[Can you believe this article in a South African newspaper? It appears there is still Apartheid in America. Apartheid is now in Israel. And Apartheid it seems never left America. Can we get royalties on Apartheid? Jan]

It was her first day at Greensboro Senior High. In a prim brown dress, 17-year-old Josephine Ophelia Boyd braved a throng of students and townspeople. “Nigger go home!” they screamed.

Her mother, Cora Lee Boyd, six months’ pregnant, took her as far as the school entrance, squeezed her hand, and left. For the next nine months, the daily jeers were backed up by a fusillade of snowballs and eggs. In the cafeteria, boys spat in her food and squirted ketchup in her lap. Tacks were left on her seat, ink spilled on her books.

Klansmen phoned her home and cursed her for scorning the will of God. The tyres on the family car were punctured. Their two dogs were killed in the night. Her mother lost her job as a housekeeper. Her father’s sandwich shop burned down – the only time she saw him cry.

In the same week that Boyd, now Josephine Bradley, started classes at the North Carolina school, National Guardsmen blocked enrolment of nine black students at Central High in Little Rock, Arkansas. The Little Rock Nine started school three weeks later under military protection.

“Most of us had no idea what we were getting into,” said Bradley, 64, now a college professor in Atlanta. “And none of us would ever be the same.” The only black student among 1 950, Bradley was the first to enrol at an all-white high school in the southern states. That same month, September 1957, dynamite wrecked a Nashville school the day after it desegregated. In Alabama a white mob chain-whipped the Rev Fred Shuttlesworth, and stabbed his wife as they tried to enrol their black children.

That first year 11 black students attended previously white schools in North Carolina. After Bradley’s graduation in June 1958 there was a trickle of black students to white schools. Not until 1964 did another black student enrol at Greensboro High.

Bradley believes her year there left her less assertive, and she picks battles only after weighing the personal cost against the principle. She raised her children to judge people by their character and not to use race as a crutch.

“There is no hatred there,” Mark Gray, Bradley’s nephew, told the Los Angeles Times. “She understands there are things that have kept black folks from reaching their goals, but the burden of overcoming them is up to you.”

What does leave Bradley disillusioned is the state of education for those who followed her — her children and her students. There has been some progress. There are 10 times as many black Americans with high school degrees as in 1957. The proportion of blacks over 24 with four years of college rose from 2% in 1952 to 17 % in 2002 (29 % for white people).

But almost everywhere, schools have started to resegregate. Black and white students rarely share classrooms, and social segregation is deeply entrenched. At the former Greensboro High, black and white students eat apart — not legally segregated but hopelessly ghettoised.

“I don’t see that the masses of black kids have benefited at all,” Bradley told the LA Times. “After 50 years we have to acknowledge that the intent of Brown has not been met.”

Bradley found herself at Greensboro because her mother, Cora, did not take racism lightly. When a shop assistant told her: “We don’t serve niggers,” she replied: “That’s OK, I don’t eat them.”

Bradley remembers Robert Lody Glenn, the school’s assistant principal, greeting her with: “We really don’t want you here, but since you’re here we have to let you in.” Glenn, now 82, denies making such a comment.

Bradley says: “I thought there was going to be this dramatic change in white folks because they were going to see that we were just like them. That was my biggest disappointment, that this magical place I envisioned never came to be.”

In June 1958 she became the first black student to graduate from a previously all-white North Carolina school. A phone call warned that a coffin was waiting for her at Brown’s Funeral Home, and jeers and cheers met the calling of her name.

She sat out the rest of the civil rights movement, marrying and having two daughters, Paulette and Teresa. She moved to Tennessee, taught sociology and bought a house in a white neighbourhood close to her campus. Several blocks away was an elementary school that, in 1980, had never had a black student. The school dissuaded her from enrolling Teresa, telling her: “We can’t promise you that she’ll be safe.”

Bradley opted for a racially mixed school further away. “My mother would have made them take her,” she told the paper. “But having lived the experience, perhaps I just didn’t see the value. I did not want to see my child psychologically damaged.”

Teresa, a 29-year-old business graduate, says of her mother: “She never thought her children would have to face the same thing that she had faced. She never thought that history would repeat itself.”

— (194)Â Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

Source: Daily Mail & Guardian
URL: http://mg.co.za/Content/l3.asp?ao=66054/p>