Little Rock Integration: Good article!

» Bill_Samuel - Good article!

Thanks for the article, Kelly. You mention the Quaker family that took a student in. As a matter of fact, there is a long history of Quakers working to support the education of African-Americans dating from the slavery era.

The organizer of the famous March on Washington at which Martin Luther King Jr, gave his I Have a Dream speech was a Quaker. Folks may want to read the Quakerism article on Bayard Rustin.

Seven years after that famous day at Central High in Little Rock, our family had moved to Lawrenceville in southern Virginia. My parents taught at St. Paul's College, where one of my sisters was the first white student. It was the first year of so-called "freedom of choice" integration.

A hearty band of a dozen African-Americans signed up to attend the formerly all-white Brunswick High School. The school system didn't decide until the last day what to do about busing. So they notified students of their bus arrangements by phone the day before. They couldn't notify us because the phone company resisted giving us a phone because they didn't like that we associated with African-Americans. So I just went with a neighbor on campus who was going to the same school. It turned out the buses were segregated. Our bus served the black high school and then did an extra run for us, meaning we got to school late every day. It served us first in the afternoon, meaning we had to leave a little early.

When we walked in the first day, there was an opening assembly in progress. There, they read out a list of names of people to go to a separate assembly. That list was everyone on my bus except me, whom they did not yet have categorized. In the white assembly, they announced that it was normally their policy to welcome new students, but this year it was their policy to ostracize new students. This policy was not enunciated in the separate assembly, but of course I filled in my friends on my bus. The policy was largely followed. There was only one white student at the school who would speak to me in other than a hostile manner.

This was a most interesting year for me, and I certainly learned a lot about race in America during that year.

-- posted by Bill_Samuel