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Last night I took my six-year-old to a local screening of Standing On My Sisters’ Shoulders, a documentary about the women of Mississippi in the civil rights movement. It is a courageous and moving film in its own right, but I was most captivated by my first-grade son’s response. He was riveted by the stories and images of a world before integration. This is a world he has heard and read about, but this was his first time to see footage, some violent, of sit-ins and marches, and to listen to accounts by the women who waged a transformative battle in what was arguably the most violent and intractable frontier of the movement. In one part of the film, Mabel Carter, sharecropper and mother of 13, tells the story of integrating her county’s schools. When the Civil Rights Act of 1965 forced public schools to offer freedom of choice forms to all county residents, or lose funding, her county school system grudgingly complied. Seizing on the chance to give her children the best education she could, she chose to enroll her children in the all-white school. She was the only African American in the county to dare to do so. She describes the threats and hostility they endured, as the film shows school yearbook pages with the photos of her children, always the one somber black face in a sea of smiling white faces. I watch my son’s blue eyes for some glimmer of recognition—or puzzlement—as he takes in those yearbook spreads. Forty years later, his school experience has some haunting parallels. The yearbook of his publicly-funded school this year will show 27 smiling faces in his class. His will be the only fair-skinned, blue-eyed face. What did the civil rights movement do for schools in racially segregated areas? What roles do we have in helping schools? Find out by reading the full text of this article in the July/August 2006 issue of Horizons. Call 800/524-2612 Dee Dee Risher lives and works in the Germantown neighborhood of Philadelphia. She volunteers regularly in the public school programs her two children attend. She is former editor of The Other Side magazine. |
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