This weekend's newspapers and television news programs are filled with references to Monday's 50th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in the case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka - the decision that declared segregated schools inherently unequal and therefore unconstitutional.
Most of the news stories will focus on how the 1954 decision, which led to desegregation of public schools, transformed American culture or how it positively impacted the lives of African-Americans by eventually giving them access to an equal education under the law.
I write today from a different and more personal perspective - that of a white person whose life was positively impacted by Brown v. Board of Education. Yes, positively impacted. While the court's decision enabled blacks to have an equal education, the decision gave me an equal cultural experience.
Many whites who, like me, attended public schools in the South in the 1960s experienced early school integration this way: A few black students showed up at their all-white schools.
My experience was different. I was one of a small number of whites who showed up at what was effectively an all-black school.
The North Carolina town where I grew up had two high schools - one for whites and one for blacks. The black school was in an impoverished, all-black neighborhood; the white school was all the way across town in an upscale, all-white neighborhood. As I left junior high and started high school in the fall of 1967 (at the white high school, of course), the local school board was debating how to integrate the system. The board decided that high school students would be the pioneers in our town, and that desegregation would be accomplished by shuttering the black high school, keeping the white high school open and building a second, new high school midway across town. The first year, everyone could attend whichever school they wanted.
My parents decided I would go to the new school because it was within walking distance of my neighborhood. That decision was made, I am certain, merely to save my mother the twice-daily, 20-minute drives to the traditional white high school I had attended my first year. I don't believe my parents considered where other kids were going or what the conditions might be like that first year of integration.
Had they been plugged in, they would have known what was happening in our town that summer of 1968. The white kids were registering for the old all-white school, which was retaining an almost all-white faculty. The black kids were signing up for the new high school along with virtually all of the administrators and faculty from the old black high school.
On the day my new high school opened, it was almost 80 percent black. It had a black principal, black dean and many black teachers. White faces were few and far between.
Today's public school students have no real understanding of what that era was like. In my town before desegregation, the only time black students and white students participated in the same activity was in the annual Christmas parade. The white high school band and the black high school band both marched in the parade, but separated by other units. We never visited each other's schools. We didn't play each other in sports.
And we didn't mix in other aspects of our lives, either. We lived in segregated neighborhoods, attended segregated churches. We white kids knew little or nothing of their lives; they knew little of ours.
Brown v. Board of Education changed all that. For me, it revealed a new world I had never seen and put me smack in the middle of it.
I admit that at first I wasn't sure I wanted to see it. Many people, white and black, young and old, were buffeted by the sea changes of desegregation. That certainly was true for those of us enrolled the first year in the new high school. I remember it as a time of turmoil for everyone. Black students were angry that their old school, which had been the center of their community and a source of pride, was shut down. They didn't like the new school. White students didn't want to be there either, and we were experiencing the shock of finding ourselves a racial minority. White kids exposed for the first time to blacks, we were simply afraid. The ground beneath us wasn't firm anymore. Our assumptions about life were turned upside-down.
There were fights, walkouts, tense confrontations and teacher resignations. Police patrolled the halls and appeared en masse at school events.
But as the year neared an end, a measure of peace prevailed, creating relatively undisturbed ground for tentative friendships to grow. And by the start of the second year, a handful of white students and a handful of black students had emerged as leaders who could work together and point the way for others. I am proud to have been a member of that group, and I still look back and value the friends I made then. Society was still a long, long way from integrated, but in that school that year, we discovered that we shared many of the same needs and wants and interests and that our differences did not have to frighten us or divide us.
At graduation I was handed a piece of paper that was supposed to represent what I had learned in high school. It did not. The most valuable lessons of my high school years were not in the textbooks, but in the hallways and cafeteria, on the band trips and in the hours spent decorating homecoming floats side by side with people who were different - but different in a way I could understand, accept and even appreciate. I hope that many black students who graduated that year felt the same about their relationships with white students.
I am grateful for an activist Supreme Court that ruled as it did in Brown v. Board of Education and opened the door for an experience that was for me both humbling and enriching. I regard it as a lifelong blessing.
