In Celebration of Black History ,at my Individual Level

BLACK History Month

To Kick off Black History month I am going to post each day something that I have learned as a person or a teacher about Black History.

I am first re posting a story written six years ago, a night after a severe gastric bleed almost killed me. At that point I decided for my own children to begin writing in front of them, openly journaling, to encourage their doing the same. Plus I had a witness piece. My conscious required I place it before others. Before children.

This is the telling of how I "learned skin is different colors".
It isn't an easy story.
My state which I dearly love, West Virginia, had Laws to segregate the schools. My 3rd grade teacher who was black, shared with me when we talked when I was older that she never was "accepted" by white peer teachers in reality. But laws finally put them together in one school setting. She was integrated into their faculty by Federal court actions (see green font background information below). She retired just a few years after the "law" put her in the main building. I believe her isolation she felt keenly. I assert this because on returning to the small school for overcrowding she said, "I'm glad to back in my old room, it's what I feel comfortable with." Her story, what I know, is presented below. I ask it be read for what it is, a story of race unfolding in our schools and lives in a singular situation that was not so unusual.


While I often read about the tales of racial struggle, and I certainly lived the times of Dr. King, I lived a kind of knowing of how this looked in one very small situation. Mine.

I know that no one ever, ever, in my schooling spoke to the fact the school had been segregated. Not in Junior High or High School, not when teaching to racial issues, not ever. Indeed children a few years older than myself, who were black, had not attended the "main" school. For a time in their lives they were segregated. Yet not a word. Looking back the story unfolded for me because Mrs. Peyton left me a few clues and I nudged others into the truth of the telling.

Because I was able to attend the Little Red School on the hill, because overcrowding re-opened it, I had my first clue. My teacher a few years later returning to the place she had spent most of a 40 plus year career, mandated into her situation by law. From Kindergarten to High School she was my only Public School teacher of color. I want to be very clear. My other teachers with equally long careers taught down the road knowing their peer was up in that Red Building, they where white and evidentally had some degree of difficulty opening arms to her when the law required they share their facility. They did not perhaps create the segregation, but did they participate with the construct? Clearly the entire community did. That is a truth I bear, uneasily.

And understand that she felt this, deeply, with her sterling character we children had "no idea". This was something teachers "accepted" as "the way it was", or at least several later said this to me. It was America and her laws. Consider that carefully.

It is a very good thing that we speak openly that we desire to see all children into successful lives. I would ask this month you visit my posts. Or the work of those far more articulate than I am. To celebrate our fellow Americans and their stories. This clearly has something to say to us all about education in the lives of children.

I celebrate Black History Month. I celebrate the teacher who inspired in me the desire to teach. It is the mandate she gave me, to treat others , the children, thinking of her. This is the cornerstone of work that I carry to my world everyday.

1954 to 1963, courtesy of Fact Monster

School Desegregation

In 1954, the Supreme Court took a momentous step: In Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka the court set aside a Kansas statute permitting cities of more than 15,000 to maintain separate schools for blacks and whites and ruled instead that all segregation in public schools is “inherently unequal” and that all blacks barred from attending public schools with white pupils are denied equal protection of the law as guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment. The doctrine was extended to state-supported colleges and universities in 1956. Meanwhile, in 1955 the court implemented its 1954 opinion by declaring that the federal district courts would have jurisdiction over lawsuits to enforce the desegregation decision and asked that desegregation proceed “with all deliberate speed.”

At the time of the 1954 decision, laws in 17 southern and border states (Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, Tennessee, Kentucky, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, Texas, Oklahoma, and Missouri) and the District of Columbia required that elementary schools be segregated. Four other states—Arizona, Kansas, New Mexico, and Wyoming—had laws permitting segregated schools, but Wyoming had never exercised the option, and the problem was not important in the other three. Although discrimination existed in the other states of the Union, it was not sanctioned by law.

The struggle over desegregation now centered upon the school question. By the end of 1957 nine of the 17 states and the District of Columbia had begun integration of their school systems. Another five states had some integrated schools by 1961. The states mostly fell back on stopgap measures or on pupil-placement laws, which assigned students to schools ostensibly on nonracial grounds. Forced integration led to much violence. The most notable instance was the defiance in 1957 of federal orders by Governor Orval Faubus of Arkansas, who called out the Arkansas National Guard to prevent integration in Little Rock. President Eisenhower responded by sending federal troops to enforce the court order for integration.

In 1958 Virginia closed nine schools in four counties rather than have them integrated, but Virginia and federal courts ruled these moves illegal. In 1960 desegregation began in Louisiana; whites boycotted the integrated New Orleans public schools at first triumphantly, later with diminishing effectiveness. In 1961 two black students registered at the Univ. of Georgia but were suspended because of student disorders; they were later returned under a federal judge's order.

In 1962–63 violence erupted in Mississippi, precipitating a serious crisis in federal-state relations. Against the opposition of Gov. Ross R. Barnett, James H. Meredith, a black who was supported by federal court orders, registered at the Univ. of Mississippi in 1962. A mob gathered and attacked the force of several hundred federal marshals assigned to protect Meredith; two persons were killed. The next day federal troops occupied Oxford and restored order. Meredith became the first African American to attend a Mississippi public school with white students in accord with the 1954 court decision.

In 1963, South Carolina's Clemson College became the first integrated public school in that state. Gov. George C. Wallace of Alabama stood in a doorway at the Univ. of Alabama in a symbolic attempt to block two black students from enrolling in 1963; the attempt failed. In the North attempts were also made to combat segregation. After a suit brought by black parents in 1960, the school system of New Rochelle, N.Y., was in 1961 ordered by a federal judge to be desegregated. Similar suits followed in other cities.

White Avenue

There is a certain irony that in my hometown in West Virginia most African Americans, blacks, in the very early sixties lived on a street called White Avenue. When I was young we lived in a neighborhood containing that street called South Park and attended a school named Second Ward Elementary School. It was an old several storied building with halls and rooms and a wonderful candy shop, “Bobette’s” across the street with candy cigarettes (long understood now to be a sign of our stupidities) and candy necklaces one could even theoretically eat during class. I never kept one long enough to try it.

I had been two years at the school when I experienced a little "different" third grade year. My classmates were children of faculty members of the university, store owners in town, business people, all working class people in the early 1960's. We lived in large aging Victorian era homes. I suspect that if I could transport these houses to California today I would spend $800, 000 to own one even in decaying condition. In those days my dad rented ours for $200 a month.

I walked to school alone a downhill proposition about a mile and a half. I had a little baby brother. It was a quiet neighborhood and walking was normal to do then even for first graders. I remember the climb home, walking in huge snows sometimes and losing a peridot ring one day. A good deal of the time we walked home for lunch. In third grade this changed a bit. When I was eight I got ready to go to third grade, which as it turned out changed my life in the kind of way a school can do, through a special teacher, changed essentially forever.

I was a “second” group reader. I think bluebird or yellow. Lower then in status, but not the lowest. In those days those things mattered all the time and seldom did one work out of a grouping. Second Ward School must have had some minor baby boom looking back because we got word that our third grade would not be in the main building which was a big monolith that set into the bottom corner of the all up neighborhood. White Avenue was on its other side, prompting me to say below the school but essentially lying on the other side of the hill.
I remember my mom in negotiations on the phone about third grade but I don't know what went on, now she probably doesn't totally recall either. I knew something was up when she escorted me on my first day walking along with a good many of my classmates past the big school and up adjacent White Ave. about three quarters of a mile.

All the way up the hill to a red brick little building on the right, past houses full of "How are you’s" and friendly greetings and waves. I found we kids got greeted on White Avenue the entire year. Like visiting dignitaries. They watched us come and go, always watching. Just such friendly porch loving people I thought on this street. The walk was well below those houses, they were propped up like most of Morgantown rising above you. The red brick building had many stairs rising up, up three levels to the big wooden doors. Inside were two classroom, wooden plank floors and a little front receiving area with the cloak racks. You hung the coat, deposited your lunchbox and went in. My desk was in the back, first row behind Kelly, all year.

I never walked beyond my desk much, never went over and looked out the window. That's how it was in the old days. We respected the area like sacred ground. It was school. The left side of the room was all big windows. Up front was a piano, blackboard, teacher's desk and teacher. That's how my mom left me my first day with a cheery good-bye. I was in Mrs. Peyton's class. Mrs. Gladys Peyton.
"Good morning ", she sang pumping the keys and we learned the good morning song so well known to all. We sang it everyday. I noticed Mrs. Peyton. She wore a red plaid
dress. It seemed she wore it everyday, but not really, I liked that one the best so my memory dresses her in it of course. She was kind, fair. Really a good teacher. She was black, before I knew what that really was. Another student in the class Debby Cady told me so first day as I was walking in to my desk. And in time I was to learn that I was the first white child ever to attend the town's “Negro school” with blond hair.

Some things it takes many years to learn, some things take many words to tell. The story of Miss Parks is told like a mantra to our school kids today. The story I lived was the quiet, sadly, almost insignificant unwinding of that legacy. The legacy of race in America, in my hometown, and that of the finest quality of character. Mrs. Peyton didn't tell us where we were or that she had been forced, really, in her past to teach there in separation. Never stated she was returning to her not so distant past of a few years to teach again there under really enormously different circumstances. I learned that later, piecing it together like a patchwork.

Mrs. Peyton told us she had a quince tree in her yard, and she brought us quince jelly, put it on white bread cubes and made us try it. In those days that was pretty revolutionary. She sang. When she put her glasses off in the middle of the day, it meant "fire drill”. She leaned over you to help you. She told us of Mr. Peyton, long gone and well loved, and how she lived with her sister in Sabraton, which was outside of the city proper. Many blacks lived there she said and I noted a first reference and perhaps only to her color. Now she said that was different and many people lived there.

She sang a song I'd give a lot to hear again, I forget the second verse:
Look here in the garden bed
Something beautiful is growing,
Bright green with a cup of red.
Tulip opens to the sun.

It was a very good year in our little school in the hills. Mrs. Peyton retired that year. But she was coaxed back two years later to do fifth grade. We had moved across town to a new school. I heard my classmates were not so good to her in fifth. My mom somehow got mingled into getting her retirement picture in the paper and a suitcase tribute on retirement. A SUITCASE? I guess to hold her memories.

In a way life takes you in circles. Mom sent me, when I was ten living across town in a new neighborhood nearer to her, down with a huge bag of vegetables on a little journey to Mrs. Peyton’s house. My Dad grew everything. People talk of big gardens and growing in their families but when they see my Dad's operation they just fall silent. It was a journey to walk down into Sabraton and give the bag to Mrs. Peyton and say a “little hello”. I was about the shiest kid on earth then and this idea didn’t make me leap for joy. I was actually dumbstruck that it even occurred to mom to suggest it. Beyond that it's at least four miles over the hills. But because I've always done whatever momma said, no matter, off I went. She had called to tell her I was "On my way." On my way.

I got to her several story white house that literally sat on the edge of the street with a yard that simply fell away to the valley below. The view there is beautiful. I probably went partially because I enjoy seeing that view and a challenging walk with forty pound of zucchini, yellow squash, cukes and beans. Mrs. Peyton was so gracious and kind. I was tongue tied, of course. She gave me a tour of her house, lemonade, showed her pictures, her memories. I learned about her husband, his military service, leadership in the community, I saw the quince tree out back, I asked to see it. She introduced me to her sister. She asked about my learning. She knew about my Dad, the professor, all that. She exclaimed over the bag of stuff. Then something happened, an exchange, that sums up why I teach and who I am when I am at my best. She told me something. She taught me again. I like to share this with kids. I think it very profound. It pours over my experiences in South Central, the Salinas Valley and Colonia (Oxnard, CA) like a waterfall. I said, in my fumblingly totally inadequate way, knowing the visit was ending, that I could never really thank her for all she had done for me.

I can't really thank her. And that matters to me to this day.

She looked at me and said, "Sarah, as you go on in your life try to give of yourself to others, to the children, that is how you will repay whatever debt you have to me. I want you to treat others thinking of me." It was a kind of epiphany I had to grow up to have. I work really hard to look that woman in the face when we meet again in a different kind of valley. I pray Mrs. Peyton is still alive, maybe a hundred and twenty now or more. I hope she lasts forever. We all need her. I learned more about the content of one's character with her than in any book or listening to any theory. If you wonder, through time, why racial issues pain me, you have to realize the among the people kindest to me on the planet, ready with a hello or kind word or Band-Aid (one day when I fell) were the people of my third grade year who lived on White Avenue or who taught in what had been the segregated school. The year I learned skin is different shades, but it’s all just skin. The year I went to the segregated school. The year I was treated the way a group of people always wished to be treated. And for that I thank Mrs. Peyton and that neighborhood with all my heart.