[Durham INC] Speakers illustrate pain of desegregation (Herald-Sun)

[John Schelp]

Speakers illustrate pain of desegregation
By Neil Offen, Herald-Sun, 23 Aug 2010

The pain of memory -- and the memory of pain -- was etched on Janice Mack Guess' face, nearly 50 years after.

Her voice fraught with emotion, Guess was recalling the early days of integration of Durham's public schools. She was telling a hushed audience at the auditorium of the main branch of the public library Sunday what it was like to be one of the first black students at previously all-white Brogden Junior High School in 1964.

White students, she said, threw food at her. They called her "nigger." Teachers wouldn't let her participate in gym class. "We had to walk around the track for an hour," she remembered.

It was "a very traumatic year," Guess said. "I just didn't understand how people, how adults, could treat children like they did. It hurt so much. I didn't understand where all the hatred came from."

Speaking at "A Community Dialogue About School Desegregation," Guess acknowledged that she was "very angry about [her treatment]" for many years.

"I carried the pain with me for a long time," she said. "Thank you for giving me an opportunity to release some of this pain."

The public library event, the third and final one in a series called Commemorating Courage that highlighted local individuals and groups who have challenged the status quo, gave more than 100 people an opportunity to recall those early days and to ponder the state of integration and of race relations today.

The discussion "offers us an opportunity to talk to each other in ways we don't normally do," said meeting facilitator Kathleen Clark, who emphasized that the process and story of integration is not yet over. "From a practical standpoint, this change is something we continue to work on," she said.

A timeline on the wall of the auditorium indicated how long the process has been going on. It depicted the history of integration of local schools, from 1954 and the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision, through Sept. 2, 1959, when six black students "crossed the thresholds of previously all-white schools," to 1970-71, when the Durham Schools were ordered by the courts to integrate.

But by this time, as the timeline noted, the schools were already predominantly attended by black students, as the district population had dropped from 15,000 to 9,000 students during the decade because of what was called "white flight."

The audience, composed almost equally between blacks and whites, at first shared almost light-hearted reminiscences of who graduated from what school when.

It was like being at a casual school reunion, but the mood turned more serious when Charmaine McKissick-Melton, an N.C. Central University professor and one of the first black students to attend previously white Durham schools, acknowledged how difficult it still is to talk about those early days of integration.

She had asked some of those first black students -- including one of her sisters -- to attend Sunday's event, but they did not want to come.

"Fifty years later, they still don't want to talk about it," McKissick-Melton said. "They still are hesitant to speak about what happened. That says a great deal by itself of how difficult those times were."

Penny Pleasants had an inkling at the time of how difficult it must have been. She was in the 11th grade when the first black students came to Durham High School. She had come to Sunday's event, she said, to express how she had felt back then.

"I remember how brave they all seemed," she said.