Lines Were Drawn by Horn Teena F.;Huffman Alan;Jones John Griffin;Barksdale Claiborne;

Author:Horn, Teena F.;Huffman, Alan;Jones, John Griffin;Barksdale, Claiborne;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
Published: 2016-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

“Yes!!”

“Yes!!”

“Well!”

“Well!”

“Uh huh!”

“Uh huh!”

“Mm hmm!”

“Mm hmm!”

“Yes!”

“Yes!”

“Well!”

“Well!” (repeated a time or two)

It is amusing to recall how bewildered we white boys were by that bit of black culture.

Charles Miller:

My class (unlike the class behind us with you guys, Bob Lampton, Doug Minor, etc.) did not have the unifying experience of going to Brinkley. We had tasted the “old Murrah” of prancing Murrah Misses and Jack Carlisle football glamour; desegregation threatened that Camelot. My classmates ran for the hills to Council Manhattan, Jackson Academy and the beginning of Jackson Prep. A double standard quickly emerged—parents sent their daughters to private schools and their sons to public school, presumably to protect them from the threat of black teenage boys. By the time I graduated, my class’s white population was two-thirds male.

I never really had any close black friends at Murrah. My black classmates were virtually unknown as individuals to me. Some certainly stood above the rest and were very likable, a few seemed like thugs, and most were in the anonymous middle (obviously, in hindsight, an exact reflection of my white peers). One of my most memorable experiences at Murrah was being a student assistant in a math class in my junior year, with all the kids being black and mostly seniors. I graded their papers and never will forget how many people added 1/3 and 1/4 and got 2/7, simply by adding the numerators and denominators across to get an incorrect total. It dawned on me—above anything else, many of my black classmates were academic cripples and nothing “magical” happened, or would ever happen, in an integrated Murrah to change that. It was too late for them.

In an interview, John Mixon, Kip Ezelle, Michael Bounds, Johnny Jones, and I discussed bomb threats and variations between the grading scales.

John Mixon: “Well, you know, we had a lot of bomb threats. I don’t know if you had them at Brinkley like we did at Murrah.”

Johnny: “Yeah. We would get to go home.”

Mixon: “We didn’t ever get to go home. We just had so many we would parade out in the streets for thirty minutes and then they’d call us back in.”

Kip Ezelle: “I do know this. When we went to Brinkley, school was so easy. I remember having, I don’t remember his name, but it was tenth-grade history.”

Johnny: “Wasn’t Krauss, was it?”

Kip: “And I had a 106 average in the class. So the black teacher that I had by the spring part of the year, sixth period, I’d say ‘you mind if I go over to the Quick Chick,’ which was the convenience store across the street from the school. We’d go over there and get stuff, bring it back to class. Then in the twelfth grade I had Mr. Harris. Y’all remember him? He about killed me. We were doing an experiment, and it was to make … I don’t remember how it happened, but you never heat a closed system, and of course he didn’t particularly tell us that, and we ended up making chlorine gas in the closed system.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.