Reality TV about race in America
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Booker T. Washington High School graduates in Memphis, Tenn., celebrate Monday before receiving their diplomas from President Barack Obama. The first black president said "nothing about the de facto segregation of the public school graduates sitting in front of him."
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It turned out to be a remarkable variation on reality TV.
First, on Monday afternoon, President Barack Obama addressed the graduating class of Booker T. Washington High School in Memphis with a message of hope, encouragement and optimism.
Then, that evening, WQED-TV and other PBS stations broadcast the American Experience documentary "Freedom Riders," a riveting 50th-anniversary account of black and white American teenagers and young adults riding buses into the South in May 1961 to break the back of Jim Crow segregation.
As MSNBC cameras panned the audience at the Booker T. Washington graduation ceremony, they took in a sea of black faces listening raptly to a black president. The only white faces visible were those of the press corps and Secret Service. It was a scene not much different from that experienced by my mother when she graduated from the legally segregated Booker T. Washington High School in 1940.
Every member of both sides of my family born in the first quarter of the 20th century attended Booker T. Washington. It may not have been the only high school for blacks in Jim Crow Memphis, but it was the one attended by everyone I know of from that generation who was black and went to high school in Shelby County, Tenn.
My intellectually gifted but impoverished mother never tired of speaking about her years at Booker T. Washington. During our childhood, my sister, brothers and I listened to accounts of her classroom victories over physics, history, long passages of Wordsworth and Julius Caesar -- in both Latin and English. The curriculum was rigorous and, in the parlance of the day, Negro was the race of all of her classmates, administrators and teachers. Of the latter, her favorite was the gifted English teacher and renowned Baptist hymn composer Lucie Campbell.
The Hill side of the family, on the other hand, were of some means, and my aunt drove to Booker T. Washington in a nice car, giving rides to kids who, like my mother, were less fortunate. The Hill siblings, including my father, graduated in the 1930s.
In 1954, 14 years after my mother graduated from Booker T. Washington, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the Southern and border states practice of segregating public school children by race. In a later ruling, the court ordered that integration be achieved not by a specific deadline but with "all deliberate speed."
First Published May 19, 2011 12:00 am
