Going to School in Black and White

by Cindy Waszak Geary

  * * *

  What I learned in my family about how to live in the world and treat other people influenced my racial attitudes. My father, Rudy, was born in Davenport, Iowa, in 1922 to German immigrant parents and grew up working to help his large family of three sisters and three brothers make ends meet. He was a free spirit without tight parental oversight, so when he wasn’t on his paper route or some other job, he spent as much time as he was able swimming in the Mississippi River and playing basketball with his friends. After he graduated from high school, he was a census-taker and a bus ticket agent and eventually joined the Merchant Marines during World War II. After the war, he began work installing telephone equipment, a job that required frequent moves around the country.

  My mother, Norma, went to college, a rare privilege for a girl born in rural Appalachia in 1924, but made possible through the sacrificial support of her parents and a scholarship from Berea College in Kentucky. After graduating, she taught home economics and then ran a school lunch program, both jobs in a small town in North Carolina. My father’s job brought him to this same small town, and there he met my mother at a bridge party. Mother left this town and her career to marry my father and follow him and his job around the country.

  My parents both had strong “no nonsense” values, formed in part by growing up during the Great Depression. My mother’s childhood experiences were rural and religious, and my father’s were urban and secular, but both had grown up in big families where it was necessary to pitch in to ensure everyone had enough food and clothing. Both of their families valued education for boys and girls, although for Daddy’s family this meant finishing high school and for Mother’s it meant going to college. My father, however, started saving for my college education before I was born. I never questioned that I would go to college.

  Both my parents were frugal, and savings were valued more than possessions. Daddy was a member of a labor union, and that union ensured him wages adequate to live modestly, clothe and feed his family, and send his children to college. My parents believed in the American promise of a level playing field at birth, and they taught my brother and me to be honest and to do the right thing even if it was not popular. We were not encouraged to question institutional authority—or to complain.

  Our frequent moves around the country had a strange liberalizing effect in the midst of what may sound like an otherwise boring middle-class lifestyle. What we learned that was liberating was that more than one way of being is possible in the world. My parents were more tolerant of the diversity of human experience as a result. My father had seen a lot of the world as he traveled as a Merchant Marine, and my mother was always interested in what was happening in foreign countries because of her missionary union work at church and close friends who were missionaries in Indonesia. She always enjoyed getting to know people in our community from other countries and learning about their culture, especially the foods they cooked and ate. She never denigrated their differences, and even admired them.

  Neither my mother nor my father talked openly disparagingly about black people. Mother thought that using the “n-word” was “low class.” Before coming to Durham, I had heard what white people like Mother’s friend who claimed not to be prejudiced said about black people: “It’s not that I don’t like Negroes, it’s just that I don’t see why we have to go swimming with them.” In Durham, I also knew people such as our next-door neighbor, who hired a black housekeeper and babysitter. She treated this woman as one of her family at home but made racist comments in all-white company.

  These kinds of overt racist conversations, however, were the exceptions in how I learned prejudicial attitudes toward black people when I was growing up. People around me communicated their biases in much more indirect ways. Stereotyping of people by race or religion was transmitted when white adults, my parents included, asked about or noted a person’s race (or religion) as a way of explaining a situation or the way people acted. It was usually subtle—noting certain people’s knowledge or talents (or lack of them) and a mention in that same breath of their race or nationality. Sometimes the evaluation was so subtle as to be non-verbal. A raised eyebrow, a sigh, pursed lips. Thus, I learned in an unconscious way that my parents or other adults in my life believed that black people were different from white people in ways that may have contributed to their poverty and lack of education. In this way, I learned that black people were less ambitious, slower, more concerned with status symbols than savings, more willing to be on welfare. And there was no counterbalancing or concomitant critique of the systemic causes of racial disparities. Nobody I was around was calling out racism as a factor in any of the problems black people were facing.

  Thus, the way I learned about race was not so much in long discussions of white superiority or through racial slurs but in small conversations in which race was noticed and associated with difference and also with judgment about that difference. I resisted even this subtle racism when I could see it, but I didn’t always see it. I wanted to be and thought that I was immune to racial prejudice, but I was embedded in my white world, and that meant that the bias I learned, even if unconsciously, was part of me because it was a part of that world.

  While I had my personal adolescent identity storm brewing, I was also aware of a tearing of the larger social fabric. Being close to two universities, I saw evidence of upheaval—resistance to the Vietnam War, women’s liberation, concern about the environment, teenage runaways (some from my church), drugs and overall disillusion with the status quo. Opposition to the war in Vietnam, unthinkable initially, grew with the nightly viewing of the deaths and suffering of American GIs and Vietnamese civilians. We began to question why we were there.

  I was in the middle of a mix of shifting women’s and men’s roles, faster communication via mass media, the use of mind-altering drugs, and the introduction of Eastern philosophies into popular culture. The birth control pill, loss of faith in our government, veterans coming back traumatized from a war that made no sense to them, concern about a degrading environment and increased secularism were transforming the American “Leave It to Beaver,” “Father Knows Best” family and ideals. Once the Pandora’s box that allowed us to question authority opened up, everything flew out at once. In the midst of this social change was the civil rights movement, and ending school segregation was a critical component of the fight to end racial inequalities.

  * * *

  Until the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. when I was in the seventh grade, I was only vaguely aware of the racial tensions present in Durham. On that night in April 1968, I was in the living room watching The Mod Squad when a news bulletin reported that Dr. King had been fatally shot. I knew who Dr. King was; I had seen him on television and knew he was a civil rights activist, though I did not know a lot more about him. When I heard of his assassination, I was sad in a general way about the loss of someone trying to do something good and horrified at the violence. I also felt the worry of my parents that there would be more violence because of this murder. There was rioting in town, and fires. We had curfews and a day off from school. Students talked about the curfew, but our teachers did not discuss the assassination in our classes; they were all too nervous. Most of what I knew I saw on television and in the newspapers. Just a couple of months later, I woke to news of the assassination of Bobby Kennedy, and that summer I saw images in newspapers and on television of cities across the country torn apart and blazing. But all that seemed far away and unrelated to my life.

  Everything that was swirling around me at 15—school, family, church, faith, and what was going on in the bigger world—influenced how I felt about my assignment to Hillside and my engagement with what I found there. I brought all of this with me as I became part of the social experiment of school desegregation at Hillside High School during the fall semester of 1970.

  Photo courtesy Rogers-Herr Yearbook, 1967-68

  Cindy Waszak (third row from bottom; sixth from left) at

  Rogers
-Herr Junior High pep rally.

  5— Going to Whitted With the White Kids

  Five

  Going to Whitted with the White Kids

  LaHoma

  My resentment toward Whitted Junior High School ripened and matured as the first day of school neared. I was giving up so much: my friends, my teachers, my beautiful new school. For what? I loathed the idea of going to Whitted—it was old, it was run-down, it was on the other side of town, and I just didn’t want to go there. It was not in my neighborhood.

  Shepard’s new brick façade and the surrounding vicinity were much more appealing; new homes lined the sidewalk to the school, and I had grown accustomed to walking the mile and a half back home with my friends. Most of my frustration with the new school assignment to Whitted revolved around having to walk a different route to school. Even though the walk was exactly the same distance, just thinking about the walk from Whitted was emotionally and psychologically more stress inducing, making it seem longer. Facing the change to my day-to-day routine just didn’t seem fair, especially when I felt that I wasn’t getting anything worth having in return for the disruption. For me, going to school was about more than just attending classes at any particular school. The ritual of getting to and from school took on great importance, and I bemoaned this distressing change in how I got to and from school. Once a week, for example, on my way home from Shepard, I would stop for piano lessons. My piano teacher, Mrs. Reeves, lived on the corner of Lawson and Sima, conveniently on my route from school. Mrs. Reeves had a small piano studio in her home for young black students. I never became much of a piano player despite the eight years of piano lessons, but the proximity of her studio to my home and its location along my path from school guaranteed that I was a decent player and rarely missed my weekly lessons. The lessons inspired my love and appreciation for music. I learned the notes; I could read music and make beautiful chords. And if I practiced, I could get through most of my assigned pieces. Mrs. Reeves held yearly recitals, and we were required to learn two or three pieces to play “by heart.”

  Annually, we were evaluated by the North Carolina Piano Guild to assess our level of accomplishment in classical pieces. I developed advanced proficiencies with several Bach and Beethoven selections, to the delight of Mrs. Reeves, who looked forward to showcasing her troupe of budding black piano performers before the wider community of family and friends. Once I changed schools, going to her studio became increasingly burdensome, and within weeks of beginning at Whitted, I quit my piano lessons.

  When students started complaining that the new assignments required longer and more challenging commuting distances to school, we were introduced to the word “busing,” although it technically did not involve getting on a school bus. Instead we were given vouchers to ride the Durham city buses. I didn’t start taking the bus right away, but eventually I succumbed to the urging of my peers. A bus stopped right outside my house.

  My friends from the adjoining streets, Joyce and Phyllis, had already started taking the bus. There was another stop at the top of the hill, and they would catch the bus when it stopped at the bottom of the hill—directly in front of my house. I hated taking the bus because most of the good seats were occupied when I boarded. I would have to stand until we reached downtown, where we changed buses.

  This transportation arrangement worked out until I started to participate in extracurricular activities. On those afternoons, I could not make it to the bus to get downtown to make the transfer in front of Woolworth’s. I would have to walk the mile and a half home by myself. I could control when and where I walked, past houses that became more and more familiar, waving to people sitting on their porches. I could also stop at the “mom and pop” places on the corner of Alston or Ridgeway Avenue, just before I reached home, which I liked to do when I had a few pennies for a treat.

  I also hated taking the bus because it seemed that it took forever to get to school, and I had to get up extra early to catch it. We also had to ask for a transfer ticket so we wouldn’t have to pay for taking a second bus to school. If you forgot to ask for the transfer or lost it before getting on the next bus, you had to pay full price.

  Despite these challenges, I often took the bus because of bad weather or just to go downtown with my friends. Downtown was a great place to see lots of other junior high and high school kids. Somewhere in the sea of black faces there may have been a few white students making the same trek across town, but they were invisible to me. Downtown was also where we met boys—boys from other schools, but more important, from other parts of town.

  Learning about boys was a preoccupation, but I also needed to learn a few things about teenage girls. We often did stupid things and instigated fights over silly matters—territory, pride, possessions, boyfriends, girlfriends, and anything else we could think to fight about. Pulling hair and throwing punches were the norm, although sometimes a knife would be pulled out to stress the seriousness of the offense and bring greater attention to a particular grievance.

  I was once drawn into a fight to defend my honor because the girl had said something I didn’t like.

  “Don’t call me names,” I said, clenching my fists.

  But after this bigger and much badder girl pulled out a knife, I got smart and ran away as fast as I could. I was so scared that I promised God that I would never allow myself to be drawn into a meaningless fight again. I learned a valuable life lesson, and since that day I have seen myself as a peacemaker, conflict resolver, and avoider of all physical displays of aggression or violence—especially with people bigger than I.

  * * *

  The first few days and weeks at Whitted proved not as bad as I had imagined. As the months rolled by, my outgoing personality and desire to please the teachers surpassed my anxieties. I was in the modern dance group, cheerleading, honor society, student council and the band. I made new friends, and I relished my expanding circle of influence at school, even though I still longed for dear old Shepard. And then there were the school athletic competitions, which forced us to claim bragging rights of superiority for our school.

  Durham City Schools’ efforts to integrate Whitted were most evident in the membership of student activities and organizations. The 1971 Honor Society at Whitted included its first white students. We were friends because we had mutual academic interests and goals, but we rarely interacted with each other outside school. We were all nice to each other, but Honor Society meetings were where our lives together began and ended. We certainly did not hang out or spend time together after school. Most of these students came from the Forest Hills and Duke University area and were children of privilege and prominent political figures in Durham. Despite the change in Durham school board policies, that they came to Whitted was surprising and that they remained—perplexing. I overheard black adult conversations suggesting that it would just be a matter of time before these white students would transfer to private schools, since many others had already made the decision to leave the public school system.

  * * *

  Much has been written about the black students forced to endure all-white schools, but very little about those white students who elected to remain in an all-black school setting when, often, their social and economic status provided them with other options. Most of the white students who remained at Whitted during those first couple of years continued on to Hillside to complete high school. I was not aware of their struggles, did not ask about their problems and lacked curiosity about their daily lives. They were, again, largely invisible to me.

  I was caught up in the busyness of my own existence, and I did not feel any particular need to reach out to them. We were all the victims of our Southern traditions and had low expectations for anything beyond a friendly “hey” to the sprinkling of white students here and there. Besides, they seemed fine. Later I would discover that although this was certainly true in some cases, there were definitely exceptions. For the life of me, I couldn’t tell you who those struggling white students
were.

  * * *

  I loved going to school, reading books, and doing homework, and I generally excelled in my classes. I was rewarded for good penmanship, studiousness, and responsiveness to authority. I increasingly took on more activities, eventually leading to my election as the student body president in ninth grade.

  I still can’t explain exactly how I won that election, because it still felt as though we were the “new” kids—the interlopers. My friends and I were outsiders to the Fayetteville Street and Enterprise neighborhood surrounding Whitted, and we were definitely the geographical minority in the school. I was not particularly well known, and I was not liked by the majority of students because of the other names I had acquired, including “teacher’s pet” and “stuck up.” So even though I ran for student body president at the urging of one of my teachers, I did not think I stood a chance against my more popular opponents.

  I was elated when I won, but I thought that if I was puzzled over the outcome, I couldn’t imagine how some of the other students were feeling. But no one challenged the results, so I spent the ninth grade learning how to carefully walk the tightropes among administration, teachers and my peers, both black and white. The white students were easy—they did not aspire to traditional leadership positions in the school, although they were often the top academic performers. My fellow black students presented an array of amusing and annoying challenges, mostly teases and teacher’s-pet name-calling, which I could mostly ignore. But this short tenure with student government was sufficiently difficult that it kept me from seeking similar positions in high school.

  With time, I realized that the student government president position was largely titular and ceremonial and carried little sway with the majority of students. I was an ally of the teachers and administrators, who were probably relieved that I did not appear to be someone who would disturb the budding racial integration efforts. The last thing the people working at the school needed during those early days of integration was someone to challenge authority.