Mary Roberson Wiygul – South Panola High School – Class of 1989 – Batesville, Mississippi
My first-grade classmates and I were the state’s first students born into a Mississippi with comprehensively integrated public schools. The federal courts had told Mississippi schools to stop any further delay as the 1970s moved along. So when we walked into Mrs. Katherine’s first grade class at Pope School in 1977, I experienced what the Brown v. Board of Education case had proposed—a world that opened up to my Black classmates the same as it did to me.
Until then, I’d had little interaction with any kids my age other than my cousins or the children who attended Pope Baptist. My world had been completely white. But inside my Pope classroom on that scorching August day, all kinds of children stood in front of me dressed in stiff new dark wash jeans and matching Garanimal sets, a group of students in a variety of heights, sizes, shapes and colors. I scanned the room as Mrs. Katherine called roll: Anthony, Dionne, Sandra, Shantell. This was my introduction to my first Black friends.
There were around fifty of us in our grade, but it didn’t take my six-year-old mind long to register we were all the same. We played freeze-tag on the playground, ate Mrs. Merle’s homemade rolls in the cafeteria, read “Curious George” during reading circle time, and sang “Amazing Grace” together every day in Mrs. Katherine’s room. Most of us didn’t know the purpose of integration or what integration even was, but we didn’t need to, living it was more powerful than any schoolroom lesson we were taught. Our little white-haired teacher who’d taught many of our siblings, aunts, uncles and parents treated us all as one big happy family, and so it seemed, we were.
Outside the walls of our school, things were different. Just like the invisible line that separated our town, the last fragment of the hill country, from the flatlands of the Delta, an imaginary line separated us—Black from white. We didn’t worship together or visit each other’s homes, not even for our friends’ birthday celebrations. In general, other than exchanging “hellos,” or for business transactions, Blacks and whites didn’t mix.
For the first few years at our K-9 school, we were exempt from the rules of the outside world, until fifth grade when we got our first chance to vote for yearbook awards. When ballots were presented, instead of electing one male and female representative for each category, we elected both Black and white recipients for each, a process that continued for the rest of our time at Pope.
I’m told that electing both Black and white students was to provide equal representation, but looking back, I wonder if this practice inadvertently primed us for the separation expected in the outside world. I didn’t question the system back then. Class Favorite yearbook photos show my white male classmate and I standing next to our Black counterparts, smiling and happy to be representing our class. But now I look at things differently. I can’t help wondering why the ballot reflected our world as if we were living in parallel universes instead of reflecting the togetherness we had experienced for years. In history class we were taught that separate but equal was wrong while being separated into Black and white categories, creating a separate but equal world in our midst.
At the end of our ninth-grade year, my classmates and I transferred to South Panola High School seven miles north in Batesville where we filtered into a world with over 200 students in our grade. The first year we attended, the student body not only chose both Black and white students for each yearbook award, but also elected Black and white homecoming queens and attended separate Black and white dances and proms as well.
Instead of being a part of school life, our dances were private affairs. After ballgames, we white students attended dances hosted at the local Lion’s Club located on the cusp of school property while our Black friends gathered for dances at the National Guard Armory across town.
For prom, white students met at the public library each year to elect class officers from our pool of white peers. These students handled the planning and ticket sales for the parent-sponsored event. Senior year my friends and I walked into the Omni Hotel in Memphis to celebrate this milestone, our bangs teased and sprayed high with Aqua Net, our brightly colored lamé dresses crinkling as we walked. Our dates, many rocking mullets, stood beside us, each couple a scant variation of the next. Sadly, the event that should have reflected twelve years of school memories was incomplete since our Black classmates were missing, their prom held sixty miles away back home in Batesville.
As recently as fifteen years ago, segregated proms still occurred at some public schools in Mississippi. The 2009 documentary Prom Night in Mississippi follows Morgan Freeman as he returns to Charleston, a small Mississippi town where he lived as a child with his paternal grandmother. On return, he meets with the town’s senior class to ask why they still hold segregated proms, and in response, students explain that separate proms are the parents’ idea. “As long as she’s living with me, she will not attend a mixed prom. That’s not how we raised her,” a white student named Jessica says in an interview, quoting a parent’s outrage at the discussion of an integrated prom. For years the school had released itself of liability for the segregated proms through a loophole. “The school gets away with it because they say, ‘We don’t sponsor it,’” Freeman says.
In 1989, the year I graduated, South Panola had long relinquished the responsibility of prom. Having grown up roughly twenty miles from where Freeman’s documentary was filmed, it’s now easy for me to question this decision. Could the reason have been the same as Charleston High School’s had been? At some point, had the school handed prom over to parents who would draw lines educational institutions hadn’t legally been able to draw since the full integration of Mississippi schools in 1970? Even if this were not the case, in 1989 the school board made no effort to host an integrated prom, and as a result, our worlds remained divided.
I was an adult before I considered how this separation had affected me. In 1994 I took a job teaching English at a public school in Mississippi. One day I passed out ballots for students to elect homecoming queens: one Black, one white and a discussion began. My students questioned the split ballot. Why shouldn’t they have one person agreed upon by the student body to represent them all? I was stunned—not because I disagreed, but because I wasn’t the one who questioned it. Maybe I’d been too wrapped up in my own teenage angst in the eighties to question the racial division of our ballot, but as an adult I had no excuse. I’d often boasted of being a public-school student, one free of the racist ideologies so often associated with private academies prompted by “white flight,” but at that moment, I considered the messages in all the segregated votes and dances of my high school years. I wondered if I’d internalized the underlying message of race separation, intentional or not. Maybe the separate votes allowed Black students in a majority white South Panola to not be swallowed in the historic white space. But the imaginary lines separated our worlds. Had this separation diverted us from friendships that could have made us better people? Could it have altered the trajectory of our lives? Had it postponed healing that could have long been realized?
Looking back now, I think the answer is yes. I’d started elementary school with close friends of both races, but as the years progressed a division occurred. As a young adult, I realized I had Black acquaintances, but none that I would call close friends, and other than an occasional visitor, I still worshipped with an entirely white congregation. I had internalized the division between Black and white, thinking of it “as the way things had always been.”
In his visit to Charleston High School, Morgan Freeman opened up dialogue between Black and white students, the first step in erasing the line that had been drawn between them before they were born. As a result, the senior class of 2008 held their first integrated prom. Some students, still constrained by race barriers, did not attend, but those who did felt good about themselves and their future as a community. The prom was a success. Likewise, my alma mater South Panola has long abandoned the dated practice of separate yearbook awards and homecoming queens and has claimed the responsibility of hosting both integrated dances and proms. It has taken decades, but the lines forged between Black and white have begun to disappear.
Today, as an educational consultant, I work with public-school teachers and students in various schools around the state where I witness tough lessons being taught and hard discussions taking place—the kind needed to create students who question the status quo. The kind needed to cultivate students who have the courage to fight for equality. The kind needed to develop students with the will and vision to change our future. With each visit, I see students from all backgrounds learning together, laughing together, and most importantly working together to overcome obstacles that have historically kept them separate—a sight that gives me hope.
Mary Roberson Wiygul taught at New Hope High School in Columbus, Mississippi for 26 years. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Mississippi University for Women and has work published in HuffPost and Hippocampus Magazine. She is currently finishing an essay collection titled One for Sorrow; Two for Joy.