Youngest Combatants of the Second Civil War: Black Children on the Front Lines of Public School Desegregation

Part 5: Ruth Carter and Her Siblings in Mississippi

As part of the Great Society programs, school districts could count on considerable infusions of federal money under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, but Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 stipulated that receiving federal funds depended on local policies that did not engage in racial discrimination. Beginning in 1965, therefore, a new combination of federal policies, with a big carrot and a big stick, could propel desegregation along. But desegregation in each school district unfolded at the local level, and its shape depended on the roles played by local actors, including black children and their parents. No branch of the federal government required that “desegregation” result in a genuine integration of the separate black and white systems, and no federal policy required black involvement in determining such changes in practice as took place. When small numbers of black pioneers made their way to formerly white schools, they were entering what in effect remained white schools.

For the first ten years after the Brown decision, no elementary or secondary school desegregation took place anywhere in Mississippi. In 1964 and 1965, a combination of federal legislation and federal court orders brought the beginnings of change—but the combination also brought a new version of white resistance to change. Adopting the typical approach across the South—“freedom of choice”—jurisdictions left it up to individual black students to request transfers to white schools. Some requests were approved, some not. “Desegregation” was slow in coming, and then controlled by local whites—and revealed in small numbers of black children in a few white schools across the state. Then, as a rule, physical threats, together with economic sanctions, were directed against the black families involved in desegregation—not to mention the harassment that took place in the schools—so that many of the black pioneers requested that they be transferred back to the black schools. Black children and black adults alike were not always prepared to bear the full burden, as it became revealed to them, of battling for desegregation. But some were.

Like other jurisdictions in Mississippi, Sunflower County had to go through the motions of conceding an end to completely segregated schools. The U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare stipulated that at least three grades would have to be open to desegregation, and so confident were the leaders of Sunflower County that nobody would seek to change schools, they threw open all twelve grades to freedom-of-choice. They had not counted on the Carters—Matthew, Mae Bertha, and their seven school-aged children. In 1965, those seven became the first black children in the white schools of Sunflower County. Ruth, Larry, Gloria, and Stanley enrolled at Drew High School. Pearl, Beverly, and Deborah began attending the A. W. James Elementary School. They stuck it out that entire year, and the next, the only black children in either school during either year.

The Carters’ considerations were many. Ruth, at sixteen the eldest Carter child still living at home, led the way—she wanted to go to a better school, with newer books, on a nice bus, for full days rather than split sessions and a full school year like the white kids. And she had spent a year with relatives in Ohio, so she knew that life did not have to be what she saw all around her in Mississippi. When the freedom-of-choice forms arrived in the mail in summer 1965, she wrote her mother, who was away visiting relatives, “Come home. You have some papers to sign saying what school we want to go to. We want to go to the all-white school.” Mr. and Mrs. Carter told the children: “If you want to go, we want you to go.” Mrs. Carter later explained her own considerations:

Why I decided I wanted them to go was I was tired of my kids coming home with pages torn out of worn-out books that come from the white school. I was tired of them riding on these old raggedy buses after the white children didn’t want to ride on them anymore. I was just tired, and I thought if they go to this all-white school they will get a better education there

And there was more. Mrs. Carter later recounted how the children in the black schools got lunch only once or twice a week,

And see, them white children was eating lunch every day. So that’s why we signed the papers. We had seven children to go, three to the elementary school and four to the high school. So we integrated both of those schools.

Moreover, some of the Carters had been active in the events of Freedom Summer 1964 and summer 1965, including Ruth’s going to Jackson and being among the many young people arrested for participating in demonstrations there. As Mae Bertha Carter explains:

So we really was in the movement. Going to these mass meetings and marching and going to jail and singing and talking about you ain’t gonna let nobody turn you ’round. So that’s why we was already motivated when the school integration came.

But until the new school year began, the Carters, who did not have a telephone in their rural home, had not known that no other black students would be attending either school. Ruth later pointed out: “I didn’t think we were going to be the only ones—my friend Nettie who’d been in jail with me, I thought she was going, too. But something happened—I think her parents changed their minds, and she wasn’t there in September.” The Carter children had no friends or allies around them when the school bus brought them into town the first day of the new school year, and crowds of white hecklers screamed from outside the bus: “Go back to your own schools, niggers.”

Parents and children alike were haunted by what did happen and by what they constantly feared might happen. Ruth recollected:

After we started to school, because I was the oldest, I thought maybe the younger kids were looking up to me and that I was there to protect them if something happened—if something went wrong. . . . We had to ride the school bus with all those white kids and they would throw spitballs and call us all kinds of names, and I’m sitting there and can’t do a thing. And there’s my little sisters and brothers, and Deborah, only six years old and so sweet and precious to me, being mistreated, and there was nothing I could do.

And their mother remembered being petrified to the point of paralysis, especially in the early weeks. That first day of school in September 1965, she said,

When the bus pulled off, I went in and fell down cross the bed and prayed. I stayed on that bed and didn’t do no work that day . . . and when I heard the bus coming, I went back to the porch. When they came off one by one, then I was released until the next morning. But the next morning I felt the same way, depressed, nervous, praying to God . . . ; just saying, “take care of my kids.”

Ruth and her mother pushed ahead. Ruth remembered that, especially at first, she

hated everything. Then we started having these little session at home in the afternoon after school. It was almost like therapy. We would sit down and Mama would say, “ How did things go today at school?” We would talk about what happened and a lot of times we would cry together. After we’d talk and sit down and cry together, things would seem a little better.

If Mama heard me say, “I hate white people, I just can’t stand them,” she always answered, “Don’t you ever say that. Don’t you ever say that you hate white people or anyone—it’s not right.”

And I answered, “How would you know, Mama? We’re the ones who have to stay in school with them all day. We have to ride the bus with them and go to the lunchroom with them where they won’t sit next to us. We’re the ones they throw spitballs at and call ‘nigger.’”

But she got on us every time we said we hated them.

She concluded her reverie on a positive note: “At least I got out of the cotton fields, so I guess dreams can come true.”

Larry, like some of his siblings, remembered their math teacher as fair, but not the history teacher. He found that he “hated history class when we covered the Civil War and the teacher said ‘nigger’ and allowed the students to say it like I wasn’t even there.”

None of the white students ever associated with us and we weren’t involved in any activities. Basically we just went to school there. . . .

Once toward the end of the first semester, we were in the field picking cotton after school, and I told Mama that I was going back to the other school. Then we had a discussion. She told me about how she and Daddy had committed themselves to the choice and how Daddy had sacrificed so many things so we could go and how I should try and stick it out. She never did say I couldn’t change schools, she just explained things to me. That was the last time I ever thought about leaving—that conversation in the cotton field took about thirty minutes.

Things didn’t change much in the tenth, eleventh, or twelfth grades. I just separated school from my personal life. I went to school, studied, 3:15 came, school was out, I did my homework and chores, and I had black friends at the other school, and we went to football games and events there.

When he graduated in 1968, he recalled, “My father put his arm around me and walked with me . . . and told me how proud he was of me.”

The other children had similar experiences and similar memories of their time as pioneers. Pearl, born in 1955, was in the fifth grade when she enrolled in the white elementary school in 1965. She later told an interviewer, Connie Curry, about her time as a lonely pioneer: “How can I describe it? Five years of hell?” Her teacher that first year, the worst year, was “really cruel to me.” But though Pearl wielded no sword, she had a shield and wore her armor that year. As she later said:

I knew they had to be mean to show us they didn’t want us there, and I kept thinking, “I deserve to be here just like you.” That’s the one thing Mama always preached. One time we said something about the white school, and she said, “That school is not white, it’s brown brick, and that school belongs to you as well as it belongs to them—always remember that.”

Gloria, two years older, has said:

It just hurt. I’d go home after school and pray about it and say, “Dear Lord, don’t let this happen tomorrow—let tomorrow be an okay day. Don’t let anybody hit me with a spitball.” . . . It’s not like the seventh grade was okay and by the eighth you adjusted so you didn’t mind. You never got used to it.

But we never once thought of quitting. I kept saying, “I can’t quit. They can’t make me leave. We are not going to lose—we are not going to let ’em run us away. . . .

You know, up until a few years ago, I was still having nightmares about being in Drew High School, and I would wake up sobbing.

Each of the children pointed out that, when “full integration came,” things greatly improved. Carl, the youngest, had not begun first grade until 1967, so most of his schooling took place in the 1970s. His first two years, “the worst thing was not having playmates,” but then a court order came that brought a whole new era in desegregation—the suit was brought in 1967 by the Carters, and the ruling in 1969, reflecting a recent decision by the U.S. Supreme Court, threw out the “freedom of choice” tactic. “All the black kids came” to the formerly white schools, joining Carl and his school-age brothers and sisters; and “from the fourth grade on I went to games and activities.” Revealing the importance of what his parents and siblings had accomplished, he concluded: “I certainly didn’t have the hardships that my sisters and brothers went through.”

All eight young Carters graduated from Drew High School. Seven went on to the University of Mississippi, where, under federal court order in 1962, James Meredith had become the first black student.

 

Wallenstein Home
Part 2: The Second Civil War
Part 3: Josephine boyd, Greensboro, North Carolina
Part 4: Betty Ann Kilby, Warren County, Virginia

Part 6: "Desegregation": More Than a Black Student Entering a White World

References