A New Day in the Delta: Inventing School Desegregation as You Go - Hardcover

Beckwith, David W.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0817316337 ISBN 13: 9780817316334

Verlag: UNIV OF ALABAMA PR, 2009

Inhaltsangabe

Explores Mississippi’s school desegregation from the viewpoint of a white teacher
 
A New Day in the Delta is a fresh and appealing memoir of the experience of a young white college graduate in need of a job as the Vietnam War reached its zenith. David Beckwith applied and was accepted for a teaching position in the Mississippi Delta in the summer of 1969. Although it seemed to him a bit strange that he was accepted so quickly for this job while his other applications went nowhere, he was grateful for the opportunity. Beckwith reported for work to learn that he was to be assigned to an all-black school as the first step in Mississippi’s long-deferred school desegregation.
 
The nation and Mississippi alike were being transformed by war and evolving racial relations, and Beckwith found himself on the cutting edge of the transformation of American education and society in one of the most resistant (and poor) corners of the country. Beckwith’s revealing and often amusing story of the year of mutual incomprehension between an inexperienced white teacher and a classroom full of black children who had had minimal contact with any whites. This is history as it was experienced by those who were thrust into another sort of “front line.”
 

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

David W. Beckwith retired as a Senior Vice President from Morgan Stanley after forty years in the business. He is coauthor of the Will and Betsy Black adventure series. He currently writes a syndicated book review column and is adjunct finance professor for multiple colleges. He resides in Little Torch Key, Florida.
 

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A New Day in the Delta

Inventing School Desegregation As You GoBy David W. Beckwith

THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS

Copyright © 2009 The University of Alabama Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8173-1633-4

Chapter One

The day had started badly. Most of my days recently seemed to start badly. Each began with a series of skirmishes that more often than not escalated into battles which then, if not checked, became mini-wars. There was seldom a clear-cut victory in these conflicts. Things sure had changed since I was a student, I mused. My teachers weren't always respected, but, by God, they ruled. They were the lords; we students were the serfs. My secret thoughts of rebellion had always been fleeting and had never been verbalized. After all, my mama didn't raise a fool.

My attention returned to the present and the skirmish at hand.

"Ain't nothin' you got to say that I need to hear. Nothin' I ain't heard umpteen jillion times before," Fisheye grunted petulantly. "Near as I can tell, nothin' in this school ever helped me with anythin' that counts."

What had begun as a well-intentioned counseling session had quickly deteriorated into a standoff. Fisheye had drawn a line in the sand and dared me to cross it. Others in this seventh grade class had drawn this line—for the most part, silently. Less shy than others in expressing his disillusionment with a system he felt was without practical value to him, Fisheye also enjoyed the rapt attention his behavior brought him.

I wasn't supposed to call him by his nickname, despite the fact that few in the school would recognize Fisheye's real name. "Eugene," I began, "if you spent half as much time trying to get to the eighth grade as you do on extracurricular activities—"

Dismissing me as irrelevant, he turned his head and looked out the window.

As I mulled over what I could say to Fisheye that would make any difference, my mind drifted back a few months—which already seemed like an eternity—to before I had ever heard of Abraham Lincoln Attendance Center. I recalled standing outside Connor Hall on the Ole Miss campus and yelling "Glory Hallelujah!" at the thought that I had taken my final exam and, after graduation, would embark on an exciting new life.

This was the new life, all right, but not the Leave It To Beaver one I'd left behind. The realities of Lincoln were a far cry from my WASP existence that, up to now, had been my only point of reference: two parents, a comfortable home in a middle-class, all-white neighborhood, a segregated high school. My security had been overseen by our cocker spaniel, my probity assured by attendance at our Methodist church each Sunday.

My mother was co-owner with my dad of J. G. Lusk & Company, which specialized in brokering cash commodities, primarily cotton seed and soybean products. The cash commodity business at that time was a male-dominated industry, and my mother enjoyed the status of being one of the first females in the trade.

My parents were both native Mississippians—my mother from Collins in south Mississippi, my father a Greenville native. Constancy is common in the Delta. My father was born in King's Daughters Hospital, the same hospital where my younger brother, Bill, and I were born. Some of my teachers had been my father's as well. His family had been old Greenville middle class. Though never wealthy, they had always been respectable. He had been raised by a prematurely widowed mom who was a well-established local seamstress. Nana, as we called her, lived in the old downtown section of Greenville, one block from the levee. The black section of town was less than a mile away. Blacks frequently walked past Nana's house on Central Avenue, more often than not to shop at the Chinese grocer down the block from her house. It certainly never occurred to me that they might have entertained even a passing thought of living there.

You qualified as being old Greenville if your forebears had lived there before the flood. All my life I had heard the stories of the infamous 1927 flood and how Nana had allowed a black preteen, Kitty, to evacuate with the family. Kitty, when she herself had grown old, returned to pay her respects and attend Nana's wake when Nana died at age ninety-six.

I reviewed the incident that had triggered the confrontation with Fisheye. At the back of my classroom, before class started, Fisheye had been dealing out ice cream sandwiches he'd bought at Jones Grocery. He wasn't doing this out of the goodness of his heart but was demanding the recipients' lunch money in exchange. The ice cream was beginning to melt, and it was imperative that he get rid of the stuff. His entrepreneurship also extended to dill pickles, which he had stuffed into his socks.

Is this how Cornelius Vanderbilt got started? I wondered. Is this what my four-year college degree has gotten me? Have I become Lincoln's Dick Tracy—my specialty being bringing to justice teenage culprits who sold ice cream sandwiches and pickles in school?

I enjoyed college, and getting an advanced degree had always appealed to me. I knew, however, that if I pursued further education, most of the financial burden would be mine, since my parents still had my younger brother to educate. So barring getting drafted for the Vietnam War, as many of my contemporaries had been, my only option was to get a job and save my money.

In an optimistic frame of mind, I had sent out twenty résumés with high hopes that several acceptances would show up in a short period of time. Instead, in reply I received twenty form letters which were brief and to the point: "Thank you for thinking of us. At the present time we have no openings, but please try us again in the future." What's the matter with these people? Don't they realize I'm a college graduate? Hadn't my father told me since I was a small child that if I got a college degree, doors would open for me that had been closed to him because he didn't have one?

It was now July 28, 1969. Bill and I were home: Mom and Dad had gone to the lodge for a Masonic–Eastern Star function. My brother, a budding artist, sat in the den with a sketch pad on his lap while listening to the evening news on TV. As usual, when he had a few moments free, he sketched whatever crossed his line of vision. This time it happened to be our grandfather's shotgun, which Daddy had hung on a wall of the den.

I sat at the dining room table typing up résumé number twenty-one on Mama's manual Smith-Corona. To this point, the résumés sent to Fortune 500 companies had met with a dismal reception. I considered this résumé, sent to the superintendent of schools in Leland, Mississippi, inquiring about a teaching position, my last resort. Leland was just down the road from my hometown of Greenville. I reasoned that since I planned, somehow, to go back to the university for an advanced degree, staying in the education field would be a good idea.

As I typed the address on the envelope, I could hear the evening news from the den. The Huntley-Brinkley nightly news was detailing the big events of the day. Neil Armstrong's spectacular walk on the moon had replaced Ted Kennedy and Mary Jo Kopechne's plunge off the Chappaquiddick Bridge. "I bet Senator Kennedy won't hesitate to vote for NASA's next appropriation," I called to Bill, "now that Neil Armstrong's adventure bumped his catastrophe off the news."

The Kennedys hadn't been popular with most white adult Mississippians after Jack and Bobby spearheaded the federal government's efforts in 1962 to integrate the...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: UNIV OF ALABAMA PR
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2009
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0817316337
• ISBN 13: 9780817316334
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 284
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar