Gregory Freeman: An Opportunity To Get Beyond Race. P-D 5/15/1994

Headline: AN OPPORTUNITY TO GET BEYOND RACE
Reporter: By Gregory Freeman

Publication: ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
Last Printed: Sun., May 15, 1994
Section: NEWS, Page: 6B, Edition: FIVE STAR

WHEN I WAS 9, I was bused into a whole new school and a whole new world.
My all-black neighborhood school was overcrowded, and I was bused to an all-white school - Walbridge. While I had been used to walking to school, now I walked a block from home and caught a chartered bus. Suddenly, most of my fellow students were white, a real change for me.
I didn't experience culture shock. The biggest surprise, I think, was in the last names of students. Used to people with last names like Washington, Johnson and Hayes, I was confronted with students with names like Brandmeier, Hiken and Montez.

Perhaps the best thing that happened to me, though, was the development of a friendship with a white kid who attended Walbridge with me.
   Tom Aaron was his name, and we took an instant liking to one another. We found that we shared a lot of interests and became fast friends.
   I didn't pay much attention to his color, and I don't think he paid much attention to mine. We were friends and that was all that mattered.
   In the evenings and on weekends, we spent a lot of time on the phone, much to the chagrin, I suspect, of our parents. Had we lived closer to one another, I'm sure we would have spent even more time together.
   By the time I hit 6th grade, a new school - Yeatman - had been built in my neighborhood, and I left Walbridge, my old teachers and Tom Aaron behind. We eventually lost touch.

I learned an important life lesson during my Walbridge experience - that people really aren't all that different from one another. If you get beyond race and get to know the person, you might find more in common than you had realized. I did.

I could never have learned that lesson without a 1954 court decision that rocked the nation - Brown vs. the Board of Education.
That decision ended - on paper anyway - "separate but equal" education in public schools. It meant I could attend Walbridge in 1965, and it gave me the opportunity to know real white people.
Until then - with the exception of a few brief encounters - my knowledge of whites came from TV. My Walbridge experience made me realize that all whites did not lead the lives of the dusting-in-pearls, hi-honey-I'm-home, I'll-make-you-a-pitcher-of-lemonade-while-you-cut-the-grass families depicted on 1960s TV.

My lesson in similarities among people - one that was learned by students all over America - is an intangible that can't be measured as we consider the impact of Brown vs. Board 40 years later. But it is, nonetheless, important.
It's one reason I think the suggestion that we give up on school desegregation is wrongheaded.
It's been a rocky road, to be sure. Those opposed to blacks and whites going to school together have thrown every roadblock possible in the way of the desegregation bus.

Despite those roadblocks, however, census figures show that Brown vs. Board has made a difference. They show the educational gap between blacks and whites has narrowed significantly in 40 years.
In 1950, for example, the percentage of whites graduating from high school was nearly three times that of blacks, at 36.4 percent to 13.7 percent. While the percentage of whites graduating in 1991 more than doubled, to 79.9 percent, the percentage of blacks graduating the same year increased more than five times, to 69.6 percent. Census figures show a narrowing of the gap between black and white college graduates as well.
That, after all, was the purpose of the Brown decision: to provide blacks with the same opportunity for a good education as whites.

But children learn and grow from different experiences. Short of housing desegregation - a struggle that at times seems insurmountable - schools offer the only opportunity for children of different races to know one another. It offers them the chance to base their opinions of people on their own experiences, not on stereotypes.
We will never break down discrimination in this country if we retreat from every difficult battle. Separate but equal - even if schools really are equal - isn't good enough.
Many good people, black and white, fought long and hard for Brown vs. Board. To give up on that now - at a time of seemingly heightened racial tensions - would be unconscionable.

Daniel Schesch - Webweaver

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