Last week, Stephanie Cunningham Warren wrote an editorial about a meeting she attended in Jackson that dealt with racial issues. It’s a good piece. I highly recommend you read it if you haven’t already. Heck, go back and reread it.
Stephanie recounted one conversation she had with a young Black woman at the conference. What stood out to me were these two sentences:
“It’s just how I was raised. I was never around White people growing up. I didn’t have a need to talk to White people, so I avoided them whenever possible,” she said.
Those words reminded me of something a Chicago friend told me about fifteen years ago. She said that she never had a conversation with a Black person until she was forty years old. She just had never had any reason to be around Black people.
I still have difficulty understanding the similarities in their upbringing and the stark difference from mine.
I grew up in the Mississippi Delta. In the fall of 1970 Judge Wiliam Keady’s order to desegregate the “Separate But Equal” Drew public schools went into effect. For me, this meant I went from the mostly White AW James Elementary in the sixth grade to the majority Black Hunter Middle School in the seventh
At Hunter, most of my classmates, probably 90%, were Black. For two years I was the only White kid in the Drew High School band. After those two years my little brother and a few of his classmates joined the band. What I’m saying is, unlike the young lady in Stephanie’s article and my Chicago friend, I grew up around people from another race. From the fall of 1970 through graduation in May 1976 I spent as much time, if not more, with Black kids than I did the White ones.
There were differences in how we viewed the world. There were differences in our home lives. There were differences in how we talked, and how we did things. There were differences in how we went to church and what songs we sang along with on the radio.
I was into Wet Willie and Johnny Winter. Later on, I learned to appreciate James Brown and the great Johnnie Taylor.
Sometimes there would be disagreements, as in any school or group of teenagers. But mainly we got along. We did things together. We studied together. We played baseball and basketball and made long bus trips with the band. Many of us had after school or summer jobs and we worked together.
And we talked. We were teenagers. Of course, we talked. We talked about classes and teachers.
We talked about our classmates, the ones we liked and didn’t like and the ones we REALLY liked and hoped liked us back. We talked about our homes and our parents and plans. Mostly, we got along as well as if not better than kids at countless other small schools in the U.S.
Our school never had the large-scale fights between Black and White kids as some of the surrounding schools did. A lot of that had to do with our teachers staying on top of things. I learned many years later that Doc White, Ruby Nell Stancill, and Annie Branson met daily to talk about and deal with any problems they saw. Honestly, I’m not aware of any real problems. Maybe I was, and still am, naïve. Maybe those teachers and others did a really good job.
Or maybe it had to do with all of us, Black and White, spending time with people who society said were different from us and realizing the other guys were more like us than we had been told.
(If you’d like to learn more about how the Drew Schools were desegregated, I highly recommend “Silver Rights” by Constance Curry with Mae Bertha Carter.
Mr. and Mrs. Carter were good people who fought hard for their children to get a truly equal chance at education.
I knew many of the people in the book. I knew about many of the incidents. The ones I knew about happened exactly as described in the book.)
