Rochester, New York, 1971-reorganization

I've talked to my mother a bit about my experiences in first and second grade. As I mentioned she was a teacher at #2 school and had elected to have me in the reverse open enrollment class, as I've learned the official title was at that point. My impressions of these two years are rather idylic. I remember being in integrated classes, having a diverse pool of teachers, and being told by all of the adults around me that black students and white students should get along. My parents had a black and white together sign on their window. But things were not so idylic behind the scenes.

The open enrollment program was just one in a series of attempts by The Rochester City Schools, to integrate the students of Rochester. My mother was able to add an additional perspective. She attended meeting both as a parent and as a teacher. While many families supported the reverse open enrollment programs, some black families found the concepts paternalistic. They wanted their schools improved not by the presence of white students, but by qualitatively better instructional programs. Mom says the meetings were hard and at times confusing for a well-meaning white liberal. I knew nothing of any of this. However, I do know that what happened the next year was not a step forward!

According the the book, Achieving Racial Ballance, by Sonia Astor Stave, Rochester "divided the 43 elementary schools into primary schools (grades K-3) and intermediate schools (grades 4-6). ...the districts were designed to also balance socio-economic differences as well as those of race." This moved me from #46 school, my little grassy oasis of calm and tradition, to #14 school--a bleak rectangular school surrounded by hardtop and in the inner city. Since reorganization affected all of the students in Rochester, most families experienced busing with some of their children when they had formerly been able to walk to school. "Rich white" schools had to welcome children of color from less affluent circumstances, and vice versa. I'm not sure how the primary schools did, but the intermediate school I attended was full of stress and racial tension.

Many perfectly awful memories accompany this year. While my teachers were diverse and nice for the most part, they looked stressed. Behavior in the classroom was worse than anything I'd ever seen. It was the first instance in which I remember feeling bad for a teacher and mad at students for wasting our collective time. But the most confusing thing to me were the instances of racial hatred. I had been told from an early age that all people were equal. I knew my parents supported integration, as had other adults I respected. Unfortunately, the atmosphere surrounding a forced integration, no matter how well meaning, was just not the right atmosphere for tolerance and mutual appreciation. And I was just very, very white.


It was common practice for some students to spit down stairwells at students ahead of them in line. I guess I'm not completely sure who was spitting at whom, as once I realized this was a danger, I stopped looking up. But it made any trip around the school potentially disgusting and stressful. I was the target of racial hatred several times over the year. Sometimes the incident was very minor. In one I remember, a black girl put her sneaker on the seat of my chair. I asked her to remove it and she replied, "you're prejudiced!". I said I wasn't, but didn't like sneakers on my chair. In this instance, she seemed satisfied and removed her foot. A more serious incident occured in the bathroom--always a scary place. I was in the bathroom when two black girls grabbed me. They weren't quite sure what to do with me. One suggested they should knock my head into the door of the stall. But the other said, "I've never heard her say anything." The first asked, "What do you mean", and the second replied, "I've never heard her say anything bad." Thanks to the second girl, who wasn't about to beat up a kid just for the color of her skin, they let me go. But I was hysterical. My teacher noticed and I told her what happened. What happened next was very artful, and I've never forgotten it. Rather than punish the two girls, someone--a councilor or assistant principal maybe--met with the three of us. We sat and talked, and they agreed to leave me alone. We never became friends, but we did say "Hi" in the hall, and I had no more difficulties. If the girls had been punished, I'm sure I'd have a worse tale to tell.

Little and big incidents like this were really confusing to me. I always felt somehow that they were my fault. I never told my parents because I was ashamed. Later in College, I read Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye and felt like perhaps I understood in retrospect a little of what was going on. In one scene of the book, a girl destroys a white doll with blue eyes. It is a response to the racism around her and being told by society that the blond and blue eyed doll was more beautiful than she was. While these girls could not have articulated these issues any more than I could have, I think we were all caught up in the swirling racial tensions around us. I stuck out because I was blue eyed and had waist length blond hair. I also sang and had a solo in the school concert. Teachers liked me because I was always well behaved. So I had a lot of strikes against me. Racial tensions continued to lead to incidents like the one above through grade 6, even when I was not in a school with forced bussing. By middle school, I was active in music programs and had black friends. Music was a wonderful equalizer, bringing students of all races and academic abilities together . So while I remember racial tensions from older grades, the hatred was no longer projected onto me personally.

Another vivid and disgusting memory from this year involved dirty gym suits. Generally if students forgot their gym clothes, they would have to stand at the side lines for the whole gym class. I had the misfortune of forgetting my clothes on the day that a couple of girls had forgotten for the third or forth time. In disgust, the teacher told us all to change into some gym suits. We walked into a room behind the "stage" which was a part of the gym and found a box filled with blue cotton one piece gym suits. The crotch of just about every suit was caked with dried menstrual blood. I hadn't even seen "the movie" yet, so I was really shocked. This type of cruelty on the part of a teacher seemed mostly reserved for gym teachers. We found the suits with the least visible blood and joined our class.

One thing that made this year so stressful, was that you never knew when something really unpleasant or even scary like this could happen. I had a headache for most of the year, and a case of hives on my forehead. The results in most Rochester schools this year were equally poor. A black advocacy organization, FIGHT (Freedom, Integration, God, Honor, and Today), was not happy with the results of the reorganization plan and asked that the focus be shifted to improving inner city schools rather than busing black children to schools where they were not welcome. (Stave)

So the program was scrapped after just one year. I did not return to #46 school, though. I was selected to attend the MAP program for grades five and six and instead attended #31 school. More about that another time.