"Integrate"

NOTE: I first wrote a slightly different version of this piece soon after the controversial version of Huck Finn appeared replacing the "n-word."  I am posting this piece on the word "integrate" to mark the 45th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Integrate (verb, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, late 1960’s):  an effort on the part of government officials to appease the requirements of Brown vs. the Board of Education; action involving the placement of one or two black children in traditionally white classrooms.

            In my 6th grade classroom in 1967, “integration” involved placing one African-American boy in a classroom of close to 30 white children.  We noted his presence but otherwise went about the process of being 6^th graders.  One boy caused a stir one day by uttering a fairly harmless obscenity at the water fountain.  Some boys discovered girls and vice versa.  In music class, we sang Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land.”  Meanwhile, the solitary black boy sat quietly in the classroom while this white world swirled around him.  In retrospect, I have wondered how he must have felt, being “integrated” in this manner.  What did any of us learn as a result of his “integration” in that classroom?

            My real lesson in race relations that year came outside of the classroom in the halls of a local hospital.  My mother shepherded my sister, a 4^th grader; my brother, a 2^nd grader; and me through the halls to visit my maternal grandmother who was dying of breast cancer.  Before we entered my grandmother’s room, my mother pulled us aside and quietly admonished, “Do not tell your grandmother that you have black children in your classroom.  It would kill her.”  My 6^th grade self did not quite understand why that news would strike my grandmother dead, but we obeyed my mother’s warning.  Breast cancer took my grandmother in March, 1968.  Louisiana finally settled Brown vs. the Board of Education in 2004, the last state to do so.

Integrate (verb, Anywhere, USA, early 21^st century):  an effort on the part of well-meaning people to whitewash the literary record

The controversial “revisions” of Mark Twain’s classic novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, are disturbing.  Revising the work to replace Twain’s language of separation with less offensive euphemisms negates the experiences of those who worked so hard publicly for integration and civil rights and for those who were unwitting participants, such as the black boy in my 6^th grade class.

Much progress has been made regarding integration and other aspects of race relations, not only in the South but across the nation, as well.  While the race issue will never be totally resolved in this country, separate but equal has, in theory, disappeared from classrooms, from public facilities, and even from public office.   However, the record of this racial segregation should remain integrated in its original language.

In another classic work of American literature, published in 1940, which examines race relations, Richard Wright’s protagonist in Native Son, Bigger Thomas, is in hiding after accidentally smothering the white daughter of a wealthy philanthropist.  As he huddles in subzero temperatures, Bigger laments that no black leader had come before to lead the way for blacks:  “If only someone had gone before and lived or suffered and died—made it so that it could be understood!”  Bigger’s thoughts eerily foreshadow black leaders who were soon able to break open the civil rights movement—Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X, among others who followed in the path which they were able to forge.  These leaders were able to inspire and validate the experiences of the lesser known people whose efforts contributed to the civil rights movement to create a world of integration for the real children who were “integrated” so many years ago and for the fictional Bigger Thomas’s.