The end of school segregation happened at different times in various parts of the country. It brought an end to a social injustice but students affected often have odd stories to tell. Some funny, some scary and others frustrating.
Share your school stories here. Busing, over crowding, riots or what ever.
For example, my hometown had two high schools built in the late 50’s. They were on opposite sides of town. One had been for the black students and the other whites. We had unusual situation because of the end of segregation. There wasn’t room for all the students in the main high school building. The old black high school became the 10th grade. I had a 10th grade world history class at the main high school from 2 to 3. Had to ride a school shuttle bus for it and then return back to the 10th grade building. Just in time for school to end. I lived near the main high school but mom had to pick me up at the 10th grade building. They wouldn’t let me stay at the main campus and get picked up. crazy situation. I didn’t mind because my teacher had to let me leave my class 15 mins early to catch that 3pm school shuttle bus.
My cousin had gone through the same thing a few years earlier. She was in the first class after segregation ended. Sadly, there were quite a few riots. At least a dozen that year. They always just sent the students home. The few trouble makers got suspended.
Thank goodness we only had one riot when I was in high school. Some idiots spray painted a slur on the gym doors. They got suspended, but that didn’t stop the riot. I was in the band hall and we just locked the doors.
I started school in '73 and knew nothing of segregation. There simply were no blacks in our little community, although there was one Hispanic family with a girl in my class.
What I know of is the segregation in the German town of Herzogenaurach, when Rudolf Dassler left his brother Adolf’s company and brought with him a third of the Addidas employees to establish Puma. The town remains segregated to this day and the two brothers were buried on opposite ends of the cemetery.
I went to New London school in East Texas for a little while. The school was integrated, K-12, but the surrounding communities weren’t. This was early '70s. For a 9 yr old middle class white boy, it was really entertaining to ride the bus with a culture I had little previous exposure to. Namely, the Black culture. I was very familiar with Hispanic culture, living before that in L.A. and Houston. My bus ride took about 40 minutes or more.
One particular incident sticks in my mind because of hind sight. Going home on what I think was a Friday. A bottle of something fizzy that needed a bottle opener was desired to opened. I’m pretty sure it something soft, like an Orange Crush or something. A guy (teenaged) grabbed a pick out of someone’s giant afro and used that to open it. He didn’t share with the fro girl which seemed to upset her and her friends to a great degree. When we got to the little town/community that most of the black students on the bus lived in, they all got out, still arguing. A small crowd was gathering. But, the bus driver drove off. I guess he didn’t want to get involved. I have no idea what happened after.
Some of those same guys lent me records/recordings of Isley Brothers, Parliament/Funkadelics, Screamin Jay, Sly, etc… I owe them big time for that wonderful awakening.
I went to school in Pennsylvania in the late 60s and early 70s. There was no segragation but there was racism, boy oh boy was there ever. I remember the N-word being used in casual conversation just like any other word, dozens of times every day.
It was like this for me, both in Maryland and Pennsylvania. There was no official segregation by the government, but society was segregated anyway.
Heh, my neighborhood was integrated before integration. The powers that were bused black, white kids and hispanic kids from our neighborhood to another neighborhood and bused black kids from the other neighborhood into ours. It was a total :smack::smack: for all the kids involved. Especially since before this happened all the kids walked to school.
It wasn’t an issue in our school since it was 98% white. My class had three black students in it out of 120. But the black students were fairly well integrated into the class.
That was demographics: the blacks lived in the next town over and went to a different school (though it was predominantly white, too).
I graduated in a class of six hundred something; nearly 2500 students in the school. In the entire 4 years of high school, I can recall 4 Black students, none of them in my year. Two of them had been adopted by White families as infants. One I don’t know her family situation (she was several years younger than I, so I didn’t know her personally.) The last one had a single mother (Black) and the two of them lived on, quite literally, the edge of town in one of the very few rental properties out there at the time.
I graduated in 1992. Segregation was, officially, long over. We were generally raised with anti-racist sentiments, although it was entirely theoretical, and didn’t always stand the test of reality. When Marc (he of the single mother) came to my house for a barbeque/party once and gave me a hug and a peck on the cheek to say goodbye, the neighbor bitch literally called my mother to tell her that “some n— is kissing your daughter!” :mad:
I moved away in part because I wanted to raise my son in a more diverse area. By the 2000 Census, they were 1.92% Black. Looking at my old high school district now, it’s 4% Black. So it has become more diverse, but it’s still pretty pale.
I have to say, it wasn’t until I began working with elderly black people that I became aware that *Chicago *was at one point segregated in terms of stores and services. I know that there were always Black neighborhoods and White neighborhoods, but I did not realize that, for example, Marshall Fields would not serve Black people, or that there were some gas stations Black people couldn’t use the toilet in. That made me incredibly sad to learn. Here these people came up from Mississippi thinking it was different, and the only difference was corn instead of cotton.
I can remember when the Black Power movement finally reached my small town. Probably 6 or 7 years late but it got there. 
A African-American Studies club started at school. The faculty adviser was a young black teacher. They met weekly to read and talk. Quite a few students started wearing African style clothes and even those scarfs on their head. I recall those clinched fist patches on their clothes. Giant Afros appeared with hair picks in the back pocket.
These kids were just like me. Small town, rural. I knew a few of them pretty well. It was pretty cool seeing them rediscover their heritage and take pride in their Roots. Which of course aired while I was in high school.
Same here. I grew up in an all-white town and went to an all-white school. (1974-86)
I was right in the middle of it in East Texas, a small city that had a race riot in 1959 and resisted desegregation. Integration came in 1969, when I was in 6th grade, and for the first time there were 4-5 black kids in my class (of 30). Most notably, my teacher was black, a woman recently moved from New Jersey who didn’t have the black speech patterns and cultural markers found locally. I was wary at first, but within weeks she won me over and she became my favorite teacher, whom I’ve been intending for a couple of years now to try to track down and thank.
In junior high, the classes were tracked so the black kids in my classes were the intelligent ones and I had little trouble feeling comfortable with them, though we weren’t close friends. Of course, society was changing around us, and things like music were starting to cross over.
In high school, the limits of de jure desegregation became apparent. Blacks and whites self-segregated: they sat at different cafeteria tables and even used different parking lots. Positions like cheerleaders, majorettes, and class favorites had some sort of quotas to ensure proportional representation (the school was about 35% black; no hispanics). Inter-racial dating was almost—but not completely—unknown. I don’t remember any hallway brawls, though I think there was some racial incident at a football game. My main memory of the black students is that it was the era of the Afro and “cake cutters” to comb them, and the bathroom sinks were always covered with tight black curly hairs.
I’m long since moved away, though I understand the city is about as integrated as any place in the mid-South. The more affluent “new home” area north of town created a new high school district in the 1980s, allowing “white flight” as drugs and trouble became more common in my old school. And I think there was some slight, real or imagined, such that the 15th and 20th class reunions had very few blacks and I think there was an alternate event they organized.
My high school desegregated in 1961. Washington-Lee HS in Arlington VA. Good experience, having a shooting guard on my intramural team to my taller center. 
I taught high school in Oxford NC from 1967-1970. All black HS. Great experience, except for the administration. Kids were great.
My high school was finally integrated in 1996 and I graduated in 1994.
West Virginia was largely insulated from forced desegregation because of a small minority population. Even though the state constitution mandated segregated schools, when Brown v. Board of Education was handed down the Governor did probably the only good thing in his life by defying entrentched interests, and enforcing the law against their will by saying that it was the “law of the land and West Virginia will abide by it.” He later died of alcoholism after finally finding work as a taxi driver. William C. Marland - Wikipedia
So, my state was never a party to any of the subsequent lawsuits or forced busing. The voters finally repealed the constitutional segregation provision in 1994.
And since I mentioned it, his successor continued to desegregate the schools (as much as was needed in West Virginia), and called out the racists who were urging him to take a stronger stand. Cecil H. Underwood - Wikipedia
He was Governor from 1957-1961, the youngest governor in the history of the state. He was also Governor from 1997-2001, the oldest in the history of the state. In 1996, when I was President of the College Republicans, I was invited to several functions and got to know Mr. Underwood personally. He was one of the finest men, a gentleman, that I have ever known. He wasn’t as aggressive as I was itn pushing things, and he told me that you can’t force things on people, but you have to accept and understand people and look out for everyone. But he didn’t mind pushing desegregation; he thought segregation was awful even back in the 50s.
He was a grandfatherly figure who remembered every name, and every detail about everything. I don’t know how he knew my age, but at a campaign function, we were talking and I was sipping on a beer. I was only 20. We talked for a while during a break in the activities, and he told me that he hoped his first act in office wouldn’t have to be a pardon for my citation for underage drinking. He had a stern look on his face for several seconds and then gave me a grandfatherly smile.
He died the very same day my father died, so my mind was elsewhere. That guy was something special.
Not “segregated” per se, but my schooling might be an interesting data point. From mid-50’s to mid-60’s I attended schools in a town near San Jose, California. For 12 years AFAICR there was not a single black student ever enrolled in that school district. Zero. Nada. I do remember one obviously Oriental-looking student who was ridiculed by the other kids.
The San Jose area may not have a high black population, but it’s non-zero. My mother went out of her way to make friends with a black family “across the railroad tracks” that had a boy my age.
My mother explained that area realtors had an implicit rule: Blacks looking for homes got “I don’t think you’d like the homes there, let me show you something in this other neighborhood.”
The year I graduated from high school, there were still no blacks, if I recall correctly. There were long-haired guys with beads which was something new!
I started school in 1965. The small city I grew up in was whiter than white, so none of this mattered. In fact, the first time I’d ever seen a black person in real life was when I was 12 and went to summer camp. All the way through high school I can only recall 1 person that may have been Hispanic. But only because of her last name. She didn’t look it.
I was a pawn of bussing in Louisville in the 1970s. We had armed federal marshals on our buses. I remember pulling into school through a protest of yelling angry white parents (I’m white and middle class, we were having inner city kids bussed out, and then some of my neighbors got “chosen” to get bussed in).
I remember the inner city kids being very disrespectful and aggressive in comparison to the kids from the 'burbs. I remember my forth grade teacher really doing her best but frankly, nothing had prepared her for the class she got. She was a white Southern lady from deeper South than Louisville of a certain age, and I don’t remember any behavior from her that was racist, but I do remember her having “classroom management challenges.” I remember we had to stop playing dodgeball because suddenly all shots were head shots.
I remember my parents trying to get me into the overfull private schools for years - not because my parents are racists (they aren’t) but because when people are threatening to bomb the schools and their are armed federal marshals on the buses and suddenly, for the first time, you get knives in classrooms, you start thinking about if your child is safe in that school.
We moved out of Louisville after three years and I graduated from a Minnesota suburban high school with two Asian kids in my graduating class and no black kids. It was a pretty blue collar suburb, most didn’t go on the college, 10% of my graduating class was pregnant or had a baby at graduation (and several had left school), but it was - and still is - a glaringly white district.
I’m the white mom of a white daughter and Asian son, and this is STILL the case - at least with my kids. A few kids move fairly seemlessly, more common in boys than girls - more common in kids like my son, who are adopted or have bi-racial parents, but the kids do self segregate.