That experience was traumatizing and in many ways, I still to this day
feel the effects of it. But you … and you probably can't imagine as
young as you are. Being able to go to a school where everybody that you
saw looked exactly like you, where you were treated like a human being,
not as something exotic, or something undesirable, or just totally
ignored. Ummm … and especially for it to happen right after my sophomore
year in high school because my sophomore year in high school I was very
involved in all the extracurricular activities of the
Page 2 school. In fact I was president of almost every organization except
student government, which you had to be a senior to be president, so I
was vice president of the student government. I was a majorette in the
band and I belonged to all the other extracurricular activities at the
school. Everyone knew me, teachers and students alike.
The tenth grade year was just the best year of my life, and then the
following year, at the end of the tenth grade, near the end of my tenth
grade year being asked by my teachers to volunteer to transfer because
they knew that that fall they were going to close the tenth grade at the
all black high school that I went to and they would have no choice, they
would have to go. But Juniors and Seniors would have an option of going,
so they really pushed a lot of us in the top of the Junior and Senior
classes to go on and transfer because they knew at that time that the
following year, our senior year, the black school would be closed
totally so we wouldn't be able to graduate from there, from the high
school that we'd started at. They thought it would be better for us if
we went on and adjusted to the school by going our junior year.
So there were actually six people, uh, from Torrence-Lytle that went with
me, none of them were from Davidson, so what that meant was that I would
ride the bus everyday,
Page 3 thirteen miles on an
all-black bus, I'd walk into North Meck and because I was, even among
the six, one of the only ones who was on a college track everybody else
would go one way and I would go another. Because my schedule was college
bound it meant my lunch period also had me isolated, and umm, so it was
really a very trying experience in many ways. I don't think - at the
time it was just confusing, and frightening, it's been with age and
other experiences a growing awareness that it was actually a painful
experience. Because like I said, I went from everybody knowing my name
and being very popular and very involved, to, uh being almost invisible
for the most part.
North treated us very unfairly as blacks. Our athletes were able to
transfer and immediately start playing football and basketball. I don't
know if that meant, if that had anything to do with the fact that
North's athletic teams at that time were not doing so well and with the
addition of the guys from my school, they suddenly started winning. But
we were told that you had to be at the school for a year before you
could participate in any extracurricular activities, yet I saw the white
students, that I eventually discovered had just transferred to North
from other places, they were immediately welcomed to any organizations
or anything they wanted to participate in. In
Page 4 fact,
there was a young man who was going to be president of his student …he
was, had been elected president of his student body the spring before
and his father moved because of a job and he was made co-president of
our student government, but he hadn't been there a year, but that
courtesy was not extended to us. In classes, many times I was the only
black student. And I remember I had two classes out of six where I
wasn't the only black. In my U.S History class there was one other young
man who had transferred with me from Torrence-Lytle, and we were in the
history class. Unfortunately it was United States history so we had to
deal with the humiliation of getting to that one page in our U.S history
book that dealt with slavery, not even African American history, but
slavery in the United States. Half the page is taken up with this
picture of black folks in the cotton fields smiling and picking cotton.
And naturally, the teacher turns and is like: "Brenda, Tommy, why don't
you tell us about the black experience, or why don't you tell us about
slavery."
I had just finished reading Frederick Douglass's autobiography the summer
before she asked that question, and so I started relating to her about
slavery from what Frederick Douglass shared in his narrative, and I was
interrupted by a North Mecklenburg student who happens to
Page 5 be a professor here at the college who said: "Oh Brenda,
that was Northern abolitionist propaganda, slaves were not treated
cruelly at all, in fact slaves were a part of the family. And they were
taken care of, and they were loved, and that brutal stuff was just
Northern abolitionist propaganda." And the teacher agreed with him, and
they would have won if it had not been for another student in the class
whose father was a professor here for many years, he's now retired, who
got up and challenged both of them, who got up and said: ‘Why are you
saying that, you know what she's saying is true, why would you tell her
that, why would you say that it is not true?" And the teacher at that
point just got up and changed the subject to something else.
I remember, umm, in the other classes, because the other class I had
where there were African Americans was my French class and unfortunately
I had what I call a liberal for a French teacher. I called her a liberal
because she gave you a B for being Black. I started suspected that that
was what she was doing but one day we had a test, and the questions were
written up on the board, and you know you turned your paper in. Well,
all I put on my paper was "French Test" and signed my name, all of that
was in English. My paper came back with a B on it. Now how did I
Page 6 get a B and I didn't answer any of the questions?
Unfortunately at that point I was so young and naive I felt like, at
that point: "Oh well I got over without applying myself." So why say
anything, but it was really a tremendous disservice because what that
meant was that I got credit for French one and two in high school, and
went to college and had to enroll in French three, and when I walked
into my French classroom, the first thing teacher said was, you know, no
more English. And I was totally lost. So as a result of that I ended up
being what we call a fifth-year senior, and completed everything for
graduation except French in four years and so I had to stay a fifth year
just trying to pass French.
In the classes where I was the only Black, I really felt like I was a fly
in buttermilk. I would often be the first to raise my hand, the last one
to be called on. If I was called on the entire class would stop,
everybody would turn and stare at me. Umm, which I'm sure you've
probably experienced, as a student even if you do know the material, you
know the answer, you can sometimes feel intimidated, especially if
you're shy, and I am somewhat shy to offer an answer in class. And so to
have everything stop and everybody staring down you throat is even more
pressure. Umm, I had teachers who, when I would answer a question,
Page 7 would paraphrase it, and, but they would do it in
such a way, you were left thinking: "Well, I think that is what I said,
I'm sure that's the right answer," but it was the way the answer was
paraphrased back, or re-said by the teacher that always left you feeling
that you were somehow incompetent, something about your answer wasn't
right.
I can also remember passing in A papers and having them come back with
C's on them and no correction marks and going up asking the teacher:
"Could you explain to me what I have done wrong, there are no marks on
here and I have a C." And being told: "Do you want to go to the office,"
you know, "Are you challenging my grading?" It's like: "No, I come from
a house where you're not allowed to bring home anything less than a B,
and my mom's is going to want an explanation, so I need to be able to
explain to her what it is I got wrong so I can work on getting it
better." And the teacher was like: "Look, either go to the office or
take your seat." Well I know better than to go to the office because
again I come from a household where teachers are like demi-gods and
anything they say, even if they're wrong, my mother always sided with
the teacher. So there was, I felt no support.
I can remember almost getting expelled because I didn't stand up for the
school fight song, which was Dixie. You could sit down at my school that
Page 8 first year when they played the national anthem,
uhh, and nobody would say anything, but if you didn't stand up for
Dixie, that was grounds for … expulsion.
Also when I was at North, the school mascot was the Confederate soldier
and flag. And the students, while we were doing what they called a rebel
yell, we were the Rebels, the North High Rebels. And it wasn't until my
sister came through which was about five years after I was there that
the students had become a little more militant, and they tore, we had a
life, bigger than life-size Confederate soldier and the flag on the wall
in our gymnasium. Well five and half years after I was at North the
students tore that off the wall and built a bonfire with it out in the
parking lot. Which started a period of police being present at the
school in full uniform, umm, for quite a while. Umm, I think the thing
that was, I also remember, at North they like to give seniors an
opportunity to practice marching, and so anytime we had assemblies or
programs in the gym, the sophomores, and the freshmen would go in, I
mean not the freshman, we only had tenth, eleventh and twelfth grades.
Sophomores and juniors would go in, and we were to sit in the bleachers,
leaving the bleachers closest to the floor for the seniors. And then the
seniors
Page 9 after everybody else was in, they'd play the
school alma mater and everybody else would march in to that.
Well, I noticed the first year, when there were only six black students
in the senior class, if those six black students - one or all of them -
would happen to come up to get in line behind a white person, the person
would run. So there was, you could sit and watch them marching into the
gym, and you knew when the black students were coming because there
would be this gap, or they would come and there would be a big gap
behind them. But it was like a lot of the students didn't even want to
be near them. But again, like I said, football players, athletes were
treated like demi-gods, you would have thought they had been there since
forever. You would see people socializing with them, laughing with them,
but not other blacks.
Same thing would happen when you'd go in the cafeteria, uh, if you put
your tray down at a table, it was suddenly like you had a sign: "I'm
oozing with the AIDS virus, come near me you'll die of AIDS," because
you go to sit down and people at the table just jump up and run. And in
adolescence, that can be very, very dis-settling because one of the
things that mark the adolescence period of our life is sensitivity. An
adolescence can get a tiny pimple on their face and to them it looks
like Mt. Everest;
Page 10 someone can walk by you and not
speak, not because they're mad at you or they don't like you, but
because their mind is somewhere else, and as an adolescence you will
have a tendency to interpret it as: "Oh, what's wrong with me, why don't
they like me, what did I do wrong?" when none of those things are going
on.
So to have this type of treatment … and for me it was hard because my
mother went to great extents to shield us from whites that were not
liberal - no, I don't want to say liberal. Whites who would not treat
you like a child of God, whites who believed that everybody was equal
regardless of race, color, or creed. So, I was there for about three
months, because of what my mother had taught me and how she had shielded
me from certain types of whites, and then watching the athletes be
accepted. It took me three months to realize that people were not
running from me and treating me the way they were because I was ugly,
but because I was black. Beause I remember the first day I walked into
my chemistry class, this girl had gotten to class before me and put her
books down and ran to the bathroom. She came back from the bathroom and
saw me now sitting behind her, this girl stopped dead in her tracks in
the door, looked at me, and just let out this blood curdling scream. You
would have thought that I was Freddie
Page 11 from the
Nightmare movies or something, Friday the 13th. And the teacher did not
reprimand her or anything, I mean he went and like calmed her down, and
he came over, picked up her books, and like took them over to a desk on
the other side of the room away from me.
Of all the things that happened, the one that really hurt me the most was
a really trite one. After that year of waiting to participate in
extra-curricular activities, umm, I went out for letter girl, and it
just so happened, my girlfriend's brother was on the football team and
there was a white letter girl that really had a crush on him. She tried
to make friends with his sister, my girlfriend, we told her that we were
going out for letter girl, she said: "Well let me teach you our
routines." You know, so … and she explained to us that the way they
handle the selection was that you would come on like a Monday when they
designated, and the letter girls would work all week teaching you their
routines, and then on Friday, everybody would come, you know, try out.
Well this chick had taught us all the routines a whole week before the
tryouts, before we went to start learning them. So on the first day that
we were there the letter girls were working with us and stuff, and my
girlfriend and I faked not knowing them for a while, then we got tired
of
Page 12 faking, so we just started doing them. They
were like, Oh wow, look, oh they already know! So they then sat down,
and for the rest of the week, they would come and laugh and talk and
spent time with each other while we taught the recruits the routine. So
naturally, because we were teaching everybody else, we assumed: "hey, we
done made it, you know." And so that Friday, umm, just before I was
getting ready to leave my house to go to the tryouts, another girlfriend
of mine came by, and she wanted to go to the movies afterwards. So I
told her, look, I've got go to these tryouts, you know, and then we'll
go to the movies. So she went with me, and after everybody had tried
out, one of the letter girls came over to my girlfriend that was going
to the movies with me and said, Carol Ann, why don't you try out? Carol
Ann was like: "Well, you know, I don't even know your routines, I wasn't
thinking about letter girl, so I didn't come. I don't know any
routines." She said: "Well let me show you a step." So she showed her a
step and then she had her to try out.
Well, that Monday, you know, me and Sylvia, we couldn't wait to get to
school, we knew we had made it. We almost didn't even go look at the
names on the list because we were sure our names were on there. But we
decided, you know, just so we could lord it over the people who were
Page 13 standing there looking and being disappointed to
go and look, and we didn't make it, but my girlfriend Carol Ann did. And
it wasn't until the first football game when I'm sitting out in the
stands looking up at the letter girls, I realized why she made it and
Sylvia and I didn't. My girlfriend Sylvia is like three shades darker
than me. We had to look for Carol Ann. "Oh yeah, there she is." But if
the two of us had been out there, you would have not had to go through
any moving of the neck, head, body, we would've stood out. And it was
very much like some of the things you saw in integration of the media,
the first anchor people, very light skinned. The first black Miss
America, they always start with the ones you have to like: "Is she
black? Well, maybe, only some of us can tell, you know."