After the Dream: Black and White Southerners since 1965

12 THE AFTERMATH

• 12 • THE AFTERMATH From History to Memory When Josephine Boyd Bradley returned to Grimsley High School in Greensboro, North Carolina, on March 30, 2006, the reception she received could scarcely have been more different than that which greeted her when she had first nervously entered its doors in September 1957. Then, as the only African American in a student body of two thousand, she was the victim of constant racial slurs, physical intimidation, and studied insults from students and faculty. Forced to take her meals in the library, she endured the torment, partly, she said, owing to the support of three white students who befriended her, themselves suffering insult and ostracism as a consequence. She graduated in 1958, the first black student in the state to do so from a formerly all-white high school, and went on to a successful career in higher education. But it had cost her part of her youth. She had refused to cry “during that long-ago year,” she recalled, “but now I know I can let the tears flow. I know the mission has been accomplished.”1 In 2006, Bradley was back at Grimsley, this time as the school’s honored guest, there to receive the plaudits of the student body (now 42 percent nonwhite), to witness the unveiling of her portrait (to be hung in the school’s main hall), and to be formally hailed as a civil rights pioneer. In response, she said she wanted no apology for the mistreatment she had suffered; rather, she considered her presence to be a wonderful “celebration ” of her small part in “a moment in history” that had profound consequences . Desegregating Grimsley High was “one of the most powerful things and meaningful things I have ever done,” she told her student audience, who, though initially only dimly aware of the history she had made, perhaps now had a greater sense of its significance. “I think it takes a lot of courage to do something like that,” mused the ninth-grader Tracey Canada. “I don’t think I would have been able to do that.”2 Dorothy Counts, one of the four students who integrated the Charlotte school system in September 1957 and the one whose presence at The Aftermath • 255 Harding High School sparked so much violence that she had to be withdrawn after four days for her own safety, was similarly reconciliatory. She had forgotten some of what happened on her first day, she said fifty years later, “and forgiven most of the rest.” But she had spent half a century thinking about the events—and looking at the photographs of the jeering, menacing crowd that had followed her into school. If you studied them the right way, she claimed, you knew that she had been the winner. “What I see is that all of these people are behind me. They did not have the courage to get up in my face.” She had made much the same point in a press interview on September 4, 1957. The students who had so hounded her that day “didn’t hurt [her]”: “They only hurt themselves.” Far from hating them, she felt “sorry for them,” she had said then.3 James Lawson was invited back to his old school, too, in 2006, to Vanderbilt University in Nashville, from which he had been expelled forty-six years before for his key role in organizing the lunch counter sitins that heralded an expansion of the nonviolent protest movement. Lawson, who had previously studied nonviolence as a means of protest while serving as a Methodist missionary in India, was one of a handful of black students attending Vanderbilt in 1960. After his expulsion, his reputation as the movement’s leading theoretician of nonviolent action grew exponentially, and, as such, he deeply influenced a whole generation of civil rights activists, including Stokely Carmichael, Marion Barry, and John Lewis. Now, aged seventy-eight, Vanderbilt had asked him to return—as a distinguished visiting professor. “It isn’t often that an institution gets the chance to correct for a previous error,” said the university ’s associate provost, Lucius Outlaw. Lawson, though surprised by the university’s invitation, was delighted to accept and further agreed to donate his papers to the Vanderbilt archives. For him, as for Josephine Bradley, his return marked a positive reconnection with the past.4 Unlike Lawson, Bradley was a pioneer of the civil rights movement whose story was never national news, scarcely known, in fact, outside...