She’d Segregated Me Within Her Classroom

Margaret McMullan
Spann Elementary, Jackson, Mississippi 1967-1969
Lake Forest High School, Class of 1978
Lake Forest, Illinois

(The names in this essay have been changed.)

Miss G welcomed us to our first day of second grade at Spann Elementary, a newly integrated public school in Jackson, Mississippi. This was 1967. I was seven and white. My sister was two grades ahead of me, somewhere else in the school.

Miss G had salt and pepper hair done up into what looked like a pith helmet.

“Michael?” she said, reading from the list of names in her green attendance book. Miss G looked at the boy coming in late, taking a seat next to me. For the first time, I was sitting in school next to a black boy my age.

“You’re late,” Miss G said, pointing to the ping pong paddle hanging on a hook near her desk at the front of the room. The paddle had holes to make it go faster and hit harder. At St. Richard’s, the Catholic school where I went to first grade, the nuns spanked but I don’t recall a method. I do remember one nun plucking single hairs from the top of a boy’s crew cut as punishment, for what, I don’t know.

“Don’t be late,” Miss G said.

Michael was often late, and each time he was, Miss G invited him to the front of the classroom, unhooked the paddle, held his wrist, and paddled him. Hard. He never cried.

Michael hardly ever said a word in class or to me, but somehow, we became friends, sitting beside each other in class, playing together at recess, and once, riding on the bus to the Bunny Bread factory.

Miss G was particularly hard on Michael and the one or two other black children in my class that year. She would ask them to come to the front and solve difficult math problems on the board, clucking at any mistake. Then she invited a white child to come to the board, with the instructions, Erase and correct. I don’t recall Miss G ever paddling white children. I don’t recall ever seeing Miss G. smile either.

I don’t know why my parents switched us out of St. Richard’s and into Spann, but I did have a feeling we were part of some experiment. Spann was closer to our house, so we could walk to school. My father might have been creeped out by the priests and the nuns and the spectacle of Catholicism. My parents were quietly progressive, though they would never have described themselves that way. My father was from Lake, Mississippi, graduated from the University of Mississippi, and worked at Merrill Lynch at the time. He was a Deacon and Sunday School teacher at Covenant Presbyterian Church. My mother graduated from Trinity College and Johns Hopkins University, and taught history at Millsaps College.

The U.S. Supreme Court had already declared that segregated schools were unconstitutional, but Mississippi resisted the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling. In the early 1960s, Jackson schools were segregated no matter where children lived. Under the Jim Crow “separate but equal” laws, all-white schools received more tax payer money for new books, after-school programs, school lunches, sports equipment, and higher-paid teachers. The all-black schools had few of these “extras.” Consequently, white students received a better education.

Even at seven, I was aware of the violence. I knew about the KKK burning crosses and African-American churches. I knew that our President, John F. Kennedy had been shot dead. I knew that a black man named James Meredith had graduated from the University of Mississippi, and that it had required nearly an army to keep him safe. I knew about the bomb thrown into a black church in Birmingham, Alabama, killing four little girls attending Sunday school. One was my age, and had been identified by her shoes.

My mother had the talk with me early on one morning before school.
“Don’t talk to anyone about religion or politics,” she said as she helped me put on socks.

“Why?” I asked, fastening my new school shoes.
“Because it’s dangerous and they don’t like Catholics here,” she said. My mother was an expert at keeping secrets to survive. She fled Nazi-occupied Vienna when she was nine, and later, she worked for the CIA.

That year in Miss G’s class, Michael and I learned fractions and cursive writing sitting next to each other. I don’t remember much, but I recall Dairy Day when we both tried cottage cheese and strawberry yogurt for the first time. When the recess bell rang, Michael and I were the first ones out the door. His sisters taught me double Dutch. Sometimes, we played freeze tag. Mostly we ran.

Miss G never asked me about my politics or my religion, but I remember she told the class that Kennedy was Catholic, not Christian.

I think now of the insane incongruity of those days. Most mornings I watched Miss G spank Michael. Then I went home to play with my white friends in my white neighborhood while housekeepers who were black prepared our suppers. We wore short-sets, watched “Lost in Space,” and roller skated up and down the street collecting cicada shells in Mason jars. We ate fish sticks and read comic books, paying close attention to white superheroes with capes that helped them fly, not away from, but towards danger. Around supper, when our parents called, we chased after the “Mosquito Truck,” dancing around in poison clouds of insecticide.

My parents got most of their news from newspapers and Life Magazine which often lay open near board games called Sorry, Trouble and Clue. Once, my friend Stacy came over and flipped through an issue of Life with black and white photographs of policemen spraying black protesters with water hoses. Stacy said, it looked like they were having fun. I looked closer at the pictures and said, no, they’re screaming. They’re not smiling and they’re not having fun. I wondered how Stacy could say what she said. We were both looking at the same pictures.

I did not know then what I know now. People see what they want to see, even when the facts in black and white are right there in front of them.
The world changing was changing Mississippi. Language changed, too. Some of my relatives whispered “colored.” Others said “Negro.” Miss G said “Nigra,” a word uncomfortably close to the n-word, which we were not allowed to say.
I didn’t know why black and white protestors marched in the streets holding signs or why they had sit-ins at lunch counters, but I suspected it had something to do with me sitting next to Michael. When I finally asked, “Why are people protesting?” my mother said because they have the right to protest and my father said because black people want the same opportunities as white people, and they are not getting that. I looked through those Life magazine photographs again. People of all backgrounds and colors wanted to sit, eat, read, learn, study, work, shop, and swim where they wanted. They wanted to live in freedom in America, the land of the free.

That Spring my grandfather visited on a book tour for his new memoir. He’d returned to Austria in the late 1950’s to teach as a professor at the University of Vienna. I stuttered when I tried to talk to him. He admired how lush and green Mississippi was, and when I showed him my father’s stuffed alligator, I felt he was suggesting something more when he said that our state was “positively primordial.”

He had been to Jackson before in 1964, and spoke at the Jackson Kiwanis club. My grandfather was an historian. Russia was still the enemy, and he talked about how the KGB used America’s Civil Rights and race problems as propaganda against us: See? The United States is divided. They can’t even treat their black citizens fairly.

On this trip my parents gave a party. People ate boiled shrimp and smoked cigarettes standing in our living room while my father stacked the record player with our favorite albums: Judy Collins, Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Johnnie Cash, Pete Seeger. We went to bed humming.

Deep in my heart, I do believe. We shall overcome someday.
Driving to the airport, my grandfather asked me about my new school and desegregation. I didn’t stutter, and I told him about Michael and Miss G as we parked and walked toward his gate. Before he left, perhaps to reassure me, he said, “School is something to survive.”

Interesting advice, which I now wish I had passed on to Michael.

That fall, when I started third grade at Spann, Michael wasn’t there. Was he not going to school because he didn’t want to be beaten anymore? Had his family moved? I never found out.

In my new classroom, I sat beside Emily, a tall black girl. Emily wore pale dresses that tied into bows in the back. She was powerful in her silence and her two front teeth fell naturally over her lower lip when she concentrated. Emily and I stayed together, pushing our desks closer, so that by the end of the day, they touched. The next morning, the desks would be separated, and we’d start all over.

When Miss P was not looking, we drew in the corner of the chalkboard and sucked on saltines I kept in a sleeve inside my desk. We colored our suns purple and our people way outside their bold black lines. When Miss P caught us doing something she did not like, she asked Emily (not me) to hold out her hands. Emily always did, closing her eyes.
Miss P used a ruler.

My hands curled into fists as I looked away. Why was Miss P treating Emily this way?

That spring, we had an emergency assembly in the gym. Our principal announced that Martin Luther King, Jr. had been shot dead in Memphis. Most of the female teachers and older students around us began to cry. Emily cried too.
When we returned to our classroom, dry-eyed Miss P said that it was as good a time as any to plant beans, which we did in paper Dixie cups.
And then came a day I remember most clearly.

Miss P moved me away from Emily to a desk next to a white girl, who was smart and popular and wore different colored knee socks to match her dresses.
On the day she moved me, Miss P called on me to read aloud from a book.
I looked at the words on the page of the book. They formed a sentence, a paragraph, a story about children we all likely assumed were white, playing with a cat. There was order here and this realization felt deeply personal, one I did not want to share with Miss P. I missed sitting beside Emily. We had been learning and playing together naturally. I understand now that Miss P was teaching us to separate by color. Emily was left to sit by herself.
The girl with the knee socks scooted closer and ran her finger under the sentence to appear as though she were helping me read. I shook my head, no. No to this prissy white girl and no to this mean white teacher. Miss P asked again, but I wouldn’t read. It was a gut feeling of no more, hardly an act of non-violent protest. I simply did not want to gift Miss P by reading from that book after she’d segregated me within her classroom.

Years later, my mother told me that at the end of that school year, Miss P wanted to hold me back because she said I couldn’t read. I’m sure Miss P judged my reading skills on that day when I would not read out loud. But by that time, my father was interviewing for jobs and looking for ways to leave Mississippi.

At a Presbyterian church meeting, one of the elders said my father and the other Deacons shouldn’t allow any black people into the church. My father asked how he, a Deacon, was supposed to prevent anyone from coming to church to pray. They suggested he stand outside the front doors during the service.
My father stopped going to church.

Years ago, before my father died, I interviewed him for a novel I was writing about Jackson in the 1960’s. He told me that when he was working for his father in Newton, his father suggested he join the Klan because it was only a dollar, and it would be good for business. My father declined. His manager at Merrill Lynch in Jackson suggested he join the Citizens’ Council, a white-supremacist organization which pushed back on integration and attracted a strong membership of business leaders. Again, my father declined. But when a business professor from Tougaloo, a historically black college, invited him to talk to students about finance, my father accepted.

I imagine when he went, my father talked about the miserable Dow Jones of the 1960s, variable endowments, or market fluctuations. Regardless, the following day, my father’s manager said that if he ever spoke to students at Tougaloo again, he would be fired.

Then the synagogue, five minutes from our house, was bombed.
When I asked my father what exactly made him finally decide to leave, he said it was in June 1968, the day Robert Kennedy was shot and killed in Los Angeles. He attended a business lunch in Jackson that day. A colleague sat next to my father, and as this man cut into his chicken, he mentioned Kennedy’s death, and said, laughing, “Two down, one to go.”
My father said he got up then and went home. My mother was in the kitchen.
“We have to get out of this place.” That’s how he remembers deciding to leave.

That Christmas, an aunt gave me a blue plastic suitcase with a wooden handle. Perhaps she knew we were leaving, and she was being practical. I don’t remember who gave me the doll. One side of the doll was a southern belle in a long pink floral dress and matching sun bonnet. Flip her upside down, and turn her inside out, she was a black mammy in a red and white polka-dotted dress with an apron. Two personas. One doll. I packed them inside the suitcase.

By the time we left Mississippi in 1969, beehive hairdos had flattened and the U.S. Supreme Court ordered statewide desegregation of Mississippi public schools. Private all-white segregated academies, nicknamed “Seg Academies,” began to pop up throughout the state.

My parents kept in contact with friends who sent their children to “white flight” schools built soon after we left. My father was genuinely saddened. He felt the majority of white Mississippians had given up on doing the right thing. My mother was not surprised. When she was growing up in Vienna, she saw how easily Nazism and nationalism can occupy a region.

I soon learned that running away from white pathology was impossible.
Walden public school in Deerfield, Illinois was all-white. There were no black children or black families in our neighborhood, either, a fact that was impossible to miss. My fourth-grade classmates spoke in nasal twangs. When they found out I was from Mississippi, they called me a hick. At recess, they lifted girls’ dresses, and hit each other with rubber balls.

My teacher, Mrs. Voltz, had puffy yellow hair and taught us about Mr. and Mrs. Yeast, fractals, and General Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. It was the first time I heard the War discussed in a classroom. It was the first time I heard about slavery, and saw the famous photograph of the black man’s scarred and beaten back. I thought of Michael. How had Miss G’s spankings scarred him emotionally? I missed Michael, Emily, and Stacy. But I did not like all the feelings I had about Mississippi, and I had the vague sense that the world around me was not as I believed it to be.

The day we finished the Civil War, it snowed — my first snow. At recess, I stuck my tongue out to taste the flakes. A girl in pink knee socks and matching hair band called out my name, then pelted me with ice balls. She called me southern loser.

I know now what I felt then. I had left Mississippi where we were in daily contact with African Americans, and immigrated to all-white Illinois, where I would go months without seeing a black person.

For a long time, I was ashamed to say I was from Mississippi. When people asked where I was from, sometimes I just said, “the South,” or “North of New Orleans.” After all, how could this one state produce magnolias, pine forests, Eudora Welty, William Faulkner, Richard Wright, and the Citizen’s Council? How was that possible? How could I love a state that did such horrors to its own?

Sometimes when I tell my son about growing up in Mississippi I sound like my older relatives when they used to talk about the Civil War years. My 1960s are like their 1860s, for in my lifetime, white people in the United States went out, beat, and killed black people and often got away with murder.
Sometimes, they still do.

I’ve thought a lot about my role in the lives of African Americans I’ve known, especially in light of the recent killing of George Floyd.
I worry now that maybe we were part of the systemic race problem in Mississippi because we didn’t stay and attempt to change things. We left. We had the money to leave. Not everyone had that luxury. Now, whether it makes a bit of difference or not, I’ve returned. Maybe because I needed to. There was no way I was going to live out the rest of my life in an all-white, Midwestern community.

White teachers spanked African American children at Spann in 1968. According to a 2020 Harvard University study called, “African American Inequality in the United States,” African Americans are frequently stopped, searched, arrested, convicted, and sometimes killed — even when they’re innocent. There is a clear pattern for some white people to dominate another race. The bigger question is why. Why do some white people in authority feel they can or should control or punish African Americans?

Something for all Americans, not just Mississippians to seriously consider.
“Not everything that is faced can be changed,” James Baldwin wrote. “But nothing can be changed until it is faced.”

Margaret McMullan is the author of nine award-winning books including the novel, In My Mother’s House and her memoir, Where the Angels Lived, which she researched on a Fulbright grant in Hungary. Her work has appeared in USA Today, The Washington Post, The Huffington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune, The Boston Herald, Glamour, The Millions, The Morning Consult, Teachers & Writers Magazine, National Geographic for Kids, and The Sun among others. She taught at the University of Evansville for 25 years. She writes full time now in Pass Christian, Mississippi.