In the small town I grew up in, in my fifth-grade class we had one black, and he was the only black in the whole school. He was the son of the principal at the black school in town, and his father sent him to the white school. He came in with an attitude and was greeted by plenty of attitudes in return.
In the summer before the sixth grade, the authorities had decided to put a bunch of white kids in the black school, and the whole town was in utter turmoil, including a dramatic upswing in violence in what had always been a sleepy, peaceful small town. White parents reacted and moved their children into private schools en masse.
We were dirt poor and I went to live with a relative where the schools were still peaceful. After a year and a half of this, I was so homesick that I talked my parents into letting me come home and give our hometown school a chance. I was harassed, cursed at, you name it, and I was told that if I came back the next day they would cut my guts out. I was terrified.
It’s also worth mentioning that in the seventh grade, they were working on material I had learned years before. Who Christopher Columbus was, things like that. In math, they were learning addition and subtraction of 2-digit numbers, 22 + 33, etc.
I did not go back.
MM (in TX)
My last year of HS (68) was the first year of
integration for our school. Freedom of choice was
what they called it. We had one in our class
and maybe 6 in the whole school. They were accepted
by most of the kids. The parents through a fit.
That wasn’t good enough for the Feds.
So the next year the busing and private schools
were on the move.The plan was to bring them up
but it backfired(Like most all govt plans)
us and pulled down.