Incidental Ambassadors

Reviewed by Linda Blackford

Vol. 14, No. 3, 1992, pp. 28-29

An Education in Georgia , by Calvin Trillin, Foreword by Charlayne Hunter Gault (University of Georgia Press, 1991, 180 pages)

If prevailing wisdom is correct, the events and conditions detailed in Calvin Trillin’s An Education in Georgia are—if not completely gone—then at least unfamiliar to Southerners who grew up after the shadow of segregation was lifted, in 1961, Trillin, then a Time magazine reporter, chronicled the entrance of the first black students into the University of Georgia, a haven of some of the most distinguished alumni, and hardened racists, in the South. He recounts the long court battles before Hamilton Holmes and Charlayne Hunter were finally admitted, the riot that sent them home a week after they arrived, the gibes, the taunts, the cruel and total isolation.

Unfortunately, prevailing wisdom too often represents the casual chatter of optimists, not the truth. After reading Trillin’s book and breathing a sigh of relief that all that is over—the book was, after all, first published in 1964—a disquieting fear creeps in with the realization that complacency about progress is not only dangerous, but misguided. Trillin’s book recalls William Faulkner’s advice about history—”The past is not dead, its not even past”—and reminds us to look at today’s college campuses and witness the so-called progress that has been made. To be sure, black students on college campuses in the South and, indeed, in the North, are no longer outcasts, but the racial lines stand out as clearly as they ever did in the past, and black and white interaction is guarded and infrequent. Confederate flags may no longer fly over the campuses nor do hostile crowds greet minority students, but the uneasy truce that exists on campuses today is a far cry from the promised land of racial unity envisioned by desegregationists three decades ago.

Trillin followed the facts of the case in 1961 but never lost interest in the consequences. He notes, “As a reporter then based in Atlanta, I had covered both the week-long trial that resulted in their admission and the events that followed their arrival on campus in 1961, and in the spring of 1963, about ten weeks before Charlayne and Hamilton graduated, I returned to Georgia from New York, where I had been living to see how integration had worked out at the University of Georgia—whether or not the Student Heroes had ever become simply students and how two bright young people happened to become student heroes in the first place.”

Trillin held to his original intent, detailing the legal and political changes and ramifications, but never moving too far away from the two main characters, Hunter and Hamilton. Trillin was there when the two black students arrived and witnessed the riot in front of Hunter’s dorm a week later, after which Holmes and Hunter were suspended, “for their own safety.” Once they were reinstated with a court order, their real life began. Real life as two black students at an all-white school was, as Hunter recall in her introduction to the book, “the closest thing to a surrealistic dream I have ever experienced.”

Hunter and Holmes were instantly famous. They, along with other black students like James Meredith, in Mississippi, furthered the “Cause,” far more tangibly than marches or sit-ins, by forcing unwilling participants in integration to face the future. But what Trillin never loses sight of is that this episode was not just about the Cause or segregation, but about two young people who made history without necessarily wanting to do anything more then be college students.

The fact that they became student heroes was unavoidable. Hunter and Holmes had been selected as two of the best and brightest to come out of middle-class black Atlanta; their records had to be impeccable so the admissions department could have no excuse for denial. Hunter got more attention for being a pretty girl and living on campus; it was she who had to bear the most insults and invisible barriers everywhere she went. Holmes lived in Athens’ black community, quietly making Phi Beta Kappa and ignoring the students around him with as much scorn as they ignored him. He also coordinated successfully his relationship with the Cause, spending weekends speaking to young people around the South. Hunter was much more ambivalent about the Cause, and about accepting her situation; as Trillin describes:

But, more and more, Charlayne had come to recognize the irony of spending a week end in New York, where everyone found her charming, and then returning to the long weeks in Athens, where she was likely to be sneered at when she went to the Co-op for a cup of coffee. There was a special kind of loneliness, she discovered, in being the best-known

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student on campus and a student undesirable at the same time. Moreover, her ambitions were not as easily related to the Cause as Hamilton’s—she had no desire to be the Number 1 student at Georgia or to be admitted to Emory Medical School—and she felt a certain hollowness in being honored as a student hero without having done anything that was, by the ordinary standards of collegiate success, heroic.

Or, as Hunter said,

“When I go to those meetings, people try to make me feel that I’m representing the whole Negro race, and that’s not right. I’m not an ideal girl or a perfect student. I don’t want to be an ideal girl—just a girl.”

The other heroes of Trillin’s book are the families and lawyers who worked behind the scenes, and many of the. professors at Georgia who helped get Hunter and Holmes admitted and make to their stay, if not pleasant, then bearable. Notable among them were Jesse Hill, representing the Atlanta Committee for Cooperative Action, and Donald Hollowell and Constance Baker Motley, lawyers for the plaintiffs through the arduous court battle.

Fortunately, Trillin the reporter is never too far away from Trillin the humorist, who pops up from time to time, always ready to record the theater of the absurd. When a white professor at Georgia calls the N.A.A.C.P., the N.A.A.C., Trillin remarks, “It seemed to me that the dean’s courtliness was slipping; white Southerners often have difficulty with the names of Negro organizations, presumably on the theory that if they are mispronounced often enough they will go away.”

Beyond the individual stories that Trillin captured is the as yet unfinished tale of the South and its racial relations.

Trillin’s objective yet moving prose underscores the truth of the phrase, Le plus ca change plus c’est la meme chose. An Education in Georgia stands in its own right as a scroll of one of the most significant events in Southern history and a startling testament to the advances that still must be made.

Linda Blackford is a young news reporter with The Observer of Charlottesville, Virginia.

A Journalist’s Education

Reviewed by Linda Blackford

Vol. 15, No. 1, 1993, pp. 29-30

In Our Place, by Charlayne Hunter-Gault (Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 1992, 257 pages).

“We were simply doing what we were born to do.”

With this statement, journalist Charlayne Hunter-Gault recalls her role in an era of great change for the United States. That role is less famous than her present persona as a television journalist with the MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour. But in 1961, Charlayne Hunter attained instant fame as the young student from Atlanta who integrated all-white University of Georgia. She has set down her memories leading to that tumultuous time in In Our Place.

As Hunter-Gault writes, it becomes apparent that she was indeed a model to bring the South into the twentieth century. She was bright, beautiful, and well off by the standards of many Southern blacks, a polished product of black, middle-class Atlanta. Her father was an army chaplain frequently stationed away from home. She was raised by her mother and grandmother, the two women who most influenced her, and instilled in her the sense of pride and courage that convinced her that the University of Georgia was as much “our place” as anyone else’s.

Hunter-Gault records both happy and painful memories of her upbringing; her birth in Due West, South Carolina, her moves to Covington, Georgia, then Atlanta, growing up in schools that were neither equal to white ones nor up to the task of educating precociously intelligent children. Her childhood could have been that of many pretty, smart girls who are editors of their school paper and homecoming queens at their high school and who want to go to journalism school. But as she was black, and living in the South during the 1950s, it became the extraordinary precursor to extraordinary event.

Because the lengthy court battle had just begun on the case to enter the university, she went to Wayne State University, in Detroit, to begin her studies at another journalism school. At Wayne, she took part in the social life as a normal college student, joining a sorority, and getting involved with various student groups.

All that ended on December 13, 1961, when she and Hamilton Holmes entered the University of Georgia. Calvin Trillin has extensively documented the chronology of the two years that took Hunter, along with her Turner classmate Holmes, from the courts to the classrooms, in his An Education in Georgia. But where Trillin provided the facts, Hunter-Gault fills in the personal, compelling details of that time, such as how girls a flight above her in the dormitory took turns pounding on the floor so she wouldn’t be able to sleep, and the reactions of other students when she finally received permission to use the cafeteria. She and Holmes were suspended a week after their arrival, ostensibly for their own safety because of a student riot. She notes that the famous photo of her leaving the dorm after the riot, clutching her Madonna, showed tears of rage, not fear. Her last years at Georgia never became more warm or welcoming, despite the few people on campus who would talk to her, people she describes as “well meaning but who also had nothing else to do.”

One of the most interesting offshoots of her experiences is her ambivalent relationship with the civil rights movement. She, along with her peers at Turner in Atlanta, became involved in the Inquirer, a newspaper largely run by Atlanta’s student movement members, and would speak for various organizations about her experiences. But as she became less of a member and more of a symbol, the novelty and allure of the movement and her role within it lost its appeal. When Walter Stovall (whom she later married), a white student from the University, came to visit in Atlanta, the disapproval of some of her black friends became a lightning rod for many of her frustrations with the civil rights movement in general.

“I found the things they said to be racially insensitive and totally at odds with the movement position articulated by Dr. King: that people should be judged ‘not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.’ Besides wasn’t anybody concerned with my personal happiness? How much of a sacrifice was I supposed to make? And who was in a position to judge?” She never underestimates the historical importance of her experience. But she never rests on her laurels as a hero of the movement, a role she neither desires nor sees as particularly heroic.

“If I were going to be known to the world, I wanted it to be through the efforts of my ability, rather than through something that but for the time and the place should have been ordinary, routine occurrence. I wanted to be famous someday, but not simply for going to college.”

Autobiographical writing remains one of the most difficult literary genres to convey to the reader without either being self-effacing, boastful, or awkward. Hunter-Gault writes without sentiment, bravado, or bitterness, a pleasing combination of journalistic detail, humor, and insight. Her life comes through as clear as her prose, with the same sense of purpose and persistence that got her through the

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most arduous travails at Georgia, and to her status as a national journalist. It is the work for which she seems to want to be remembered and recognized—the rest was something she was born to do.

Linda Blackford, who reviewed Calvin Trillin’s book about Hunter-Gault’s and Hamilton Holmes’s desegregation of the University of Georgia in our August/September 1992 issue, is a reporter for The Observer, Charlottesville.

Get Back! The Resegregation of America’s Schools

By Linda Blackford

Vol. 19, No. 2, 1997 pp. 9-11

The city of Charleston, West Virginia, took an unusual approach to school integration in the fall of 1956: It moved black children into white schools long before the rest of the South, and did it without a peep.

No one showed up to protest. No state official swore to block the schoolhouse door. It seemed that the daring experiment of integrated schools could succeed.

But over the years, and again, without a peep, Charleston’s schools have moved back to the separate and unequal facilities the Brown decision tried to correct.

Most of Charleston’s black residents–about 12 percent of the population–live in the Flats, the river bottom land north of the Kanawha River. Their children go to crumbling, un-airconditioned schools. Children and teachers move in and out at an alarming rate. The shiny, new schools up in Charleston’s hills have PTAs that raise up to $40,000 a year to hire art teachers and install new computer labs. The Flats schools still hold fundraisers for field trips. In the seven Flats elementary schools, there are less than five black children in the gifted programs.

“People are having a lot of problems.” said Anne Gilmer, a parent and teacher. “We’ve noticed a lot of our kids have been passed over and we feel the school system for our kids is a lot worse now than it ever was then.”

When the school board created a re-districting program, they refused to consider creating more racially and economically diverse schools, opting

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instead for “neighborhood schools.”

But Charleston is far from being alone. In fact, according to Harvard researcher Gary Orfield, it’s just one more fallen domino in what is becoming a pre-Brown pattern of segregation in America’s schools.

As places like Charleston show, the historic promise of integrated schools has somehow gone awry. Small gains that were made since the 1970s have reversed and widened the gap between black and white schools, and rich and poor ones.

Meanwhile, the entire principle of desegregation has become so controversial that the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) has discussed abandoning its historic and vigorous support of integrated schools. Even the U.S. government has changed its course.

“It is wrong to conclude that schools that teach poor, black children cannot teach,” said Raymond Pierce, Deputy Assistant Secretary for the U.S. Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights. “We need to look at the deliverables like test scores and graduation rates.”

Reversals

Orfield, who started the Harvard Project on School Desegregation and frequently testifies in desegregation court cases, has sounded this particular alarm since the late 1980s. His latest report, which came out in April, 1997, and is excerpted in this issue of Southern Changes, shows that re-segregation is occurring at the fastest rate in schools in the South. The other increase is for Latino students, who find themselves more and more isolated in schools in the West and Southwest.

The Southern states have the most to lose ‘they moved from total segregation in 1960 to placing 14 percent of blacks into majority white schools in 1967. By 1988 the percentage jumped to 41 percent. By 1994, however, that number has dropped to 36.6 percent. Maryland, Mississippi, and Louisiana are now among the ten most segregated states in the country.

Latino segregation has become even more severe, according to Orfield’s data. In the North, South, and West, three-fourths of all Latino students attend predominantly non-white schools.

Orfield’s report blames most of the reversals on lower court and Supreme Court rulings that reversed desegregation orders, many of which are Reagan and Bush administration legacies just being felt today.

The trend started in Detroit in 1974 when Milliken v. Bradley drastically limited the flow of students between suburbia and the inner cities. Michigan now ranks second in the country for segregated black students. Cities like Richmond, Virginia, or Atlanta, Georgia, are similar: inside city limits, the schools approach 95 percent black, the result of nearly irreversible white flight.

Since then, major desegregation and busing orders were overturned or dismantled in Oklahoma City, Denver, and Kansas City; a landmark case in Norfolk, Virginia, supported by the Reagan Justice Department allowed the school board to return to segregated community or neighborhood schools.

Orfield’s numbers also illustrate the consequence of this segregation by showing the close link between racial isolation and economic deprival. The way most school systems are funded today, local economic deprivation too often means educational deprivation as well.

For example, he points out that only 5 percent of the nation’s segregated white schools face conditions of concentrated poverty among their children but more than 80 percent of segregated black and Latino schools do.

“Desegregation is not only sitting next to someone of the other race,” he writes. “A child moving from a segregated African-American or Latino school to a white school will very likely exchange conditions of concentrated poverty for a middle class school. Exactly the opposite is true when a child is sent back from an interracial school to a segregated neighborhood school as is happening under a number of recent court orders which end busing or desegregation choice plans.”

The Brown decision said that segregated schools were “inherently unequal,” and evidence proves this is true today, Orfield says.

Economically deprived schools must often cope with a host of problems before class even starts. Poor children are more likely to have health and developmental problems, they may not be ready to learn, and they may not speak English. Many poor schools find it hard to attract good teachers while parents cannot afford the many extra resources, like art and computers, that wealthy schools buy.

Like a Mirage

Orfield is a tireless campaigner for integration. But many others feel the long struggle has had too few results.

“I’m not saying it was the wrong thing to do,” said Gilmer, who went on to teach in the Charleston schools. “What was bad was we expected too much of it.”

Mary Sanford, president of the Perry Homes Tenant Association in Atlanta, Georgia, thinks integration failed because it wasn’t done fairly.

“They took all the best black teachers into the white schools and bused all the black children,” she said. “Black schools stayed black, they never bussed any whites.”

Gilmer and Sanford agree that too much time and

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money have been spent trying to persuade white families to integrate. They think that the country needs to strive for integration, but not at the expense of children’s education.

“I think we lost a whole generation of children,” Gilmer said.

Integration was also resented because it held that a black child got a better education because he or she sat next to a white child. In fact, many black children in white schools were ignored or tracked into low level classes, regardless of their intellect.

Pierce of the U.S. Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights, thinks too many people assume a majority black school must be a bad one.

Black residents of Greensboro, North Carolina, including a group of black ministers called the Pulpit Forum, supported the end of large-scale busing in Guilford County. “Separate but truly equal would not be so bad,” Greensboro resident Amos Quick told the Greensboro News and Record in May.

But the idea of “truly equal” still shimmers like a mirage in school districts around the country. Educational equity may prove to be just as elusive a concept as racial integration.

Numerous states have used lawsuits to fix funding disparities between rich and poor school districts. Those lawsuits may equalize property taxes between areas but they have not addressed the crucial difference between a PTA that raises $40,000 and one just a few streets away that raises $400. That difference often occurs between white neighborhoods and minority ones.

But Orfield is not the only one who thinks it’s too early to give up on integrated schools and the educational equity they bring. After much speculation and debate at the NAACP convention in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in July, the NAACP confirmed its support for school integration and pledged to continue to fight in desegregation court cases.

“Separate, segregated schools are inherently unequal,” Chairman Myrlie Evers-Williams said at the conference, “and will not provide the quality of education needed for the twenty-first century.”