I posted two other reminiscences of growing up in the South in the years before the Brown decision was implemented. I reiterate that I am not suggesting that there is less segregation today than there was in the 1950s; there may be even more. But so much was qualitatively different, and I find it valuable to recall what the qualitative differences were. There were no black mayors or Congressmen, no blacks on television or in the films. All public (and private) facilities in the South were segregated. I could go on, but I’ll save that for another time.
| My take on segregation comes from being an English child brought to America to escape WW!!. Fourth grade in the Aiken, S. C. public school was about 2 years behind my London County Council school near Edgeware Road. No, I was the right color. I just sounded funny and that made me a pariah. I was not aware of the color line until my parents allowed me to visit the Aiken jail in the company of their friend the chief of police. The black prisoners were kept in an unconditioned ‘trailer’ 3 bunks high in back of the station, and I remember when chief opened the door, black faces stared down at me, waved and said, “How-ya doing little girl?” The chief had a black woman who did all the cooking and cleaning, and who went into the back yard to catch a chicken and prepare it for Sunday supper. I was told that Saturday night was the night on the town for the ‘coloureds’. The movies were segregated with black audiences seated in the balcony, and the local Baptist church was all white and all ‘ Christian.’ A polio scare that spring shut the school down to my everlasting thanks, and my Father’s employer escaped Aiken for his penthouse in New York City. I felt even as a child that I could breathe again, to be accepted, and to live where many nationalities and races mingled. I cannot compare my experience with Jim Crow South to the black experience. That would be insulting. But having had a small whiff of that corruption, I think America has much to atone for, to correct, and finally to ask forgiveness.
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Diane Ravitch's blog 
I weep for our nation!
I well remember the segregated theaters. Birmingham had 3, the Melba, the Empire, and the very grand Alabama. The first two had “Colored Balconies” There was a door to the side of the main door that said just that. The Alabama was totally segregated and where kids went monthly to see a serial, cartoons, newsreel, a movie, and a chance to win door prizes if they put at least a quarter in their savings account at the Guaranty Savings Bank. Of course they meant only white children.
I asked my mother why the colored children were allowed to go to the Empire and the Melba, but not the Alabama. She said they would throw popcorn off the balcony. Mama always had an answer that justified segregation and does to this day. I wanted to ask why they would have to sit in the balcony, but I was a well-behaved child. She would have given the same answer, “They’re colored” as she always gave to my racial questions. These theaters were right down the street from the Woolworths where Dr. King held his sit-ins and where I did my childhood Christmas shopping.
When I moved to Atlanta in 1975 I still saw remnants of the signs that said “Colored Balcony” at the theaters there even though that type of segregation was gone and we had a black mayor, Maynard Jackson, I believe.
I remember the day that the poor kids showed up at our school. It was in 1964.
Classes had already started, and I was in second grade, surrounded by my familiar friends from my mostly white, mostly well-to-do, suburban neighborhood in North Dallas.
Their bus showed up after the last bell had rung. That in itself was a little odd because most of us walked, biked, or were driven to school by parents.
Looking down from our classroom widows, we watched the kids file off the bus and trudge up the sidewalk — a mixed group of younger and older, mostly black, some brown, a few white.
Two girls seated next to me pointed and giggled about something. Then Mrs. Bowman called us back to attention.
Minutes later, three of the new students were escorted into our class by the school secretary. One girl, Brenda was her name, wasn’t wearing any shoes. And there was mud smeared on her leg. “Class,” Mrs. Bowman announced. “Please welcome your new classmates.”
It wasn’t like we hadn’t been told this was going to happen. At an assembly the previous week, Mr. Abbott, the principal, had introduced us to the term “Affirmative Action.” And we were told that students from another school — a place I knew mostly as being “in the sticks” — were going to be “integrated” with our school.
But the awkwardness of the day was unavoidable. Because that’s how it usually is when poverty is introduced into the world of the better-off. Isn’t it? A sort of public shaming. Especially for schoolchildren.
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