Sometimes it takes courage to go to school

When you live in a predominantly white community, you remember the first time you saw, met, reached out to, or became friends with a person of color. Often that person will be, in our country, African American.
For me, it happened in 1967, the year I took a college course about the history of the black person in America. For once, the room was somewhat integrated. I took a seat next to a honey-skinned girl, feeling a bit uncomfortable, and the class began. 
As the teacher plunged us into the forgotten, unseen, unheard, unnoticed black history of our country, I slowly became – in equal parts – outraged and embarrassed.  Out of white guilt (not a great reason to make friends), I reached out to this one African American girl.  It never really clicked. Maybe neither of us were ready. But I carried my rage home.
My father, a Finnish-American carpenter who I idolized for his strength and tenderness, said something – I cannot remember the exact words – that absolutely maligned African Americans. For the first and only time in my growing up, I went hysterical. I screamed, cried, ran up to my room – leaving the family and visiting friends in awkward silence. It took a visit from my mother and her friend Mim to peel me off the roof of my despair. I never ‘resolved’ the pain. I finished the course, never saw the honey-skinned girl again, never marched (to my historic regret) when Martin Luther King spoke.  My “African American Adventure” was over.  It was just too painful and I had no place to put the pain.
Now I am 60.  School doors are opening.  A new year is beginning.  I wonder what it was like in the mid 1950s in Hannibal when the black teen-agers left their comfortable all-black Douglass School and walked into Hannibal High for the first time – because of a Supreme Court decision.
Last year, I wrote an article for the Courier about the Douglass 50th High School reunion.  Initially unable to reach the very few African American students that left Douglass to enter Hannibal High, I got the reactions from some of the white students. Universally, they said everything went smoothly. Bill Foster, class president, however kept wondering, “What was it like for them?  I’d be petrified.”
Eventually I made contact with Minnie Morrison Smith, and her story took me back to my hearing real true history in college.
“Only two of the Douglass teachers got hired after Douglass finally closed 1959.  All the other teachers in the school grades lost their jobs,” she remembered. “They were very good teachers. A lot had their master’s degrees.”  And what touched her heart sadly was this: “They never said a negative word about our going to Hannibal High.  They just encouraged us to do our best.”
I could feel tears of sadness coming. But it just got worse. “There were 16 in my class of 1957, but only five went to Hannibal High.  The rest just stopped their education and went on to other things.And nothing was said or done about it in either the black or white community.” The class of ’57 was the second class to graduate from HHS. 

The white students were, probably like I would have been, surprised to see a black person – such a strange event, why had they never thought about it before – walking down the terrazzo floors of their school. It was, for the politically uninterested (as most of us were and are in high school), a curiosity. Bill Foster just wondered where they had been all those years. “On the other side of town, of course, in a polarized section just for blacks,” Minnie knew. 
Who, after all, even knew that Douglass School existed. And what would a Hannibal High student have thought if he or she had walked into the Douglass “science room” which doubled for the classroom. They would have seen one square room with four tightly packed tables, and only one microscope per table and set of experiment supplies to be shared? Only one student could do the experiment; the others observed. As shocked, probably, as Minnie Morrison was when she walked into separate full-sized, fully equipped labs for biology, chemistry, and physics. There were even separate classrooms for lectures!
It never occurred to Minnie Morrison that she didn’t deserve the best education in United States. Her parents solidly believed in her intelligence, her ability, her future success.  What angered her was the soiled torn battered worn outdated textbooks they had used in Douglass High, along with the cramped unequipped classrooms.
Nevertheless, she did what she always did – she applied herself and took care of business.  She joined the band, she was inducted into the honor society after one year of scrutiny, and attended proms and other school functions. But when the integrated teams went out-of-town for games, the coach would have to leave the white players and drive around town looking for some place willing to feed the black players.
And the African American high schoolers certainly didn’t hang out at Mary Ann’s ice cream parlor. They weren’t allowed.
But however you get there, graduation arrives. During the final weeks when the kids get to cut loose a bit, and the whole town celebrates, several activities were opened to the senior class – one being roller skating.  Minnie and her friends decided to do that. 
“You can skate here,” the owner said, “but you can’t wear our shoe skates. You’ll have to wear the clip-ons.” Sickened, she left without skating. She owned shoe skates – at home.  Angry, she went to the top – the principal. “You’ve got to fix this.” He promised, but she wondered, and doubted, if next year’s class would be able to slip their African American feet into those skates. 
The start of the school year brings back memories for all of us.  Mostly we think of who we had a crush on, which teachers influenced us most, what life was like back then. If we were white, that’s about all we think about. If we are African American, we think about a whole lot more.
Though even harder, more painful, stories lay beneath the ones Minnie shared, she recognized the good memories too.  “I idolized the business school teacher, Pat Bourn.  We all did. She was a role model for me. I wanted to be just like her.” That teacher was white. She was human. She made Minnie feel welcome, competent, and good. “She made me aware that I could type faster than most people. She planted that seed in me. She pointed to the future – what education, and life, should be in America.”
So Minnie went on. To college. To working for the federal government. To marriage. To counseling. To ministry. She became what America has always said it stands for – an independent honest hardworking spirit.