While at William and Mary I toted my pawn shop guitar across the tracks to the segregated primary school and entertained the kids in a crowded third grade class once a week. This was my first experience with segregated schools. I literally walked across the railroad tracks and then through a dark, urine-stenched tunnel marked with graffiti to get to this school. It was 1968 in southeastern Virginia. Have you been influenced by any similar experience? Please share.
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12/3/2015 07:42:18 am
My "across the tracks" was not literal, but it might as well have been. In the summer of 1965, as a recent high school graduate from Georgia Military College, I had the opportunity to work as an orderly at what is now Central State Hospital (then Milledgeville State Hospital, the second largest mental hospital facility in the country at the time). It would be a great experience before going off to college in the fall. That same year had seen the integration of all state medical facilities, including the State Hospital, which previously had been strictly segregated. In order to get the job I agreed to work in a building which had been completely for African-American patients on a ward of 96 patients. As part of the integration process about a dozen Caucasian patients were transferred from other buildings. I was the only Caucasian orderly. There was also a single Caucasian nurse who had been transferred. It was one of the most meaningful experiences of my entire life and I will be forever grateful that I had the opportunity to live it.
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Robin
12/3/2015 10:14:44 am
Don, I can picture this scene you paint as the system changed. Everyone was so afraid. And aren't we afraid of the "other" as in the fear of Muslims, all Muslims, in our culture. Unfortunately it is and was more than fear.......hatred causes the eruption of violence. Senseless, heart breaking. An end?
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Janet Lundy
12/10/2015 06:49:03 pm
I remember that same trek to the segregated Williamsburg elementary school. The schools were soon to be integrated and they wanted tutors from the College to help the students. I thought I'd be helping with math, but when they found out I played the piano, I ended up helping them prepare for an upcoming school concert instead I think Trudy Butner did this as well. It was my first experience with a segregated school, too -- a truly eye-opening experience for me!
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