Integration helped shape many hearts and minds

Whether they experienced court-ordered integration at the time the Brown decision came down or many years later when massive resistance began to give way, many California teachers can recall its impact on their development.

For some of these pioneers in integration, it seems like only yesterday, even though 50 years have passed since the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that separate but equal is unconstitutional.

Even those who were sheltered from the realities of the day realized that something "wasn't right" if so many people had to take to the streets to demand equality.

Etta Martin-Lee was one of several African American students bused across St. Louis, Mo., to comply with the Brown v. Board of Education ruling, which had outlawed segregated schools nine years earlier. She had attended an all-black neighborhood school until fourth grade.

"I was so excited," recalls Martin-Lee, who now teaches fourth grade in Sacramento. "I felt like a big kid because I got to carry a lunch pail instead of walking home at lunchtime. My grandmother told me to put two cookies in my lunch, but I took three. I was so jazzed and excited about going across town. I couldn't understand why all the parents were wringing their hands and crying."

Soon it became clear why the parents were not overjoyed to see their children off. As the bus arrived in the other part of town, bricks were thrown at the vehicle. As the National Guard escorted the children into the school building, screaming onlookers spat tobacco juice on the children, staining Martin-Lee's new, white pinafore.

Inside the building, all of the students huddled together fearfully, she recalls. "We were crying. I remember thinking that maybe God was punishing me for taking that extra cookie. I didn't know what else to think, because I hadn't done anything wrong."

Her hope of making friends at her new school was dashed when she realized that all but a handful of the white students had left rather than comply with the law. The six special education students who remained were all boys.

The experience was painful, but it made Martin-Lee more determined than ever to get a good education. Today, the San Juan Teachers Association member is determined that her students do the same.

"I say to my students: 'Do you think men spat on me so you could come to class and not do your homework?' I tell them they should never take education for granted."

Ginger Curry 's family owned a ranch in Texas, but she saw no difference between herself and her playmates - the children of Mexican ranch hands - until kindergarten, when she was sent to school with the Anglo children and her best friend, Antonia, was sent to a different school for Mexican children.

"I was very, very upset about it," recalls Curry. "I don't think I really understood what was happening until much later. Language was not the real reason for separating us. It was just an excuse, because people believed that Mexican children should not be in the same classroom as the children of white ranchers."

Today, many people assume she's Hispanic due to her coloring and ability to converse in Spanish. In fact, she's part American Indian. While she's proud of her heritage, she recalls that nobody knew about it when she was growing up. It was not discussed.

Curry never saw an African American child in public school until after the Brown decision. "I had no idea where these kids went to school before then. It was like they dropped in from nowhere. Many of them lived on the outskirts of town, in the boonies, and I'm not sure they were going to school at all."

When some African American students arrived on campus and couldn't read, she's ashamed to say, many white students called them "dumb."

Tracking based on IQ tests was another way to segregate students of color in those days. "Being in the top track, I never saw those kids. I saw them once in a while on the periphery of the playground, but I was never around them. It was a way to make sure that the kids of white businessmen and landowners got a quality education without being around children of color, who lived without sewers and electricity like people in a third-world country."

Today, she says, she is amazed at how oblivious she was to such injustice. "It's embarrassing. Because we were so deeply segregated, it was like people of color didn't exist."

"This is why I went into teaching," says Curry, a kindergarten/first-grade teacher in Pomona and a member of Associated Pomona Teachers. "I have always taught in low-income schools with Hispanic and black children. My background is reading remediation, working with children with problems."

"It's horrifying when I look back on how things were," says Curry. "But the past has made me who I am today. And it has left a deep scar on my soul."

Zenia Brisjon Holmes was born in 1965, 11 years after the Brown decision. Even in the 1970s, when she started school, her native state of Texas was still using legal loopholes to subvert the law banning segregated schools.

Holmes could see white children at the school she attended, "but we were kept totally separate from them. We did not have classes with them. We did not have recess with them. We did not eat lunch with them. There was no contact, although we sometimes passed each other in the hallways and stuck our tongues out at each other."

Most of the time it wasn't a problem, says Holmes, a San Dieguito Faculty Association member who teaches middle school in Solano Beach. "Every day I had a great time at school. I had great teachers, who were black."

She noticed that things were separate, but not exactly equal. "The white kids went to lunch first. They got chocolate milk and we didn't. I always wondered about that. It didn't seem fair that they got chocolate milk."

She didn't realize what was going on until fourth grade, when she moved to California and enrolled in schools that were truly integrated. Then she got angry.

"They called it integration in Texas, but it wasn't. We were in the same buildings but didn't have the same anything else. They had our parents hoodwinked into thinking we were being treated equally, but we were treated like second-class citizens by the school. It was wrong and something no child should ever have to experience."

Gloria Sanders was in the fourth grade at an all-black elementary school two blocks from her Wichita, Kan., home when the Brown decision was rendered. "I lived in an integrated neighborhood, but white students went to the white elementary school or Catholic school."

"I did not receive an inferior education by going to an all-black school," says Sanders, now president of Associated Chaffey Teachers. "I learned and I succeeded. I had excellent teachers. If I had not received a good education, I would not have come this far."

One thing that helped motivate students was the community nature of the school. "We all belonged to the same church. On Sunday morning, we were all well-behaved, because we knew we would see our teachers and principal at church. It was a good experience for me."

Deborah Harrison was 4 years old when theBrown decision was handed down. Growing up in the South Central neighborhood of Los Angeles, she attended all-black elementary, middle and high schools. Even though her middle school was brand-new, textbooks and other supplies were hand-me-downs from white schools.

"I remember crossing out the old school name and putting the new school name on the books," she says. She also remembers being upset that her brand-new school lacked a swimming pool and other amenities that were available in white schools.

After graduating from high school, she bravely decided to go to Mills College, an all-girls college in Oakland. "I wanted to know what it was like to go to a white school," she explains. "I had never been around white people." Her high school counselor tried to talk her out of it, even though she had a full four-year scholarship. "She was afraid that I might lose something, or that I might not be able to afford what the other students could afford. She had great concerns."

Harrison started college shortly after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. In reaction to the slaying, Mills College doubled the number of African American students it enrolled from 12 to 24, which was considered a milestone.

Harrison was given a black roommate so that she would feel "comfortable," she was told. Most of the students were polite except for one, who asked Harrison and other African American students if they had tails, if their color rubbed off, and how they got their hair straight.

Harrison decided to jump right into school activities. "I got involved in helping students attending the college orientation. I took high school students on tours. I was the first person that people saw when they entered the school."

Overall, the experience was very positive, says Harrison. "I made some really good friends. I'm glad I went to Mills. One of the things I was told was 'Once a Mills girl, always a Mills girl,' and that if I needed anything, someone would help me. That was true. When I needed to get a job as a teacher, I went to an alumnae meeting, and one of the women went home and asked her husband to help find me a job. That's how I got started in the Los Angeles Unified School District."

A member of United Teachers Los Angeles, Harrison now represents Los Angeles on the CTA Board of Directors and serves as the Board liaison to CTA's Brown v. Board of Education Commemoration Committee.

Looking back, she realizes she was a pioneer in integration. "It was brave. But at the time, I didn't really think about that. I just wanted to go to a good college."

Grace Blagdon 's parents, who were unhappy with the segregated schools in Arkansas, ran a Baptist boarding school for black children. It catered to the children of sharecroppers who paid tuition in the form of fruit, vegetables and livestock.

Blagdon, a kindergarten teacher and member of the Saddleback Valley Education Association, was 16 when the decision came down. Hers was the last segregated class for black students at her neighborhood high school. The high court's decision inspired her to take the college entrance exam. She was away at college when Arkansas erupted into violence, and schools were closed rather than integrated.

On a return visit to her home state during college, she and her brother felt empowered enough by the court ruling to sit down at the soda fountain in the Majestic Hotel and order something to eat.

The man behind the counter told them, "We don't serve Negroes."

"I said, 'That's okay. We don't eat Negroes,'" Blagdon recalls, erupting into laughter. "We told him we just wanted a hamburger. He called the police."

Latoya Harvey was 12 when she moved to Los Angeles. While she had excelled academically in her native Jamaica, she found that others expected little of her in her new country and the integrated school she attended.

"I think it was because I had an accent. I talked differently and I'm black, so they put me in remediation classes. I was put in special ed."

At first, she was puzzled. Then she got angry. "I was discriminated against. They just assumed I had learning disabilities. After a while, one of the teachers asked why I was in this program. After one semester, I was put in the gifted program. I took AP calculus in 11th grade. I began taking lots of honors classes. But as I moved up, everyone looked alike. Everyone was white."

Today, Harvey is a school psychologist in Los Angeles and a member of United Teachers Los Angeles. She hopes that African American children can stop being referred to special education programs because they talk differently or because they have different learning styles from white students.

"Children today are still having the same kinds of experiences that I did," says Harvey. "It's not right."

Evelyn Guess was attending integrated schools in California when the Brown case was decided. "I saw images on TV of police escorting the black children to school in the South," she recalls. "As an African American child, I had a lot of questions. It was very frightening to watch, and it had a lifelong impact on me."

During visits to relatives in Arkansas, she learned how different it was to live under Jim Crow laws. She didn't worry about where she sat on the bus as it left California, but as it pulled into Arkansas, she joined other black passengers in moving to the back without question. She also used restrooms, water fountains and restaurants marked "colored."

"How you felt about the Brown decision depended on which ethnic group you belonged to and how you were raised," says Guess, now a second-grade teacher in San Jose and a member of the Oak Grove Educators Association. "In the African American community, it elicited joy, excitement, relief and gratitude. With other ethnic groups, there was resentment, fear and hate.

"As a child during that time, I thought that people should be happy to have the opportunity to attend school together. Instead, I saw anger, resentment and violence. But the main thing is the decision gave us the opportunity for decent schools. It opened a lot of doors that had been closed to us."

Jim Himelhoch remembers hearing grown-ups in Los Angeles talk about desegregation, "but I didn't really understand it all." As a four-year-old, he was aware that some African Americans didn't want busing - they wanted their children to go to local schools and to have them fixed up in the same way as white schools.

Years later, when the riots broke out in Watts, he was living on the boundary line of that area. "The National Guard trucks were in the streets. I heard shooting when the National Guard fired on Americans. As a kid, I was scared about the whole thing. It was something you never thought you would see."

"As I got older, I realized that there were economic differences between communities," says Himelhoch, who serves on the NEA Board of Directors and teaches government at San Dimas High School. "I realized that just a few blocks away were neighborhoods I had never seen, where people lived in poverty. I had a sense that things weren't right and that things needed to change. It wasn't just a riot in which people wanted to steal something. It was a riot because people were frustrated. I can understand that now. But as a child, I was scared."

Benee Hopson 's first memory of integration is standing in front of the television set at his South Central Los Angeles home at age 4, watching coverage of protests. "I remember hearing people chant: 'Two, four, six, eight, we don't want to integrate' and thinking it was a cute little chant with numbers. When I chanted it, my folks told me it was not good to do that."

When his family first moved to the South Central neighborhood, most of the residents were white. But as black families moved in, the whites left. "It was white flight. Today, Latinos are moving in. It's fascinating to see how things change. African Americans have gone from minority to majority to minority again."

He was in summer school when violence broke out in Watts. "I went right through the war zone to get to school," he recalls. "When I was taking the bus, someone threw a rock and shattered the window. I was scared. It was so weird going down the street in the morning. Nobody was there. Buildings were on fire. There were overturned cars. I saw the National Guard coming down the street. It was like an occupation force had come - like we'd been invaded."

"The African American community did not call what happened a riot," says Hopson, now a social studies teacher in Sacramento and a member of the Sacramento City Teachers Association. "They called it a revolution."

Growing up during that time period has marked him in a way, he says. "During the '60s, I used to get a shock and thrill if there was a TV commercial with a black person on it. I would be pulling for the Rams because they had the only black quarterback.

"I got into a counting game. I was constantly asking, 'Where are we?' I still do that subconsciously. I go to different events and am very aware of the fact that I may be the only African American male there. The courts ordered integration 50 years ago. And everywhere I go, I'm still looking for people like me."