Black History Month: School integration

Looking back at history with an eye to women or people of color is important, and generally disappointing. You knew there was racism, you knew there was slavery, you knew some people were murdered, but then the more you look the more there is, and the worse we have been.

For example, I have thought the return to actual, open Nazis was a departure from where we had been. Sure, we have backtracked, and it comes from not honestly examining the past, but at least until recently we didn't have any illusions about Nazis being bad.

Raoul Peck's I Am Not Your Negro was not initially on my radar, but the library had a viewing. I couldn't make that but I checked out the DVD and watched it. It turns out that people protesting school integration in the South used a lot of swastikas.

Brown versus the Kansas Board of Education was decided in 1954. Most of the famous photos of Black students going into formerly segregated schools happened between 1957 and 1960. Younger students were probably mostly born after the war, and even seniors for those years wouldn't necessarily remember it, but still, the war is not an abstract at that point. Parents and grandparents and teachers and certainly all of the adult protestors should have remembered the United States rising up and winning the war against evil. Sure, we didn't live up to that promise in a lot of ways, but swastikas in 1957? Really?

I watched documentaries about the Brown case and the attempts at integration in Clinton, Tennessee and Baltimore, Maryland, as well as reading a book from one of the Clinton 12, Jo Ann Allen Boyce.

It was disturbing to see that so many of the early students ended up dropping out or transferring or moving away. There was harassment at schools and at home. Sometimes interracial relationships that had been friendly before integration changed after, perhaps indicating that one factor in the harmony was everyone knowing their place.

In some areas, white people were able to strike a blow for segregation by withdrawing their kids. Ruby Bridges was the only child in her class for her first year of school. It makes me have to wonder, when did we integrate? Are we integrated yet?

bell hooks switched from a segregated to an integrated school a few years later. (It should have been the late 60s, but I can't find the exact date.) She writes about going from teachers who believed in their abilities (though still having some issues with colorism) to going to a school with more hostility. Some people tried to reach across, and some committed to their duty, but there was a lot of hostility.

That is a common theme with other students. Would they have been better off staying at the other schools? That sounds terrible, but the problem isn't the integration, it's doing it without the commitment to the welfare of the students. How do you reach the point of people accepting integration without starting it before they accept it? Do you have to sacrifice students?

It looks different out here in the Northwest. When I was in grade school, I could count the number of Black students in the school on one hand. In junior high I would have needed both hands, but you get the idea. It wasn't all white, because there were several students with Asian and Latinx heritages, but it was pretty white. That was not due to any school policy, but because our neighborhoods weren't integrated. Racist policy from years back did lay behind that.

Oddly, the thing that has made our area more integrated now (besides immigration) is that gentrification has pushed a lot of people out of their historical areas as they have gotten more expensive. I like the greater diversity, but that doesn't make gentrification a good thing. Plus, the new high school drew its boundaries very carefully to try and get the students most likely to excel, which means we have one high school that is very wealthy and one with a high homeless population. Fixing the social problems would probably do more to fix the schools, but when you are in charge of the schools, what helps most? What works best?

I don't have any answers; I just think the questions are important.

I also believe there are answers out there, and that good things can be done if enough of us will decide that we want it.