June M Thomas - Struggling to Learn: An Intimate History of School Desegregation in South Carolina

An Intimate History of School Desegregation in South Carolina

June Manning Thomas

2021 June Manning Thomas

Published by the University of South Carolina Press Columbia, South Carolina 29208

www.uscpress.com

Manufactured in the United States of America

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data can be found at http://catalog.loc.gov/.

ISBN 978-1-64336-259-5 (hardcover)

ISBN 978-1-64336-260-1 (ebook)

Publication of this book is made possible in part by the Distinguished University Professorship and the A. Alfred Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Michigan.

Front cover photographs: (top) First students, including the author (front row, striped dress), planning to desegregate formerly all-white public schools, Orangeburg District 5; and (bottom) arrested Orangeburg student civil rights demonstrators; Cecil Williams, photographer.

Front cover design: Nathan W. Moehlmann, Goosepen Studio & Press

To Hubert and Ethels great-grandchildren:
Mobin, Marzieh, Adib, Amil

Chapter 1
Black Education as a Response to Jim Crow

Chapter 2
Struggling for Equal Education

Chapter 3
A Neighboring County Arises

Chapter 4
Defending White Schools

Chapter 5
Living There and Then

Chapter 6
Struggling to Learn

Chapter 7
Struggling to Desegregate

Chapter 8
Struggling to Survive

Chapter 9
Keeping up a Struggle

Have you seen Cindy Tyler lately? my sister Michelle asked. I laughed. Why no, I said, what do you mean, and why would I want to see her? You should talk to her, Michelle said. Shes really quite nice. She has a shop just around the corner. We could walk there and talk to her! Youd be surprised. Ive talked to her quite often.

I had not visited Orangeburg, South Carolina, frequently for a number of years, having made my home as an adult in Michigan. There, marriage, children, faith community, and work had happily filled the years. Once our father died and my invalid mother came to Michigan to live with my husband and me, there was little reason to visit Orangeburg, until my younger sister moved back there to accept a job. Orangeburg was the site of many happy memories during my childhood, such as of rare snows and school pageants and our sweet-smelling backyard peach trees laden with fruit once a year, of homecoming parades and college choirs singing glorious music. It was also, however, the site of trauma, of daily evidence of the denigration of an entire race of people, of college students jailed or shot for protests against segregation. It was the site of my own pained efforts on school mornings to get out of bed and attend Orangeburg High School, as one of several Black students enrolled in the previously all-white school because of a federal district court order. Memories of Cindy, unfortunately, connected strongly with memories of that struggle.

Just before several Black students desegregated that high school, many years after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka Supreme Court decision had ruled public school segregation unconstitutional, hopes had been high for a new, integrated reality. Instead white South Carolinians had resisted, keeping separate and unequal schools, ignoring the Brown decision except to insure for as long as possible that it would not change segregated practice. The hope for many of us in the 1950s and 1960s was that once Black children entered those schools, white people would see that we were just the same as them, human beings eager to learn, and that friendships would soon emerge. This was not to be.

Shortly before encouraging me to visit Cindy, Michelle had decided to attend her older sisters (my) high school reunion; she was curious about who these people were, and I had refused to travel South for this event. She attended with another Black woman who had entered that high school a year or two after several of us integrated it in 1964. Its so unusual to attend someone elses high school reunion that several people approached her asking if she was me. When a few of them found out that she was my sister, they talked to her about me, explaining why they noticed me so many years ago. At least one was in tears as she spoke. Please tell her we are sorry, they told Michelle; please tell her we are sorry for the way we treated her.

Just before the reunion, Michelle had bought a rambling ranch house on a street somewhere in town for a very reasonable price. When I visited her there, at first I could not get my bearings, although she kept showing me the middle school that replaced the high school, and I recognized a nearby commercial area. The enclosed mall that once sat across the street was now a strange amalgam of shops surrounded by mall-like parking lots, with no enclosed mall, just shops created around the outer rim of the old building, in a strange configuration that added to my confusion. In the surrounding area, everything seemed unfamiliar, even though this is a small town. Then I realized that her house was located in one of the older, formerly all-white neighborhoods arrayed around the formerly all-white high schoolno wonder I was lost. Years ago, no Black people lived there, and no one would have asked any of us to enter one of those homes, except perhaps as maids. It gradually became clear that her house was located on a side street that led directly into the street I would have used to walk to high school if it had been safe to do this. Although the school was only one mile from my house, my parents had never once let me walk there after our successful court action; the route would have taken me through hostile White neighborhoods at the height of resistance to desegregation. Almost fifty years later, my sister had moved into this forbidden territory, now open but still unfamiliar.

Its walking distance, she said on my last day visiting from Michigan. She has a shop that we visited during the reunion. Its just around the corner from here. I talked to her. Im sure shed be glad to see you.

I considered the situation. I remembered Cindy quite well. She was lead soprano in our high school choir, fellow classmate in several classes, and one of the ones I had watched silently, wondering: How is it possible for us to sit in the same class, day after day, and for these people to say not even one word to me, except to hurl epithets? Cindy had been a part not of the hecklers but of the great silence; as a part of the white resistance in that town, evidently white students had created a pact to ostracize the new Black students, to ignore their presence except to heckle. I remembered a comment Cindy made in gym class, said to her friends but addressed to me, and I remembered other difficult moments as well. What would motivate people to act in this way? Id only seen her once or twice since graduation but did not hesitate. My husband, Richard, had packed the rental car. It will just be a few minutes, I said; I have to see someone from high school.

It was indeed a short walk physically but a long walk emotionally. I trudged uphill, filled with misgivings. The shop itself was pleasant, a compendium of small items appropriate for a residential house turned into a boutique shop located in a section of the country that loves crafts, pottery, scarves, and baby clothes. Cindy and my sister chatted easily as I walked around the shop, wondering what to say, wanting to buy something if for no other reason than to show that I could. I chose a small item for purchase. After an awkward silence at the cash register, Cindy started talking about the reunion. I should have seen how everyone looked, she noted. The girls had kept themselves up, but the boys had not; they had gained weight and gray hair. She proceeded to name several students, one by one, all white; did I know what they were doing now? This and that? Of course I didnt know, never having had a simple conversation with any of them and having no idea of what their lives were like during or after high school. More talk ensued, and then she asked questions about what I was doing, my husband, my children, my job, my childrens professions. Your sister told me you are a college professor. Im hoping at least one of my grandchildren is smart like that, she said.