Then her father began to read. The development of separate public library systems was an example. When Minerva was about to graduate, with no resolution to the case, Millicent became the lead plaintiff. She also began to understand just how intractable racism can be. In late May 1962, arguing that they had exhausted all administrative remedies to integrate the public schools, lawyers representing Brown and seven other Black children filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of South Carolina, where Judge Robert Martin presided. The Browns’ dinner table was often a sight to behold. “I spend the rest of that day and probably the next couple of days worried that I’m going to give this woman a heart attack.” That was likely the least of her worries: Three bomb threats were called in during those first days. By the time the case was heard by Martin in August 1963, the parents of six white students were seeking to join with the school board as co-defendants, claiming that their children would be adversely affected by integration. “How dare they try to make me speak ill of my Black community?” she says. “I guess he had faith in me.” But when she got to her homeroom class, the signs that this would not be easy were quickly apparent. We started electing a few more Black folks to public office. But words have meaning — even if they are only symbolic and not legally enforceable — especially at a time when public schools are more segregated than at any time since the 1960s and school choice policies favored by President Trump and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos have been found to increase school segregation. My father really thought, and I did too for many years, that integrating schools was what was going to work. Millicent’s first day at Rivers High School in Charleston—September 3, 1963—went smoothly. Editor’s Note: This is the fourth story in The Firsts, a five-part series about the children who desegregated America’s schools. But of all the things that happened during that time, what she remembers most is Dippity-do. This day came after a major stand off between federal authorities and Gov. “I don’t sleep that night because I’m going to represent the race the next day, and I realized that I never used this before,” she laughed. Rogers, William Warren, Robert David Ward, Leah Rawls Atkins, and Wayne Flynt. “Don’t you like your friends?” asked another. But there is something else to consider about Alabama that reflects on its history and the country’s current racial divide. Now, opponents fear that passage of Amendment 4 will free the Legislature to slash funding to public schools as the state faces budget shortfalls. There were no throngs of people jeering and throwing things. Beginning in 1951, the South Carolina legislature passed a general sales tax that anticipated a Supreme Court ruling on school segregation. For years, she taught history at Claflin University, Hofstra University, North Carolina A&T, and other schools. By the end of the 1880s, the unification of Democrats around an agenda of racial hostility toward blacks had contributed to dividing and weakening the Republican Party. It doesn’t mean anything now.”, …The problem with the amendment, Reed says, is that it would reinstate language added just after. Segregation appears to have increased since 1990. “My father was not one for prepping me,” she told me. ", Morgan, Martha and Neal Hutchens. After a while, one white student, Barbara Solomon, began to walk with her in the halls, but she was the exception. In some ways, segregation enabled moderate whites to provide limited benefits and accommodations for blacks without threatening white supremacy. “That’s the sort of thing you never forget.”. The Democrats regained tenuous control of Alabama's government in 1874, and they continued to fend off challenges from Republicans and emerging third parties intermittently through the 1870s and 1880s. She has interviewed dozens of other “firsts” like herself. All five of the poorest are overwhelmingly black. “She brings out this gel called Dippity-do and so I washed my hair and she sets it because that’s the new way that Black women are doing their hair,” she said. Barrett Holmes Pitner wrote this in this Daily Beast piece about the Alabama constitution in 2015: Some people in Alabama say that because the language has no legal force, it doesn’t really matter. TheAtlantic.com Copyright (c) 2020 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. White girls would crowd into the bathroom stalls to keep her from using the restroom between classes. of Alabama in 1960 Table 5: Black and White Population Over 25 Years Old with a High School Degree for the City of Montgomery in 1960 Table 6: Public and Private High School Students for the City of Montgomery in 1960 Table 7: Public and Private High School Students by Race for the State in 1960 “I was excited because my parents were excited,” Brown said. During a bomb scare at the school on September 3, 1963, 15-year-old Millicent Brown, left, chatted with fellow students outside Rivers High School. The struggles of the postwar years and late nineteenth century culminated in utter victory for white supremacists in 1901, and systematic social division between the races was the effect. Formal and informal policies of repression, such as separate public accommodations, limited access to suffrage, and strict control over black labor, were put into place between the 1870s and the 1890s, and Alabama's 1901 constitution rested upon white supremacy as a basic element of governance. Matthew J. Perry, the civil-rights lawyer from South Carolina who would become the first Black federal judge from the Deep South, was in town. Standing on the spot where Jefferson Davis had declared an independent southern confederacy just over 100 years before, he pledged: "In the name of the greatest people that ever trod this earth, I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny and I say: Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation for ever.". It has been amended more than 800 times since then and is the longest constitution in the country and possibly the world, at what the Council of State Governments says is 388,882 words. Still: “I was always mad at my father for not preparing me,” she told me last year. There were other slights during Brown’s three years at Rivers. Seeing such luminaries in her home “was foundational,” Brown told me.

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