In the 1960s, Movement Conservatives created a cast of villains. The Brown v. Board decision in 1954 and President Eisenhower's use of troops to desegregate Little Rock Central High School in 1957 enabled Movement Conservatives to resurrect old white fears that government activism was simply a way to funnel white tax dollars to African-Americans.
There was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools and she was bused to school every day. That little girl was me.
In 1974, when the city of Boston was desegregating its schools, I watched the news with my dad and saw the police escorts in riot gear, the protesters screaming at the buses, small frightened faces in their windows.
Desegregation came very painfully to the Boston schools, long after John Kelly finished high school, and the pain of desegregating Boston schools was visited entirely on the students who looked like Frederica Wilson.
Tomorrow morning, we’re going to try to integrate the University of Mississippi. Get me a memo on … what we can do if the governor sends the National Guard there. Have it on my desk at 8 in the morning.
Wherever schools can be integrated through the busing method, and where it won't be just a, a terrible inconvenience, I think it ought to be done.
The attorney general would call at 5 o'clock in the evening and say: 'Tomorrow morning we are going to try to integrate the University of Mississippi. Get us a memo on what we're likely to do, and what we can do if the governor sends the National Guard there.'
During the decades after Brown v. Board of Education there was terrific progress. Tens of thousands of public schools were integrated racially. During that time the gap between black and white achievement narrowed.
My mother helped to integrate the local elementary school in the nineteen-sixties.
