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143 23 Standing Up for Brown in Danville Richard Bourne I was eleven years old when Brown I came down in May 1954. My biggest concerns were girls (I didn’t like them but secretly coveted their attention) and making the majors in Little League baseball (I couldn’t hit, and so knew I would be relegated to the minors). I don’t remember much about my family’s reaction to Brown, except that they thought it was high time for the Court to rule as it had and that they were generally elated about the prospects for change it augured. The next day, because there was a delay in getting into the elementary school I attended, the kids were milling around the schoolyard. They were full of anger and resentment and suggested that integration would never come to Danville, Virginia, where we lived. When I told them I thought the decision was a good one, they called me a “nigger lover.” I had never heard the term before and wasn’t sure what it meant, but I knew I didn’t like being ostracized. White kids in places like Danville had very little contact with black kids. The programs open to us—the schools, youth sports leagues, the scout troops, yMCA programs, et cetera—did not include people of color. We were aware of the order of things—I remember, for instance, knowing that I could escape the gentle control of our black nanny when she took us downtown on the bus simply by moving to the front of the bus—but gave it not a thought. We accepted it as the way things were. We didn’t think much about it. I went away to prep school at Andover in September of 1957. I was the only kid from my Danville high school class who went to school with Negroes. As part of its massive resistance to federal desegregation policy, Virginia enacted legislation that allowed any parents who wanted their child educated in private schools to get a tuition grant from the local government where the child lived, with reimbursement to come from the state. The grants were rather puny, like most of the voucher payments right-wingers are trying to foist off on Americans in the twenty-first century, but they were enough to help rich people like us. My father decided to take advantage of the program to spite the system. The deans at Andover and my father got a chuckle out of the 144 De Jure States and the District of Columbia fact that I was the first kid from the state of Virginia to get a tuition grant. The local white populace was furious because we weren’t using the money for the purpose it was intended—to flee integrated public schools. The lynching of Emmett Till in Mississippi and Orval Faubus’s resistance to desegregation in Little Rock were the only major national crises in race relations I remember from the 1950s, but things began heating up in 1960 and stayed that way through most of the next decade. Pressure on Jim Crow mounted nationally with the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, James Meredith’s integration of Ole Miss, the Freedom Rides through Greyhound and Trailways bus routes across the South, and the sit-ins at the Woolworth’s store in Greensboro , North Carolina. My parents got involved, in a minor way, in trying to promote reform, both on a local level in my hometown and on a regional level throughout the South. My mother helped create the Virginia Council on Human Relations, a state offshoot of the Southern Regional Council out of Atlanta , and became the Southern national vice president of the yWCA, which was more progressive than its male counterpart, and spent the next five or six years traveling around the American South cajoling women in Southern cities to desegregate their local yW chapters. During the summer of 1960, the city government in my hometown closed its public libraries rather than desegregate them, and my folks got involved in a local political scrap about the issue, which forced them to become more publicly aligned with the cause of desegregation . I became a cub reporter for a local newspaper during the summer of 1960 and covered the library story, which turned out to have its deliciously silly side. The city officials briefly reopened the library as a stand-up facility, sans desks or tables...

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