often shameful behavior by teachers.

As Ernest Green from Little Rock, Arkansas, says, “You'd be crazy not to have fear.” But these young people also had a sense of perspective and even humor about what was happening. Their courage made a difference not only in each of their individual lives, but for all the others who have followed.

In 1957 I was starting the ninth grade and supposed to go to Parker, an all-black high school. Phillips was all-white. Where I lived, you'd have to go past Phillips to get to Parker. It didn't make sense. Phillips had much more to offer. At Parker we didn't have the equipment or the facilities. I knew Phillips was a better school. So we decided to enroll. It was an effort to break down segregation. Daddy said, “You're going,” and I trusted his judgment.

I never really showed fear because I was always taught to be strong. Being a “PK,” a preacher's kid, you couldn't always let your feelings show. A lot of times I had played out a scenario in my mind. But it was so frightening that sometimes you didn't deal with it. You just did it. I'm sure I was nervous the day we went, but then again I was with my father and that alleviated some of the nervousness.

I didn't expect the mob that was there. It's not that I expected a positive reception either. They hadn't been positive for the other things we did, like the bus rides or the sit-ins. But even before we pulled up, when we turned up the street, we saw this tremendous number of people. All whites. Everywhere. I don't remember any of the dialogue that went on. I just thought, Are we going in there?

I could not believe that Daddy got out of the car. The crowd started to beat him. Mother got out. Then I started to get out of the car to get to my mother and my father, and somebody slammed the door on my right ankle. There was mass confusion, but I have blanked it out of my mind. My sister and I have never talked about what happened that day.

Somehow we were all back in the car. Reverend Phifer was with us that day. I remember Daddy saying, “Don't run the stop sign.” We went to a hospital. Daddy was on the stretcher, and he wanted to know if everybody was okay. We sat in the hall for a while, waiting. I didn't know what was happening, if Daddy was okay. He was broken down, shallow breathing, and I thought he was dying. I couldn't believe that people would hurt him like that. They beat him with chains and stuff. I was just in shock that they were so vicious.

Somebody said we did it in the name of freedom. What my sister said sticks in my mind. If she had to go back in that crowd again, she said she would have a fork as a weapon. But we were nonviolent, and as I think about it, what good would a fork do?

We discovered at the hospital that my mother had been stabbed. That was even more upsetting. She was stabbed in the hip, and I wasn't aware of it. She never let us know how she was hurt or how she was suffering.

We were told we were going to integrate Phillips. With Daddy being the leader, he wanted his first two kids to be involved. I'm not as patient and nonviolent as Ricky and Daddy are. If anybody hit me, I was ready to hit back. But I had been told you can't do anything but walk in the school. They prepared us.