It was 1971 and I was a newly elected Student Council President in a newly integrated Mississippi high school when the principal called me to his office.
He hadn’t much approved of my campaign — “try it a different way” — or my election poster comparing our school to a concentration camp. But protesting the draconian school board discipline policies that also killed all social activities was how I had won.
So I was quite surprised to find that Mr. Wade actually wanted me to fight for the return of one social activity that had only recently disappeared — the pep buses, which were school buses used to carry students to away football games. The school had provided them before integration, and if the principal wanted them back? Well it wouldn’t be hard to get them, right?
I couldn’t have been more wrong.
Before long I was to learn that the agenda of the white adults of my home town was in conflict with my own — and that they would fight to make sure their daughters were sheltered against any possible social contact with a teenaged black male.
That is what what drives so much of the racism in the South, the white man’s secret fear that what their women really want is a black man. But I only fully understood that sad truth much later through my work as a documentary filmmaker interviewing people about racism and the South. In 1971 I was still a naive and hopeful seventeen-year-old.
Integration & the student council
Our school was 50-50 black-white, despite some white flight to the newly established segregation academies — hastily established private schools with the sole purpose of preserving white supremacy. Prior to integration the Student Council had been a joke, just another school popularity contest. But integration and the black students changed all the dynamics. And it was the black vote that elected me President. For me, integration was an extraordinary experience, like a curtain was pulled back and you could suddenly visit another, very exciting country without leaving the city limits. It wasn’t just me, many young people were eager to interact across the race line — nothing close to a majority on either side, but still there were a lot of us.
I became passionate about using my year as President to create opportunities for students to cross the color line. I understood that the unspoken reason for taking away school dances, after-school social events and the like was to limit fraternization between black & white students. My goal was to find ways around those prohibitions. And I saw pep buses as good first step since they wouldn’t just carry football fans to the night football games in other towns. Those fans would also be an inter-racial mix of students. Just being on the bus together would create interactions and relationships you couldn’t get any other way.
Growing up during “Massive Resistance”
The journey that got me to this way of thinking had been a long one.
I was born in Mississippi on May 24, 1954. It was a Monday, a week to the day after the Supreme Court ordered the desegregation of southern schools “with all deliberate speed”. That ruling was called “Black Monday” by white southerners opposed to any mixing of the races. They claimed that African Americans were happy with their lot, that segregation was the keystone of ”our Southern way of life” and that the real troublemakers were the outsiders and communists pushing for integration against the will of the people.
Those who don’t understand the desperate need for integration of schools in the 1950s need only visit the University of Mississippi Archives & Special Collections and look through the pictures taken in the Mississippi Delta by colleagues of my Father at the University of Mississippi’s School of Education. It was one of the few forward-looking places in the State and one of their projects was to document the unequal nature of black and white schooling in Mississippi. The photographs I use here are just two of hundreds showing the poor quality of rural black schools.
It wasn’t just that many black schools had few resources along with teachers who lacked proper training. But many rural schools in Mississippi — both black and white — also operated on a split session schedule, with schools shutting down for the spring planting and the fall harvest but open during the hot Mississippi summers. Black Delta schools were always on a split schedule because the children weren’t only students, they were also labor for plantation owners.
Imagine the school below, essentially a one-room schoolhouse, in a Mississippi summer with no air-conditioning.
Many Mississippi counties offered education only up to the 8th grade for black students. But my home town of Oxford was one of the exceptions thanks to the Rosenwald Foundation which provided funding for 5000 African American schools during the Jim Crow era. The Rosenwald High School in Oxford became Central High School and provided a high quality education. But Oxford was one of the exceptions to the Mississippi rule.
I grew up in segregation, on the white side of the line. I attended a Southern Baptist Church where we sang “Jesus loves the little children, all the children of the world — red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in his sight . . .”
But I drank from a white only fountain when I was thirsty, pissed in a white only bathroom, played baseball in a white only sports league and had the privilege on a hot summer day of swimming at the local university pool. Which was all-white. I also lived in a much nicer house than the black children three blocks over who would one day become my friends.
My first real contact across the race line didn’t come until I was a twelve year old boy. That delay coming after the Supreme Court Brown ruling, was because white southerners developed a policy called “Massive Resistance”. The resistance to Barack Obama as our first black president was nothing but the resurrection of the old “massive resistance” playbook by Mitch McConnell and the rest of the Republican Party. The Massive Resistance of the 1950s continued to work for over a decade and because of it the all-white schools of Oxford, Mississippi didn’t see their first trickle of black students until 1967. It took two major military confrontations to force even that small crack in the apartheid wall of education.
“Freedom of Choice”
The story of the Little Rock Nine has sometimes been told with a finality that makes it seem as though school integration proceeded smoothly in the years following Eisenhower’s use of the military to enforce school desegregation in Arkansas in 1957.
In fact most of the deep south fought on long after that. In 1962 there was still no school or university integration in Mississippi when state officials triggered an insurrection in my home town over the enrollment of James Meredith, the first black student to attend Ole Miss, the nickname for the University of Mississippi. It was not just the place where my Father taught. It was also the all-white flagship of the state university system and Governor Ross Barnett was determined to preserve white supremacy there at all costs. President Kennedy intervened in the insurrection — called a riot at the time — sending in troops to restore order. Over 20,000 of them arrived in Oxford. They were the elite of the U.S. Army, including the 101st Airborne and the 1st Army Division, the celebrated Big Red One.
Along with the federalized national guard, over 30,000 troops occupied North Mississippi that fall and winter.
It sent a powerful message, not just in Mississippi, but to the entire deep south. Fight us, Kennedy was saying, and it will be a new civil war and the nation is going to win. Mississippi began to cave on school desegregation, but not without dragging it out for as long as legally possible.
The first step along this new path of delay was something called freedom of choice, an Orwellian name for a fake integration plan presented as a “compromise” by Mississippi and other deep south States. Parents could “choose” whether to send their child to the black school or the white school. No white parents sent their children to the black schools. A few brave black parents who wanted to push the state toward integration and school equality did send their children to white schools. Sometimes they lost their jobs, or were thrown out of their rented homes for doing it. The children endured terrible harassment — not the mobs of the Little Rock Nine, but a constant drip-drip of racist comments, physical attacks masquerading as “a joke” and the like.
Oxford saw its first black “freedom of choice” students in 1967. I became friends with Clinton, after we were on “safety patrol” together, where we made sure students could safely exit buses without being run over by a careless motorist. I couldn't put words on it at the time, but it was exciting to have my young, rather narrow world suddenly broadened.
It was only years later I realized the pairing with Clinton wasn’t accidental. The teachers knew I had one of the few parents who wouldn’t object to their white son being matched with a black student. But I didn’t learn until long afterward of the extensive abuse that Clinton endured. He was never harassed in front of me, but to miss it I must have been quite naive and slow to pick up on things. It was only later as an adult that I learned about it from friends who had seen it.
The parents of these freedom of choice children sued and finally the last of the southern hold-outs had to enforce real desegregation of the schools. In Mississippi that didn’t happen until the winter of 1970. Our school shut down for an extra month at the Christmas holiday and reopened with all the black and white students of Oxford suddenly in the same schools for the very first time.
Sixteen years after Brown, desegregation comes to Mississippi
That first semester was shock-therapy for students on both sides. Many of the white students were numb from what seemed to them like the sudden collapse of white supremacy.
Many black students also seemed lost, but for a different reason. They were the ones who paid the higher price of desegregation, since their school identity disappeared as they were merged into the white school. We did get new colors and a new mascot the following year to replace the racist white “colonel”— an old dude Confederate soldier type. The same mascot was used at Ole Miss until 2003.
Many of the black teachers were fired or demoted to assistant jobs. For instance the long time black band teacher was made an assistant and forced to adapt to the boring, very white marching music of the era — as opposed to the ebullient, exciting style of the black Central High band. Some of the white students understand that loss, since Christmas parades in the South always featured black school bands as well as white — and we had seen Central High in their heyday.
It was desegregation, but nothing approaching true integration, since that would have combined and equally respected the culture and staff of each school. Instead we witnessed a forced assimilation of black students and staff into the white school and its culture. But at the time, we called it “integration”.
Sports were an exception where we did have something approximating integration. While the coaching staff remained predominantly white, the players were equally mixed and the black students fought to be respected as equal by the coaches. They succeeded for the most part, because winning was everyone’s common objective. For the first time Oxford sports teams were competitive and reached the playoffs.
I hadn’t played football in the all-white school, but in 1971 I joined the team and it gave me a chance to make friends across the color line since sports were one of the few places in the school where black and white students could freely mix. I had my own car and often gave rides home to black team-mates — most of whom didn’t have a car. That helped me get to know several of them well. it was my football experience that inspired me to run for Student Council President.
Social life and the fight over the Pep Buses
We never got those pep buses. And I learned an important lesson: the racists among us never give up in face of anything but superior force, and they will continue to fight their small battles against progress even after they’ve lost the war.
But at first I thought this was something I could win. After the principal suggested I try to get the pep buses, I asked him what I needed to do. And it sounded simple — ask the Superintendent for them, in my role as Student Council President. He was for the buses because as a former coach, he wanted the football team to be supported when it played away games.
But the Superintendent was evasive. “Well we’ve got old buses and its an insurance problem”, he said.
“Now we have some new buses on order and when they get there, well then we can do it, but not now,” the Superintendent continued.
It seemed a poor excuse, but I didn’t know how to break through it, so I returned to the Principal, who now seemed more subdued, not so eager for me to push. So I waited for the new buses — making a point to bother the Superintendent on a weekly basis about their arrival. I also kept friends the Student Council appraised of the progress.
The games came and went. No new buses. We shifted our efforts on the Student Council to preparing for homecoming. Simple matters like electing the homecoming King and Queen and their court — the Favorites — are no simple matter in a racially divided school. But working together with teachers and administration we invented a process that guaranteed equal white and black representation on the court while allowing an open vote on the King and Queen, where two popular black students were elected. We also were successful in bringing back the homecoming parade and resurrecting a homecoming bonfire on the night before the game — both were integrated social occasions, which was a first in our new integrated era.
The return of high-school sponsored dances, however, was still a no-go. Instead white parents arranged a white only dance at a private facility while black students attended a dance at a city community center that had been recently built in the black part of town.
Finally those new school buses arrived and there were still a few away games that needed pep buses. I had started talking behind the scenes to Wayne Johnson, a local Civil Rights leader and the only black member of the School Board. Through him I learned that the main opponent of the pep buses was the Superintendent himself and that the School Board had yet to discuss the issue. But the Superintendent had told me it was a School Board issue so it was clear he intended to use them as cover for a decision that was actually his. I decided to call the School Board members individually ahead of their next meeting where I knew the pep buses would be on the agenda.
Several of the Board were okay with the idea of pep buses, with only one being noncommittal. I knew Wayne Johnson was in favor so I expected it to pass.
I was shocked to find the next day that it had been voted down 4-1. The superintendent was in a sour mood and clearly wanted a short conversation with me. But I protested:
I don’t understand. I called all of the Board Members the night before and they were in favor of it.
He immediately flew into a rage and physically got in my face:
If you ever call my Board again behind my back I will have you expelled at once.
A student had been expelled a few years before for publicly questioning a policy of the former principal so I knew this wasn’t an idle threat. I wasn’t prepared to lose my chance at a high school degree, so I gave up the fight. The pep buses — and what they represented to me in advancing the cause of integration — were dead.
But we looked for other ways to advance our agenda and we found a few. The most significant was our “Community Clean-up Day”. Students could volunteer to clean up city streets and the city’s park in exchange or getting out of classes that day. But it was also a chance for black and white students to work together and more importantly interact together in a setting free from the control of white adults. We also created a small party at the end, meeting back at the school for a refreshment hour — with Coca-Cola supplying the drinks free of charge.
At the end of the school year a small group of us organized our own protest of the segregated dances. A group of 30 to 40 white students boycotted the white dance and instead attended the black dance at the community center. We had been encouraged to come by several of our black friends, so we didn’t do it without an invite. On the other hand I can now see that the invite was only extended by a few individuals and it was presumptuous of us to think that all the black people there were happy at our sudden appearance. Looking back I can remember feeling some hostility from a few. I don’t blame them. It was their dance we crashed and we were still in a world where encounters with white people could go badly and when they did it was always the black people who got hurt.
But most welcomed us very warmly and the evening was fun, exciting and trouble-free. It remains one of the most memorable moments of my high school experience, as it was for those who went with me. Not to mention that the music and the dancing were far superior to anything we had yet experienced on the white side of the line.
I wouldn’t say this story has a happy ending because the significant social advances we made in that 1971-72 school year weren’t followed up by the classes that came after us. The student body president after me failed to use the student council to build on our accomplishments and subsequent classes didn’t have the same energy as ours at breaking through the racial barriers. Principal Wade — who had been helpful to the progress we made — retired and was replaced by a narrow minded and racist man who happily implemented the Superintendents wishes to block any real racial progress. In the larger society the white south soon adapted to American norms and found more socially acceptable ways of expressing its unspoken but fierce sense of white privilege, which created further barriers to the real integration of our schools.
Probably the most significant barrier, however was the internal segregation imposed on our school by the use of school tracking, also called ability grouping. This was a way to segregate the classrooms of our integrated school since black students as a group had lower grades than whites. This was a partly a result of them losing their own school and teachers and suddenly being graded by mostly white teachers, some of whom were openly racist. It was also a reflection of class divisions in the community since many of the white students had parents who were teachers and administrators at Ole Miss, whereas most of the black students had working class parents. Students in the lower tracked classes also got the worst teachers while white students with academic ability had parents who knew how to fight the system and could make sure the best teachers were allocated to their children. Black parents were understandably intimidated by the system and in those days were less likely to protest — and not without reason. I saw first hand how our schools were managed by a racist who had a hidden agenda.
My story with the Oxford Schools didn’t end with my high school graduation. After going to NYU film school in New York in the late 70s, I moved back to Oxford with my then-wife and we raised three sons, all of whom attended Oxford schools and graduated from Oxford High School.
My oldest son became friends in first grade with Tony, the son of Clinton, my first black friend in the Oxford schools. Tony came to Nick’s birthday parties and they remained close until middle school when social pressures from both sides of the racial divide encouraged children to self-sort into their own black and white groups. It wasn’t a clear-cut thing and Tony and Nick continued to interact but I could see that it wasn’t the same as when they were younger. My other two sons also had a few black friends throughout their schooling. But that wasn’t the norm. The Oxford schools are still evenly mixed black and white with a number of new immigrant children from around the world added in. Private schools have come and gone but none have succeeded in re-segregating the school system. For the most part, however, internal segregation has succeeded, especially at Oxford High.
But that doesn’t mean that school integrated doesn’t matter. Even if its limited form it accomplishes important things, exposing children to those who come from a different group, and learning common history. All three of my sons had a middle school English teacher, who was black and who spent a month teaching civil rights and encouraging her students to ask their parents about their own civil rights experience. A number of white parents protested, but the white adminstrator of the school fully backed his teacher. In elementary school, my youngest son went on integrated field trips in which black and white students interacted as though it was the most normal thing in the world. One of these was an overnight trip, with students segregated in bedrooms by sex but not by race. And I’ll never forget the trip to the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, and how these children learned about the racial turmoil of the 1960s — many of them hearing it for the first time. The best part was that it seemed to them to be such a foreign concept — neither the black or white children could understand how we could have lived in a world of total apartheid, one that meant the constant humiliation of African Americans.
I’m still a great believer in integration, but it’s taken a lifetime for me to understand what that greatly abused word might mean — if we ever took it seriously and really did it. If Donald Trump and this election has shown us anything, it’s that we can’t afford to give up just because the thing is hard.
Half the country wants to move forward on race relations and nearly half wants to move back.
I’m 62. Many of Trump’s voters are my generation. Those in the deep south attended all-white schools in a legally segregated system and that created their world view. For a long time, they had considered it a lost world. But Trump has led them to think it can be reclaimed. Call it Make America Great Again, or Make American White Again or Make America Hate Again, its all the same thing. Give us back the good ole days of segregation.
Trump is a menace for so many reasons. But foremost is that he is re-igniting the dormant racism of the 1960s. I know many of the Trump voters. They were my classmates when schools were fully segregated, when racism was the norm and when hurling racist epithets was commonplace.
Trump has awakened things that needed to be confronted and apologized for — not brought back to life.
Rick Tyler of Tennessee is one of those living-dead racists. Although he is running as an independent, he borrowed from Trump’s slogan to make his own: Make America White Again. And he explained his logic on his website:
. . . we are confident that a widespread and creative billboard advertising game plan could go a long way toward making the Rick Tyler For Congress candidacy both viable and a force to be reckoned with. Clearly we are in uncharted waters, in that there has never been a candidacy like this in modern political history. Of great significance, as well, is the reality of the Trump phenomenon and the manner in which he has loosened up the overall spectrum of political discourse.
Yes, that was what America needed — to loosen up our “spectrum of political discourse” so the Klan and Nazis could have a voice. Thank you Donald Trump.
We have two big jobs in front of us. The first is to beat Trump. You can only win against racist bastards by beating them bad, so badly they have no recourse but surrender. We’ve done it twice before, in the Civil War and in the Civil Rights Movement. We now must do it again at the ballot box and we need every possible voter we can get for Hillary Clinton. A close victory won’t do it, I agree with Dana Milbank in the Washington Post, Trump has to suffer a humiliating landslide or we are going to have a world of trouble come November 9th. So if you are considering third party or not voting because you just don’t like Hillary or the emails or Wikileaks or whatever — don’t.
If you believe in a racially inclusive America there is only one vote that keeps us on that journey, and you need to vote for the Democratic ticket up and down the line. Get your family and friends to vote. Get strangers to vote. I know the Trump voters first-hand and what they are capable of if we don’t bring them to their senses by making them see that Trump is a loser, not a savior. We can reclaim many of them as law-abiding, semi-sensible people if we do that. This is the most important election I’ve seen in my lifetime and I've been watching them closely since 1968.
The second big job starts November 9th. We need to have a real discussion about a multi-racial America and what integration means when it is done right. And about how we create that America.
Actually Denise Oliver Velez has already started this discussion at Daily Kos. Here’s a small sample from her story, The black and brown firewall against Trump is being joined by more white women:
How do we as Democrats—and as women—consolidate this tentative new coalition with the women who may be voting for our party for the first time? If the majority of these women are white and may not be voting against Republican racism, voter suppression, and xenophobia, but have been inspired to cast a ballot in reaction only to sexism and misogyny—how do we work with them to expand their consciousness, and to embrace those of us who are women of color and solid Democrats? How to start the difficult conversations around privilege and intersectionality that need to take place?
Let’s continue to talk about this at Kos and explore how we can take the discussion to the nation.