Children of Crisis

by Robert Coles

  “We were as nervous as they were.” I heard several teachers say the words almost as if they had all rehearsed them. Miss Lawrence described the first day of desegregation briefly: “You could hear a pin drop. Those children just sat there and they looked as if at any moment a frightful disaster, a tornado or something, might come upon them. It was obvious that none of them wanted to sit near the Negro child, and yet they were so curious you could read it all over their faces. I’ll have to admit it, I was, too. How were we to know what might happen? After a while you realize that we should know, because we’re the same old people, the same old teacher and children, in the same old room; some scattered dark faces don’t make it any different. But you have to go through it to know it, or we did. No one else ever had in Georgia.”

  She felt that she had never faced so strenuous a year. Before school even opened she found herself aware of the loneliness the Negro children would experience, and the fear and confusion the white children would feel. She briskly started her first class with a firm declaration of her wish for “order”; she would insist upon it in her classroom, and everyone must know that, and not forget that. Then she outlined the year’s work before them. She wanted them to realize they had come together, to work. She wrote the three words on the blackboard; she then underlined them slowly.

  They did work; she made sure of that. She allowed no nonsense. She never had in the past, and this was hardly a year to start doing so. Work, she reasoned, would unite them. It would dampen the tension in them, and thwart the stirrings of hate and violence. She had always watched her students closely. In fact, until this year, she had grown tired of the mechanics of teaching. There was just so much that one could do with the same books, the same stories, year after year. What saved it all was that she had never tired of watching adolescents. They grow in so many different ways. This year she expected to see more growing than she ever had before.

  The first weeks were filled with apprehension and uncertainty, with more of both in the teachers than the children; or at least more that she could recognize. “We are so much more fixed than they are. We can’t help it, we’re older. We’ve lived with segregation as a fact of our entire lives. Take lynching; lynching was hardly protested when I was a girl. Our children may oppose integration, but it’s a fact of their young lives, not something strange and impossible, the way it seemed to me for so long. I really don’t think any of our young people will run away nearly screaming from a Negro in a college room the way I did.”

  Miss Lawrence read constantly. In the early morning she would rise to enjoy the best hours of her day, relaxing over coffee and jellied toast, and reading “Mr. McGill.” Often she talked to me of Ralph McGill. “I read Mr. McGill like the word of the Bible. He’s not as popular down here, you know, as I think he is in the North. We’ve been calling him names for years; my closest friend does. She’ll read a column of his and then call me up to tell me what a terrible person he is, how he’s against all things Southern. In my opinion, Mr. McGill should be declared a college, a one-man fully accredited college, by the Association of American Colleges. I’ve wanted to write him that for years, but I’m shy at such things. I think all of us have been prodded by him, even those who keep on calling him ugly names. He has courage, and he has a sense of timing. He doesn’t say something and then forget it. He knows what a teacher knows, that you have to repeat and repeat, and not despair when your students seem apathetic or even resistant. He’s been doing that for years, patiently saying things that the rest of us were afraid to say, and maybe even became angry at him for saying — I suspect as much out of shame as anything else. He never got too far ahead of us — that’s what I mean by good timing — and he never left us impatient or in despair. I think all this means that I feel he really is one of us, and he knows what’s happening here. I don’t resent the Northerners who come down here and preach at us, or write their books after a two-week tour of a couple of Southern cities. I just don’t pay any attention to them. People going through what we are going through have to learn from themselves. Mr. McGill is of us, and he writes for us.”

  All that year she kept watch over what her children learned at school: “I’ve never kept my eyes so fastened on a class.” She kept scrutinizing herself, too. “How can you plan some of these things?” she asked herself and me one day. “You can plan all day and predict until the world ends, but there’s no way for anyone to be sure about how children will act. Some of the children I would have thought least likely to approach those nigras have done it so nicely and casually, while others I thought their potential friends are afraid to lift a finger, or risk a shred of their ‘reputation.’ The first thing I learned was kindness and decency didn’t have anything to do with I.Q. scores or grades. There’s the matter of heart and compassion, and say what you will about intelligence, I’m not sure it has all that much to do with sensitivity. What I mean is that the very broadest kind of intelligence will include sensitivity; but I’m thinking of a very able student of mine — he gets almost all As. He cares much more for his own memory and how well he can use it to get a high mark from me than for what is happening around him, to white people or black people, to any fellow human being.”

  The teachers talked to one another, comparing experiences and attitudes much as their students did. Miss Lawrence did this not only in her own school but with friends she had in other schools. All her friends agreed upon the need for outward calm and firm discipline, regardless of the turmoil in the students. Some wanted to go further, help bridge the silence and hesitation between dark and white students. Yet, any move in this direction required planning. The pulse of the class had to be carefully estimated day by day. The image was Miss Lawrence’s and she continued it with the remark, “You can’t treat a condition until you take stock of it.

  “It’s like anything else, what happens in the classroom will depend on us and the children both.” She was evaluating the progress of desegregation, and emphasizing some of the variables. “I’ve been collecting stories this year, because each school is different, and even the classes in them.” She gathered obvious pleasure from telling about teachers in one school peeking into a classroom during the first days. “I can just imagine what the parents or children would think if they saw that scene, a group of teachers behaving like children looking in a store window. Well, it was quite a novelty, and we’re human like everyone else. Look at all those TV people who came around the first few days, and the reporters, too.” Then she liked to mention the incident with the psychological facet to it: “I think you would be particularly interested in what happened to another English teacher. She was no integrationist, just a hard-working teacher. The first week she assigned a theme which was to be titled “My First Week at School,” or something like that. She has been assigning that topic for years, and so have I. Would you believe that out of all her classes, with all those children, she received only a small handful of themes which even mentioned desegregation in connection with the first week of school? Imagine that, with all the police and the nationwide publicity, with all the coverage on television, those children were simply afraid to mention the subject. They ignored the most important thing to happen that week, or that year. It shows you what the mind can do. I’ve often wondered whether it was a deliberate thing, whether they were simply frightened, or whether it was unconscious and they really forgot. I suppose those children reflected the atmosphere around them: everyone was holding out on everyone else; no one really dared to say what he thought, or no one except a very few outspoken segregationists. Even they were quiet at first, at least in school itself. Those were crucial times, those first weeks. All kinds of attitudes were set, or for that matter prevented, by the policies we teachers adopted.”

  She felt that about her work generally, that teachers can do a lot. She was proud of her profession. “It all depends upon what you want, I mean what the teacher wants. The first thing, as I keep on saying, is that children must learn; nothing must be allowed to interr
upt that. After that, it’s almost a matter of what the teacher decides to do, of what her goals are. I know two history teachers who teach the same course. One of them sticks to facts and events; the other is concerned with ideas and ideals. Isn’t that the same alternative that faces all of us in this situation, too? I teach English — grammar and composition as well as literature. Yet, I don’t think a clay passes that I don’t have some opportunity to draw some moral, some more universal message from our work together in class. I’ve always done that, telling them how important order is, in punctuation or driving on the road, to preserve us from chaos. Of course, when we read Macbeth or any of the novels they select, from Dickens to Conrad, there’s unlimited chance for talk about personal freedom, tyranny, and what have you. Sometimes I wish we adults could see things the way some of these youngsters do. My purpose, as I see it, is to encourage the best and curb the worst in every class I teach. I know I can do it. I believe it’s as much a matter of the teacher’s desire as anything else, at least in a school like this, in what you might call a middle-class area. With very poor children I think it’s only natural for teachers to lose a lot of their interest and concern. It’s so hard to fight hunger and the bitterness it produces.

  “In our school a teacher can play it as safe as she wants. She can let the children know that she cares about facts only, or she can take an interest in them as human beings. It has to be both, I believe. If I see any child lonely or terrorized, I feel that if he is going to learn, something must be done about his terror as well as his answers in tests. If I see a brute or bully at work, I’ve got to help him, too, or he’ll flunk more than my examinations. I don’t believe in all this psychology, this psychological approach, they call it. I believe in teaching. They have fancy new names for all that we do today, but any teacher worth anything always has known a lot of these things intuitively, don’t you agree with that?”

  She would pause, then launch into examples: about how she helped the two Negro students speak up, by calling upon them firmly but sympathetically; about how she sensed real fear in a white girl and consequently spoke with her after class, telling her that she herself, a grown woman, a school teacher who had traveled far in America, and beyond, too, had gone through some moments like that in the past, moments of tension and irritability and a sense of being cheated. “I said to her that she felt tricked, that was the word I used, and I could see her face respond — she knew that I was telling the truth, because I had supplied a word, an accurate word, for her confused feelings.”

  Miss Lawrence characterized the first two years of desegregation in Atlanta as “the two most exciting years” of her teaching career. “I’ve never felt so useful, so constantly useful, not just to the children but to our whole society, American as well as Southern. Those children, all of them, have given me more than I’ve given them. They’ve helped me realize that some unpleasant times in my own life were not spent in vain. That’s a privilege, to be able to have your life tested and found somewhat consistent, at least over the long haul. I guess I grew up there in New York, and used the strength from it down here later on. I was just another teacher up North for the summer, but it made me a better Southerner, a better person, for a long time afterward.”

  The Protesters

  Larry

  He thought he might have appendicitis. The pain in his stomach had persisted for a day, then moved vaguely to the right side of his abdomen where he felt it intermittently. He had no appetite, and he thought he might have a fever. He waited for another day, then became worried enough to seek out a doctor. The pain seemed to have settled deep in him, and he feared that the next event would be rupture, and a belly full of poison. “For a while I thought I’d be going to medical school next year,” he told me after outlining his symptoms in an orderly and precise fashion. He was then a senior at a first-rate Eastern college. He was bright, well spoken, intensely idealistic, very much determined to reach Mississippi and be of service there. “Even if I do need surgery, I’ll be able to get down there within two weeks, won’t I?” he both stated to me and asked me as I prepared to examine him.

  Though I couldn’t be certain, I did not think that he had appendicitis. I told him so, and also told him that we should keep an eye on his pain and his general state of health. Then I asked him how he was managing at the orientation sessions. (It was the summer of 1964 and we were in Oxford, Ohio, for two weeks before going into Mississippi.) He said that things were going well, but his manner — the impatient legs, crossing and recrossing, the averted eyes — told me to let the subject drop. I asked him to come back in twenty-four hours for another examination.

  He was back that evening, after a service had been held for the three missing civil rights workers, later found dead in Philadelphia, Mississippi. His stomach seemed better. For the first time in two days he had eaten a full meal. Now that the threat of surgery was gone, he was in good spirits. “I dreaded the idea of spending the summer in the hospital and not in Mississippi,” he said almost immediately. I told him that even had the worst been the case, an appendectomy was no longer the serious matter it used to be. “You would have certainly arrived South by mid-July.”

  For a few moments there was silence. I wanted to ask him, again, how he was feeling, how the orientation sessions were going. He was less restless and apprehensive than he had been, and I decided to ask him how he happened to become involved in the project. He gave me a quick glance, as if to say that he knew who I was and what I had in mind; moreover, knowing it, he was not interested in the kind of casual talk I only seemed to have in mind. I expected the awkward spell of quiet that fell upon us to be followed by his departure, when suddenly he spoke: “Do you think it will do any good? I’ve been asking myself that more and more. I know it’s good for us. We’ll learn a lot about the South. What about the civil rights movements though? How can a few hundred students change Mississippi?”

  The questions were unanswerable at that time. We both knew that only events themselves would provide the answers. I asked him his major and it was history, with a minor in American literature. I suggested that it was hard to evaluate history as it was happening. Inconsequential incidents may be significant beginnings. Elaborately planned uprisings may come to nothing. We talked in such generalities — banal generalities — and he became more relaxed and more talkative, that day and on the other days we met.

  “I expected to be in Europe this summer. My cousin and I were going there. My brother is studying at Oxford, and the three of us were to travel in England, then go to France and Italy, and maybe Greece. Then this happened. I wasn’t really very interested in civil rights. My parents were always much more involved in that kind of thing than I was. To tell the truth, for a long time I was bored with the whole subject. I remember that a couple of years ago I asked my father why he never seemed to get tired of all those ‘causes.’ One after another he takes to them, and each time you would think the whole world stands or falls on what happens. We had quite a fight. He said I was pretty casual because we had money and I said he was pretty tense because he didn’t trust his own success; he constantly feared someone would take his job away. I suppose I was unfair to him. Actually, I think he’s a very sincere man, and wants to help when he can. The only way he really helps, though, is with money. That’s what used to bother me. I saw him write the checks, then look satisfied with himself when he was finished. He would tell my mother to be sure to address the envelopes and mail them right off the next day. I could see the look of satisfaction on his face. He had done his generous deed and he wanted my mother to know it. He was almost distrustful of her, as if she might take away his glory by not mailing the check. I had never read Freud then, but I used to wonder why he was so worried that somehow his checks wouldn’t be mailed.

  “I still don’t know exactly when I decided to go South instead of to Europe. I read of the project and heard that students were being recruited. I went to a meeting — a question-and-answer meeting — because there were
no movies around that I hadn’t seen. I think I really went for the same reason you’re probably here: I wanted to find out what kind of people would be there. I noticed right away that they weren’t the ones I expected. I thought they would be the politicians, who always work up a storm over one issue or another. Instead they all seemed to be like me, and more were there than I expected.

  “We heard a few speeches. I almost left in the middle of one of them. A Negro kept on telling us how rotten America was; how rotten every white man was. I wanted to stand up and ask him why he was asking for our help if we were so damn ‘corrupt’ and ‘hopeless.’ No one dared say anything though. I knew some people felt like speaking out but couldn’t. You feel guilty, to blame for it all. You also feel that the man who is talking has been so hurt and beaten down that he’s no longer rational. So you excuse him, as you would anyone who has had a rough time.