How I Shed My Skin (15 page)

The Human Relations Committee

One day early in my sophomore year, the principal, Mr. Cooper, asked me to serve on what he said was an important committee designed to provide a forum for discussions of problems related to integration. Flattered, I agreed to be a part of the group, and he told me when the first meeting would be held.

We assembled for that first meeting of the new Human Relations Committee in one of the school's temporary classrooms, mobile units that had been trucked to the back of the grounds and laid out in an L-shape around the new library and science classrooms. The name “mobile unit” glorified what was actually a double-wide trailer in which desks, chalkboards, and fluorescent lights had been installed. A couple of narrow windows brought in frames of the outside world, a view of the flat, brown football field.

Mr. Cooper was a slim, athletic fellow in his forties or early fifties, with the kind of aging good looks that made me guess he was a former athletic coach of some kind who had furthered his career by moving into administration. He had married a woman with a ready-made family; she was shy and a bit introverted, as I noted the few times I served as their babysitter. They made an odd group, since the three sons all looked like her, remarkably so, and Mr. Cooper hardly resembled any of them. They were like a family he had bought on discount, as an accessory.

At the first meeting, he opened proceedings by saying some appropriate things. We were gathered in this committee, he said, because we were the best and brightest students in the school, known for our level-headedness and academic achievement. He had chosen two students from each class, one black and one white, and we, along with Mr. Cooper and the vice-principal, Mr. Worrell, would consult with each other over issues that might come up between the races now that integration had come. I don't recall that teachers had any representation in this group at all. The school's administrators spoke for the school, and that was that.

We were a new school, Mr. Cooper stated, and we were starting over. We had chosen school colors that were different from the old white high school and the old black high school. Our sports teams wore new uniforms, and so did our band. This was a fresh beginning. We needed to learn to listen to each other, to get along, and to conduct ourselves like ladies and gentlemen. As such speeches go, it was a respectable effort.

The committee sounded like a good idea. We students looked at each other, knowing that we had all been chosen. We were very satisfied. Most of the chosen were boys, of course, but at the time I thought little about that.

The first issue Mr. Cooper presented to us was that of homecoming queen. Since the high school was nearly two-thirds black, an elected queen would nearly always be a black student. This might cause tension in school. Could we think of a different way to select homecoming queen that would be less of a popularity contest? We thought about it. We proposed that the selection of homecoming queen should be decided by fundraising. Each homeroom would select a candidate, and these candidates would compete for the crown by raising money for the school. This would be fair, we decided.

In practice, the decision would lead to homecoming courts that were mostly white, and white homecoming queens, at least for several years. Our decision ignored the fact that fund-raising was much easier for white students than for black students. During my years in school, this process caused no friction, but it was changed a few years later.

This decision revealed a good deal about what we presumed integration would look like. A majority black student body would never elect a white queen. The fact that black students were the majority and that they were entitled to cast their votes as they wished was unsettling to the committee. Had we been a white majority in the school, I suspect the notion that electing a homecoming queen was unfair to anyone would never have arisen.

The next important issue Mr. Cooper wanted us to discuss was the selection of a graduation speaker. He wondered whether we should continue with the practice of having the valedictorian speak at graduation, in light of the fact that white students were perceived to have academic advantages over black students. I do not recall his exact words, and would guess that he did not speak quite as plainly as I have done, since it was not his habit. Mr. Cooper was more affable than honest. Someone proposed that the graduation address be delivered by the student body president rather than the valedictorian. This would enable each class to have some voice in electing its own speaker.

On the surface, this decision offered a more open process, but it also presupposed that a black student was not likely to be valedictorian, an assumption that was faulty and biased. However, the notion that black students were not getting a fair chance in the classroom was one that would arise again and again. When our school finally formed a chapter of the National Beta Club, there were only a handful of black students in the group. As it turned out, the first several valedictorians of the school were white, in fact.

We had the discussion and came to these decisions, and the school operated under them for the next few years.

In other schools in eastern North Carolina, incidents related to homecoming courts, school colors, and band uniforms provided reasons for discord and even violence. Mr. Cooper was prudent to raise the questions, even if our decisions were flawed. Our school would suffer from discord in the coming two years, but not because of questions about the homecoming queen.

Once these decisions were made, the committee foundered a bit. While Mr. Cooper noted that we were starting over, that this was a brand-new school, he took the idea of dialogue no further than necessary. We scheduled no series of meetings, formed no process for seeking out grievances from students.

In the setting of the meeting itself, the principal and administrators talked, the students responded to questions, and the conversation remained fixed in a kind of hierarchical pattern. The issues to be debated were decided by the adults, and the correct answers were those to which the adults agreed. Since we were meeting in a bleak little classroom, fluorescent lights blaring and buzzing, tiny windows providing little relief against the heat, we were not disposed to linger.

Mr. Cooper had good intentions, perhaps, but little real sense of the problem that he faced in dealing with this student body. He was content when students behaved well, moving from class to class without fuss. The notion that there was a deeper layer of discord, one that could benefit from discussion and communication, was lost on him. He was content to read the surfaces. Soon enough he would learn that this approach was not enough.

I was clueless as well, and simply thought that it was nice that the teachers and principals had noticed me and selected me to be on this committee. This tickled my teenage vanity. I was trusted as part of a decision-making body that included adults. But in my case, I was young and stupid and could be expected not to see beyond the end of my nose. Adults should have known better, and I don't doubt that our teachers knew that there was more need for dialogue than our little Human Relations Committee could provide.

We left that first meeting feeling very pleased with ourselves. I can remember no other meeting of the group until after the black students of Jones Senior High School staged their first walk-out, later that year.

Protests

One morning in January, I was sitting in French class, waiting for another lesson from Mrs. Blount, the French teacher who would be fired in a few weeks. This was a Monday morning, and the room had a sleepy feeling as we waited for the bell. We had not quite resigned ourselves to the passing of the weekend. The room was a glare of white, from the fluorescent tube lights to the cardboard-thin walls and speckled linoleum. A couple of chalkboards sat forlornly on the walls, and at one end of the room was cabinetry and a countertop. This room was long and thin, a trailer but not a double-wide, and the shape of the room made it awkward for lectures.

There was no sign of class beginning, however, and Mrs. Blount simply waited at her desk. She was never an engaging teacher, and it was not unusual for her to begin class late. The tardy bell rang, a distant sound, drifting from the main building to our little room at the periphery, but I remember the ringing had an odd echo, and I was perplexed by it, since most of the seats in the classroom were empty. None of the black students had yet come to class.

Those of us who were present looked at one another. We were no longer quite comfortable sitting in a room with only white students, even those of us who did not much like integration. Something was afoot.

A latecomer arrived, bringing rumors about a demonstration in the hall leading to the teacher's lounge. This was Mitch, one of the student bus drivers, who had been delayed in making his morning report to the vice-principal. “It's some kind of riot in the hall,” he said.

Hearing him, Mrs. Blount said, “What do you mean, a riot?”

“All the black kids is out in the hall,” he said.

“Are they rioting?” asked Barbara.

“They're just standing around, I guess.”

Mrs. Blount had sat up straight and adjusted her glasses. “Don't spread rumors, now. Let me see what I can found out.” With this admonition she left the classroom in search of information. When she returned she told us that we were to remain inside the classroom, that classes would not be changing.

“There is a demonstration,” she said. “In the main hallway.”

“What's going on?” asked Faye Ollins.

“I just told you everything I know. There will be an announcement on the speaker, maybe.” She folded her hands at her desk, then drew out her lunch from a brown bag and started to eat her sandwich.

Mercy, Barbara, and I conferred a bit. None of us had heard anything in homeroom, and, since we would have seen most of our friends for the first time in this French class, we had no idea what had happened or what was going on. “Do you really think there's something going on?” I asked.

“Must be,” Mercy said. “Nobody's here.”

“I wonder what it's about,” Barbara said.

Mitch, who sat in the seat ahead of mine, was affecting superior knowledge due to his tardiness. “I seen 'em, they're all out in the hall doing something,” he said. “Ain't this a mess?” Despite his words, his tone was more lackadaisical than outraged; even on the best day, French hardly felt like much of a class.

“If it gets me out of French class, it's fine with me,” said Barbara. “I wanted to skip school today anyway.”

“I bet they let us go home,” said Faye Ollins, with a broad smile.

There followed a period of about an hour when we knew little or nothing other than that school was to be dismissed. We were understandably gleeful at the prospect and some of us thanked the black kids for being mad about whatever they were mad about. Others spoke as if this were an act of disorder that should be condemned. But nobody took that too seriously. These were years when there were demonstrations, walkouts, and outright riots even in the best places, and for many reasons. People acted out about racism, about women's rights, about the war, about poverty. There was something exciting about the thought that we actually had civil disobedience in Jones County, too.

The bus ride from school to home was memorable, black students feeling the adrenaline of what they had done, energized by the statement they had made, white students cowed and silent. Alex Burbank strutted from seat to seat, saying, “That was some shit. Can you dig it?” From listening to the talk at the front of the bus, I could begin to piece together a narrative. The students were angry with the teachers. One of the teachers had said something. Black students had walked out of class, congregating in the main hall and the courtyard outside the shop class. Somebody threw something. Somebody got hurt. Accident. The students had been trashing the teachers' lounge and somebody threw a bottle.

Piece by piece, statement by statement, the story came out. They were in a kind of headspace I had never seen before, hyperalert, giving information in tones that did not invite much follow-up. “Power to the people, right on,” said Alex Burbank, and heads nodded as if all were testifying. He spoke in a rhythm that I could hear but that was different from his usual voice, as if he were channeling someone else, and the response from his friends was united, almost eerily so, as if they were all joined minds. Maybe because they had been in a group action so recently, this was how they felt.

Tensions between the black students and the teachers, most of them white, had flared into violence upon reports that Mr. Taylor, one of the teachers in the vocational classes, remarked that blacks were the scum of the earth. Why he felt the need to make such a remark, when he did it, and who heard it—none of these details ever became clear. At the time I heard only that he had said something nasty about black people, but later read the quote as it was reported in the
Kinston Daily Free Press.

The walkout and violence that followed responded to the remark in unequivocal terms. Black students surrounded the shop, filled the hallway outside the teachers' lounge, and destroyed a vending machine. Someone threw a few bricks through classroom windows, and students threw some of the soda bottles from the vending machines. One of the drink bottles struck a white student, Byron Johnson, though by accident, according to what I heard and to the newspaper report. His was the only injury.

Jones County, where little or nothing ever happened, had an event on its hands, a genuine insurrection. Black people were rioting right here where we lived. White people used that word for it right away,
riot,
and I did too, the same as everybody else, unthinking. The other names for it,
walkout
and
demonstration,
were never as popular, too tame and inadequate. Reports appeared in the local papers, the
Kinston Daily Free Press
and the
New Bern Sun Journal.
For a week our high school was the talk everywhere, but even so, there was little enough to say. A couple of windows had been broken, one vending machine was trashed. I even heard contradictory stories about the vending machine, some people saying it had merely been moved out of the teachers' lounge. Nevertheless we had an event to remember now, caused by integration. Other cities and towns had their riots, and now we had ours.

At home after school, my sister told me that one of her friends had given her a warning as soon as she got to school. “We like you,” said the friend, a black girl. “But some stuff is about to happen. You on your own today.”

The issue the students addressed was real. The Jones County school superintendent affirmed this when he was quoted in the Kinston paper as saying that the students were voicing a legitimate complaint. The issue was not limited to one teacher, though it was the words of the one teacher that sparked the conflagration. The white faculty had made it clear in all but words that they had little respect for black students, other than the gifted. Some of the teachers appeared bitter at having to serve in integrated classrooms. I could see this at the time, but had no clear way to understand the causes of the reaction.

For black students, the victory of integration had come with a cost. Most of the time, they were not in classrooms with black teachers who served as role models, as examples. Their teachers were no longer people of their own race, who saw them as human beings of equal status with all the rest. School was no longer a haven from prejudice but was rather a study in it. Students in all-black classes now—and these classes continued to exist—were second-class citizens of their schools.

To give this picture some balance, I do not expect our teachers were excited about teaching white students in all cases, especially when they were less than gifted, or from the poorer parts of the county, or when the students showed their own apathy toward school, as so many did. The students in the vocational programs were moving toward trades that were often dominated by one race or the other. Classes there were resegregating along color lines—white people in the agricultural classes, because white people owned the land; black people in the bricklaying classes, because black people laid the bricks.

White adults reacted to the disturbance in the schools with mockery, especially those who had placed their own children in the new private schools. This was the kind of behavior you could expect from niggers, a remark I heard in church, offered as proof that the races should not be mixing in this way. The matter was debated in the local restaurant where my mother worked as a waitress, too. That place was owned by the Russell family, who sent their children to Pollocksville Academy and later to a school in Kinston. The Russells, like other private school families, appeared smug about their decision, satisfied with the fact that they could still find a way to keep their precious young from contact with Negroes. Though we went to church with the Russells, they no longer felt quite like neighbors.

The public high school was no longer really part of the white world, the local world, in the view of these people. The school was now marked out clearly as an arm of government. The government had sided with black people for good and all, and here in the riot was the result. The schools were “ruint,” as Jones County people said.

The reaction on the part of black adults was probably as divided as the white adult response, with some glad about the walkout and others feeling that the students ought not to have carried the incident that far. But it is also likely that some black parents were part of the planning for the event at school, and that they encouraged their children to take action, and supported this choice.

Because I was a member of the Human Relations Committee, the principal called me to come to a meeting at school on the day after the demonstration. He had arranged a ride for me with another student who was also attending, since I had no car of my own. We met in the home-economics classroom, in which two fully outfitted kitchens occupied one wall, dusty venetian blinds at the windows, winter light settling over us. Mr. Cooper opened the meeting and thanked us for coming. He announced that schools would open again the following day and that he wanted to consult with this group about making sure the restarting of school went smoothly.

We discussed nothing in particular of importance, and I expect the meeting was intended to create a feeling of action rather than to achieve anything in particular. We discussed the issue of Mr. Taylor and whether he should apologize for the remarks he made that set off the demonstration. We talked about unlucky Byron getting struck in the head. We discussed the issue of whether the students involved in the violence should receive any kind of discipline. The principal planned to reactivate student government, which had been dormant since school consolidation, and to gather students to talk about this when school started again.

The walkout took place on Monday, the meeting of the Human Relations Committee on Tuesday. When classes resumed on Wednesday, the courtyard and public areas buzzed with talk of what had happened and what might follow. White students had less to say about the aftermath than one might have expected, given the talk I had heard in church and on the streets of quiet Pollocksville. I recall only a few mutterings, and no complaints at all about the missed day of school. Teachers for the most part remained mum about the demonstration, though some exuded disapproval and muttered a remark or two about the hopeless rudeness of young people.

Some conversation happened, in private, on the smoking patio, or during walks from class to class. In general, white students expressed mostly disapproval about the demonstration, even though most of them remained ignorant of its cause at this point. Black students obviously felt satisfaction that they had taken action and made their feelings known. Everyone agreed that the problem here was not between the students, and the school returned to its relatively peaceful norm. The shop instructor was dismissed from his job, or was allowed to resign, though, again, little or no word of this reached students in any official way.

We were left to trade rumors about the walkout and its causes, and the rumors soon established themselves as facts, even though they were false. Most white people never learned about the teacher or his remark about the scum of the earth, or else learned it but decided some other explanation would be more interesting. Years later I would hear white people repeat the story that the black students rioted in order to get out of classes for exam week. I would also hear that the problems at our high school were instigated by visitors from New Bern, where the high school had to be closed due to conflict the same day. But newspaper accounts of the New Bern school problems made it clear that the issue there was between students, while the Kinston newspaper confirmed my own memory, that the walkout in Jones County sprang from a hostile remark made by one of the white teachers.

Since the conflict had never been between the students, our pattern of behavior toward one another went unchanged. This is not to claim that our relations were in any way harmonious; they were simply never hostile to a point that approached group violence. But the underlying problem remained, and black students continued to feel conflict with the teachers and administration. These problems would arise again the following year.