Yazoo: Integration in a Deep-Southern Town

11

11 I was invited to give a talk one morning to one of the brightest classes in the high school, a class of twenty whites and two blacks. From the first semester, only one out of twenty-three in the class had dropped out in favor of the private school. I turned the conversation to the school itself. When one of the Negro boys volunteered, "You can't have education if everybody opposes each other," several of his white classmates assented: "That's right. That's right. " A white boy said, "It's gonna get more accepted as time goes by. The first reaction is the worst one. Nowadays we just have two schools in one building. It's like havin' two student bodies." "If the parents would leave us alone, we'd make it," another said. "They're much more upset than we are. We're gonna have to live with Negro people the rest of our lives. To tell you the truth, I kind of enjoy it. You certainly 91 Willie Morris learn a lot about human relations. The parents are the worried ones." Another boy, sitting right in the middle of the class, was obviously searching hard for words, for the beginnings of perception. "They're some white kids who think colored people aren't as good as whites," he said. "I know one white kid who went to the private school who thinks this, and you know ... you know ..." blurting out a conclusion, "he's not as good as Negroes. He's not as good as colored people!" "That's the truth," someone shouted from the back. There was one varsity basketball player in the room, a tall, pale white boy who had been silent through the whole class. The white team and the black team were just then having tryouts under the new integrated arrangement to choose a varsity, he said. "We clown around a lot together," he said. "It's real spirited and loose. We talk and congratulate each other. We'll be closer together now as a team than we were last semester." Later that day, I met with a group of white student leaders, including two members of the student council and the editor of the paper. Alice DeCell, the editor and the daughter of the senator, was the leader of the group. She has organized this group, and I sense she is rather proud of her friends, that she has given considerable thought to her own reactions, and that she has discovered at the age of seventeen that to be a newspaper editor, no matter where, is to possess a 92 Yazoo strong responsibility indeed. She has performed this responsibility well, because time and again over the past year she has written editorials and stories touching deeply upon the considerations here that matter. "A lot of the white students are indifferent, a lot are upset-only a minority are positively for it," Alice said. One white left just that day to go to the private school in Silver City. He said, "The niggers simply bother me. It just gets on my nerves to see 'em around." But one of the students, who calls himself a liberal on race, added, "The students have learned to respect each other's opinions. That's the key to it right now. "Five years ago the people who were against integration -the rednecks-were in power both in the school and town. Now it's a little unfashionable to say. you're against it. There's a generation gap here, just like everywhere else. People say it's the adult leaders who're makin' this work here, but I really think it's the students who've done it. I don't think the older generation here realizes how much the white people need the colored people." As a testimonial to the generation gap, several of the white students reported that the mayor has raised the restricted age from seventeen to eighteen for certain movies, and actually tried to stop the projector in the movie house during Rosemary's Baby. They have disparaging words for the private school and its academic standards. The vast majority of the 93 Willie Morris students there, they say, are girls. "The private school is a passing phase now. In five years they'll come back. A lot of the white students that stayed with our school didn't...