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Moving from Vermont to Virginia at age 17, back in the sixties, was like suddenly being teleported to an alien planet.
My parents had rented a house for a year in Highland Springs, just outside of Richmond, to give them time to search for a permanent home. The day after we moved in, our next-door neighbor—a pleasant young man with a blond buzz cut, a police cadet—moved out and the FBI and the State Troopers promptly showed up to go through the house. He was, it turned out, a violent white supremacist and there were slogans and symbols painted on all the interior walls, and that’s all we ever learned. Friday and Saturday nights, moonshiners of violent repute sold cheap hootch to broken-down alkies in a patch of scrub woods not two blocks away. Some of my new friends paid a visit to a radical rightwing Mom & Pop store and brought back Minuteman stickers and anti-Catholic newspapers for me.
I was a Catholic. It had never occurred to me that there were people who would like nothing better than to kill me for that.
And then there was race.
Back in Winooski High, there were roughly two hundred students. Only two of them were Black because there was only one Black family in Winooski and they only had two kids. Vermont was very white back then. But in Highland Springs High School, there were something like six hundred students. It had just six Black students and those only because the school was under a court order to integrate. Exactly one percent in each case, but for very different reasons.
I never did get to know either of the two Black students in Winooski. They were extremely popular, and it was hard to get anywhere near them. But in Virginia I did become friends with one-sixth of the school’s nonwhite population. His name was Ron and I quite liked him. He was smart, forthright, optimistic, and when the two of us competed for the same summer job at the weather station at the airport, he won. It was a close thing. But he was just a little overall better than me.
Then, on Thursday, April 4th 1968, a gunman named James Earl Ray assassinated Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
My friends Daphne and Robert were out bowling that evening, when the news was patched into the intercom system. Everybody but they two cheered. Then one man began to sing God Bless America and all the rest joined in. Robert hustled Daphne outside. She barely made it into the parking lot before throwing up.
Things were pretty solemn at school the next day. All I remember of that, other than Daphne’s story, was that at the end of classes, I casually said, “See you on Monday,” to Ron.
“Oh, I won’t be here Monday,” he said. “I’ll be in jail.”
“What?!”
“All of us are going to riot this weekend. It’s the only thing we can do to make ourselves heard. The police will arrest everyone. So I’m not sure exactly when I’ll be back.”
Ron said that so casually, as if it were the most normal thing in the world.
And when I came back to school on Monday morning, for the first time in my life I was attending an all-white high school.
Above: The image of the old Highland Springs High School building was taken from the Richmond Times-Dispatch. I'm sure the new building is much better integrated than the old one was when I was a senior there.
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2 comments:
I attended a Catholic highschool in Norfolk, Virginia. Norfolk Catholic Highschool had six blacks, one Cuban, and one Puerto Rican. I was the Puerto Rican. When Martin Luther King was assassinated I went to school very sad and with the intention of expressing my solidarity with the six black students. Instead I got into a fist fight with some white students, who had been my friends, but they were celebrating King's death an calling me a "n**** lover". I went home early that day, cutting all my classes, with a cut lip and a bruised face.
I hardly have the words to respond to that, Daniel. A terrible way to learn something awful about your friends. My heart goes out to your younger self.
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