THE LOUD, PROUD BLACK KIDS

...If you had your choice, would you choose a black tutor or a white tutor...

...Your friends stay away from you because they say you think you're better than them...

...Mostly Negro, so when they vote on a trip they can't outvote the Negro tutors...

...We need you people...

...But I know we going back...

...The staff evaluation questionnaire asked the students, "What was the best thing about the program...

...Of these, the 150 in Grenada (population 8,000, about half white) are best known to the outside world...

...The Tougaloo program was designed to strengthen the integrating students both in their ability and in their will to stick it out in the white schools and, hopefully, to provide a model for other programs throughout the state and throughout the South...

...America is ours and we have a right to fight to make it a better place for us...

...The issue was finally drawn over a trip: The black tutors (with some white defectors) wanted to go to Montgomery and a football game at Tuskegee...

...I'm not going to bed at all tonight...

...White and colored so that when kids who might be afraid of white people when they go to the white school can feel a little more secure...

...All right, I would go to the office and report it...

...I'm just going from room to room and cry...

...My mother signed us right back ovej there...

...Can a black child learn how to be a black man from a white man...

...Five or six girls cornered a Smith College tutor one day and poured their resentments and wrath upon her, shouting and spitting and threatening to "beat her ass" in an amateur rendition in blackface of the old familiar act...

...The director was bewildered and distressed...

...The 200 students lived in dormitories along with their college-student tutors...

...And when I'd tell about it, the principal he would say, 'I think you'd better step out, young lady, because you getting quite sassy around here.' " Mississippi is at, or close to, the bottom of almost every index of educational achievement: teachers' salaries, percentage of high school students who graduate, school expenditure per pupil...

...I said / would decide...

...A build-up of summer-long and life-long resentments had erupted in a geyser of accusations and counter-accusations: The white tutors were pushing their superior education and abilities...

...Next day William says, 'Margaret, what you doin' talkin' to that nigger?' And she said, 'I'm not studying about you, William, because the same Man made her made me.' " "I stayed in the office more than I did in class...

...that gives whites a chance, too...

...black power versus integration...

...These students have taught me more about being a real person than school has ever taught me...

...She asked me my boy friend's name...

...Nigger, nigger, nigger.' And they'd throw things...

...He thinks he's better than anybody else just because he went to a white school...

...In the last days of the session the students wrote their autographs and messages pledging friendship to eternity in each other's copies of Fannie Lou Hamer's autobiography...

...The adults' conflicts swirled about the children—and so did their love and respect...

...And some was getting beat up...

...And the girl who had had to put up with Frankie and Jim (whose daddy had beat up her daddy in the dark), the girl who never cried when they hit her, said, tasing in advance the joys of sorrow: "I'm going to break curfew...

...But stick it out...

...And throw spit-balls...

...They asked her what she thought about James Meredith endorsing Ross Barnett...

...But even in Mississippi, white schools are vastly more demanding than Negro schools...

...She said, "If I had the chance, baby, I would go in there with you...

...People from the North were giving the students notions about personal freedom that were inappropriate for Southern Negro children...

...After a summer in which local Negroes with the support of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) demonstrated and boycotted for integrated facilities, including integrated voter registration rolls, and local whites with the support of law-enforcing authorities fought savagely to retain their feudal rights, school opened...

...Some of the tutors who wished the black director to be a "strong father figure" probably had hoped for a tougher fight...

...Finally she was released and told not to come back to the white school...

...A white high school graduate from Jackson addressed the group and told about a Negro classmate who had made the basketball team and was kept on it, and honored, despite objections from other teams that they played...

...And I told her...

...Their teachers were ten Smith College students, ten Amherst students, ten Tougaloo students, and six Mississippi teachers (one white...

...Like dogs...

...Half and half, because you could get used to the idea of going to a white school...

...But in the moments before they boarded the buses that would take them back to their cities and counties, they stood with locked hands and sang We Shall Overcome and even the verse Black and White Together—hymn of the "old days" of The Movement...

...There was one crippled girl in the group," a student reported...

...Two black and two white "counselors" (one a trained psychologist), a Negro director, a white assistant director, a white business manager, and a white administrative secretary completed the staff...

...one of them said, "I'm going back to the white school next year because I got my class ring a year earlier than at the colored schools...

...I can't even sit in the library and concentrate but here come Frankie and Jim: 'All right, nigger, I'm gonna get you like my daddy got your daddy.' " "There was a girl...

...I never cry when they hit me," a Grenada girl said of her school experiences...

...The black director was a negligent administrator...

...The children ignored the conflicts when they could (they had had plenty of experience in surviving conflict situations) and, when they could not, threaded their way by making illogical choices...

...I mean study" a veteran of the year before told an audience of Negro students in the Tougaloo summer program who planned to go to the white schools in the fall...

...Confronted with a choice between black power and integration, for example, they chose both...

...Two hundred of them spent seven weeks last summer working fractions, writing compositions, and drawing rivers and boundaries (including the Missouri Compromise line) on outline maps while their wounds healed and their strength was renewed...

...Next thing I know I'd be in my class and I'd be called into the office, asking why did I spit in the kid's face or why did I hit a kid...

...They were trying to pit me against him, you see...

...Each tutor had the same group of six or seven students for all subjects all summer and had far more influence over them than their teachers did...

...She responded with indignation: "Why did I decide to come back...

...The students were involved in a series of meetings and backroom discussions...

...Every week, I mean every week, you have a vocabulary test, you have a book report, you have a lot to do...

...Her articles have appeared in New South, New Politics, and Integrated Education...

...Late-afternoon activities consisted of "special interest" groups: art, music, French, Spanish, Russian, drama, a school newspaper, and a popular course in Negro history which was attended by many tutors as well as by students...

...She said later that she came close to hating those girls for turning on her, for denying the sincerity of her summer's dedication...

...There they discussed their home and school experiences and together sought meaning in the direction of their lives...

...That didn't stop us from going to school, because we still going...

...People like you," she began in her measured contralto tones, "my own black people, people that care, black and white, gives me the strength to keep me going...

...All black: I think that it is time for all black people to stand up and show the 'cracker' that we don't need their help...

...The students began to confront their past experiences and prepare for encounters to come...

...They're better than flowers," read an advertisement in the project's West Point Free Press...

...You gonna have to study...

...Each youngster took English, math, science, and social studies at his or her school grade level...

...Tutors took their own little groups on short excursions and picnics...

...You, the young people of Mississippi, must stay here and carry on the fight for justice, truth, freedom...

...demands for a television set in the lounge, for weekend trips, for live bands at weekend dances, and for a student-run assembly to discuss experiences at integrated schools...

...Thus while most of the Negro children were long familiar with physical work, it was not until they entered white classrooms that many of them were introduced to work in school...

...In the next few years, all of the civil rights leaders will be gone and where are the new ones coming from...

...The white architects of the program had engineered that the white tutors outnumber the black tutors and that a black director be a front for white control...

...They picked at me at home, on the roadside, in town, but most of all in school...

...From eight o'clock, after breakfast, until twelve o'clock, lunch, they attended two classes conducted by regular teachers and two small-group follow-up sessions conducted by college-student tutors...

...There was a series of outside speakers...

...On a swing through the state endorsing Ross Barnett for Governor, Meredith stopped at West Point and told the assembled students and staff that Vietnam was the best thing that ever happened to the American Negro (when he went into the Army, he said, he came out a sergeant...

...The students were readied for their encounter with Meredith not only by their experiences in organizing "against" their administration but by the constant emphasis in all their academic work on speaking out, expressing opinions, asking questions...

...If James Meredith provided the white background for the students' definition of black self, Fannie Lou Hamer, the leader of the Freedom Democratic Party, provided the mirror that reflected black beauty and toughness and humor...

...Two of the boys, their father beat up my father in the dark...

...It was she who had initiated the summer program when she came to recognize that without supportive action in the Negro community her legal efforts for desegregation would be barren...

...I was born here and I have a right to be here...

...A reporter for the West Point Free Press interviewed students who had already attended white schools...

...Because, today, this is a beautiful audience, and without knowing the true facts about our country, you will not be able to stand up and fight for what we don't have now...

...Every time I would go down the hall, there was some kid they would hit me, they would spit in my face, run into me, knock me into the wall...

...And as we got halfway to the school, they was a lot of grownups-—white grownups—with sticks, bricks, guns, axe handles, everything—you name it, they had it...

...black tutors versus white tutors...

...Meanwhile a student government was being organized...

...Half and half, because I believe some white folks like working with the Negro children...

...With the aid of the young tutors, the students began to express their turbulent feelings in the now classical pattern: protests to the administration over dormitory rules...

...The students repeated again and again how they "had to work to pass...

...And we finally made it back to the church...

...White, because a white teacher or tutor never taught me...

...The black tutors were instilling hate in the innocent students...

...Whites are human like us...

...the black director versus the white assistant director (possibly more as symbols than in themselves...

...I think that this whole program should be run by Negroes, who are trying to get our freedom...

...The whole company took one trip to New Orleans and another to Memphis—the latter event was the center of the bitterest intergroup hostilities of the entire summer...

...Among the protagonists and issues were: James Meredith versus Fannie Lou Hamer, Mississippi's outspoken civil rights leader...

...Some 10,000 Negro students all over Mississippi entered predominantly white schools in September, 1966...

...Magnified homesickness on the part of many children who had never previously been away from home over night and who rarely left their home counties...

...that he would come back to Mississippi only to make a lot of money...

...One Tougaloo girl responded, "The loud, proud, black kids themselves...

...Each bearing his personal history plus 350 years of America's racial history, these 250 individuals played all the tortured games that Americans have long played with each other, experienced all the dilemmas, expressed all the guilt and resentment...

...Interestingly, teacher and principal "unfairness" seems to produce more lasting and more bitter resentment than physical brutality...

...The students all went home for one weekend, hosting visits by their tutors...

...She said: "I know how hard it is for you to go on in the white schools...

...a trip to Tuskegee to see a football game versus a trip to an amusement park...

...Marian Wright, a young Jackson attorney, spoke to the children...

...Trying to get their freedom...

...So went the distrust and dissension...

...Let the poor whites get their own...

...The seizures gradually stopped...

...and the anxieties of those who, by their presence, were committed to attend white schools the following September, all together produced an epidemic of strange ailments...

...Negro, because he is my color and he seem more close to me than the white...

...And when we got halfway they said, 'Here come them nigers...

...The approximately fifty Grenada kids who did come back, and the other children who attended white schools throughout the state, experienced a variety of responses, mostly unpleasant, from white classmates and teachers during the school year: "Every time you sit down, all those whites around me, they'd say 'Nigger, you stink...

...He did decide: They went neither to Tuskegee nor to Grenada Lake but to Memphis...

...And maybe it's not but twenty going back or fifteen this year...

...Let's get 'em.' . . . And some was fallin' in the street, you know sliding...

...Should another program like this have a staff that's all Negro, mostly Negro, half and half, mostly white, all white...

...I guess I envy their dedication and their complete participation in their goals...

...complaints about the food...

...The students muttered that the white tutors "didn't want us to have any fun" and were using their superior voting power to control the trip choice, that all the Negroes were being used to get money, prestige, and position for whites...

...There was a constant sound of shuffling and dribbling from the basketball court, and two or three evenings weekly a bus took a group to a nearby "Negro" swimming pool...

...He's only interested in himself and his family...

...white elementary and high schools were met by roving bands of white adults armed with a wide assortment of weapons...

...Just what Fannie Lou Hamer is doing...

...Someone asked, "In your book you talk about Africa a lot, and could you tell us why you decided to come back and make your life in the United States...

...She brought down the house with, "Is I'm going to have to answer about poor little Meredith...

...He's going to leave us behind...

...These children were enrolled in the Tougaloo Summer Enrichment Program, a residential tutorial project housed on the campus of Mary Hblmes Junior College in West Point, Mississippi...

...the tutors themselves had participated in making the rules and were now instigating a protest against him...

...The frightened Smith girl was "rescued" by a Tougaloo boy...

...On June 14, 1966, the Meredith March passed through Grenada and carried the town into the Twentieth Century...

...Margaret...

...The white assistant director was really the boss behind the boss...

...The trip crisis and its aftermath became the group's vehicle for a kind of orgy of self-examination which lasted until the program's end: What are white people like...

...Take a tutor home to your mother...

...If you wanted to learn to be a carpenter, you'd get apprenticed to a carpenter, not a bricklayer...

...They are two-faced and they still think they are better than you...

...The white children will harass you...

...I mean a lot...

...The entire campus then moved on to the final phase of the treatment by ordeal...

...They arrived brimming with the anxiety that comes from pain, and they left brimming with the determination that comes from pain...

...At the student-run assembly which they had demanded, a panel of veterans described their experiences in the white schools, not leaving out the brutalities, the humiliations, the injustices...

...The issue was brought to the director...

...But she added, "I feel that this summer has been the most exciting and instructive of my life...

...Although he felt that they were getting "more freedom than they knew how to handle," the director met the youngsters' demands...

...And I also think that I can learn more...

...They challenged the competency of one of their teachers...

...On the last evening, a busload of returning swimmers cheered and sang and exchanged vows and medallions...

...They asked her about Vietnam, and she said, "I just don't see no sense in me fightin' somewhere else for somethin' I don't have here...

...The youngsters argued every inch of the way...

...The whole campus fell in love with her—and with themselves...

...that they ought not to get all hung up on the race issue ("every time the white man does something to you, it is not because you are black, but because he or she may not like what you are doing...

...And I'm glad she did...

...She smiled at me the first day...

...The 250 people left with as many problems before them as behind...

...the emotional release after nine months of impossibly overtaxed restraints ("I don't cry...

...Trying to get the black power structure on the go...

...Some are all right, but they're white...

...They asked me," he said, "if I wanted to go to Tuskegee, and the assistant director wanted to go to Grenada Lake, where would we go...

...the responses to them probably best represented the project's exuberant, unifying spirit amid so much distress and dissension...

...One girl thought she was going blind...

...Negro, because when they speak you can understand better their dialect...

...and the white tutors (with some black defectors) wanted to go to Grenada Lake, an amusement park...

...Then regrouped by counties, rather than by school grades, each child met once a week in a "county counseling" session with one of the four counselors...

...James Meredith talks like a Southern white man...

...The white tutors were accused of rejecting Tuskegee because it was a Negro institution...

...That got the loudest applause of the evening...

...The whole campus seemed to be accident prone...

...What should black people be doing...

...After the wounds endured at the white schools, the summer's healing process began with several weeks of something like mass psychic breakdown...

...They wrote a great deal of poetry, including counter-poems to Langston Hughes' Florida Roadmaker, to express what they felt to be a proper tone of militancy...

...They asked her if she thought it was right for black kids to go to white schools...

...The mob beat the crippled girl, who could not run away, and when she tried to get up, a man with a gun said, "Nigger, you move I shoot your brains out...

...I feel, too, that if I go back up North and continue living the life I led before, that I will be betraying not only these students, but myself and my country as well...

...Talking about Meredith later in a final evaluation session, the students kept using the word "stupid...

...They wrote essays about whether whites should learn Negro dialect and whether Thomas Jefferson, slave owner, had a right to sign the Declaration of Independence...

...The black tutors were goofing off...

...Evenings there were movies, talent shows, dances, and plays...

...Mostly they asked about black power and non-violence, because by the time Fannie Lou Hamer came, all libido seemed to be running into the black-white conflict...

...They wouldn't let him leave," a tutor said later...

...Speaking is one of the young Negro victims—and victors—of school desegregation in Mississippi...

...Dressed in first-day-of-school freshness, the 150 Negro children who sought to enter the previously allMIRIAM WASSERMAN is a free lance educational consultant in Atlanta, and she was associated with the Tougaloo project in that capacity...

...They kept running along beside him, tugging on his silk suit...

...The productive daily routine was therapeutic, and a number of special events helped...

...Among the plastering of posters for plays, dances, meetings, language clubs, and picnics that told the story of their lively daily rounds were several calls for "Black Power...

...I want to see how their mind work...

...There were cases of hysteria and imaginary appendicitis...

...Really, they shouldn't have signed and written the Declaration of Independence if the Negroes has to fight this way for equality," an eleventh-grade girl wrote...

...Things that Negroes say have a true meaning...