I don’t know whether to celebrate or cry on May 17, as the landmark Supreme Court decision to desegregate public schools reaches its 70th anniversary.
I was born two years after that 1954 decision, but I experienced what that court case meant 10 years later when I entered the third grade.
Growing up in the town of Upper Marlboro, Maryland, the county seat of Prince George’s County, I initially attended our segregated Black public school.
As my mother explained to me in later years, she was not going to let me go to the nearby white school until I learned to read and write. So, once I was old enough to start school in first grade in 1962, I walked past Marlboro Elementary, which was literally just a few hundred feet from my house, to go to the town’s main street to catch a school bus to the segregated Frederick Douglass Elementary School a few miles away.
Two of my other African-American elementary-school-aged neighbors and I, among a few others, became test cases for integrating Marlboro Elementary in the 1964-’65 school year.
My mother, a psychiatric nurse, and my friends’ mother took us to the school for our first day at a new to us, yet familiar, neighborhood school. The school’s secretary told us it was too late to register for school.
My mother who grew up in segregated southern Virginia was an even-tempered woman. But now, I could see she was angry. She, along with my friends’ mother, took us back home. My father, who was pastor of the local Black Methodist church, returned to the school with all of us following. He spoke to the principal, who seemed to welcome us. No problem.
During that school year, for the first time in my life, I was called the N-word by the younger brother of one of my classmates. What could have turned ugly in the community was dissipated when one of my classmates told a teacher. The boy was forced to apologize to me.
The complexion of the school changed the next year when other Black students were transferred to Marlboro Elementary. I guess the test case year was uneventful enough to continue with integration the following year.
However, in communicating on social media recently with one of my Black, male classmates from elementary school, he wrote that his experience at the school was terrible, the worst time in his life, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to relive it.
Despite how difficult it has been for Black Americans to live through segregation and then integration, integration hasn’t even been sustainable. A UCLA Civil Rights Project study published in February of this year found that 30% of the country’s public school students attend suburban schools experiencing “a substantial proliferation of school segregation.”
Changing laws doesn’t necessarily have the results expected and may not change someone’s heart. Maybe it’s time to take a closer look at one prescription for eliminating racism in this country — racial healing circles. In 2020, U.S. Congresswoman Barbara Lee, a California Democrat, called for the creation of a national Truth, Racial Healing, and Transformation Commission. Racial healing circles are an outgrowth of that project. They are supposed to be safe spaces, so no matter your race or color, with the help of a facilitator, you can share your stories about the people, places and things that have impacted your life in this country.
There are opportunities for all of us to learn from each of our histories, good, bad and indifferent. Telling our stories and being heard can be cathartic and could possibly lead to behavioral and attitude changes. Winston Churchill, prime minister of Britain during World War II, said in a speech, “Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” Learning about history may not necessarily come from the schoolhouse these days, but your own house, the church house, the local bookstore, the local museum, the local library, the job site and online resources.
Recently, I saw a bumper sticker on a truck that read One Race – Human Race. What happens when we define ourselves as members of the human race rather than a race based on color? Our stories could be the first step in effecting change among the races.
Pia Jordan (pmw.jordan@gmail.com) is a former broadcast journalist and a retired associate professor at Morgan State University School of Global Journalism and Communication. She is the author of “Memories of a Tuskegee Airmen Nurse and Her Military Sisters” (NewSouth Books/U of GA Press; 2023).
