Struggling to Learn by June M Thomas

Author:June M Thomas
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
Published: 2022-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

In Orangeburg, throughout that year of constant pickets, burgeoning arrest lists, downtown businesses’ crises, shopping boycotts, and inspirational rallies, the topic of school desegregation was never far below the surface. School desegregation was part of the original list of ten objectives/demands given to local government leaders. It was also part of the list of twenty actions that the Torch asked all readers to undertake: registering to vote, joining boycotts, helping to plan mass meetings, participating in sit-ins and picket lines, writing letters to editors, learning about “Negro history,” and helping “integrate schools and colleges—yours and others,” to name a few. By the November 8 issue, parents of fourteen Black students had requested transfer to the all-white Orangeburg schools. The district’s school superintendent held private meetings with several of these parents, according to the February 13 issue. By March 16, 1964, parents of twenty-three Black children, including me, had filed suit.

Probably during that spring or summer of 1964, Williams photographed a celebration for those who would integrate the local white schools. I have only faint memories of that evening, but photographs clearly show many of the nineteen who integrated schools that fall. The NAACP sponsored this event; we were standing in the pews at Trinity as we received recognition. Almost all of us were girls, as Rachel Devlin would have predicted. In one of the images, my father and sister are standing as well, several rows behind us, so families and parents must have received recognition. At the time it seemed to me this was just another, inevitable stage in the civil rights movement. We might even find new friends at the white school, as soon as they realized that we were just normal human beings.

Court papers for Adams et al. v. School District No. 5 Orangeburg et al. are dated March 20, 1964. Listed is the name of each Black student plus one parent; my mother signed on my behalf. Also listed are a few students who did not end up joining us in desegregating local schools that fall, such as Rackley’s younger daughter Lurma, who had gone to jail regularly but experienced selective harassment because of her last name, so perhaps she had already done her penance.26

The language of the petition filed with the US district court, Orangeburg division, is standard legal fare, but two sentences stand out. The first: “The operation of a compulsory biracial school system in Orangeburg County violates rights of the plaintiffs and members of their class which are secured to them by the due process and equal protection clauses of the 14th Amendment to the Federal Constitution.” The Fourteenth amendment had come in handy once again. The other sentence: “The injury which plaintiffs and members of their class suffer as a result of the operation of a compulsory biracial school system in Orangeburg County is irreparable and shall continue to irreparably injure plaintiffs and their class.”27 And so we were irreparably injured, a claim that seems obvious in hindsight. A copy of our lawsuit

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