At our high school reunion last October I met up with an old friend I hadn’t seen in decades. While we reminisced, I mentioned our fifth grade class at City Park Elementary School. My friend said, “Oh yes- fifth grade. That was 1968- the year segregation ended.”
For a moment, I felt surprised. Of course I knew that particular historical fact- in 1968, for the first time, Dalton Public Schools were racially integrated- but I never thought of fifth grade as “the year segregation ended.” I always thought of it as the year my schoolmates and I moved “up” from Brookwood (a baby school) to City Park- where the big-time fifth and sixth graders went. It was the year that pretty Miss Farley, fresh out of college, learned that teachers should at least try to project a mean streak starting the first day, and some actually deserve combat pay. It was the year that fifteen-year-old Freddie Key, as tall as Miss Farley and still in fifth grade, lit a cigarette in the cloak room and Miss Farley hauled him to the principal’s office by the ear. (We never saw him again). It was the year I did little in class except read dozens of Nancy Drew books while chaos whirled around me. And although the end of segregation was a hard-won, blood-soaked, monumental achievement in society, it did not affect me much- not nearly as much as it affected my friend.
As I thought about her comment, mentioned lightly and in passing, I felt troubled- and curious. I considered that we had traveled together through a true movement in history- a time of struggle and violence, of courage and cowardice, of ponderous, fundamental changes in our national conscience and institutions. All of us tend to see the world from a limited perspective- our own lens- and we often decide how others should feel or act without taking their different perspectives into account- and without trying to understand them. I thought about my own experience at summer’s end in 1968, and I wondered how my friend’s perspective and experience was different.
I remembered that before I left home for that first day of fifth grade, as I finished my bowl of Captain Crunch and glass of Tang, my mother tried to prepare me for a change. “Children from Emery Street School will be going to school with you now,” she told me, gently and pleasantly, “so you may have some colored children in your class this year.” (She expressed no disrespect- it’s what people said in 1968). Mother’s tone became serious as she instructed me how to respond to my new classmates. “You treat these children no different from the way you treat everybody else… and I know you are always kind and friendly to everyone.” (This statement was both an expectation and direct order, not an observation).
As I left for school that day, wearing a new dress, a pair of stiff, unscuffed saddle oxfords, and carrying a new blue and black plaid bookbag with buckles- I felt more than the usual first- day- of- school nervous excitement. In the North Georgia town where I grew up, it seemed that white people and black people got along fine; and although I saw black people in town, I didn’t personally know any, and I wondered what they would be like.
Miss Farley’s class, (one of four fifth-grade classes) contained around thirty students. About half were white boys, including the one who was there on and off only until his sixteenth birthday, when he could finally quit school and go to work. About half of us were girls, and two were black. Johnetta was soft-spoken, pretty, and was immaculately, stylishly dressed. Kaye was gregarious, hilarious, energetic, and never met a stranger. I liked them both immediately and that was that. From my perspective as a ten-year-old middle class Christian white child from Dalton, Georgia, the end of segregation was no big deal. I had two new friends, and expected to have more when I met the three other fifth graders who had come to City Park from Emery Street School. I went out to play four square and hopscotch or stuck my nose in the next Nancy Drew book. I never once considered that Johnetta, Kaye, Mary Jane, Kendall, and Janice might be feeling something different.
Forty-eight years after segregation ended, Johnetta’s comment at the class reunion set me thinking. We met for lunch, and I asked her what the “end of segregation” was like for her. Although I truly wanted to know, I dreaded hearing that she felt frightened, or threatened, or marginalized. I was happy and relieved to hear her say, ” All through school, I thought everybody was nice; nobody ever tried to pick a fight or called me a name -except once at a high school basketball game in another town- and all the teachers were good to me, too. From the first day, I always felt like just another one of the kids.”
I asked if her mother “prepared” her for that first day of fifth grade, like mine did. She laughed and said she didn’t remember, but she said she didn’t feel scared when she came to City Park.
Our hometown is far from perfect, and Johnetta said that she did remember having to go with her mother to the back door of the local cafe to place orders. The injustices of segregation were never pointed out or explained to me as a child. I never knew. I looked at the world through a different lens. We agreed, however, that considering the ugliness that erupted in other towns and cities- we were thankful we grew up in a place where most of the people- black and white, Christians and Jews- (that’s about all there was in Dalton in the ’50’s, ’60’s, and ’70’s)-respected one another and genuinely wanted to put in the effort to live together in peaceful, mutually beneficial community. It gives me hope that it is possible for others to do the same. Too many Americans had far different experiences in the 1960’s.
Before our conversation drifted to children, grandchildren, aging parents, memories of our long-gone days on the basketball team- and all the other stuff old friends our age talk about when they are “catching up,” we shared our mutual concern over increasing violence and bitterness in our country today. Johnetta summed up our discussion with another thought-provoking comment: “I can’t understand why some people think they have to hate.”
She’s right. Hate never solved any problem or made one single person’s life better. Hate offers weak people an illegitimate sense of power and grants them an excuse- an excuse for cruelty, injustice, and every other evil – or furnishes someone to blame for their own sins and failures. Hate silences dialog that could bring understanding, strangles grace and forgiveness that could bring release, and changes people into things. Hate does no one- the hater or the hated- any good. Hate destroys souls and nations. Why do it?
I never celebrated Martin Luther King Day before. I never thought it was for me- but this year, I’m thinking it’s for all of us. With racial divisions once again painfully inflamed, we can all admire and learn from the man who had “a dream”- and gave his life for it. His words of wisdom speak across the decades as he offers the antidote to hate: “We can no longer afford to worship the god of hate or bow before the altar of retaliation. The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever-rising tides of hate. History is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals that pursued this self-defeating path of hate. As Arnold Toynbee says, ‘Love is the ultimate force that makes for the saving choice of life and good against the damning choice of death and evil. Therefore the first hope in our inventory must be the hope that love is going to have the last word.'” (Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., “A Time to Break Silence,” 1967).
Martin Luther King Day 2017 has offered me an opportunity for reflection- on where I have been and where I need to change. I have come to realize that it’s hard to hate- or be either ignorant or indifferent– when we are busy seeking understanding- and loving people who look at the world through a different lens.
SHARED❣️
i shared a Journalism class with Charlene Hunter, the first black woman at UGA on her first day there. there was some security on campus but all went well.