"Jim Crow" Passenger Railroad Car Comes Back to Life

From UT San Diego, "Jim Crow era recalled in rail car project: Passenger car gives glimpse of country’s segregated past," by Karen Pearlman, on 8 February 2012 -- Thousands of miles were put on the Rockdale, Sandow & Southern #3 wooden railroad car, and with that, thousands of stories were no doubt told by the people who were part of its work in rural Texas.

Thousands of trips later, this brown beauty, one of the original “Jim Crow” rail cars that segregated black and white passengers, now sits on shiny metal wheels at the Pacific Southwest Railway Museum in rural San Diego County.

The museum obtained the car in 1976 and started restoring it in 1999.

Since then, a group of dedicated volunteers, led by Ted Kornweibel Jr., a professor emeritus in African American history at San Diego State University, worked countless hours to restore, rebuild and replace parts — and recapture part of the past through this rail car, which was built in 1886 in Pennsylvania.

In time for Black History Month, the museum will display this special car and a photographic exhibit free to the public. An inaugural ceremony is set for 1 p.m. Feb. 25 inside the museum’s display building at 750 Depot St., Campo.

This car may already be familiar to some.

For years its home was 20th Century Fox in Los Angeles, and the car had parts in several Hollywood movies, including the Otto Preminger-directed “Centennial Summer,” “The True Story of Jesse James” starring Robert Wagner, and Elvis Presley’s “Love Me Tender.”

But for Kornweibel, who taught at SDSU from 1977 through 2005 and has been a volunteer at the museum for more than 30 years, those stars have nothing on this rail car.

The San Carlos resident has a deep love in all aspects of this subject and is the author of “Railroads In The African-American Experience: A Photographic Journey.”

The book offers a detailed look (more than 500 pages, including 200 photos) at the history of the railroad business and the way it affected black Americans, many of whom created the tracks and many others of whom worked on board the trains.

This particular car made only 7-mile journeys, but it had all the hallmarks of trains that went longer distances, including partitions. The car has a section with eight seats for black passengers and a section with 22 seats for white passengers.

The bathroom and water fountain are both located in the white area, meaning that nonwhites had to go without either on their journey. On trains such as this, the dining area was also off limits to black passengers.

“Separate is not equal,” Kornweibel said, then adds, “I am just stoked anytime someone recognizes the issue of segregation. It’s now a fading memory, thankfully. Many black people have seen the car and said, ‘I didn’t experience that,’ but the oldsters... the stories that they can easily tell... ‘I remember visiting Grandma, we had to bring own food with us, sandwiches wrapped in string because they wouldn’t let us eat in the dining car.’ It breaks my heart to hear that but that’s how it was.”

Only a handful of museums display a restored segregated car, none west of the Mississippi, according to Kornweibel. No other museum has a fully restored car of this kind as well as the accompanying exhibit, which depicts a 180-year scope of black railroading.

The car has an open platform with hundreds of beautiful aquamarine squall glass panes that have a rosette design. Red plush upholstered walkover seats in the passenger area look inviting and comfortable.

Larry Rose, the museum’s facilities director, said it’s difficult for him to pick out his favorite part of the Jim Crow car — much less his favorite of the 80 cars and 20 locomotives on site — but he said he is proud of all the work that the volunteers do, even if few of the cars actually do any physical moving.

He also said he fears that the youth of today are losing interest in trains and has noticed fewer young visitors to the museum annually. He and volunteer Frank Stites say they hope that this exhibit will attract people of all ages.

Rose and Stites carpool to Campo from La Mesa and San Carlos almost daily to work on trains. Stites is a retired professor of American history who sees the big picture of how the trains are a part of every American’s past.

“A group of black storytellers came out here a couple of years ago,” Stites recalled. “I took them through the (Jim Crow) car and they told me how the car makes it real for them, how it’s much better than a picture, and tells more than 1,000 words. They know this is the real McCoy. We’re making it real. This is a great opportunity to illustrate the past and teach the present.” [source: http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2012/feb/08/jim-crow-era-recalled-in-rail-car-project/]

The Pacific Southwest Railway Museum in San Diego is restoring a vintage railroad car to its condition during a controversial period of American History. Built in 1886 in Pennsylvania the car was sold and used on the Rockdale, Sandow and Southern railroad as a "Jim Crow" car, segregating black from white passengers from 1936 to 1945 when it was sold to 20th Century-Fox. It was used in films that included "Love Me Tender" with Elvis Presley, ' Centenial Summer," "The True Story of Jesse James" and "Raid." The museum obtained the cars in 1976 and restoration started in 1999.

A Visit to a Jim Crow School

Fifty years ago, Ray Sprigle of the Post-Gazette posed as a black man to experience firsthand what life was like for 10 million people living under the system of legal segregation known as Jim Crow.

As he wrote in his 21-part series, "I Was a Negro in the South for 30 Days": "I quit being white, and free, and an American citizen when I climbed aboard that Jim Crow coach. . . . From then on, until I came up out of the South four weeks later, I was black, and in bondage — not quite slavery but not quite freedom, either.’’ -- Ray Springle

A Visit to a Jim Crow School, by Ray Sprigle -- Here on the outskirts of the pleasant, thriving little Georgia town of Bluffton in Clay county I go to school again. And what a school! This dilapidated, sagging old shack, leaning and lop-sided as its makeshift foundations give way, is the lordly white’s conception of a schoolhouse for Negroes.

This leaking old wreck of a shanty must be nearly half a century old. The warped old clapboards are falling off. Holes bigger than your hand give permanent cross-ventilation. There are no desks, no seats but rude benches. Two rough tables serve as desks. A few dog-eared school books are scattered on the tables. A "blackboard,"’ apparently home made, just a sheet of cardboard about two by three feet, is nailed to the bare studding.

Only redeeming feature of this thing called a school is the teacher. Tall and spare, gentle and soft spoken, earnest and intelligent, she reminds you of a typical New England school-marm with her sharp aquiline features - except for a deeper sun tan than one could ever get on a beach.

Has Taught Three Generations

For 27 years, she tells us, she has taught this little school. Three generations of little black American citizens have picked up the rudiments of an education under her kindly tutelage. She is actually proud of this school.

"The state furnishes us free school books now," she says. "When I started in 27 years ago the only text book we had was my Bible that I brought to school. Some of the children were able to buy text books as the years went on and the whole class used them."

There are 38 children in her school, divided into seven grades. She teaches them all. If all of her 38 scholars came to school at one time the little room would be crowded to suffocation. But now there is only a handful of little tots. All the bigger girls and boys are "excused." This is cotton chopping time and cotton is more important than learning. The bigger boys and girls are also "excused" at plowing and planting time and again in the fall when it’s time to pick the precious cotton. The school term is eight months, she says. But only the little tots ever see eight months of schooling.

Salary Is $112 a Month

Miss Minnie Dora Lee draws a salary of $112 a month. When she started and for many years afterward she got $20 a month. It has taken the full 27 years of her service to climb to that magnificent figure of $112.

Miss Minnie Dora Lee’s school is typical of Negro schools in Georgia and the deep South. We could have found many far worse and did. Some few are better. What sets her school ahead of most of the other one-room shanties in the South where little black children get their three R’s is Miss Minnie Dora Lee herself. In her 27 years as a school teacher, Miss Lee has learned, too. Hundreds of southern Negro schools have teachers who never went beyond the sixth or seventh grades and are wholly unfitted for teaching. I encountered more than one instance where the leading white cotton planter of the district appointed the teacher of the Negro school. Usually on the basis that her father raised more cotton "than any other nigger I’ve got on the place."

Catchword of your lordly, lily-white representative of white supremacy to justify all the phases of segregation with its inevitable train of discrimination, oppression, brutality and petty chicanery is the term "separate but equal."

A Brazen, Cynical Lie

So far as the education of little black American citizens is concerned, that "equal" in the South’s pet catch phrase is a brazen, cynical lie and every white man knows it.

No Negro school in all the South even begins to compare in any way with its companion white school. True enough, I didn’t check them all. But I did see scores of them. And I asked literally hundreds of Negroes to help me find at least one Negro school equal to a white one in the same area. Not only did none of them know of such an instance but even the most radical opponents of segregation didn’t even hope for, expect or ask for such a miracle. Any of them would be glad to settle for just ordinarily decent schools for their children.

Right here in Clay county is a typical illustration of the bitter, tragic hypocrisy of that "separate but equal" lying catchword. Ride with me about a thousand yards down the highway past Minnie Dora Lee’s disintegrating old rookery. On the edge of Bluffton is the school for the white folks - the last word in small town educational plants.

A neat brick structure, with a wing on either side - at least six rooms. Grounds beautifully landscaped, a spreading playground crowded with all the latest equipment that money can buy.

Minnie Dora Lee’s school couldn’t cost more than $1,000 even today. This white folks’ school didn’t cost a cent less than $100,000. "Separate but equal." It’s not even funny. --[source:  Ray Springle, Post-Gazette]

University of Alabama’s Slavery Apology

Alabama Governor George Wallace

Inscription. Buried near this plaque are Jack Rudolph and William “Boysey” Brown, two slaves owned by University of Alabama faculty, and William J. Crawford, a University student who died in 1844.

Rudolph was born in Africa about 1791 and died May 5, 1846, from “Bilious Pneumonia.” Brown was born April 10, 1838, and died November 22, 1844, from “Whooping Cough.”

Jack Rudolph and Boysey Brown were among the slaves owned by the University of Alabama and by faculty. Their burials were honored and recognized by the University of Alabama on April 15, 2004. The Faculty Senate apologized for their predecessors’ role in the institution of slavery on April 20, 2004. This plaque honors those whose labor and legacy of perseverance helped to build the University of Alabama Community since its founding.

According to the Alabama Law Review, "Professor Wants UA Apology for Slavery: Alfred Brophy will present proposal for university to consider reparations to slave descendants," on 16 March 2004, by Jeff Amy: A University of Alabama law professor wants the school to apologize for its pre-Civil War ownership and use of slaves, and to consider a commission to study the history of slave use at the school and the possibility of reparations to slave descendants.

Alfred Brophy, who studies the legal history of slavery, plans to present his proposal at today's Faculty Senate meeting. The faculty body isn't scheduled to vote on Brophy's resolution until April.

Brophy, who is white, said Monday that he has discovered numerous links between slavery and the Tuscaloosa school, established in 1831. The school owned a handful of slaves for much of its early existence, and rented others, according to Brophy's research. Professors, students and at least two university presidents owned slaves, he said.

Slaves cleaned buildings, planted trees, served students and aided professors, according to records Brophy has found. Though the professor hasn't found any direct evidence yet, he believes slaves helped build at least some of the seven surviving buildings that escaped destruction by Union troops in 1865.

But Brophy believes what UA really needs to atone for is the intellectual defense of slavery made by many of its leaders. Brophy points particularly to two university presidents and a Mobilian who founded the forerunner of the university's medical school. All three were prominent public defenders of slavery and the idea that blacks were naturally inferior. All three have buildings on the Tuscaloosa campus named for them.

So far, the resolution has caused little stir on the 20,000-student campus. Cathy Andreen, a university spokeswoman, declined comment on behalf of administrators.

"At this point, we're not ready to comment on it, because we haven't seen it," Andreen said.

Robert Turner, a senior from Tuskegee, said he had heard about some of Brophy's work, and said he hoped university leaders would support further inquiry.

"It should be something we look into, discovering the role the university played," Turner said.

Turner, who is black, is the outgoing executive chief of staff for Alabama's Student Government Association.

Vivian Malone attends class in 1963 after her admission to the University of Alabama despite Gov. George Wallace's "Stand in the Schoolhouse Door."

Success in race relations:

The University of Alabama, though famous for George Wallace's 1963 attempt to prevent integration, known as the "Stand in the Schoolhouse Door," is in some ways a success in today's race relations. The school's student body is more than 13 percent black, a higher share than Auburn University or some other Southeastern Conference schools.

Even if the Faculty Senate adopts Brophy's proposal, UA President Robert Witt or University of Alabama System trustees would have to take a similar position for the faculty action to mean anything. For example, student and faculty resolutions last fall calling for the university to condemn discrimination against gays and lesbians have so far garnered little public recognition from top UA leaders.

Among campus structures that survived the Union Army destruction are outbuildings of the 1841 President's Mansion that have been identified in the past as slave quarters. Today, they appear on university maps under names like "President's storage."

At least six buildings on the campus are named for people who owned slaves or advocated slavery, according to Brophy. He notes that Basil Manly, university president from 1837 to 1855 and Landon Garland, president from 1855 to 1865, both owned large numbers of slaves who worked the presidents' personal plantations. Manly and Garland encouraged their students to believe that slavery was part of the natural order ordained by God, according to their surviving papers and other accounts.

Brophy also points to Josiah Nott, a physician in Mobile who founded the forerunner of the University of Alabama Medical School in 1858. Nott wrote and lectured about claims that blacks were genetically inferior, based partly on skull measurements he made in his medical practice. Slavery suited black people, Nott said, because the race could never hope to achieve the level of accomplishment and civilization that whites had reached.

Vivian Malone and James Hood. Vivian Malone became the first African-American to graduate from the university.

The question of whether universities profited from slavery, and what they should do to make up for it, has been a prominent subplot in a larger national debate about reparations in the last 15 years. Up until now, most attention has focused on Ivy League universities -- Brown, Harvard, Princeton and Yale.

Most recently, Ruth Simmons, the first black president of Rhode Island's Brown, appointed a committee to examine the school's ties to slavery, teach students about that history, and consider whether Brown should do something to compensate for that past.

Some black leaders have called for economic payments -- typically called reparations -- as a way for the nation to erase some of the damage caused by slavery, and share the economic gains that slave owners enjoyed. They point to reparations paid to citizens of Japanese descent whom the American government imprisoned during World War II. They also note payments by Germany and German companies to Holocaust victims.

But opponents say that idea is logistically difficult at best, and an ideological travesty at worst. Those against reparations say its unfair to tax people for the sins of previous generations. A federal judge in Chicago recently dismissed a lawsuit seeking reparations, in part because there are no slave owners or slaves still alive.

A 2002 Mobile Register-University of South Alabama poll found the state's citizens racially polarized over the question of reparations. While 67 percent of black respondents favored the federal government making cash payments to slave descendants, only 5 percent of white respondents agreed. Pollsters said some white people became so upset that they had trouble finishing telephone interviews for the poll.

Vivian Malone and James Hood register for classes at the University of Alabama despite Alabama Gov. George Wallace's "Stand in the Schoolhouse Door" protesting racial integration of the institution.

Favors reparations:

For his part, Brophy has favored reparations. As a law professor in Oklahoma, he counseled black residents of Tulsa in their efforts to gain compensation for a 1921 race riot that left numerous blocks of a black business district in ruins and may have killed 300 people.

He thinks it might be possible to track down descendants of slaves owned by the university and its early professors, to offer them scholarships or some sort of symbolic payment. He acknowledged, however, that such an effort would provoke widespread opposition.

"I'm not going to fall on a sword for reparations," Brophy said.

He said other measures, such as an open debate about UA's slave past, headstones for unmarked slave graves, a university apology, and maybe a museum in one of the former slave quarters, would all be healthy for the school

"It's not like we don't have the buildings built with slave labor," Brophy said. "Having benefited from that labor, this institution has a moral duty to make amends." (source: Alabama Law Review)

Douglas Brinkley on Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast

The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast

In the span of five violent hours on August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina destroyed major Gulf Coast cities and flattened 150 miles of coastline. Yet those wind-torn hours represented only the first stage of the relentless triple tragedy that Katrina brought to the entire Gulf Coast, from Louisiana to Mississippi to Alabama.First came the hurricane, one of the three strongest ever to make landfall in the United States — 150-mile- per-hour winds, with gusts measuring more than 180 miles per hour ripping buildings to pieces.Second, the storm-surge flooding, which submerged a half million homes, creating the largest domestic refugee crisis since the Civil War.

Eighty percent of New Orleans was under water, as debris and sewage coursed through the streets, and whole towns in south-eastern Louisiana ceased to exist.And third, the human tragedy of government mis-management, which proved as cruel as the natural disaster itself. Ray Nagin, the mayor of New Orleans, implemented an evacuation plan that favored the rich and healthy. Kathleen Blanco, governor of Louisiana, dithered in the most important aspect of her job: providing leadership in a time of fear and confusion.

Michael C. Brown, the FEMA director, seemed more concerned with his sartorial splendor than the specter of death and horror that was taking New Orleans into its grip.In The Great Deluge, bestselling author Douglas Brinkley, a New Orleans resident and professor of history at Tulane University, rips the story of Katrina apart and relates what the Category 3 hurricane was like from every point of view.

The book finds the true heroes — such as Coast Guard officer Jimmy Duckworth and hurricane jock Tony Zumbado.Throughout the book, Brinkley lets the Katrina survivors tell their own stories, masterly allowing them to record the nightmare that was Katrina. The Great Deluge investigates the failure of government at every level and breaks important new stories. Packed with interviews and original research, it traces the character flaws, inexperience, and ulterior motives that allowed the Katrina disaster to devastate the Gulf Coast.

Map of Louisiana

Douglas Brinkley

"Elizabeth and Hazel: Two Women of Little Rock"

Hazel Bryan and Elizabeth Eckford, Little Rock, Ark., September 1957.

The New York Times, "The Photo That Exposed Segregation," by Amy Finnerty, published on 7 October 2011: In September 1957, Elizabeth Eckford and Hazel Bryan were captured in the sickening news photograph that prompted this book. Will Counts, a sharecropper’s son and young hire at The Arkansas Democrat, took the picture, laying bare the disgrace of the Jim Crow South. In it, Elizabeth, a sheltered, scholarly teenager in a homemade dress, walks past Little Rock Central High School while Hazel, a student there, marches behind her, spewing racist abuse.

The unassailable black martyr and the irredeemable white villain soon outgrew that narrative frame, however, maturing in ways inconvenient for a history lesson. David Margolick, a contributing editor at Vanity Fair whose books include “Strange Fruit: The Biography of a Song,” interviewed both women. In “Elizabeth and Hazel,” he provides a patient and evenhanded account of their messy relationship over the decades.

When the photo was taken, Central High was set to be desegregated, if only symbolically, in compliance with Brown v. Board of Education. One of the “Little Rock Nine” hand-selected for the mission, Elizabeth never made it into the building that day. A mob surrounded her. “Lynch her!” some hooted, while Gov. Orval Faubus’s National Guard kept the black students out of the school.

Hazel was a boy-crazy handful whose fundamentalist Christian parents had acquired indoor plumbing only a few years earlier. She “looked livid” that morning, “her face poisoned with hate” as she snarled, “Go home, nigger!” Elizabeth, by then terrified behind her dark glasses, kept walking. The members of the national press — visitors from another planet — were appalled.

As Little Rock boiled, President Dwight D. Eisenhower at last sent in the 101st Airborne Division to enforce the law. Hazel switched schools, but inside Central the unprotected Little Rock Nine were still being shoved in the halls and scalded in the showers, week after week. The following summer Elizabeth and her fellow foot soldiers, “potent fund-raisers for the N.A.A.C.P.,” toured the country as role models, but she was still reeling.

By the Kennedy era, Hazel Bryan Massery, a young wife and mother, had evolved. Mortified by the photo, she called Elizabeth to apologize. Elizabeth accepted, and Hazel went on trying to find herself — whether through belly-dancing or volunteering to help black kids.

After Central, Elizabeth had dropped out of college and spent five years in the Army. She eventually earned a history degree from Central State University in Ohio, and found work back in Little Rock. Wary of men, by 1980 she was a single mother of two sons and on disability for recurrent depression. Overwhelmed, she sometimes “couldn’t stand to be around her children,” we learn; they spent time in foster care. One of her sons, also depressed, would later be killed by police bullets after firing a weapon aimlessly in the street. Elizabeth, the author tells us, was often “morose and antisocial,” and received a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder.

After a reporter tracked down Hazel in 1997, the women were reunited for a second photograph and a wave of publicity. They formed a fragile bond, attending a seminar on racial healing. “Elizabeth had never realized how paralyzed by anger and hate she had been,” Margolick writes. She was “better educated . . . far more cerebral than Hazel,” but Hazel was “better adjusted.”

A friendship developed, and the two women, exemplars of healing, were offered speaking engagements. Elizabeth thrived in a new career as a probation officer and received a Congressional Gold Medal in 1999. A joint book project was planned.

But as Elizabeth gained confidence and the women “shared more time and platforms,” she “spotted what she perceived to be gaps and . . . evasions, in Hazel’s story.” For example, Hazel refused to condemn her own parents for their bigotry.

“Elizabeth had always been a stickler. She saw things keenly and remembered things precisely,” Margolick notes. “The more Elizabeth got back on her feet, the more judgmental she became.” Ever the exacting history student and never one to read from a facile script, Elizabeth could not offer the unreserved forgiveness that a happy ending required.

Still, Elizabeth and Hazel seemed in sympathy when they appeared on “Oprah” together in 1999. They left the studio “feeling equally abused” by the show’s host, according to Margolick. In his telling, Oprah Winfrey was brusque, telegraphing her disapproval of any friendship between the women. She “had gone out of her way to be hateful, Elizabeth felt.”

Margolick proposes no fairy-tale resolutions to such moral impasses. To his credit, he spares us none of the unruly facts as his subjects, still wrestling with history, wander off message.

(source: New York Times, 7 Oct. 2011)

Ruby Bridges Integrating The William Franz Public School in New Orleans

“The Problem We All Live With,” Norman Rockwell, 1963 Oil on canvas, 36” x 58” Illustration for “Look,” January 14, 1964

From PBS: In November 1960, six-year-old Ruby Bridges Hall became the first African American child to desegregate an elementary school. Although she only lived a few blocks from the William Frantz Elementary school in New Orleans, Louisiana. Marshals had to escort Ruby because of angry segregationist mobs that gathered in front of the school. For an entire year, she was the only student in her class since white parents pulled their children from the school in protest. She wrote about her experiences in her book THROUGH MY EYES.

Protesters gather at William Franz Elementary School in New Orleans, Louisiana to protest desegregation in schools.

ONE YEAR IN AN ALL-BLACK SCHOOL

When it was time for me to start kindergarten, I went to the Johnson Lockett Elementary School. My segregated school was fairly far from my house, but I had lots of company for the long walk. All the kids on my block went to Johnson Lockett.

What I didn't know in kindergarten was that a federal court in New Orleans was about to force two white public schools to admit black students. The plan was to integrate only the first grade for that year. Then, every year after that, the incoming first grade would also be integrated.

In the late spring of my year at Johnson Lockett, the city school board began testing black kindergartners. They wanted to find out which children should be sent to the white schools. I took the test. I was only five, and I'm sure I didn't have any idea why I was taking it. Still, I remember that day. I remember getting dressed up and riding uptown on the bus with my mother, and sitting in an enormous room in the school board building along with about a hundred other black kids, all waiting to be tested.

Apparently the test was difficult, and I've been told that it was set up so that kids would have a hard time passing. If all the black children had failed, the white school board might have had a way to keep the schools segregated for a while longer.

Several people from the NAACP came to the house in the summer. They told my parents that I was one of just a few black children to pass the school board test, and that I had been chosen to attend one of the white schools, William Frantz Public School. They said it was a better school and closer to my home than the one I had been attending. They said I had the right to go to the closest school in my district. They pressured my parents and made a lot of promises. They said my going to William Frantz would help me, my brothers, my sisters, and other black children in the future. We would receive a better education which would give us better opportunities as adults.

Lucille, my mother, was convinced that no harm would come to us. She thought that the opportunity for me to get the best education possible was worth the risk, and she finally convinced my father.

MY MOTHER BREAKS THE NEWS

When September came that year, I didn't start first grade at William Frantz. The lawmakers in the state capital, Baton Rouge, had found a way to slow down integration, so I was sent back to my old school.

All through the summer and early fall, the state legislatures fought the federal court. They passed twenty-eight new anti-integration laws.

The federal court, led by Federal District Court Judge J. Skelly Wright, unyielding in his commitment to upholding the law of the land and his dedication to equal opportunity for all Americans, would block the segregationists again and again.

The anger all across New Orleans convinced Judge Wright that things might grow violent. He asked the U.S. government rush federal marshals to New Orleans to protect the black first graders. There were four of us in all. There was a fifth girl originally, but her parents decided at the last minute not to transfer her. Three of the remaining children, all girls, were to go to a school named McDonogh. I was the fourth child. I was going to integrate William Frantz Public School, and I was going alone.

On Sunday, November 13, my mother told me I would start at a new school the next day. She hinted there could be something unusual about it, but she didn't explain. "There might be a lot of people outside the school," she said. "But you don¹t need to be afraid. I'll be with you."

NOVEMBER 24, 1960

My mother took special care getting me ready for school. When somebody knocked on my door that morning, my mother expected to see people from the NAACP. Instead, she saw four serious-looking white men, dressed in suits and wearing armbands. They were U.S. federal marshals. They had come to drive us to school and stay with us all day. I learned later they were carrying guns.

"Federal Marshal Wallace Downs rides in auto with wide-eyed girl, Gail Etienne, to McDonogh 19 school in New Orleans, November 14, 1960. The first-grader was one of four entered in two previously all-white schools in the city. "

I remember climbing into the back seat of the marshals' car with my mother, but I don't remember feeling frightened. William Frantz Public School was only five blocks away, so one of the marshals in the front seat told my mother right away we should do when we got there.

"Let us get out of the car first," the marshal said. "Then you'll get out, and the four of us will surround you and your daughter. We'll walk up to the door together. Just walk straight ahead, and don't look back."

I remember looking out of the car as we pulled up to the Frantz school. There were barricades and people shouting and policemen everywhere.

As we walked through the crowd, I didn't see any faces. I guess that's because I wasn't very tall and I was surrounded by the marshals. People yelled and threw things. I could see the school building, and it looked bigger and nicer than my old school. When we climbed the high steps to the front door, there were policemen in uniforms at the top. The policemen at the door and the crowd behind us made me think this was an important place.

THE FIRST DAY AT WILLIAM FRANTZ

All day long, white parents rushed into the office. They were upset. They were arguing and pointing at us. When they took their children to school that morning, the parents hadn't been sure whether William Frantz would be integrated that day or not. After my mother and I arrived, they ran into classrooms and dragged their children out of school. From behind the windows in the office, all I saw was confusion. I told myself that this must be the way it is in a big school.

That whole first day, my mother and I just sat and waited. We didn't talk to anybody. I remember watching a big, round clock on the wall. When it was 3:00 and time to go home, I was glad.

When we left school that first day, the crowd outside was even bigger and louder than it had been in the morning. There were reporters everywhere. I guess the police couldn't keep them behind the barricades. It seemed to take us along time to get to the marshals' car.

Later on I learned there had been protestors in front of the two integrated schools the whole day. They wanted to be sure white parents would boycott the school and not let their children attend. Groups of high school boys, joining the protestors, paraded up and down the street and sang new verses to old hymns. Their favorite was "Battle Hymn of the Republic," in which they changed the chorus to "Glory, glory, segregation, the South will rise again." Many of the boys carried signs and said awful things, but most of all I remember seeing a black doll in a coffin, which frightened me more than anything else.

MY FIRST WHITE TEACHER

On the second day, my mother and I drove to school with the marshals. The crowd outside the building was ready. Racists spat at us and shouted things like "Go home, nigger," and "No niggers allowed here." One woman screamed at me, "I'm going to poison you. I'll find a way." She made the same threat every morning.

I tried not to pay attention. When we finally got into the building, my new teacher was there to meet us. Her name was Mrs. Henry.

Mrs. Henry took us into a classroom and said to have a seat. When I looked around, the room was empty. There were rows of desks, but no children. I thought we were too early, but Mrs. Henry said we were right on time. My mother sat down at the back of the room. I took a seat up front, and Mrs. Henry began to teach.

I spent the whole first day with Mrs. Henry in the classroom. I wasn't allowed to have lunch in the cafeteria or go outside for recess, so we just stayed in our room. The marshals sat outside. If I had to go to the bathroom, the marshals walked me down the hall.

I HAVE TROUBLE EATING AND SLEEPING

There were times that winter when I did show stress. Nightmares would come, and I would get up and go wake my mother for comfort.

My mother would raise herself up in bed. "Did you say your prayers before you went to sleep?" she would ask.

If I hadn't, Mama would say, "Honey, that's why you're having a bad dream. Go back now, and say your prayers."

I would do as she said, and then I would sleep. Somehow it always worked.

Another problem that year was lunchtime at school. I often ate in the classroom by myself while Mrs. Henry took her lunch break with other teachers. The marshals sat outside while I opened up my lunch box. As time went on I wouldn't eat. First I blamed it on the fact that my other fixed too many peanut butter sandwiches. Then I began to wish and wish that I could go the cafeteria. . . I was convinced that kids were there. I began hiding my uneaten sandwiches in a storage cabinet in the classroom. In my magical way of thinking, not eating lunch would somehow get me to the cafeteria.

When roaches and mice began to appear in the room, a janitor discovered my old sandwiches. She [Mrs. Henry] was just sorry there were so many days when I hadn't eaten. After that she usually ate with me so I wouldn't be lonely.

THE END OF FIRST GRADE

Near at the end of the year, Mrs. Henry and I finally had company. A few white children began coming back to school, and I got an opportunity to visit with them once or twice. Even though these children were white, I still knew nothing about racism or integration. I had picked up bits and pieces over the months from being around adults and hearing them talk, but nothing was clear to me. The light dawned one day when a little boy refused to play with me.

"I can't play with you," the boy said. "My mama said not to because you're a nigger."

At that moment, it all made sense to me. I finally realized that everything had happened because I was black. I remember feeling a little stunned. It was all about the color of my skin. I wasn't angry at the boy, because I understood. His mother had told him not to play with me, and he was obeying her. I would have done the same thing. If my mama said not to do something, I didn't do it.

Ruby Bridges Hall and her former elementary school teacher Barbara Henry

The next thing I knew, it was June. That incredible year was over. Oddly enough, it ended quietly. I don't remember any special good-byes as I headed off for summer vacation. I was sorry to leave Mrs. Henry, but I somehow thought she would be my teacher again in the fall and forever. (source: PBS)

The Clinton School Lecture Series Presents Ruby Bridges 9-20-11

Public Pools: Racial Segregation May Be Over, But Racial Exclusion Lives On

From the UK Guardian, "Obama should realise that segregation may be over, but exclusion lives on: African-Americans have been hit harder by this recession than others, and the president should be wary of lecturing them," by Gary Younge on 19 July 2009:

On 29 June, 65 children from the Creative Steps summer camp in Philadelphia took a trip to the private suburban Valley Club swimming pool for a dip. The Valley Club knew they were coming and how many there were because the camp had signed a contract and paid $1,950 in advance for weekly visits throughout the summer. But somehow the arrival of the mostly African-American and Latino children was still a shock. As the black and brown kids got into the pool, the white parents pulled their kids out.

One child overheard a woman ask: "What are those black kids doing here?" Another reportedly expressed fears that the children might steal something. A few days later the club revoked the contract and refunded the advance. When asked why, the club's president, John Duesler, said: "There is a lot of concern that a lot of kids would change the complexion … the atmosphere of the club."

The story broke on the national stage just in time for the centennial conference of the oldest US civil rights organisation, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. While some asked whether the NAACP was still relevant, others gathered outside the Valley Club with placards.

There is a perverse comfort many get from displays of blatant racial injustice. A simple morality play starring villains and victims always draws a bigger, more indignant crowd than the more involved narrative of structural inequality. With all laws and most voices in support of systematic racial exclusion gone, such incidents allow everyone to express their outrage – safe in the knowledge that nothing much need change in terms of systemic discrimination.

"It may sound odd to say, but in some ways rigid segregation was an ally," says the NAACP chairman, Julian Bond, "because things were so clear. There were signs, there were places where you knew you could not go if you were a person of colour. And having lost that clarity it's sometimes difficult to focus on who's the enemy, what's the ill here."

And so it has been in Philadelphia that a faceless enemy and a litany of institutional ills has long been paving the way for the clarity surrounding the situation at Valley Club.

The Valley Club was founded in 1954, the year the supreme court ruled on Brown v Board of Education making racial segregation illegal. This was no coincidence. That decade had seen a rash of efforts to integrate pools, which had sparked white flight. "When pools were desegregated, white people abandoned them en masse," explains Jeff Wiltse, associate history professor at the University of Montana and author of Contested Waters: A Social History of Swimming Pools in America. "There was a boom in the construction of private pools where middle-class whites could still exclude non-whites … I don't know the details of the founding of the Valley Club, but both the time and the place in which it was built fits right into that story."

Meanwhile, the public facilities that remained catered for the poor and the non-white, and were rapidly downgraded. This year Philadelphia has closed more than a third of its pools owing to budget cuts. So the kids from Creative Steps did not make that trip by chance. Politics and economics brought them there – and then intolerance kept them out when they arrived.

When they got home, they had other problems to deal with. The stampede to the suburbs (Philadelphia has lost a quarter of its population since 1950) has left an impoverished "minority-majority", where one in five families lives in poverty. Unemployment, already in double figures, has risen by almost 50% in the last year.

According to the coalition to save libraries (the mayor had planned to close more than a fifth of those), this was already set to be a bleak summer in the "City of Brotherly Love". Further budget cuts mean there are 1,700 fewer positions for summer camps and 3,700 fewer summer programme slots for children, and 772 fewer recreational jobs and 400 fewer summer internships for young people this year. "These cuts are devastating for youth in our communities," says Sherrie Cohen, an organiser with the coalition. "With less structured opportunities in our neighbourhoods, kids are left to get into trouble."

These cuts are not specifically aimed at minorities. But they disproportionately affect the poor, and since minorities are disproportionately represented among the poor, they hit black and Latino families hardest. Herein lies the intersection between race and class – without an understanding of which little sense can be made, and no effective challenge mounted, against modern racism.

Given the large numbers of white people who are poor and the large numbers of black people who are not, it is not helpful to frame racial disadvantage purely in terms of isolated, dramatic events that humiliate black people. Poor white people in Philadelphia have little stake in whether black kids can swim in Valley Club or not, but they have a big interest in keeping pools open, which would benefit far more black kids than does admission to one suburban pool. In those connections lie the potential for class solidarity between races

It is this context that makes elements of Barack Obama's speech to the NAACP conference problematic. Having paid homage to the heroic role of the civil rights movement and recognized the inequalities bequeathed by segregation, he started on parenting. "We've got to say to our children, if you're African- American, the odds of growing up amid crime and gangs are higher," he said. "If you live in a poor neighborhood, you will face challenges that somebody in a wealthy suburb does not have to face. But that's not a reason to get bad grades; that's not a reason to cut class; that's not a reason to give up on your education and drop out of school. No one has written your destiny for you. Your destiny is in your hands – you cannot forget that. That's what we have to teach all of our children. No excuses. No excuses."

The audience lapped it up. Such admonitions are commonplace at any aspirant black American dinner table, where parents tell children they will have to work twice as hard as their white counterparts to get just as far. These are the mantras with which I was raised, and may well one day repeat. But I would not like to see them elevated to national policy. Nor was Obama speaking at a dinner table, but at an event that produce headlines like: "School the new cool. O to parents: It's not just about rap," in the New York Post; and "Obama tells fellow blacks: 'No excuses' for failure," in the New York Times.

A leader who has spent billions bailing out banks, bombing Afghanistan and occupying Iraq while poverty and unemployment rise should be wary of lecturing others on priorities. He, of all people, should understand that we can only play with the hand we're dealt.

It goes without saying that even those in the toughest circumstances have choices. But as the situation in Philadelphia illustrates, and as Obama pointed out elsewhere in his speech, those circumstances are becoming tougher and those choices fewer for black American families, who have been hit far harder by this recession than others.

If I'm looking for someone I don't know to give me advice on raising my kid, there's always Supernanny. What I want from a president are the resources that will enable any child to enjoy their summer where they please without having the doors closed on them by budget cuts or bigotry. No excuses. No excuses. (source: UK Guardian)