What are the Freedom Lessons?
1. Treat others as you would like to be treated.
2. Have courage to confront uncertainty, intimidation or danger.
3. Family provides security, identity and values.
4. Prejudice is taught and learned.
5. It takes individual actions to create social change.
Unapologetically, I am a white woman who has written a book about school desegregation in the Deep South during the school year of 1969-1970 from three points of view: a white woman’s, a black youth’s, and a black woman’s. How could I? Why did I do this? Because I had a story to tell. I wasn’t sure whom it was for. Initially, it was to be a memoir about my own experience that year, for my daughters and my grandchildren. It became a novel, a fictionalized version of a mandated, unplanned, overnight integration of public schools. As I started to write the memoir version forty years later, I realized that some parts were missing. I wondered how this same event played out in the lives of the teachers and students I knew at the time.
When I started to research the background of the era that I thought I knew, it became clearer that I knew only my version. With the help of my local librarian, I found and read Gary Clarke, EdD’s, doctoral dissertation, Even the Books Were Separate. It documented the history and emotional impact of, decisions surrounding, resistance to, and life lessons he learned through first-person interviews about that school year. I am most grateful for his permission to use information and phrases from his dissertation, “Even the Books Were Separate: Court-Mandated Desegregation and Educators’ Professional Lives During the Caddo Crossover of 1969-70. Copyright 2006 by Gary Lee Clarke. Reading his work was the first validation of my experience after forty years. Gary was a high school student during the school year 1969–70, when I was a teacher. That year impacted many decisions, particularly career choices, for the remainder of my life. Gary is now a retired school administrator and also served as one of my beta readers.
If any reviewers look at this story through the #ownvoices lens, it won’t pass. But I didn’t write this story for black women or black men, although I hope they read it. I wrote it mainly for white women and white men because in my research I learned things about black history, culture, and families that I never knew. How didn’t I know? When I was a student, these lessons were never taught to us—I had to experience them firsthand. I am open to, curious about, and interested in other cultures. I always have been. I married a Cuban man at a time in our country’s history when our marriage was frowned upon by some and caused some concern in my own family. However, our union has flourished for fifty years. One of our daughters is married to a black man. I attribute the fact that she fell in love with someone from another race and culture to the way we raised our daughters and our continued interest in people from all walks of life. When my husband and I married, our daughter’s marriage would have been illegal in nearby states. There are books and a movie, The Loving Story, that document that truth. I hope that my novel will generate conversations that are necessary in today’s world.
This fifty-year-old story is a reflection of today’s political climate. Unfortunately, many US schools are still segregated, for a variety of reasons. A few still resist the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Discrimination, prejudice, and numerous examples of social injustice remain. Initial interest in reading my book came from readers of historical fiction and social justice stories and for professional development in the realm of discrimination.
The period from June 1969 to November 1970 documents actual events, some that I experienced and attributed to fictional Colleen. The final scene of the book was based on a lesson plan published in an Instructor magazine that I owned at the time. I credit Jane Elliott, the teacher who originally used the lesson in her own classroom the year Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered. However, I would not advise any teacher today to use that lesson in a class of young children. Lessons on discrimination and racial bias should be part of the general curriculum, and teachers should receive professional development on these issues.
When I started to write this book, I wished I’d had a friend to guide me that year, so I created her and named her Evelyn, in honor of a black woman I do call a friend, Evelyn Counts. My real-life Evelyn has always been a kind woman. Frank’s devotion to his family and his loving respect for his mother are based on two men I know well: my husband, Manny, raised in the Cuban culture, and my son-in-law Philip, raised in the Ghanaian culture. If I needed to know how Frank would act in a situation, I channeled one of them. The intersections of Evelyn’s and Frank’s stories with my story are fictionalized versions of factual events that occurred in nearby cities and states during the same year.
This isn’t a white-savior story, nor can I claim to have written a novel of diversity. As a white woman writing in the voice of a young black male and a black woman, I expect some pushback on how I could have done that.
This is how: I asked two black readers to read with a critical eye. I added two white beta readers, who wrote and published similar books representing black voices. Gary’s dissertation and two others gave me firsthand accounts by teachers and high school students, as did newspapers of the day.
I also went back to the school and met the current principal, who was a college freshman during that year. Her brother was one of the black students who was to be held back and not graduate. The scenes in which Penelope argues for the students to be allowed to graduate are entirely fictional but based on a first-person interview reporting that parents did demand that the graduation take place. I have taken care in telling my point-of-view characters’ stories in a respectful manner. I am also an experienced (retired) educator and have worked in segregated and integrated school systems as a teacher, a consultant, and a supervisor.
Ellen Oh, CEO and cofounder of We Need Diverse Books (https://diversebooks.org), encourages writers to create stories that reflect the diversity of the world we live in. Her advice to those who write about IPOC (indigenous people, people of color) is to tell their story properly or be prepared for criticism. Did I need to tell this story? Yes, it is my story too. I did my best to get it right.