Coretta Scott King by George E. Stanley

Author:George E. Stanley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Aladdin

We’re Going to Lincoln High School

Eleven-year-old Coretta’s first day in sixth grade, her final year at the all-black elementary school at Heiberger, started the way all the other school years had started. Rain or shine, she and Edythe and Obie Leonard would walk the three miles to school and back each day, hoping that the school buses carrying the white children to their school wouldn’t splatter them with mud or cover them with the fine dust the wheels stirred up.

The faces of white children staring at them from the back windows, sticking out their tongues, had been burned into Coretta’s mind. When Coretta shook her fist at them, she could tell it made them all very angry, because black people just didn’t do things like that to white people, but Coretta didn’t care. In fact, she enjoyed the feeling it gave her, even though she knew she wasn’t doing what the Bible taught, that she should turn the other cheek.

That day, when Coretta saw their school in the distance, she remembered that it had once been just an unpainted wooden frame building, with one room, in which more than one hundred pupils crowded each school day. Now, it was divided into two rooms, separating the lower grades from the upper grades, and had even been painted inside and out.

“It is still not as nice as the school that the white children go to, though,” Coretta muttered.

“And it never will be,” Edythe said. She turned to Coretta. “I know what you’re thinking, and you need to quit worrying so much about it. It’s never ever going to change around here.”

“Oh, yes it is,” Coretta assured her. “Oh, yes it is!”

“What’s going to change?” Obie Leonard asked her.

“Well, for one thing, we’re going to have real blackboards to write on, not just wooden walls that have been painted black. And we’re also going to have indoor toilets, not outhouses that smell so bad, you can hardly breathe when you pass them.”

“And?” Edythe said.

“We’re going to have real desks, made for schools, not wooden benches, or those rough things that Mr. Jones made and forgot to sand, so that I get splinters in my legs every time I sit down in them.”

“And?” Obie Leonard said.

“And we’re going to have real textbooks, new ones, and our parents won’t have to pay for them either, just like the parents of the white children don’t, and we’ll have a library, with other books that you don’t have to read but that you’ll want to read because they’ll be books about all kinds of interesting things.”

Coretta continued to list the changes that she planned to make so that the black children who attended this school after she was gone would get a better education.

“I hope they don’t change teachers, though,” Edythe said, “because no one could ever be as good as Mrs. Bennett.”

“I know,” Coretta said.

In fact, if it hadn’t been for Mrs. Mattie Bennett, Coretta was sure that she would just have quit and started working

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