Dream Not of Other Worlds: Teaching in a Segregated Elementary School,1970

Afterword

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Afterword To fling my arms wide In some place of the sun, To whirl and to dance Till the white day is done. Then rest at cool evening Beneath a tall tree While night comes on gently, Dark like me— That is my dream! —from “Dream Variations” by Langston Hughes A year after I quit my job at Z. C. Morton Elementary School, I took a summer work-study job at the Wright School, an integrated state elementary school for emotionally disturbed children in Durham, North Carolina. There, I assisted an experienced teacher with a master’s degree, working closely with the young children in our classroom and supervising them and the school’s other students during afternoon recreation sessions. After my experience in Louisa, I was astonished to find myself in a public school where everything worked: the classrooms were filled with books, creative materials, and educational games; the teachers were exceptionally well-trained and committed; a low faculty-student ratio allowed them to devote a significant amount of attention to each child; students followed a curriculum specifically designed for their individual needs and abilities; they had to complete their lessons with 100 percent accuracy, eliminating failure as an option; everyone from the director of the school to the teaching aides had high expectations of all the students, many of whom advanced three academic years in their brief, fourmonth residential stays; and discipline problems were handled firmly 216 Afterword but humanely, with misbehaving students encouraged to reflect on their behavior and to take responsibility for their actions. All these children had emotional or behavioral problems serious enough to warrant their removal from their regular schools and were, in a sense, outcasts, in danger of being exiled from all they knew. Except they had landed at a school determined to save them from that fate. Wright School was only a couple hundred miles south of Louisa, but I felt as if I’d entered another galaxy. That summer I had the opportunity to observe African American and white children who had previously attended segregated southern schools interact with each other for the first time. My experience gave me hope in the promise of school integration. Every sunny afternoon another young teaching assistant and I took groups of children to a nearby public swimming pool that had only recently been integrated . As soon as classes were over, we would load the kids onto the school’s squat, peculiarly shaped bus—affectionately known as the Blue Goose—and head off to the pool, Tom driving, me in the back with the children. Almostly daily on the bus, I took part in one of their favorite rituals, holding out my arm for its color to be compared to the different colors of the many, much smaller arms, thrust into the aisle for inspection. I watched in fascination as the children, dressed only in their bathing suits, examined each other curiously, intently, but with not a hint of mistrust or hostility. They playfully patted heads to see whose hair was silky or kinky or wavy or frizzy; carefully studied the unusual paleness of one child’s skin, the dark chocolate hue of another; and, with childlike wonder, examined their physical similarities and differences. They were not color-blind, but neither were they trapped inside their culture’s rigid racial prejudices. Jostling along together in the Blue Goose on those hot afternoons, they acted as if they belonged to one happy, boisterous clan, though, in fact, they came from upper-, middle-, working-class, and poor families, both white and African American, from across the state. Many of us back then naively believed that once the courts had completely dismantled Jim Crow and eliminated de jure segregation of the public schools, the promise of a fully integrated society, so palpable at Wright School in the summer of 1971, would be realized. We imagined countless scenes similar to the one I witnessed on the Blue Goose naturally occurring in schools and playgrounds across the Afterword 217 country. And we were confident that, once African American children were allowed to go to school with white children, the disadvantages they had historically suffered would evaporate, and they would thrive. Products ourselves of a segregated society, only a few of us who were white had ever had any close contact with an African American community , as I had in Louisa. Most of us hadn’t yet learned to be attentive to cultural differences or to imagine how those differences might...