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36 7 Loss of Innocence Angela Mae Kupenda I don’t wanna go to school with those mean white kids, cause they don’t want me there. I wanna go back to a school where people liked me. —Me to my mother in 1966 you might as well forget about making A’s. you won’t be making those anymore. Next year you’ll be in school mostly with white kids. And you’ll see that Negro kids are not as smart as white kids. I’m not trying to hurt your feelings, just prepare you. —A black teacher to me in 1971. (I responded, “yes, ma’am.” But I said to myself, We’ll see.) yes, the white students and teachers are wrong. . . . They are ignorant, not racist. . . . I know it hurts. But I’m sorry, . . . I have no power here, . . . I can’t help you. you’re on your own. —Typical comment from numerous sympathetic and unhelpful white teachers to me from 1971 to the present As you read the dates on the epigraphs, you may think my history is off. It is not. Brown v. Board of Education was decided in 1954. Although I was born after Brown in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1956, I did not attend student-integrated schools until the 1970–1971 academic year, when a mini-busload of about twenty white children began to attend our otherwise black elementary and junior high school. I was in the ninth grade. Although I remain firm in my conviction that Brown was necessary, I know that everything necessary is not necessarily easy or pleasant. Brown and the entire civil rights struggle opened new opportunities for me and many others, bringing many positive changes. Still, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Therefore the Angela Mae Kupenda 37 purpose of this essay is, first, to examine some of the voices from my past during that turbulent time and, second, to reflect on how these voices continue to echo in my present. “I don’t wanna go to school with those mean white kids, cause they don’t want me there. I wanna go back to a school where people liked me.” I can remember crying those words to my mother as if I had said them yesterday. But it was in 1966. I was almost ten years old and preparing to enter the fifth grade in the fall. For years, I knew something was going on in Mississippi. Although we lived in colored neighborhoods and shopped mainly in stores with colored people, I had learned from television and from riding in the car that paler colored people lived in big houses in our city. Whenever colored faces— other than the colored people on the Amos & Andy Show and colored people the police were looking for—came on television, the station would suddenly have trouble and the screen would black out. I had heard the whispered adult conversations at my grandparents’ house in Port Gibson, something about a NAACP and boycotts. At times I worried about the whispers, but mainly I concentrated on playing with my white dolls with the long pretty hair and my one colored doll that my uncle in the military had sent me from overseas, and studying ants. I nagged my mother to buy all the hair products the pink girls on television used to remove all the tangles from their hair. And I watched the way the ants in the yard of our shotgun house worked hard to rebuild their homes whenever their mounds were accidentally knocked down by rain or my own feet. All of this started to change in 1965 when I was told that all the schools were being redistricted. I was attending my favorite elementary school, Walton Elementary School, which was a short walk from my house. My mother explained I would have about an hour walk to attend my new school, Morrison Elementary School (she wanted us to walk around the street and not cut through the alleys). She explained the student reassignment had to do with a law requiring white and colored kids to go to school together. I was naively excited and wondered aloud if there would be white kids at my school. She laughed and said no, explaining the city was redrawing district lines but maintaining mostly separate schools. Even my small eight-year-old brain realized that did not make any sense if they really wanted to have integrated schools. My mother shook...

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