re: #55 mmmirele

I can’t even begin to tell you how upsetting this is to me. My first teacher in kindergarten was Miss O’Brien and she was black. Now even in the allegedly liberal California Bay Area of 1965, having a black teacher in a pretty much white school was an ISSUE. But my mother insisted that I be put in Miss O’Brien’s class. Two years later, my sister was in Miss O’Brien’s class.

Fast forward 54 years and we are going backwards to hell in a handbasket. On jetskis.

For the first several years of my life, I grew up in a house on a street a block and a half away from my paternal grandparents. My grandfather and his immediate neighbors all worked in the shipyard. A few of them had children my age and we all entered first grade in 1972. 1972 was the year that Portsmouth Virginia elementary school finally integrated.

I and the first grade aged children of my grandparents’ neighbors were all assigned to the same teacher, a black woman. The parents of these kids I grew up with raised a stink and had their kids reassigned to white teachers. Even though my father shared a lot of his parents’ racist assumptions, even belonging to Chandler Harper’s whites-only golf club, my parents insisted that I remain with the teacher to whom I was assigned.

From first through sixth grade, only my second and fifth grade teachers were white, and I think I turned out to be a better person because of that, in conjunction with my mother’s family’s more liberal attitudes on race.