Things Are Bad. They Can Always Get Worse.

In September 1954, I started 5th grade at West Elementary School in Washington, D.C. I had been attending West School since 1950 when I was enrolled in the 1st grade. When I walked to school on the September day in 1954, I expected to see more or less the same kids that I had seen every year for the previous four years.

But when I walked into the classroom for the first day of the 5th grade, I hardly knew anyone at all. And not only were most of my classmates a different group of boys and girls, but they were also Black instead of White.

The year before, the Court had issued the Brown v. Board of Education decision which said that segregated schools weren’t equal schools, which meant the D.C. schools could no longer be segregated, and things had to change. Thanks to Harry Truman, the Federal Government had already integrated its workforce, so integrating the public schools on Federal property would take place right away.

Most of the White kids who had been my classmates were now students in segregated schools outside of the District, because their parents moved the minute that Blacks started buying houses in White sections of D.C.

Over the next twenty years, the issue of integrating schools and the whole question of Black-White relations was probably the dominant domestic question with Martin Luther King on one side and George Wallace on the other. Guess who won?