What’s So Bad About Being Different?

I started 1st grade in 1950 when I was six years old. My public school was in Washington, D.C., and all the students were white. This is because the D.C. public schools were segregated, believe it or not.

My 5th-grade class had black kids in it because the Supreme Court had decided that segregation wasn’t equal (Brown v. Board) in 1953. The D.C. public schools were on federal property, so they had to be integrated right away. My school, West Elementary School, was integrated as a ‘pilot’ school in 1954. The whole system integrated the following year, so I attended the first public school integrated after Brown v. Board.

I became aware I had black classmates not because some of my 5th-grade classmates had dark skins. What made me realize that something was different were comments I heard about these new classmates from several of the white kids. They whispered terrible things to me; I heard words like ‘nigger’ and ‘coon’ for the first time.

These white kids mostly disappeared by the 6th grade. Their parents moved out to Maryland — Prince George’s County — where their kids could attend public schools that were still all-white.

I never understood why those white kids were so upset. Ten years later, I didn’t understand why I began hearing that women didn’t deserve equal pay when they did what had been a man’s…