Sarah Blackmon, Douglas Blackmon’s Mother: You have one shot at raising your children, you don't get do overs. We were very, very concerned that our children get a good education.
John Mccandlish, Class Of 1983: Growing up in Leland and thinking about where I lived, it seems somewhat like a Mayberry to me. It was a very tight knit community. People knew each other. People really cared about each other.
Kevin Magee, Class Of 1983: I grew up kind of a latchkey kid and had the run of the town, basically. I felt like growing up that whole thing belonged to me and I could go anywhere and do just about anything that I could get away with.
Brandon Taylor, Class Of 1982: Certain places, you know, we couldn't we couldn't visit. I mean, just like this park visit, you know, this park was off of limits, you know, to blacks.
Evelyn Gordon-Murray, Class Of 1982: Leland was divided. You had Black Dog, where I grew up, and you had the white section
Van Poindexter, Class Of 1982: There was always a railroad track. There was always a creek. There was always a road. There was always some marker that divided the neighborhoods.
Douglas A. Blackmon, Journalist, VO: In 1969, my hometown of Leland, Mississippi, finally had to reckon with something it had been avoiding for years.
Archival/Reporter: In 1954, the Supreme Court made school integration the law of the land, a law to be implemented with all deliberate speed. Last fall, the court ruled that after 15 years, deliberation should end, and speed meant now.
Archival/Mississippi Gov. John Bell Williams: The quality of public education in a great portion of our state has been made an impossibility under the conditions inflicted on our public schools by vindictive, autocratic, arbitrary Supreme Court.
Vernice Sanders, Parent and Activist: All Blacks that were involved were nervous about it because we didn't know what was going to happen next, but we were still trying to do what we felt was right.
Archival/School Superintendent: The only thing I can see that this is leading to is the destruction of our school system.
Archival/Interview with Parent: The Negro children as a whole are further behind in their studies than our children.
Archival/Interview with Man: We've got a psychology running in the state which is very deeply negative about the possibilities of black and white working is playing out together because of it. We've managed to stay 50th or 48th or mighty long while we're so busy holding one down and keeping the other just on top.
Archival/Reporter: What are your thoughts about going to school with about half of half white and black students?
Archival/Interview with White Female Student: I don't care. I mean, you know, the same people.
Archival/Interview With Black Female Student: I think we all should be together. And I hope that we could get along together.
Douglas A. Blackmon, Journalist, VO: My class was the first in Mississippi to have black kids and white kids in school together from the first day of first grade to high school graduation. We were supposed to be the seeds of a great harvest of racial harmony. Three decades later, I needed to understand what happened, and why America is still so divided even after all that we went through. I went back to find out.
Music: You can't hurry God. You got to wait. Give him time. He'll be there. Don't you worry... He's a right on time.
Douglas A. Blackmon, Journalist: When I was a kid, my family lived in this little town in the Mississippi Delta called Leland, Mississippi. If you have any vision in your mind of a cotton plantation in the Deep South, the place you are imagining is the Mississippi Delta.
Music: You can't hurry God....
Douglas A. Blackmon, Journalist: In the 1960s, Leland was still as harshly segregated as it ever was. In those very early years, I just noticed that it was all white over here and all Black over there, and Black folks had more trouble than white folks. And it perplexed me. I started asking a lot of questions some of which seemed to be uncomfortable to everybody who I asked them to, including my parents at times. And so, I couldn't make any sense out of it. Later in middle school, I became aware of a place called Strike City.
Douglas A. Blackmon, Journalist, VO: Strike City was a settlement just outside of town, created in the middle of the 1960s after a group of black tenant farmers went on strike.
ArchivalL Footage, John Henry Sylvester: The reason we went on was that I was tired of working for 6 dollars a day and I was tired of my wife and kids with working for three dollars a day...
Douglas A. Blackmon, Journalist, VO: They were among the very first African-Americans in American history to rebel in this way against a white landowner.
Douglas A. Blackmon, Journalist: There was a town oratorical contest sponsored by the Lions Club, and so I decide to write a speech about Strike City. I went to the library, read stories that had been written in the local papers at the time. I learned that the strikers were thrown out of their homes. They're attacked by the Ku Klux Klan. The men are blackballed from employment. None of the men ever work again. All kinds of terrible experiences. So my little boy essay maps all this out, and at the end says, Martin Luther King came along, and the civil rights movement solved everything. That was the conclusion. And so the day of the contest, I go in. And, of course, it's a room of about 45 middle-aged white men. The other students give their speeches, and then I get up and give my speech about Strike City. And immediately, as soon as I started speaking, I realize that something... Something's wrong. As soon as I mentioned Strike City, the men in the room begin to snicker. I was so confused. Then as I proceed through the speech. And talk about the courage of the strikers; they go dead silent. When I get to the part about the Ku Klux Klan attacking them, there's no response whatsoever. I don't win the contest, naturally. But then afterward, all the men file by and shake our hands. But this one fellow stands back and waits until the others are gone. And then he comes up to me, and he attacks. "Who told you all those things, boy? Where did you get all that stuff, boy? Nothing like that happened. You know, your mom and daddy tell you all that stuff?" You know, "They fillin' in your head with lies?" And he gets louder and louder, and I stood there thinking, why is this happening? Why is this man so angry at me? He's yelling and screaming. Finally, my teacher comes over and bumps into the guy, and says, What are you doing? And he spins around and takes off.
Music: ...He'll be there...
Douglas A. Blackmon, Journalist: That was the beginning of my quest. I became obsessed with trying to get to the bottom of why is this the way that things are?
Music: He may not...
Bucolic Leland
Douglas A. Blackmon, Journalist: In 1967, my dad finished his PhD and got a job at a research laboratory in the Mississippi Delta. So my parents, two older brothers, and I moved from Baton Rouge, LA to Leland. I was three years old. For me that's when this story began.
Sarah Blackmon, Douglas Blackmon’s Mother: We chose to live in Leland. We liked that our children would be able to do things on their own. They could ride their bicycles around town. We liked the idea of a small town.
Douglas A. Blackmon, Journalist, VO: Leland was a busy, growing community in the 1960s. The farm economy was strong, particularly for the people who owned large amounts of land. Almost everyone made their living one way or another off the vast cotton and soybean fields that surrounded us, people came from far and wide at Christmas every year to see the decorations on the wide creek flowing through the center of town. Every fall there was football and homecoming parades, that wound through town and ended up on the field. Everyone seemed to agree that Leland was a special place, a little wealthier than most, better educated, more tolerant than other places nearby, and it did have a certain unique spirit.
James Lacey, Newspaper Editor: At that time, Leland had an unusually good school system. It was the pride of the community.
Bob Neill, Class of 1960: I grew up going to the Leland schools. We rode school bus number 13. High school...it was a really good time. There were 35 people, I think. In my graduating class in 1960. Football was the big sport. Everybody from town was at the game on Friday night. Everybody rooted for the Cubs. It was a community supported, there again in these terms of modern days, it was a white community supported school.. There was a team on the other side of town. Gosh, I hate saying it this way, but that's the way it was. I mean, that's the way we grew up.
In celebration of Black schools
Billy Barber, Class Of 1983: Breisch High School was the high school for Black people and Black athletes in Leland, Mississippi. They did a good job. They competed. They they played for titles.
Betty Coleman, Teacher: We had one of the best basketball teams in the state. Basketball, football, track. We didn't have a gym. We played on the bare ground outside. We had a football field. It wasn't, you know, with the bleachers and all. But you had a football field.
Edna Scott, Elementary School Principal: We had some great ballplayers. Had some great ballplayers. They would even have a crowd. A cheering crowd, a supportive crowd.
Betty Coleman, Teacher: Loved the mascot. We were the Braves. The Breisch High Braves.
Billy Barber, Class Of 1983: You know, you take Breisch High and go back and check the history, they could compete with any team in the state of Mississippi.
Jerald Jones Woolfolk, Class of 1977: The school was like the center of social life for the Black people in Leland.
Douglas A. Blackmon, Journalist, VO: The crazy thing was, racial segregation was illegal. 15 years had passed since the Supreme Court declared in 1954 that segregation had to be dismantled forever. But during those years, Leland remained two very separate worlds one white and one black. In the white version, many people were still enthralled with "Gone With the Wind" fantasies about Confederate officers, Southern belles and ugly racial attitudes.
Then in 1969, something enormous happened. The Supreme Court spoke again. There could be no more delays. All separate black and white schools had to be completely combined. Almost overnight, a giant social experiment that would radically change American society was beginning. Dr. Martin Luther King's dream of a nation where the children of former slaves and slave owners would grow up together was finally supposed to be happening. And somehow all those millions of kids were expected to heal America's racial divide
In the fall of 1970. My hometown's first fully integrated class, the black and white first graders began school together on the same day in the same classrooms with the same teachers and books. And that was my class.
Children of integration
Evelyn Gordon-Murray, Class Of 1982: When we started the first grade, I didn't know anything that was going on. You know, I was six years old, so I didn't know anything about anything. We were excited just to be in school.
Douglas A. Blackmon, Journalist: As the first day of first grade was coming up, I had absolutely no idea that there was anything whatsoever happening except that school was beginning. And I finally got to go.
Brandon Taylor, Class Of 1982: There was no conversation about anything, you know, being, you know, different. We were just going to another school. Be on your best behavior, you know, like your parents would want you to.
Douglas A. Blackmon, Journalist: There were Black kids in my class; that didn't strike me as surprising or unusual because it was the only thing... it was the only kind of school I knew.
Donald Richardson, Class Of 1982: From a five year old perspective, there was no difference in the children, Black, white.
John McCandlish, Class Of 1983: I didn't really had any awareness of the racial integration. I think I was just trying to make new friends.
Jessie King, Class Of 1982: It was the very first time experience— the experience of interacting with the white students, was at the school, and I thought it was cool.
Billy Barber, Class of 1983: I came from a Head Start in Strike City that was all Black. And going to school and, you know, there was some white here and white there. I mean, it wasn't just something that I saw everyday.
Jessie King, Class Of 1982: We all were receiving the same multiplication facts. We were all getting the same vowel sounds. We were all reading from Sally, Dick and Jane books. There was no difference.
Donald Richardson, Class Of 1982: It was school. It was first grade. I was... I was allowed to be a first grader without the shackles of the responsibility that you are in the first class of integration as a first grader. Our hopes and dreams are on your shoulders. I didn't have any of that. And I think that's... that's pretty good from my parents. Not to have scared...scared me out of my wits about racial situations. Being where we're from.
Brown v Board of Education
Douglas A. Blackmon, Journalist, VO: None of that should have been necessary.
Supreme Court Archival / Thurgood Marshall: It is my opinion that the South will comply with the decision of the court and accept it. I don't think there's any question about it in the South. People in the South are just as law-abiding as anybody else.
Douglas A. Blackmon, Journalist, VO: In the years since the Supreme Court order, segregation was supposed to have already disappeared. But in Mississippi and almost everywhere in the South, nothing had truly changed.
Archival/Racists: I'm against the negroes and the whites going to school together. I think we as white people have developed an aire of superiority over their race.
Douglas A. Blackmon, Journalist, VO: In a few places, like Central High, in Little Rock Arkansas, a handful of Black students were eventually able to enroll in previously all-white schools. But soon huge numbers of white southerners were fighting tooth and nail to preserve segregation.
Veronica (Levison) Richardson, Teacher: The Little Rock Nine? We were glued to the newspapers and to the television. We didn't participate in it too much around here, I guess it was a little too risky. But we were glued to it, and we talked about it. We were so happy that somebody did that.
Betty Coleman, Teacher: Where we were, whatever was going on in Little Rock wasn't about to happen here at any time soon.
Difficult Lives
Douglas A. Blackmon, Journalist, VO: No place in America has a more terrible past than Mississippi. With its long abuse of African-Americans and violent resistance to racial equality. But as a young child, I had almost no understanding of that. No one ever spoke of the nightmare lynching in Leland 50 years earlier, or the murder in 1955 of a black pastor on the other end of the county after he began registering black voters. Or the church burnings and KKK rallies not far away. Or the two civil rights workers beaten in Leland during Freedom Summer in 1964. The year I and most of my classmates were born. I can't remember hearing anything about Emmett Till, the African-American 14 year old brutally killed barely 50 miles from my hometown for supposedly whistling at a white woman. And the grown ups I knew rarely ever offered any explanation for why black people all around us suffered such relentless, grinding poverty. That was at the heart of racial segregation and separating black and white children during the school day was the cornerstone of an entire system of life designed to deny education and services for black children and to trap their parents in work that made some white people wealthy, but left millions of black families desperate.
Vernice Sanders, Parent and Activist: My family were sharecroppers. Any family that lives on a farm, you know that kids was out there too. We chopped cotton, picked cotton. It was a hard, difficult life. I really wanted an education. I would get up early in the morning and go out and do work and then go to school. But the boss man stopped that. He told my dad that I had to be out there chopping cotton. And so I had to go to school whenever there wasn't anything else to do.
Edna Scott, Elementary School Principal: We picked cotton and worked in the field but we owned our own farm. We weren't on a white person's farm. One day my daddy had gone to the cotton gin, and I got on my knees in the cotton row, he didn't allow you to get on your knees. And I prayed. I asked the Lord, I said, "Lord you got to help me to find something else to do." I said, "I can't stay in this cotton field all my life." So I made up my mind. I said, I want to go to school. I want to go to college. So when my dad came back, I went up to him and said, "Dad, I want to go to school." He said, "You want to go to school? You go to school." I said, "I want to go to college," I said, "When I finish school." He hesitated and waited a minute. He said, "If you want to go..." He said, "I'll help you if that's what you want to do." And he did.
Betty Coleman, Teacher: I was born and raised here in Leland, Mississippi. My father died before I was born, so my mom raised me. I'm the only hell she ever raised. We lived in a little shotgun house in an area called Black Dog.
Veronica (Levison) Richardson, Teacher: I think what we're talking about here is the different sides of the track. We lived over on this side in a completely segregated neighborhood, completely segregated. That's the way we grew up.
Douglas A. Blackmon, Journalist, VO: Veronica Richardson still, Mrs. Richardson, to me, was one of the daughters of AB Levison, probably the most influential African-America taken in my town in the years of segregation. He was in charge of Leland's black schools since the 1940s, quietly walking an impossible tightrope, pushing white leaders to provide more for schools that were overflowing with black students, but always knowing that the slightest push too hard would backfire.
Veronica (Levison) Richardson, Teacher: My dad was principal at this school and we lived on the school campus. Our house was across the street. So I actually rode my bicycle all around this schoolyard.
Betty Coleman, Teacher: The area where I lived was a lot of families. Two-parent families, most of them. If the single-parent mama took care of business was very supportive of education because, at that time, that was your only way out. Your restaurants... you had to go in through the back door.
Vernice Sanders, Parent and Activist: I worked at the Leland Cafe for years. Even though I was a cook, I had to come through the back door to cook.
Jerald Jones Woolfolk, Class Of 1977: Doctors, they had an entrance for Black people, and they had an entrance for white people. They had a waiting room for Black people. And they had a waiting room for white people.
Veronica (Levison) Richardson, Teacher: The thing that I hated, though, was the fact that I couldn't go to the library downtown, the city library. We would pass by and I'd want to look in, you know, but no, you can't stop there. They didn't really tell me why.
Betty Coleman, Teacher: We passed by the Leland Hotel down there and it was nice linen and you peep in the window. But I always felt one of these days I'm going to be able to do that too.
Jerald Jones Woolfolk, Class Of 1977: The Temple Theater, the black people had to sit in the balcony, and the white people sat on the floor. It just didn't feel right.
Vernice Sanders, Parent And Activist: This lady had hired me to do some housecleaning for her. One time, I was working. She went to bridge club or something and she left me there. The phone rang. And so I picked up and said hello and she didn't hear me. And she was talking to someone in the background and she said she had to call to check on this N to see what this N is doing. It really did something to me. It really did.
Douglas A. Blackmon, Journalist, VO: My family wasn't wealthy, but we had a comfortable life. Dad had a good job. Mom taught algebra at Leland High. We lived in a little house on Redbud Drive. Birthday parties, camping trips. And every year, what seemed like a perfect Christmas. It was a long time before I realized just how different that was from the lives of so many of my classmates.
Jessie King, Class Of 1982: When I was very young, we were living on Neill's Plantation. The Black families were sharecroppers. My dad drove tractors, plowed fields, worked at the barn. My mom was the maid for a white family. And they worked all the time. All the time.
Cedric Bush, Class Of 1985: I lived on Walker Farm. Mr. Jimmy Walker, he was the owner of the farm, and my dad did dairy farming for him. You raised hogs, and you had cows; you had goats.
Jessie King, Class Of 1982: It was a difficult life. It was really a difficult life. We had a shotgun house. We didn't have heat. We did not have indoor plumbing.
Cedric Bush, Class Of 1985: We had outside toilets, outhouses. We had to go out to the outhouses by yourself at night with creepy crawly things outside. Later, we moved from one community to another. We had a chance to experience having an inside toilet. That was in 1977. I thought it was the greatest thing on earth, the greatest invention on earth.
Jessie King, Class Of 1982: My dad had accepted. This is how it is. This is the way it's going to be. But my mom always thought that there must be a better way. I'll never forget this particular evening. We were sitting on the porch, waiting on him to get off work. We did that every day because we didn't eat before he got home. Back then, there were straw bosses or plantation managers who supervised the laborers. My father must have done something that did not gel with the straw boss, and he kicked him. Once he got out of the truck and...
Sam Pollard (OS): He kicked your father?
Jessie King, Class Of 1982: He kicked my father in front of my mom and my brothers and sisters. I was shocked because that was my dad. I was so shocked. I didn't know what to say, what to do. It was like we were frozen; we were hurt because that was our hero. My mom, of course, knew that if he had struck back, he would also die. She knew that. That was the straw that broke the camel's back for her. She wanted her children not to be trapped on a plantation. She wanted her children to get an education. Where she and he were not granted one. My mom packed everything, and we moved to Leland. And when Dad got off work he found an empty house. Next thing we knew, he had shown up. I think he said, "What are you doing here? Who told you to do this?" And her response was, "Your bath water's ready." And next thing I knew he was in there taking a bath, and that was the end of the story.
Leland Schools - Pre Holmes
Edna Scott, Elementary School Principal: When I came to Leland in 1953, the building that the elementary students were in was a wooden building.
Betty Coleman, Teacher: I started first grade there. I doubt if there were ten rooms in there. But it was one long hallway. And on each side, there were your classrooms.
Veronica (Levison) Richardson, Teacher: The textbooks had been used when they came over. They might have somebody's name in the front of them.
Edna Scott, Elementary School Principal: We didn't have a lot of materials and things like that, but we did worked well with what we had. You had dedicated teachers, people who cared about the students, and saw their needs. And just really helped them.
Douglas A. Blackmon, Journalist, VO: For most people in Mississippi, making the changes ordered by the Supreme Court in 1954 was unimaginable, or even repulsive, so instead of abolishing racially separate schools, Mississippi did exactly the opposite, launching an aggressive campaign to convince the rest of America that white and black people should remain separate forever and begin building and expanding even more segregated schools.
MDAH Archival: Since 1956, the state legislature has provided 80 million dollars for school construction. 70% has been spent on colored schools and 30% on white schools. Each week for the past 3 years, we have completed an average of 3 new buildings or additions to buildings. Contracts have been awarded for over 5 thousand classrooms. About 3500 for colored children. And approximately 1500 for white children.
Douglas A. Blackmon, Journalist, VO: Leland's all-white school board doubled down on segregation too, adding a new classroom wing, gymnasium, cafeteria, and library to the dilapidated school for African American kids. And they named it, yes, after Abraham Lincoln. An aerial photograph of Leland's Black campus was added to the Mississippi history textbook used by almost every ninth grader in the state, including me, 25 years later. The caption described it as a model for the education of Black pupils. Nothing else changed for a decade. Black and white children still attended completely separate schools. Until 1965, when the federal government finally began pressuring southern schools to obey the law. Leland adopted what was called a Freedom of Choice plan--that supposedly allowed any family, regardless of race, to attend whichever school they chose.
Vernice Sanders, Parent And Activist: My daughter, under freedom of choice, she went to the Leland High School in the ninth grade and integrated to school. I thought that by having these integrated schools that our kids would have an opportunity to have a better education. This is what I thought.
Jerald Jones Woolfolk, Class Of 1977: I was very much aware of freedom of choice and that I could have chosen to go to the white school. As a little girl, you know, I was very fair. And I remember talking to my mother and dad about I could go to the white school. I said I would fit right in. And my mother said, "You are going to Lincoln."
Edna Scott, Elementary School Principal: At the time, I was assistant principal of the Black elementary Black school. Several Black students went over there.
Douglas A. Blackmon, Journalist: And how many white students chose to go to the Black school?
Edna Scott, Elementary School Principal: None. Wasn't Any white students...None.
Douglas A. Blackmon, Journalist, VO: In reality, Freedom of Choice was a ruse, designed to technically comply with federal law, but for all practical intents and purposes, still preserve segregation. No white family was ever going to choose the black school. And Black parents knew there could be serious consequences if they sent their children to the all white schools.
Veronica (Levison) Richardson, Teacher: A few Black parents that sent their children to the white school. Even though you knew that you would have some animosity toward you.
Douglas A. Blackmon, Journalist, VO: That threat was real. As far back as the 1950s, the state of Mississippi established a Sovereignty commission with private detectives and its own agents to spy on and harass anyone who supported the civil rights movement. They even hired a paid informant in Leland. And when local police heard that the town plumber, a man named BT Grossly was secretly forming a chapter of the NAACP, they threatened that white customers would refuse to hire him and ruin his business. But there was one group of African-Americans who had little to fear anymore. The families out at Strike City already had lost everything. They never got their homes or jobs back. They'd been harassed and terrorized, but still they managed to build for themselves houses and a meeting hall. They received federal war on poverty funds to open up a Head Start program for preschoolers. Strike City became a hub of civil rights activism. The strikers even took their tents to the lawn of the U.S. Capitol. And in 1966, their leader, a former tractor driver named John Henry Sylvester, testified before Congress about the hardships and abuse in Mississippi. When Freedom of Choice finally opened up those first few seats in Leland's white schools. The families at Strike City weren't intimidated.
Sylvester’s Daughter: I was one of the kids that did integrate into the white school. Dean school out there. I was 13 years old. In the sixth grade. It was hard when we first moved over there. If you sat at the table with some of the whites, they'd get up and move. They didn't want to be by you. And another thing. We had to go to the bathroom separate from the white kids. We had to wait until they go to the bathroom, and then we went. Some of the teachers were all right. Some of them wasn't. Some of them, like, they didn't want to help you learn. You know? Like, you'd ask them something, and they'd tell you to sit down. Go do like I told you. Look in a book if you want to know this here. The principal over there, that was the meanest white man I ever seen in my life. If he caught you in the bathroom with a white, that man, he'd make you sit out in that hallway. He'd make you sit out in that hallway until it was time to go home. He wouldn't let you go back to the classroom. Then you had to come up there with your parents the next day. Well, I took my dad up there with me. Most folks said my daddy mean, but John Henry Sylvester wasn't mean, he just didn't like nobody picking on his kids for nothing. He went in the office, they won't let me go in there. And from that day on, I didn't have no problems at that school.
Douglas A. Blackmon, Journalist, VO: After a few years, freedom of choice had turned out the way it was always intended. Barely 3% of black children in Mississippi were attending school with white children. The Leland High graduating class of 1969 had only three African-Americans out of a class of 70. White Southerners always insisted that if segregation truly had to be abandoned, it should happen as slowly as possible. But the time for that kind of gradual change was running out in 1969. In 1969, tensions in Leland boiled over. African-Americans launched a boycott of white owned stores. Students at the black high school organized a walkout and tried to march across town to the white high school, but they were teargassed by the town police chief. A melee began. Windows were broken. A white man confronted two black teenagers outside a store near the edge of town, pulled out a pistol and shot a 16 year old African-American boy. He survived, but there was no serious investigation. The white man was never charged.
Sarah Blackmon, Douglas Blackmon’s Mother: There were news stories all of the time about the push for integration in different parts of the South. So as the school year of 1969 started, there was a lot more discussion that full integration is getting closer. It's likely that there will be a major change. I don't know if this is the best time to tell this story, but since we're talking about integration. In 1962, I had just graduated from Louisiana Tech, and we moved to North Carolina for your father to go to graduate school. And so I had to have a job. I took a job teaching in a small rural school. When I interviewed, the principal said, "Well, you should know that this year we're going to be integrated." And I couldn't even... I didn't have a choice of thinking about whether that was okay with me or not because I had to have a job. Then he said that the Native American school close by was being closed, so we would have Indian students. That was the integration he was talking about. And I was--I was totally confused. I had no idea that the Indian students had been kept apart. And I didn't know that I was supposed to be prejudiced against them. So I wasn't. During that year, I kept trying to figure out why there was this prejudice. And as I began to realize that the prejudice that I saw was, in my opinion, wrong, then my ideas began to change about what was right and what was wrong about race. I realized that the that that we had to open up society and open up educational opportunities to other groups of people, including Blacks.
Douglas A. Blackmon, Journalist, VO: In October 1969, the Supreme Court finally issued the decision that would change everything. The ruling in Alexander V Holmes combined dozens of lawsuits against white school systems in Mississippi and ordered all of them to genuinely integrate every school immediately. No more take your time, no more. With all due speed. The ruling was crystal clear. Close all segregated schools in the middle of the academic year.. combine them and then reopen as fully integrated schools.
Archival / News/Chet Huntley: In the South. Reaction to the Supreme Court ruling was predictable, angry and swift. Governor Lester Maddox of Georgia called it criminal. Others characterized it as a disaster for public education.
ARCHIVAL / Sen James Eastland: Now, we're going to have a great number of private schools that will be formed in the state. And I have found that neither race desires highly integrated schools.
James Lacey, Newspaper Editor: Ugh, terrible. He'd trade any vote for segregation. They come along today with this kinda stuff, excusing these kind of activities like senator Eastland's activities: Oh that was just the way it was back then. Well that's baloney, that's the way Eastland was back then, it wasn't the way things were back then. He could have been different if he wanted to be.
Betty Coleman, Teacher: In the middle of the school year, we had to desegregate.
Veronica (Levison) Richardson, Teacher: The order came down on Thursday. Monday, they were back in their trucks getting old. So this desk and things because they had to get the all the little desks at one school and and all the larger desks and another school.
Betty Coleman, Teacher: We got this big truck. And we started hauling books and things.
Edna Scott, Elementary School Principal: The Superintendent called me in the office and told me, you going to be going to Dean School as principal. First thing I did, I lost my voice I was so nervous and upset.
Betty Coleman, Teacher: White parents were reluctant about Blacks teaching their children. My principal told me, you will teach science. I guess they said that's not an important subject... so just let her teach the science. She's black. She can't teach the reading. She's not equipped to teach the math. We'll give her something insignificant. Well, I don't like science really. I said, Okay. If I have to teach science it's going to be the best science class they've ever had.
Bob Blackmon, Douglas Blackmon’s Father: We quickly learned that many of the of the African-American teachers had degrees from prestigious universities, Ohio State, Michigan State, you know, and and we couldn't quite figure out why. And then we learned that the state of Mississippi gave people scholarships to go out of state to get their degree, rather than having them integrate places like Ole Miss and Mississippi State. And that's one of the the teachers on the surface of it, the black teachers seemed more qualified than the white teachers.
James Lacey, Newspaper Editor: When the school integration thing came along, there was this effort to support the public school.
Sarah Blackmon, Douglas Blackmon’s Mother: Your father and I, we were very strong supporters of public school. Now, there are at least two different reasons. One is financial. We didn't feel like that we could afford to send our children to a private school. But then also philosophically, we believed that public schools were extremely important and that integration was okay. We were not marching for integration, but we were not as opposed to it as many people that I knew.
Douglas A. Blackmon, Journalist: Did you have any reservations?
Sarah Blackmon, Douglas Blackmon’s Mother: We had many reservations about it. You have one shot at raising your children. You don't get do overs. And we were very, very concerned that our children get a good education. It was something that nobody had done before. We didn't know how it was going to go, but we felt strongly that we had to had to give it a chance.
James Lacey, Newspaper Editor: We had Bert Tuggle, a young preacher. There, in the Presbyterian Church. Got up and said the unthinkable: "Segregation is unchristian." Now, that was a bold, bold statement for that time. And I never heard a preacher say it and nobody else around ever heard a preacher say it. Maybe in private, but not from the pulpit. The reaction was upset. Indignation. Rage. People left the church. My personal reaction: I was proud of him.
Bob Blackmon, Douglas Blackmon’s Father: He spoke bravely from the pulpit that this was the right thing to do. His position essentially divided the church. There was about a third of the congregation that didn't like what he was saying, and they left the church. But guess what? The church was better off without them.
Douglas A. Blackmon, Journalist, VO: A group of black and white parents began meeting privately every Thursday night, mostly at black churches, and usually led by Mr. Grossly, the African-American plumber who refused to back down when the state of Mississippi threatened to ruin his business. Mrs. Scott, the uncompromising black principal at our elementary school, also joined in. Those sessions led to even larger public gatherings.
Sarah Blackmon, Douglas Blackmon’s Mother: There were several community meetings, as I recall, in the school auditorium where these issues were discussed. There were little placards passed out that said, "Think positive." Keep a positive attitude about this. Don't assume that it's going to all be negative.
Edna Scott, Elementary School Principal: One man I never forget, he had a patch with a you know, over his eye. He got up in the meeting and asked this question, how come they how come they want to come over to our school? He said, let them stay in their own school. Some of the white people really didn't think it was going to happen.
Sarah Blackmon, Douglas Blackmon's Mother: A group of people began to say publicly, We're going to keep our children in public school. We decided to buy an ad in the local newspaper, The Leland Progress, and put our name on the line that we are committed to public education.
Douglas A. Blackmon, Journalist, VO: My parents names were near the top of the list. Then a few days later, the Ku Klux Klan dropped threatening fliers on the front yard of our home and every other house on our street. But the newspaper ad kept appearing again every week for a month, each time with more names.
First day of first grade to graduation
Elementary school
Douglas A. Blackmon, Journalist, VO: Finally, it was time for me and my classmates to begin first grade. Our class arrived on September 4th, 1970, under a still blistering hot Mississippi Delta sky. When that day came, more than half of Leland's white children didn't show up, but the other half did. First day of school for me, I don't know. I guess it just felt like anybody else's first day of school.
Kevin Magee, Class Of 1983: First day of school for me. I don't know. I guess it just felt like anybody else's first day of school. A little scary. That was the one day that my mother went to school with me to get you all registered and hand her baby boy off to Miss Scott, who was principal.
Cedric Bush, Class Of 1985: You had the plantation owner's children going to school with us. You go to school together. You would think that they would treat you differently, and it didn't really happen like that. We did playground recess, ate lunch together. We just didn't ride the bus together because their parents were fortunate enough to drive them to school.
Douglas A. Blackmon, Journalist: The only explicit, racially specific memory that I have from those very early days was being out on the playground one day and another little white boy comes along and clearly he's repeating something he heard from his parents. But he says, "I think all of the I think all the Blacks should go back to Africa." And I remember my amazement at the idea that they were from Africa, because in my limited imagination, I could only hear that as to mean that these kids I knew were born in Africa and had come to Leland, Mississippi, to go to school. And I said, I remember saying, "Anthony and Craig and Donald, they're from Africa?" And he said, "Yeah, they're all from Africa." And that to me is to me. I thought, Wow, that's incredible.
Evelyn Gordon-Murray, Class Of 1982: You may have been taught things at home, but, you know, it wasn't taught in school.
Donald Richardson, Class Of 1982: Some of my Black friends pulled me to the side, as a matter of fact, one on each side and said, "You coming to play with us today. You going to play with the Black boys today. You know, you're not supposed to be over there with the white boys. You're supposed to be with the-- you're supposed to be with the Black boys." And I mean, they kind of pressured me and they were serious and they were they seemed to be upset to a degree. And I told them, I said, "Hey, let's go all play together." They won't mind you playing with them. I'm going over there. But they still kind of adamant about it and I didn't go with them. I went with my friend Jimmy because that's what I play with every day.
Kevin Magee, Class Of 1983: It was great. I don't think you could have, especially the elementary years. I don't know that you could have had a better experience or better teachers or better supervision. I just don't remember ever, ever, having a problem with anything.
John McCandlish, Class Of 1983: We always got along at the school. I'm sure there were things that maybe I'm forgetting that we didn't get along from a racial perspective, but it seemed to me when you removed the school and you went outside and into the community and I hate to say it, but to the adults that there wasn't the embrace of the integration.
Kevin Magee, Class Of 1983: I do remember there were several people I was friends with, and I remember my mother having to tell me, well, they're not going to go to school with you. They're going to go somewhere else. And I thought it was a little weird. How come they're not going to school with us?
James Lacey, Newspaper Editor: The group of people who could not stand integration, got together and created Leland academy, and that threw a lot of children out of the public school.
Bob Neill, Class Of 1960: I was on the original board to start the Leland Academy. I don't know how deep you want to get into the mind set, but I don't think it was so much a racial thing as it was a social, cultural, moral, economic thing. And educational. Uh, there was a, I think those figured into it more than race, although. There was a racial factor involved.
Douglas A. Blackmon, Journalist, VO: All over Mississippi and soon all across the South, white people opposed to racial integration were doing something the Supreme Court would never have believed possible. All white private schools like the one in Leland popped up almost overnight in dozens of towns.
Archival/News Reporter: In the Canton, Mississippi School district, parents and their children have been working around the clock to convert this former tent manufacturing plant into an academy for grades one through 12. Most of the 1400 white students in the district are now enrolled.
Douglas A. Blackmon, Journalist, VO: Soon, there were more than 100 of those schools across Mississippi and nearby states, attended by more than 30,000 white students. Most of the new schools, including Leland Academy, claimed not to exclude African - American children, but in fact, they were part of an association, the private schools that for years secretly required them to refuse admission to any black child and never to hire a black teacher. Leland Academy opened in 1969 in the education building of a Baptist church, while organizers rapidly constructed a new school on vacant land right next to the Leland High School football Field .
Betty Coleman, Teacher: At the time of integration, my expectations of what white families would do would be to leave.
Edna Scott, Elementary School Principal: I wasn't surprised. I wasn't surprised at all. I knew the reason they were doing that. They just didn't want to be with the Black people.
Betty Coleman, Teacher: And see, a lot of that, I think, had to do with ignorance. I'm sorry. I mean I mean I mean, not knowing if you don't know something, you're fearful of it. And so many of the white families had only known their maids. And for some of them just they were people, but not people.
Sarah Blackmon, Douglas Blackmon’s Mother: Before I moved to Leland, I really had never had a conversation with a black person as equals until my children started school in Leland. And Veronica Richardson was one of my oldest son, Glenn's teachers. And I, you know, I always met all of my teachers and she would have been the first person that I can remember where I and a black person had a conversation as absolute equals. You know, it's I just had never had that experience before.
Veronica (Levison) Richardson, Teacher: I always wondered how could all the whites go to the private school? How they could afford to go? And what was there that was so different. Because we catered to the whites a good bit when they were in the school system.
Pam Pepper, Class Of 1982: I started school at Leland Academy. It was an all white school. It was, I think, a combination of kids whose parents actively did not want them to go to the public school and kids whose parents were maybe interested in the public school, but worried that this was a new experiment thing. And nobody knew quite where it was headed. So there was a combination of my child will never go to a public school, and I'd like my child to go to public school. But I don't know how this is all going to go. It felt like a makeshift, which I suppose it was. It was kind of out on the highway and a building that looked sort like a school building. It was very small, weren't a whole lot of kids there, and it was very barren. There were no trees or anything. I mean it look like it had just gone up. My memory of it is, well, this is a temporary installation, sort of.
Douglas A. Blackmon, Journalist, VO: In the year before full integration, Leland's public schools had barely changed from a decade earlier. The African-American school remained 100% black. Leland's previously all white schools were still more than 90% white. Only 81 black kids had shared classrooms with more than 1000 white children. After it all became one system, Leland schools were 80% black and 20% white.
Sarah Blackmon, Douglas Blackmon’s Mother: That school year, I started back teaching full time.
Douglas A. Blacmon, Journalist: How did you react to being around all these Black people?
Sarah Blackmon, Douglas Blackmon’s Mother: I had to do some fast learning. There were things that I had said all of my life, like calling my students boys and girls. But I began to realize that to my Blacks students, being called a boy, always being called a boy was very offensive. I didn't want to offend my students. So I began to work at never calling them boys. I worked at not doing things that I knew were offensive. I am a teacher. I wanted my students to learn, and if my behavior kept them from learning, then I needed to do something about my behavior.
Edna Scott, Elementary School Principal: At first, I went through some challenges there with teachers, with teachers. There were some teachers pulling out, you know, going to the school because they refused to work under me or with me. One in particular was something to deal with, let me tell you. I hated to see the school where one shade is up and one's half down. This up and down, you know, like that. So I made an announcement. I said, "Please adjust your shades before leaving." She said she had been at that school, don't know how many years. I don't know how many years, she said. But she said nobody told her to adjust to shades. I said, "Okay." I just said okay. So in the evening when school was out, I'd walk down the hall, walk in her room. I'd go, "Hey, how you doing?" I'd go to her window, adjust the shades, and walk out. I did that for three evenings straight. The fourth evening I walked in there, I never will forget. She said, "You don't have to come in here and adjust my shades." And I said, "I don't mind it. I don't mind it at all." But since then, when I would get down there, her shades was adjusted and she was gone. So I didn't have that problem anymore. I worked it out. Me and the good Lord.
Veronica (Levison) Richardson, Teacher: The faculty actually got along pretty well, the whites and the Blacks. Some of us became friends on down through the years. Teaching strategies how do you do this and how do you teach this. And shared the ways that we could handle children. We didn't talk race too much. We just more or less talked people.
Van Poindexter, Class Of 1982: The way we were set up in school was, they had A, B, C, D, all the way, I think all the way down to G and H as far as grouping children into classes.
Kevin Magee, Class Of 1983: Early in elementary school, we had to take a test and people were grouped afterwards.
Donald Richardson, Class Of 1982: The whole A, B, C group and the whole the connotation behind it? You know, I think about George Orwell. I mean, you know, I think about 1984 and, you know, these are the alphas and the betas. Paul Chambers, and I'm trying to think, Craig Rainey and that's it. Only about three African-American males in the A group, you know, in a town that is to say the least, chock full of African-American males.
Evelyn Gordon-Murray, Class Of 1982: The A section was mostly going to be your white students. But I was in the B section. The B section were mostly Blacks, some white kids. You kinda remember that, right?
Donald Richardson, Class Of 1982: Later in elementary, elementary career, some of the African-American students got a real sense of that ABC group. And I left Leland as a sixth grader and went to Greenville because we had moved. And so I'm talking about fourth graders and third graders who understood, oh, we are ability grouped, but this may not be fair.
Van Poindexter, Class Of 1982: I started out fourth grade in C. You knew that if you were in C, you're not as smart as the kids in 4B or 4A, you're not as good as the kids in 4B or 4A, you know, you were kind of... What's a C? A C is average. You knew that you were average and it was kind of taken that way.
Veronica (Levison) Richardson, Teacher: What we did at that time was to sort of group by ability. You know after a test? The white parents who who stayed with the school systems were kind of forward thinking people, you know. And so naturally their children were in pretty...in pretty good shape. And so when they took those tests, we ended up with a lot of whites together. And so you still had, in a way, a sort of a segregation. We don't do that sort of thing now.
Van Poindexter, Class Of 1982: I decided that I'm not going to stay in for C. I think I belong in A, and I'm going to work to make sure I do. In the fifth grade I moved to five B and there were a few more white children, but still mostly Black. But then I moved to six A. That's where you and I met. Six A almost flipped. It was mostly white, and mostly middle class and upper middle class children that were in those classes. I'm a new guy just coming in, so I was an interloper. They were looking at me like, How did you get in here? Where did you come from? Not just the white students, but more so the Black students. And so I had issues, had bullying issues with several of the folks. I won't mention names.
Pam Pepper, Class Of 1982: Leland Academy only went through the sixth grade. And so my parents had a choice and that was either put me on a bus to another town or go to the public school. And by that time the public school had been 6 years, and the world hadn't collapsed and the sky hadn't fallen. And my dad was teaching, I think, at Leland High School at that time. And my mom had gotten to know a lot of the teachers. And I think she started to feel the teaching was in many ways better at public school than at some private schools. And so they just made the decision that they were going to send me to the public school, which turned out to be one of the best things that ever happened to me. So.
Douglas A. Blackmon, Journalist, VO: Leland's public schools were not perfect, but it meant something when families like Pam Pepper's came back. Things were changing. In 1976, Leland geared up for a classic small-town celebration of the 200th anniversary of the founding of America. The town renovated the old train station. Our congressman came to speak. There were two parades with wagon rides, ROTC units, a float celebrating Leland High's integrated championship football team, and the Cub Scouts marching down Main Street with my mother...were both white and Black. I marched in the Junior High School band. We proudly wore blue and gold. The old colors of Breisch High.
Bob Blackmon, Douglas Blackmon’s Father: We thought that this is going to ultimately work out. We believe that we had done something good. We were going to change things and maybe begin to create Martin Luther King's beloved community. We were optimistic. I mean, you know, that that many years after desegregation, we were we were pretty optimistic that it was going to work out.
Middle School
Donald Richardson, Class Of 1982: One white child that had gone to the private school all his life. And then he came to our school. He seemed to be okay on the front end, but but I could tell, all the Blacks classmates could tell, and my white classmates could tell that he hadn't been around Blacks kids. We were in line and I tripped over a rock and I bumped into him and he told the teacher that I pushed him in the back. And my teacher took me outside, my white teacher took me outside. She went across the hall and she called another teacher who was Black, and she punished me. I got.. I got three licks for that. And I remember being very upset, remember crying. I remember being very confused about why the Black teacher had to come punish me. But even more so, why did the white teacher just take what he said as law?
Lincoln Coggins, Class Of 1982: I started my first year in the Leland School system was the sixth grade. So one of the very first days, we're out on the playground, I ran into a Black boy that was in the same grade as me. It was purely accidental, but his friends were like, "You're going to let this guy do this to you?" It became very adversarial very quickly. So we got into a fight.
Van Poindexter, Class Of 1982: There was tension between. Some of the white students and some of the Black students and... Gosh, it wasn't too far around the time when Roots was on television for eight nights. That stoked even more of the kind of racial fervor.
Douglas A. Blackmon, Journalist: There seemed to be some tension or animosity at school, even though it wasn't really clear what this was about or where it started. Was it the white kids who had animosity first towards the Black kids... I didn't know, probably didn't matter, probably wasn't a first, but there was just this unexplained tension between the Black kids and the white kids that built on itself.
Van Poindexter, Class Of 1982: Your parents talk to you about, well, you know, you need to speak to white people a certain way. It was ingrained in them and they were kind of giving us the talk, if you will, to say, you know, you need to kind of conduct yourself a certain way around white folks or you're going to get in trouble. We've had the talk. We don't like the fact that we've had the talk. And now I'm in with the guy who's basically my peer that I have to walk around on eggshells with. And that's where a lot of tension was. I'm not going to walk around on eggshells. And there were fights.
Lincoln Coggins, Class Of 1982: The guy that I had the wrestling match with, it was more a wrestling match and a fight, was BILLY BARBER. And I gave him a bloody nose. I know that for a fact, because I can still see it in my mind. So by that time, the teachers come and separate us and we got out of the principal's office and... We didn't even know each other. How could we be angry with each other? We didn't even know each other.
Douglas A. Blackmon, Journalist: Don, I've got this memory and I'm trying to remember if it's right. I was really into GI Joes; you were really into GI Joes.
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Douglas A. Blackmon, Journalist: Do you remember that?
Donald Richardson, Class Of 1982: Very well. We were into G.I. Joe big time. I don't think they developed the Kung Fu grip yet, but... We wanted to play at home as opposed to school. So we both made mention to our parents, "Hey, I want to go over to Doug's house. Hey Doug wants to come over to my house." I remember doing that with my Black friends all the time. I remember a discussion in my home. I don't remember what was said exactly, but I could understand: "Oh, that might be tricky." They didn't say bad. They said... or they implied, okay, that that might be a controversial. Without using the word controversial, without using the word tricky. I don't even remember the word Black or white. Or Black boy or white boy. Okay? I just remember them sort of glossing over it a bit, and saying, "Well, we'll see." You know, of course, my son always reminds me: "Dad, whenever you say we'll see or maybe, that means no."
Douglas A. Blackmon, Journalist: I can't remember even now. Anyone ever saying, "No, you can't do that." But somehow we got the message. Those kinds of experiences did begin to stack up. And by Middle school, I began to think about, oh, it's very strange that school is Black and white and combined, but church is all white. Little League baseball in the summer is all white. My Boy Scout troop is all white. The swimming pool I go to never has a Black person in it. Every other dimension of life is as harshly segregated as it ever was. But here in this one place, for a few hours, every day, it's Black and white.
High School
Pam Pepper, Class Of 1982: I don't recall having even the remotest consciousness that something was significant about going to an integrated school. I don't remember having a consciousness of the fact that there was a civil rights movement, quite frankly, at that age, which is horrifying and embarrassing to say.
Billy Barber, Class Of 1983: Leland was one of the best districts that you could go to school in. We had a tough grading system in Leland. Anything below a 75 was an F. And I think it helped us. It helped us a lot, and it helped us to value things and to want more and to do more.
Jessie King, Class Of 1982: We had great English teachers, math teachers, home economics teachers right here in this small community.
Evelyn Gordon-Murray, Class Of 1982: I was able to do a term paper because we had teachers like Ms.. Quimby, for example. She made certain that we knew how to do an essay. When I got to college, I knew how to do it.
Pam Pepper, Class Of 1982: There was every kind of club and every kind of activity and that's how we formed our friendships mostly. Van Poindexter, he and I were in the school play together. The friendships came from common interests because of school was small. There were a lot of overlapping common interests. So you might be on the school newspaper with somebody and be a cheerleader with somebody. And so you kind of have crossover friendships.
Bryan Blackmon, Class Of 1979: I was fairly athletic. I played football. You developed the same sorts of relationships really with the Black kids as you did the white kids. Probably had had a lot to do with... we were a team and we had to work together.
Douglas A. Blackmon, Journalist: I was not the greatest athlete in the world, but I played basketball all the time. In my junior high school years, I'd been afraid to try out, because in fact, the team was overwhelmingly Black. They were clearly better athletes than I believed myself to be at the time. And so I get to high school and I've decided I'm not going to let that happen again. I'm going to try out for the high school team. So I was the only white kid on the team. We were an overwhelmingly Black team from a majority Black school playing in a league made up of other schools that were pretty much all 100% Black. That experience of being the one white kid on that team was a singular one in my life.
Brandon Taylor, Class Of 1982: I was focused. You know, as far as being a good student athlete as well. My senior year, we went 21 and 5. We won some big tournaments. We were serious about what we were doing, you know?
Kevin Magee, Class Of 1983: Brandon Taylor was one of the best basketball players that any of us had seen. He could slam it in the hoop any time he wanted to, and nobody could really stop him.
Brandon Taylor, Class Of 1982: I mean, they had us sharp. We ran, you know, the sprints, jump rope, long distance as well, because as a big guy, you know, being 6'7'' when I was jumping that rope, man, my quickness was, I mean, it was phenomenal. You know, little guards blow by you; they think they're going get a layup. You pin them up against the board. And he's like, 'Hey, where did you come from?' That was fun. We represented ourselves, our families and the city of Leland. And we wanted to, you know, come out on top. Every night we wanted to win. I think as a unit, we cared about each other.
Lincoln Coggins, Class Of 1982: The neat thing about that story of the bloody nose with BILLY BARBER is that in high school we were on one of the best baseball teams in the state. He was a catcher. I played shortstop. He was such a great leader. He was such a great leader. And I just, when I think of him, I can't help but smile because I think about how it started and how it ended.
Jessie King, Class Of 1982: I recall wonderful experiences in high school. One is when I was a part of the Future Farmers of America, the FFA, we had two sponsors, Terry James and Alan Clark. They took me in like I was their son. They made me parliamentarian, barely knew the word parliamentarian. Certainly didn't know what it meant, but they gave me an opportunity. And there was a young guy that was the president, last name was Smyly. I was a freshman. He was a senior. But Smyly took me under his wings and told me I could do it. And we had drilled and drilled over the parliamentary procedures. We had Robert's Rules of Order contest. We had to learn how to distinguish between the Jersey cows and the Brahman cows. Everywhere they would go, I found myself going and there were times I didn't have money, but they did not let me go without. And if Smyly and Alan and James had the money, Jesse did too. It increased my confidence. And when I became a junior, nobody had asked me, 'Will you run for junior class officer?' I was ready. I did it without second guessing myself.
Pam Pepper, Class Of 1982: It wasn't all delightful and perfect and wonderful. One time a bunch of us went to cheerleader camp at Ole Miss, and I remember ordering frozen yogurt because I had always heard about it and heard about it, and it sounded so cool. And I wanted to try frozen yogurt. And one of the Black cheerleaders said, "Well, what does it taste like?" And I said, "Well, taste it." And gave it to her. And one of the white cheerleaders said, "Are you going to use a spoon after her?" I remember thinking, 'What did you just say?' And I don't remember how the Black cheerleader reacted. I, I, I remember going, "Give me my yogurt back. I'm going to keep eating it." Looking back, I have sadness now that I didn't have then about the fact that there were wonderful social relationships between 8:15 and 3:30 and at football games and working on homecoming floats and whatever else. But they didn't extend beyond that between Blacks kids and white kids.
Evelyn Gordon-Murray, Class Of 1982: Outside going to each others' house, didn't do that often. Once you got out of school in May, you know, you may see each other at a store and pass and you'd speak. But really, you may not see your white friends until August or September.
Pam Pepper, Class Of 1982: In hindsight, you look at it and think, Well, why? That didn't make sense. It's not the way you live your life now. It was just the way it was.
Van Poindexter, Class Of 1982: The fact that we didn't have any events together, Black and white was noticeable. The one thing I do remember was prom. That was it. And it was..it was kind of tenuous then. You know, the whites were together and the Blacks were together. And even though we were dancing with our significant others, at the time, it was still a division. And you could see it whites on one side, Blacks kind of on another side. That was... that was weird.
Pam Pepper, Class Of 1982: We had Blacks kids and white kids on the homecoming court, but no joint homecoming dance. After homecoming was over, all the white kids went to the garden or wherever we went. And the Blacks kids went to wherever they went. And we had separate homecoming dances, even though everybody had sat right there on the homecoming court together. After the senior play, my mom and dad wanted to do a cast party at our house. Van said something about he didn't think he was going to come. And I remember sort of having my feelings hurt. And he said, you know, "I don't know if my parents will let me, because if I'm over in the white neighborhood, my mother would be worried that I could be stopped or I could get in some sort of trouble."
Van Poindexter, Class Of 1982: It was just the way we thought. You can't go to white people's houses like that.
Pam Pepper, Class Of 1982: He said it and I thought, well no! You know, how could that be? It's just our neighborhood. It's just our house.
Van Poindexter, Class Of 1982: I'll be honest with you, we were just frightened of the trouble you could get into by going to a white person's house. You just... we just didn't do it. And I've heard stories, and you probably have too, that if you're around a white girl, you know, make sure you know your bearings, because if she cries anything untoward towards you, you're in trouble. She's right, you're wrong, you're in trouble. A Black guy and a white girl, just didn't happen here. It was not gonna happen. We learned to talk to each other in our safe school environment, but we never really took it to the next level... the next step, which was learning to deal with each other socially. It was still, the creek and the railroad track, dividing us.
Douglas A. Blackmon, Journalist, Vo: Those 12 years of school hadn't turned out exactly the way anyone predicted at the beginning, but the segregationists who said it would never work to put Black and white kids in the same school were proven wrong. The first harvest of all that effort, the Class of 1982, crossed the stage on commencement night and stepped out into the world black and white together.
Billy Barber, Class Of 1983: That was a milestone. Because we wanted equality.
Pam Pepper, Class Of 1982: Brown was supposed to get rid of the separate in separate but equal. And to an extent it did. We went to school together. For a long time, a lot of us went to school together. Some of us really liked it. I hope a lot of us really liked it.
Jessie King, Class Of 1982: 1982, integration was a reality. And then here come the children of integration who had to be taught about racial biases, had to be told about. We didn't know it. And thank God nobody really just drove it in. And you had a few, but you had more who were saying, "In Leland, it's time. It's time." And it really was time.
2012 LHS Graduation
Douglas A. Blackmon, Journalist, VO: As it turned out, I didn't get to be one of those graduates. My dad got a new job in another town, and my family moved there while I was still in high school. I went to college, became a journalist, even won a Pulitzer Prize. And for a long lost touch with most of my childhood friends. I imagined that progress in Leland would just keep going. It seemed like we in the town had done the hardest work. Three decades later, I decided to go back and watch another Leland High School graduation. The stage, the auditorium, and the excitement of the graduates all seemed the same as back in 1982.
2014 Leland High Graduation MC
Douglas A. Blackmon, Journalist, VO: But the classes looked very different than the one I'd been part of. And almost all the white kids were gone.
2014 Leland High Graduation MC: You may now turn your tassels.
Douglas A. Blackmon, Journalist, VO: It was almost as if everything from those remarkable years together earlier had never happened.
Brandon Taylor, Class Of 1982: Back when Doug and I were in school, we had a good mix. Now it's 90% Blacks. You know, maybe a little higher. There have been changes. A lot of people have, sent their, you know, kids to private schools.
Evelyn Gordon Murray, Class Of 1982: You don't have that many whites in Leland Public School District. A lot of the whites have moved out. If they come to the Leland Public School, they take their kids in the elementary part, and once they get past elementary, by the time they make it to junior high, they're gone to the private school.
Betty Coleman, Teacher: Some of the families are not pleased with what public schools are doing. Blacks and whites who want their children to be educated will seek other means. That's why you have Black academies. That's why you have Black students that are now going to what was previously all white academies. Even Blacks churches. Unity Church has its own school because of faith based money that's out there. And it's a sad statement.
Douglas A. Blackmon, Journalist, VO: In the decade after my class graduated, Leland's public schools performed well academically, a steady trickle of white students returned. And Leland Academy, the white private school, closed its doors. But that was an illusion. Most white families were gone forever. They still lived in Leland, but the hundreds of white students who left during integration and the brothers and sisters who came after almost all were sent to other private schools in nearby towns. Those schools eventually began accepting a few students who were not white. But the schools set up to preserve a segregated Mississippi had accomplished that mission.
Van Poindexter, Class Of 1982: Integration didn't stick the way we thought it was going to stick. We're segregated again. The thing that we have been fighting for years and years, we're there again. Now it's back to almost the way it was.
Douglas A. Blackmon, Journalist, VO: The failure to genuinely integrate public schools affected more than just what happened in kids classrooms. The dream had been to build a community of different kinds of people who could trust each other enough to work through the troubles that eventually hit every town. But that never really happened. And places like Leland had a lot of trouble to work through in the 1990s. Technology eliminated massive numbers of farm jobs, dramatic cuts to public education, the war on drugs. One store after another closing down in the center of town. It all took a terrible toll. Then in 1996, Leland was tested when a black TV repairman named Aaron White crashed his truck on Deer Creek Drive and tried to flee the scene. He exchanged gunfire with a white policeman named, Jackie Blaylock, a former Leland High School quarterback. White died from a gunshot wound to the head. Black residents erupted in days of angry protests. Hundreds of state troopers were called in to enforce a nightly curfew.
Cedric Bush, Class Of 1985 (Archival): We stood for something we believe in...
Douglas A. Blackmon, Journalist, VO: Cedric Bush one of my former schoolmates was one of the leaders of those protests. He was arrested for refusing to comply with the curfew.
Cedric Bush, Class Of 1985: There were a lot of questions behind the death of the young man, and the community thought we should have some more answers, or someone in leadership should come forth and tell us something. Tried to keep it hush hush. Lot of people were upset behind how that particular thing went down, and the only thing they were asking for, what was...was the investigation ongoing. Just tell us something.
Vernice Sanders, Parent And Activist: You know we just thought that this this man had been killed in cold blood. Leland has not been the same since.
Douglas A. Blackmon, Journalist, VO: In the end, an FBI investigation concluded that the bullet that killed Aaron White came from his own gun. Publicly, they said it was a tragic accident, but the possibility that a black man in Mississippi would kill himself rather than face a white policeman still haunts me. Leland was supposed to have been a town that had exorcised its racial demons. Or at least a lot of them. I began to wonder if failed school integration was as much a cornerstone of my hometown as segregation had been 50 years before.
Thoughts on integration
Van Poindexter, Class Of 1982: For us to still be fractured along racial lines, is heartbreaking.
Brabdon Taylor, Class Of 1982: A lot of very important people put their lives on the line to make sure that we would have and would see better days. And I don't think people think about that part of our history now. You know? That's something that should be near and dear to everybody's heart, you know, regardless of what color you are. I mean, because, that was a struggle, and it's a struggle now.
Pam Pepper, Class Of 1982: I don't know why resegregation is happening, but I can anticipate, or I can imagine, that part of it might be, that there are experiences that Black people have had that they feel like they can't really talk to white people about because there won't be any comprehension of a similar experience.
Jerald Jones Woolfolk, Class Of 1977: I think it's difficult for people to remember, because then they have to talk about it. You know? And that's a difficult conversation that... to have with each other and to have with a Black person. But.. and then perhaps.. as children they were shielded from some of that. I.. I have no idea. But.. But, I have talked with classmates who say... my classmates will say, "Oh! I'm so sorry that happened to you. I didn't know that was going on. So you didn't know why I was sitting up in the balcony? You know? You didn't know why we had to go through the side door, and we had... you didn't know any of that? Surely... you just..."
Douglas A. Blackmon, Journalist: We work hard to forget things. We.. it is a human instinct. And there are things that we don't want to remember that we end up not remembering. Or at least are able to pretend we don't remember for a really long time. And as hard as we work to forget, we have to work just as hard to remember.
Jerald Jones Woolfolk, Class Of 1977: It's a difficult conversation. But until we start having that... those difficult conversations, we're always going to be, you know, divided in some way. Because it has to be reconciled. My truth has to be reconciled with your truth.
Bryan Blackmon, Class Of 1979: It's hard to believe that things wouldn't be better if there were certainly people with a more openness to accept people for who they are. And I do think that much of that in me came from the time I was in public schools.
Lincoln Coggins, Class Of 1982: Maybe I didn't see that bigger picture that I see now. Maybe I didn't see that. But I do think that I saw a glimpse of it. And so what if some of us... more of us had stayed around. Would it be the same?
Pam Pepper, Class Of 1982: Was it a reasonable expectation to believe putting innocent little kids of one race and innocent little kids of another in school together, and everything would be fine? The everything would be fine part I think is unreasonable. But I still think... I still believe... that... it's really hard to hate somebody who you know. It's really hard to hate somebody who is smarter than you in math and they're willing to sit with you for fifteen minutes and help you with it. So... was it perfect? Did it solve the world's problems? Was it reasonable to expect that that was the only piece? No. But was there some...some kernel of reason to the thought of, look if you could just sit down next to each other and see. I think that was reasonable.
Donald Richardson, Class Of 1982: Integration in its purest form, it dispels stereotype and it helps with prejudice. We are all prejudiced. We just have to figure out a way to move forward together. And to make sure that everyone has a piece of the pie. And a level playing field to set our tables on, to eat our pie.
Police Fundraiser
Douglas A. Blackmon, Journalist, VO: After I started returning to Leland, I discovered that many of my former classmates started coming home to Leland. Billy Barber came back to Leland to be chief of police.
Roy Meeks: Doug said he went to school with everybody. Jessie King, you...
Billy Barber, Class Of 1983: That's right we all went to school together.
Billy in his office
Billy Barber, Class Of 1983: After college, I left Leland. I really felt like I was going to do ten years, in law enforcement, and get out. But it kept tugging at me that Leland needed some leadership in law enforcement. Not to say that I was -- that I am the best. But I know the Lord telling me to go back home, to help home out. Brandon and Cedric and Evelyn Gordon told me, said come on back, come home. I'm still here. And I just think this is where the Lord wanted me to be.
Douglas A. Blackmon, Journalist, VO: And I found out that on his weekends, Billy Barber has another calling.
Zion Church
Billy Barber, Class Of 1983: Being a police chief is actually not much different from being a pastor. You have the same love. And my love is for the citizens to keep them safe, and as a pastor, always just having the love of god, and to love people, and to treat people right and treat people with respect and to try to make the community better.
LHS Football Game
Cedric Bush, Class of 1985 (At Game): This is where it counts to play 4 quarters of football, and I guarantee we'll do what we need to do to play next week! Play your hearts out!
Douglas A. Blackmon, Journalist, VO: Cedric Bush had been a football superstar in high school, the kind of young athlete who actually had a shot at playing professional football.
Cedric Bush in the courtroom
Cedric Bush, Class Of 1985: You know, I thought about a conversation with one of my professors. And... and he had asked the question... He said, "What do you plan to do once your done with college?" And I said, "Oh man I'm going to the pros, I'm gonna do this I'm gonna do that, and buy my dad a truck, buy my momma house..." He said, "Yeah, but what if that doesn't work out." I said, "What do you mean if it doesn't work out? You know I'm good, I'm gonna make it." He said, "Listen, your parents sent you to school to get an education. When you get the education, you're supposed to get the knowledge and take it back home to help build your community." Now I never heard that before in my life. He gave me the greatest tool that I could ever hear as a young man. I end up coming home. I went to the school system to coach and teach.
LHS Football Game
Football Announcer: Touchdown!
CEDRIC BUSH, CLASS OF 1985: And then I began my political career. And ran for the city council. I served one term. Now, serving as a justice court judge, you do more help to people than harm to people. Some people just need a second chance. And that's who I am and that's the role I play in coming back home to help my community.
Bush's Kountry Cafe
Douglas A. Blackmon, Journalist, VO: Cedric and his wife also went into business taking over the old Leland Cafe. They now run the restaurant that wouldn't have let their parents enter through the front door. They also started a funeral home at the center of Leland's downtown. And in the same building were the segregated Rex Theater had once operated.
Funeral Home
Cedric Bush, Class Of Class Of 1985 (At Funeral Home): To be proud owners of this particular building, knowing the history behind it, you can't beat it... you can't beat it.
School Board Meeting
Douglas A. Blackmon, Journalist, VO: Brandon Taylor and Evelyn Gordon Murry were elected to the school board. She has served more than ten years. Brandon is the president of the board.
Brandon Taylor, Class Of 1982: I played basketball in Baylor and then I went across seas to Germany. I could've stayed across seas and played in other countries, but I love, you know, small town feel, small town atmosphere. There's nothing like being at home. What made me decide to run for the school board? My love for the kids. I want to make sure the children have someone fighting for them every day.
Evelyn Gordon - Murray, School Board Member: I would like to see our school back like it used to be. If we had more whites in our school, you would have the backing of the community.
Bond Vote Meeting
Man at Meeting: The stadium you see..
Douglas A. Blackmon, Journalist, VO: A few years later, after an unexpected drop in the performance of Leland schools and a succession of superintendents who struggled to turn the system around...
Jessie King, Class Of 1982 (at meeting): And all great ideas we welcome...
Douglas A. Blackmon, Journalist, VO: The board hired another of our classmates, Jesse King, to be school superintendent. In the years since then, student scores in Leland have improved dramatically.
Jessie at School
Jessie King, Class Of 1982 (Interview): When I was a teacher, a former superintendent said, "Jessie what do you want to do, in life? What would be your dream job?" I said to the superintendent, "To have your job." And, the Superintendent smiled and he said, "You can have it someday." And someday came. I've been the superintendent of the Leland School District since February of 2016.
Jessie King, Class Of 1982 (At Leland Elementary): Good morning.
Class: Good morning!
Jessie King, Class Of 1982: I just wanted to stop in and see how learning is progressing.
Jessie King, Class Of 1982: That first year, I walked into some situations that, I just did not know existed in the school district. The technology was not here. The libraries did not have current books. And so we had a lot of challenges. And our kids deserve better, our kids should have better, and our community, I hope, will help us to make it better.
Jessie King, Class Of 1982 (in hallway): Hello, how are you?
Doug at Strike City
Douglas A. Blackmon, Journalist, VO: For reasons I've never entirely understood, giving that little speech about Strike City to the Lions Club long ago seemed to connect me to that place forever. I remained fascinated with the people there even decades after I no longer lived in Mississippi. I visited more than once over the years. And in the 1990s, I took a cameraman along and did one of the last interviews with John Henry Sylvester, the leader of the walkout, a few years before he passed away.
John Henry Sylvester, Strike City Leader: And then we went on strike with him that day, he put us all off the place....
Douglas A. Blackmon, Journalist, VO: I was struck by their determination and bravery, basically still on strike 30 years after the day they walked off that farm. But Strike City was also crumbling by then. Some of the houses had burned or been abandoned. The painted sign with Black and white hands clasped in unity, had fallen long ago. The original plans to make bricks--to create an economy separate from white control--were all abandoned. I wasn't sure what to make of it all.
Minnie Bell (archival): No matter how long it takes...
Douglas A. Blackmon, Journalist: That's your voice isn't it?
Minnie Bell: Yeah that's it... Say he may not come when you want him but he's right on time...You can't hurry God...
Jessie En Route to Strike City
Douglas A. Blackmon, Journalist, VO: I also realized among the many things I never knew about my Black classmates when we were kids, was that Jesse King and Billy Barber both had deep connections to Strike City.
Jessie King, Class Of 1982 (in Car To Strike City): This is the place that I went to Headstart, which was very popular for low income children going into public schools. This is Strike City here. It used to be very vibrant. A lot of the buildings are gone now, but a few are still standing.
Jessie at Strike City
Jessie King, Class Of 1982 (At Strike City): It was a classroom space, it was a dining hall, lunchroom... It was a huge playground here for us where we did not have the luxry on the plantations. I remember very vividly, you would only have standing room. Kids were everywhere. Teachers were everywhere. Once you became a teacher at Headstart, it was like you had really struck oil. I think about the people who actually came from the plantations. Sharecropping no longer existed. So we had the gardens up there with greens and vegetables and crops. If you pitched in, you'd get an opportunity to get some of the vegetables. Even when you didn't pitch in, the kindness of the spirit would be, pitch in next time. Strike City symbolized a step up for African-Americans. And it gave motivation and encouragement, that this may be the first step, but it was a huge step in the right direction.
Jessie & Doug Walking through Strike City
Doug Blackmon, Journalist (Walking At Strike City): You know, I have I have... I'm not exaggerating this... In just the last few minutes of listening to you, I've had a little epiphany.
Jessie King, Class of 1982 (Walking At Strike City): Mm hmm.
Douglas A. Blackmon, Journalist: You could look at Strike City and say, well, you know, it was a good thing to go on strike, and they were right, but it didn't work. You know, you can say that. But the truth is it did work. And the story you're telling is because it just worked in this different way, the store and the and the women who had been working in houses becoming teachers and, you know, all the things that you're talking about.You're going to get you be emotional. I have I've always known in my heart that this was a story of a great success, but I couldn't quite put it together until I was listening to you just now.
Jessie King, Class Of 1982: Yeah, it really is. If this had not existed, living where we lived, we only saw what we saw. And just getting out of that gave us another target to improve, to advance, and to move forward. I think about my mom, who made the bold assertion, enough is enough and we're leaving. We're leaving. If she never decided to do that, we would not have had choice. I never would have made it to superintendent.
Douglas A. Blackmon, Journalist: Yeah no! You would not be here. You would not... You would not be doing the good things you're doing now, which are a version of the same thing. Of looking out for each other.
Jessie King, Class Of 1982: It planted the seed. Not just in education, but law enforcement with Billy Barber and all of those who may have come this way.
Douglas A. Blackmon, Journalist: That's exactly right.
Jessie King, Class Of 1982: Mm hmm.
Where the Kids are now
Van Poindexter, Class Of 1982: I spent all total 20 years and 10 months in the air force. I retired in 2007 as a lieutenant colonel. Now I'm a professor at Defense Acquisition University.
Pam Pepper, Class Of 1982: I am a United States District Court judge for the Eastern District of Wisconsin which is in Milwaukee.
Donald Richardson, Class Of 1982: I live in Little Rock Arkansas, I'm an assistant principal, at the famous and historic Little Rock Central High School.
Jerald Jones Woolfolk, Class Of 1977: I am the president of Lincoln University in Jefferson City, MO.
Douglas A. Blackmon, Journalist: Doesn't that sound cool to say?
Jerald Jones Woolfolk, Class Of 1977: Yeah that sounds pretty cool. Not bad for a little girl from Leland...
