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72 13 a Glen Echo Passage Robert B. Keiter I understood, but only vaguely, that I would be attending a new elementary school next year to make room for the colored children from Seven Locks Road at my present school. The year was 1955, and I was just finishing the third grade in Cabin John, Maryland. My teacher mother, I remember, had been pleased—even downright gleeful —upon learning that the Supreme Court had ordered public schools desegregated . To its credit, the Montgomery County School Board responded almost immediately, opening its previously segregated school system to the county’s black children, most of whom lived in scattered pockets around the area. The monumental significance of the Court’s ruling mostly escaped me. As a white child raised in a middle-class white community, all I knew for sure was that I would be moving to a new school. Home was Glen Echo, a small town perched above the Potomac River a couple of miles west of the nation’s capital. Glen Echo was a pretty typical middle-class community in those days. The town’s eighty or so homes were modest, though comfortable. The residents were decidedly middle class—a baker, a plumber, a butcher, and a taxi driver, a couple carpenters, some civil servants, salespeople, and quite a few housewives. The town was incorporated, with its own mayor and town council system, bringing local government close to everyone. Glen Echo, however, was anything but enlightened when it came to matters of race in the mid-1950s. More than once I can recall adults in town, upset over a town council decision or some other perceived slight, threatening to “sell out to niggers.” Whether serious or not, the threat always seemed to alarm those listening. But my parents, refugees from the Pennsylvania coal fields who’d relocated to the Washington, D.C., area after the war, had been clear with me for as long as I could remember: Everyone was equal, regardless of the color of their skin. The town was divided by Glen Echo Amusement Park, a longtime D.C.area landmark situated at the end of the streetcar line. The park offered an assortment of rides, ranging from roller coasters to a merry-go-round. It had the Spanish ballroom, a shooting gallery, and cotton candy too. And it had Robert B. Keiter 73 a swimming pool, which local kids used from Memorial Day through Labor Day, a welcome respite from the summer heat and humidity. But there were no black people at the park; it was segregated and would remain that way for more than a decade. (The park was privately owned, I learned from my father, which meant it was not bound by the Brown ruling or any other law then on the books.) For me, besides relocating to another nearby school, not much changed in the immediate aftermath of the county’s decision to desegregate its schools. A few black children joined me at my new school, but they were in other grades, and I really didn’t get to know them. I don’t recall much local resistance or protest either, perhaps because there wasn’t a very large black population in the county and the dislocations were minimal. Then one day in the early summer of 1957, a friend and I ventured across the bridge to the Cabin John Recreation Center looking for a baseball game. Cabin John was another primarily white working-class community. In no time, Corky and I were on the baseball diamond trying out for the team. Beside us were other boys our own age, both black and white, each intent on proving his prowess as a fielder and batter. The coach, I soon learned, was Harold, a softspoken young black man who was working his way through college and who took a genuine interest in each of us. Despite the strange surroundings, I was in heaven. Here was a real baseball team with a real baseball diamond, a coach, and a schedule of games against other Montgomery County teams. There couldn’t be a better way to spend a summer than playing ball. I met Dwight that day, little knowing that we would become friends all the way through high school. In response to Harold’s query about what position I played, I said either second or third base. After I’d fielded a few ground balls, a lanky black boy sauntered by and let me know that...

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