A reader writes about growing up in the South. She brings back memories to me of growing up in Houston when it was segregated:
I don’t think PUBLIC schools should be catering to one ethnic or religious group either and I don’t think that schools that do so should receive public money. I grew up under segregation. My high school integrated when I was in the 11th grade. The chemistry teacher asked if I minded being lab partners with “the colored girl”. I was never a racist, even having grown up in Birmingham, so of course I didn’t mind and Portia Montgomery and I screwed up our lab experiments all year.
I can see why certain religious or ethnic groups with non-mainstream practices might want to have their own schools. I don’t have a problem with that as long as we don’t pay for it. There was a Hebrew School in Atlanta where many Orthodox and Ultra-Orthodox Jewish children attended. Many lived in the neighborhood around their school and synagogue They wore their special clothing and curled sideburns and hats. They did not have school on Fridays because of the Sabbath. I understood that as well as the Kroger grocery with its separation of foods, separate kosher meat department, rabbi butcher, and huge, about 1/3 of the store, Jewish section. The store was also decorated for Hannukah instead of Christmas and their school choir sang Hannukah carols at the store. My tax money did not go to any of it. It was fine.
What I cannot see is public schools bowing down to the needs of the religious right or even recognizing particular races or religious groups exclusively or nearly so. Sometimes it was difficult in my early years in Atlanta Public Schools which, at the time were 90% black for students and 75% for faculty. There was discrimination against everyone else. A principal at one middle school made several stereotyped remarks against me as a white person and eventually got rid of me for teaching while white. She also ran off ALL her white students who were not special ed. She had her eye on one of mine but did not realize he was biracial. The schools were extremely Afro-centric, at least the ones where I was. But because I was only at two where there was a problem with racism towards me and because I was liberal, flexible, older, special ed., and married to a black guy, it did not really bother me. And I learned a whole lot of black history.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Every life that spanned those times is so specific, but we always talk about them in huge generalizations.
Segregation was my silly mother’s excuse to baptize us Catholic in Atlanta in 1954, when my older brother was ready to start first grade. Did y’all know that the Catholic schools were already desegregated, all that time? New Orleans was the only specific date I could find, just now. It was desegregated in 1948, the year before I was born.
When We lived in San Antonio, we attended Our Lady of Sorrows, where we were a minority. My daddy had died, his military life-insurance was tangled up in paperwork for years, and he had set up his meager NCO pension allotment to give a share to his mother and his many young siblings, back in Florida. My mom worked off our tuition as a crossing guard. Our landlady, Mrs. Morales, was always claiming she’d cooked too much, and brought us nutritious and delightful combinations of cornmeal, beans, and every possible local vegetable. There’s so much I could say about the intelligent, creative, and devoted polylingual women who taught me. Oh, my God. I just this second realized, that’s what I’ve always expected of myself as a teacher.
And I was in eighth grade at Everett Junior High School in Panama City, Florida, the year it accepted its first black students. I can’t even begin to convey all that. We should all write memoirs, or even novels, so history will know.
Each of us who grew up in those momentous decades has a different and specific historical context, depending on our birth year, city, economic level, and the racial identities of our own families. You who aren’t “baby boomers”, stop a minute and realize what Linda Brown’s victory over the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, meant to the other little girls of her generation. We lived it from the inside out, as children, while the fabric of our own selves was being woven.
Injustice and division seem overwhelming, but look around, inside and out, and realize the majesty of what we did accomplish, and what we are. Whatever happens to our children is happening to OUR children.
We are one people.
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