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107 SOUTH CAROLINA 19 Sacrifice, Opportunity, and the New South Mildred Wigfall Robinson In 1954, I was enrolled in the fourth grade in the Berkeley County Training School in Moncks Corner, South Carolina. The Berkeley County Training School was the public school that educated all the Negro children, grades one through twelve, who resided in that county. I remember quite clearly the day that the Brown decision was handed down. I recall the image of my father, the school principal, ringing a handbell while standing on a little hill that was just outside of his office. He rang that bell daily to signal the beginning of the day’s classes and the end of recess. We had been outside enjoying recess in the late spring sunshine and assumed that he was signaling its end. We quickly noticed that this was not his intent—he was beckoning us to him. We ran to him. He announced with great excitement that the Supreme Court of the United States had just held that segregated schools were unconstitutional. He explained to us that there were no longer to be separate schools for white and colored children. The decision was, of course, Brown v. The Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. His excitement was infectious, and so we children all became excited. We ran around and generally acted out that excitement. We did not, of course, understand all the ramifications of the decision. We could not know that widespread resistance to the appropriate implementation of the decision would ultimately lead to the firing of beloved teachers, the closing of facilities so much a part of life in black communities, and the fragmenting of the support and protection that those communities provided to their young. Nor could my family know how much the dismantling of the dual school system would demand of us personally . On that day, we celebrated the decision. And then, nothing happened—at least insofar as public education (for that matter, anything else!) in South Carolina was concerned. The schools were not desegregated. There were, of course, the “Impeach Earl Warren” billboards alongside the highways. But in most ways large and small, it was as though the case had never been decided. 108 De Jure States and the District of Columbia My family moved in the summer of 1954 from Moncks Corner to Newberry , South Carolina, where my father became the principal of the brandnew but still unequal Gallman High School—the school that served all the Negro students in Newberry County. Local newspapers carried no civil rights news, nor did local radio stations, which routinely signed off at the end of each broadcast day by playing a thumping rendition of “Dixie.” Most homes did not yet have television. My family remained informed of current events through a black weekly newspaper published in Pittsburgh, the Pittsburgh Courier (I was the local newspaper girl). And of course we subscribed to Ebony and Jet magazines —publications that also reported current (sometimes, even to my young mind, horrific) events as the national struggle continued. But I suspect that many black families in our town existed in a news vacuum. The years passed. I remember that those of my schoolmates who lived in outlying parts of the county rode a fleet of school buses (driven by fellow students ) for hours each day in order to attend school. Pursuant to an arrangement struck with local landed white farmers, our school days were truncated year after year (in by 7:45 am and out between noon and 12:30 pm) during spring planting and fall harvesting, as my father sought to avoid having students drop out of school entirely during those periods. As violence or the threat of violence tore the South asunder, my parents cautioned my brothers and me against rash statements or actions that could bring undesirable attention to our family. Through it all, our principal (my father) and our teachers (including my mother) constantly exhorted us to work hard in order to prepare for the day when we would finally be a part of the larger society—a day that they assured us would come. I studied (How could I do anything else when every teacher in the school was poised to report the least instance of misbehavior to my father?), practiced piano when I absolutely could not avoid doing so, played clarinet in the high school band (first chair in my junior year in high school!), practiced the sultry look and walk of my favorite...

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