Mississippi School Integration and Me
My family moved from Jacksonville, Florida to Jackson, Mississippi in October of 1969. There were issues in my parents’ marriage and my faither’s professional life that drove this move that I was unaware of at the time. I had just turned ten years old and was in fifth grade. Though the house we lived in was just four blocks from Boyd Elementary School, that school was “full” of fifth graders, so I was assigned to Watkins Elementary School, a couple of miles down Northside Drive from our house and Boyd. It was not until December that a spot for me opened up at Boyd and the three of us were all in the same school. My sister was in first grade and my brother was in sixth grade.
I was also unaware that there was a major court case (Alexander v Holmes County)moving to resolution in the U.S Supreme Court that would result, fifteen years after the Brown v Board of Education decision, in the full integration of Mississippi’s public schools. In the middle of January, Jackson Public Schools got an additional week of “vacation,” as new attendance lines and teacher assignments were drawn. The three of us stayed at Boyd, but we had new Black classmates and teachers. I’m sure my parents were anxious about these developments, but I don’t recall their communicating any anger or resentment about them to us. There WERE other issues in their marriage coming to a head. My father resigned his job at Broadmoor Baptist Church and left the family to move back to Jacksonville, FL. The turmoil at our house came from those developments, not from the larger developments in Jackson that consumed the news. We remained at Boyd through the end of that school, as Broadmoor Church allowed us to continue living in their house, even though the employee with the claim on the house had resigned and left town.
My mother had an Elementary Education degree and secured employment at one of the new private schools, headquartered in a church. She had taught for several years in Kentucky, Tennessee, and Florida, but didn’t particularly care for it. Teaching was also a nine-month job, and she would need a twelve-month job. Eventually, she settled on becoming a Medical Records Administrator, which would require about a year of training at the University of Mississippi Medical Center. We moved into a three-bedroom apartment in the Fondren neighborhood of Jackson, several decades before Fondren would be the “hip and happening” neighborhood it is today. My sister would be in second grade at Duling Elementary School and I in sixth grade. My brother would be in seventh grade at Bailey Junior High. I recall that there was just one sixth grade class at Duling. I did not know that huge numbers of White parents had removed their children from Jackson Public Schools by the beginning of the 1970-71 school year. I know that I had Black and White classmates, but that didn’t make me at all anxious.
What DID make all of us anxious was our severely limited income. We regularly scoured the Fondren neighborhood for discarded soft drink bottles that could be turned in for deposit. We would use the money to pay for groceries at the Jitney Jungle (Now Corner Market) in Fondren. I have heard that people scrounged for money to pay private school tuition during those years. They were unaware of what real scrounging looked and felt like.
After she completed her Medical Records training at UMMC, my mother got a job as Director of Medical Records at King’s Daughters Hospital in Greenville. We had no family or friendship ties to Greenville or to the Mississippi Delta. I did not know that a community meeting had been held in Greenville more than a year earlier at which the White elites had determined that private schools would be established to avoid the integration that was coming to the Greenville Public Schools. By the time we arrived in August 1971, the private schools were an established fact. There were two private schools in Greenville, Washington and Greenville “Christian.” I do not know why there were two. If my mother ever considered placing us in one of the private schools, I didn’t hear about it. Her salary as a Department Manager of a “Woman’s Department” did not provide enough income for private school tuition for three children in any case. Her place in the social hierarchy of the Delta was “hired help.” Throughout our years in Greenville, we lived very close to the “edge,” financially.
I was not involved in any of the discussions about the establishment of the private schools, but I knew they were established to keep White children from having to go to school with Black children. Everyone knew that. For various reasons (most probably economic) the Greenville Public Schools in the 1970s maintained around a 35% White presence. This was certainly very much to our advantage and to the advantage of the town. Though most of the Whites were from the working classes (as most White people in Greenville were), there were children of the professional/managerial classes and even of a few of the ownership class who remained loyal to the public schools in those years.
I began that 1971-72 school year as a seventh grader at Coleman Junior High School. I did not know(initially) that this had been Coleman High School, the Black High School for Greenville. That school had been an academic and athletic showcase for Black Mississippians for decades. During my seventh-grade year, the stands at the football field were dismantled. I now recognize that that was an act of cultural erasure. There were several incidents in which the “Junior” part of “Coleman Junior High School” was erased or painted over. The Black community had also lost something of value in the way integration was implemented in Greenville.
Midway through my seventh-grade year, my mother married an assistant coach at Coleman, who was also the Study Hall supervisor. My brother and I warned our mother that he was “mean.” She waved this off, saying this was a persona he had to adopt as a teacher. As she was to learn the hard way, he actually WAS mean. We lived for more than three years in a house of domestic violence. This made school and church refuges.
One blessing of that first year at Coleman was my enrollment in chorus during the second semester. I eventually became a member of the Concert Chorus. Kaye Ventura, the chorus teacher, became the first Black teacher who was also a mentor and encourager to me.
In the early 1970s, a big issue receiving national coverage was “forced busing” for school integration. This led to riots in Boston and other Northern cities. In Greenville we didn’t even have “voluntary busing.” . We lived two miles from Coleman, five miles from T.L. Weston (the school for tenth graders) and a mile and a half from Greenville High School. There was no bus service. Getting to and from school was up to me and my family. We managed, but not at all with the support of the school system.
We joined First Baptist Church in Greenville shortly after moving to town. Many members of the “ownership class” were members of that church. I became intensely aware of the class system at church. There were “nice enough” people among the class elites, but I knew where I fit on the hierarchy. As the son of a twice divorced (by 1975) woman, I was at the bottom of the social system at First Baptist. Many of the elites at First Baptist had been founders of the private schools, often personally guaranteeing the loans needed to get the buildings up and equipped and teachers hired. They underwrote some of the tuition for select children of the “hired help.”
One “absence” through the years had to do with school-sponsored social activities. I can’t answer the question of whether I went to Prom, because there WAS no school prom. White parents independently arranged things like Homecoming dances, graduation dances, etc. I presume that Black parents did as well. Dances and social events weren’t really my “thing,” anyway, but interracial social events just didn’t exist in those days.
The two stated reasons for the founding of the private schools had been “quality” and “safety.” I was never bullied because I was White, even though Whites were a minority at all of Greenville’s public schools. I was bullied because I was unathletic and socially awkward. That’s pretty much a universal experience.
Beginning in tenth grade, I began to find my way to challenge the claim that only the private schools provided a “quality education.” I discovered that I was excellent at rapid recall trivia competitions. I was on the “Literary Bowl” team at T.L. Weston High School. I excelled both there and at Greenville High School. I was the only junior on a “Challenge Bowl” team that won the state championship in 1976. I was also a member of the Literary Bowl team that won the County Championships in 1976 and 1977. This was the only area in which public and private schools directly competed. It was satisfying to be able to demonstrate that “quality” education was available in the public schools.
My PSAT score made me a National Merit Semi-finalist and finalist. I was encouraged by the school guidance counselor and by my teachers to “aim high” in my college applications. I was accepted to Vanderbilt, Rhodes College, and Millsaps College. That certainly spoke well of the quality of education I had received in Mississippi’s integrated public schools. I chose Millsaps because of a favorable financial aid package. I graduated Magna Cum Laude and had a full tuition scholarship to Garrett-Evangelical Seminary, where I earned a Master of Divinity degree.
My older brother spent his senior year with my father in the Atlanta suburbs, but he had gone eighty trough eleventh grade in Greenville Public Schools. He earned a Bachelor’s Degree in Electrical Engineering from Georgia Tech.
My younger sister was four years behind me. She also excelled academically in Greenville Public Schools and was admitted to Agnes Scott College, where she was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa. She earned a Ph.D. in Clinical and Community Psychology from the University of Illinois Chicago and later a Master of Divinity from Pacific School of Religion.
My mother took a job in Medical Records at a hospital in Valdosta, GA in the summer of 1981, the year I graduated from Millsaps. I do not really know what happened in Greenville Public Schools through the 1980s, but it appears that by the 1990s education in Greenville was again segregated, with an almost all Black public school system and an almost all White private school system. This is quite unfortunate and has not served the prosperity of Greenville at all.
Of course, Sarah was going to take ASTRONOMY, not astrology.
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