There Were Moments When I Could Hardly Breathe

Rita Watts Boone-Crystal Springs Attendance Center-Class of 1970-Crystal Springs, Mississippi

I didn’t think much about the day in 1970 when I took my senior photos at Crystal Springs Attendance Center. To my seventeen-year-old self, it was just a picture. I didn’t know the lasting importance of a senior photograph. I didn’t know that it was, to a degree, how I’d be immortalized. I didn’t have school friends to get together to talk over our hair styles, makeup and accessories for the day. I didn’t know anything about that. I was isolated as one of just two Black girls in the school finally integrating nearly two decades after the 1954 Brown decision.  I came to school that day with my hair in my signature style, a ponytail. My White classmate Susan saw how I was looking, and she helped me pull my hair down. She was good that way one on one. Yet I can’t help but remember how her support had limits. Around other White friends, she was cooler, nervous about being seen as someone with a heart for Blacks. 

     The class photo wasn’t a big deal to me. My resulting picture is just basically me with my hair down. In retrospect, however, everything else about me attending Crystal Springs was major. I’d come over with about ten other Black students at the beginning of my sophomore year in 1967 as the first Black students in the school’s history. I was one of two Black students in the class of 1970, along with Mary Ann Williams.

  My family and I lived in rural Copiah County, near Carpenter. I was the third of four girls. My mother stayed home, and my dad worked as a school bus driver. He had an eighth-grade education, and had been drafted into World War II. He’d seen the world beyond Mississippi, which buoyed him, along with his innate desire to be a force for justice and progress, to be politically minded. When the chance to attend Crystal Springs came along for me, there was really no question for him that I would enter.

My father had hopes for better schooling for me than he’d had, and so did I before actually walking through the Crystal Springs school doorway. All I had to do was look around Copiah County and see that there were two separate worlds: a technicolor, sky-is-the-limit world for Whites with nice homes fronted by wide grassy lawns, and a separate, less desirable one for Blacks 

Attending school at Crystal Springs Attendance Center was the first time in my life I had a chance to experience what seemed to be “better.” The school certainly looked better.  It was a three-story maroon brick high school, which blended Tudor and Gothic revival architectural styles. It not only had a gymnasium, but an auditorium as well. Besides the building, being at Crystal Springs showed me in real time that the “separate but equal,” system of education for Whites and Blacks was a sham. “Separate but equal” were just words. What I experienced was altogether different. Some of my earlier segregated schools I attended had outside toilets and lacked libraries. We had second-hand books and older school buses. Those objects often reminded us that we were to make do with what Whites had discarded. 

In that initial year, integration only occurred through Black families specifically opting to attend the formerly whites-only schools. The practice was called Freedom of Choice, eventually struck down by the Supreme Court as an adequate method to equalize education.

When the idea of attending school there first arose, a lot of my peers thought it was a good idea. It seemed like it would be a fun new experience. As the day drew closer, many decided not to go. I didn’t want to either. I wanted another choice. I wanted to stay at W.H. Holtzclaw School, where all the Black kids attended. But by that time it was a done deal in my father’s mind. So I made the fifty-mile round trip to the school every day. 

As I mentioned before, Crystal Springs “seemed” to be better. Physically, the campus was better. How I was treated was not better.  I had ventured into a world where no one played by the rules and good didn’t necessarily rise to the top. In this new world of high school, everyone was White: the students, teachers, principals, counselors, secretaries and coaches. Even though our small group integrated the school, we were still separate. At recess we congregated near the pillars of the steps at the entrance of the school; similarly, in the cafeteria, we all sat together. It was just natural that we congregated with one another because none of the White students wanted to associate with us.  In my classes however, my schedule was always such that I was the only Black student. Every day felt like Day One, as if being surrounded by a sea of opposition. I was friendly with Mary Ann Williams, the only other Black student in my grade; we had known one another since seventh grade. However, we were far from being best friends. Since my close friends had decided to stay at Holtzclaw, I was effectively alone.

Meanwhile, my father lost his job as a school bus driver after opting to send me to the formerly all-white school.   

For me, there was no such thing as a typical day. I never knew what I’d encounter. At one point I was experiencing panic attacks, even while I was at home, as I reflected over the school day. I’m not even sure if ‘panic attack’ was in the vernacular at that point. I had no name for what I experienced. There were just moments when I could hardly breathe. There were moments that I gasped for the next breath. Those moments were fueled by my life, by the memories that I have to this day. One day a boy on an upper staircase spat down on me below. The principal didn’t do anything because I didn’t really know who did it. I felt that he was less than concerned anyway. All I could do was cry, but I had to suck it up. I felt disgusted, but nothing was going to be done about it. I remember the aggressive hostile mispronunciation of my history teacher, a big Archie Manning fan, who always made a point of saying ‘nigra.’ On another occasion, in study hall, a boy kicked me. I instinctively kicked him back. There was no punishment this time either, but the teacher in the class had us to apologize to one another. I did but didn’t mean it. I’d kick the boy again if necessary. 

When I look back at those three years now, my memory is of my adolescent self just trying to exist, hour by hour, day by day.  I eventually graduated, without much pomp and circumstance. My parents were there, and they watched as Mary Ann and I marched in together. It was 1970, the dawn of a new decade, and my life stretched out before me as a gigantic question mark. My goal in life was to be a model; I don’t know where that idea came from. I’m not even certain if the phrase “Black is Beautiful’ was in vogue yet. And it certainly wasn’t about being seen as pretty; I’d simply had an experience and wanted to be represented in the world. But I didn’t know what steps to take, and my parents didn’t think it was a good idea either. My next idea was to go to college. The counselor at Crystal Springs paid no attention to me, so I didn’t have any guidance regarding next steps. My parents had had no experience with higher education. Still, one day after graduation I went with my father to Utica Junior College; I enrolled there and my education was financed on work-study. My campus job was in the nursery where I passed out lunches and washed dishes. After two years, I was off to Alcorn State. I received federal financial aid and graduated with a degree in elementary education in 1974. 

My Crystal Springs ties weren’t over with graduation, it turned out. I returned and taught fourth grade reading in the district from 1975 through 1988. And my youngest sister attended the same high school I’d help integrate, only by the time she graduated in 1981, ironically, the school was majority Black. More and more White students gravitated to private schools like Copiah Academy, which—not exactly a surprise—started as a Whites-only segregated academy at the 1967 moment when I integrated Crystal Springs. 

I visited the school, now Crystal Springs High School, for the first time in decades during the summer of 2019. My eldest son was researching the birth of Mississippi’s segregation academies; his research intersecting with my life since it was acts like my integrating Crystal Springs that gave rise to Copiah Academy and the other White-flight academies. Being back at the school was more than a trip down memory lane. I was a different person, had lived a life with a career as a teacher myself, married, had three children and ultimately retired from the classroom. But in that moment I was a sophomore again. The memories were there, as if only the day before, not a span of 49 years. Even just driving up to the campus evoked the memory that Black students had to dropped off across the street, not closer to the campus like the other White students. I was back at the same place where I had been spat upon, back where I had been kicked. It’s like going back to a civil rights museum, and seeing all the history, all that I had to endure. I had an uneasy feeling as I walked the same path I had for years, ascending the same steps. The hallway still appeared as wide as a boulevard. There was the auditorium with its rows and rows of empty seats, with the curtains bearing “CS.” 

There were grouped photos lining the walls in the main hallway for each year dating back more than 20 years before I graduated. The all-white years. Then there was 1968, featuring the first integrated class. Then two over was the class of 1970.

There I was, Rita Watts. My hair is down. My face is resolute with no trace of a smile. 

Rita Watts Boone is a native of Utica, Mississippi. She integrated Crystal Springs Attendance Center (now Crystal Springs High School) in 1968 and graduated in 1970.  A graduate of Alcorn State University, she was an elementary school teacher in various Mississippi districts for more than 30 years before retiring in 2006. She is a married mother of three children, grandmother of five, and resides in Jackson.