This is an author panel on education issues. [inaudible conversations] good morning. Welcome again to the 2016 mississippi book festival. [inaudible] all right. I think were ready to get started. Welcome to the 2016 book festival. This is our panel this morning on schools and change. I just have a few housekeeping rules. Please remember to silence your cell phones. Books of these and many of the other authors here today will be available outside the State Capitol building. The booksellers are out on mississippi street, and signing tent is directly opposite that. Youll see in the back of the program the full booksigning schedule with authors and the times that theyll be signing today. Were delighted to have cspan broadcasting live with us today from jackson, mississippi. I want to thank the state legislature for allowing us the use of this facility today to come together. I want to thank the authors and the moderators today for helping us celebrate literature and the written word together. Also todays, the sponsor of this particular panel, i want to thank the Mississippi Humanities Council for their continuing support of the humanities and what were all doing here today. Id like to introduce Charles Bolton who will moderate todays panel. Hes professor of history at the university of North Carolina at greensboro. Hes the author of the book William Winter and the new mississippi a biography, also hardest deal of all the battle over School Integration in mississippi 18701980, and the book poor whites of the antebellum south, tenants and baylorers in central carolina. Welcome and thank you. Thank you. [applause] good morning. We have the authors of two memoirs this morning both that look at Public Education after mississippi schools were desegregated. One looks in the 1970s which was immediately after integration occurred, and one looks at it a few decades later in the early 21st century. I thought i would start off, though, by just giving a little bit of historic call context which does draw on my own book, the hardest deal of all, and we have a little bit of extra time, i think, because unfortunately you may have noticed two of our panelists couldnt be here today because of unforeseen circumstances, and they actually were both more history than memoir. So i thought i could maybe provide a little bit of context. So i promise i wont give you a fullscale lecture though here. So for much of the 20th century, probably youre all aware mississippi had a dual School System, had a black School System and a white School System. And that did present some difficulties for a poor state like mississippi because it could barely afford to fund one School System, much less two. And yet for many whites, especially in the, you know, early part of the 20th century into the mid 20th century, one of the most important things was that in looking at a quality education was that schools be segregated and other kind of Educational Measures were not nearly as important. But the consequence was that what really was created in mississippi was a somewhat mediocre School System for whites and a sorely underfunded School System for blacks. And that system of education came under attack from at least two fronts throughout the 20th century. One was from black parents and black educators who from the very beginning were with trying to get more resources for black education. The other was from a federal government that increasingly was concerned with this issue of ending racial segregation, and there are a lot of complicated reasons for that. But segregated education was perhaps the most obvious example of why the jim crow system was inequitable. If you wanted to look around and see that separate but equal was really not equal, the best place you could look was the schools. I mean, there were all kind of aspects of southern life were segregated during the jim crow era. You had segregated water fountains but, you know, everybody at least got a drink of water even if, you know, the fountains themselves maybe looked different. But in schools almost everywhere you looked, it was unequal. The materials, the training for teachers, the pay for teachers, the length of time that people went to schools, the Actual School facilities, and thats why its no surprise that when there is a legal challenge to segregation, that it comes in education. Im sure most of you are familiar with the brown decision in 1954 which is about education, that the Supreme Court ruled that segregated educational facilities were inherently unconstitutional. And it was a relatively it took a long time, but it was a relatively easy case for groups like the naacp to make because the evidence was kind of overwhelming. The federal government support, theres a variety of reasons for why over time the federal government became more interested in ending this, and i wont go into all that, but certainly by 1954 when the brown decision was handed down, it was a unanimous decision by the Supreme Court. But even then the court was a little bit unsure how to implement it. The implementation decree of the brown decision said that schools should be desegregated with all deliberate speed, which as you probably recognize doesnt make a whole lot of sense. Deliberate means slow and speed means fast [laughter] so, of course, white people fastened on the deliberate part and said, yeah, well get around to that one of these days and the blacks, of course, thought it should happen right away. And it didnt happen right away despite the efforts of black parents and other black activists to try to make it happen. In fact, for ten years there was absolutely no School Desegregation after the brown decision. The first School Desegregation in mississippi doesnt happen til 1964. And part of the reason why it started to increase there was, again, because the federal government became a little bit more active. In 1964 there was the 1964 Civil Rights Act in which the federal government said that schools could lose their federal funding if they discriminated. The next year there was another piece of federal legislation, the elementary and secondary education act, which for the first time the federal government allocated millions of dollars for elementary and secondary schools. Again, mississippi is a poor state. They needed that money. And to get that money, they were going to have to change, and they were going to have to start or ending the dual School System. And so there, again, there are further changes, but theres also continued resistance. And while theres some kind of token desegregation from 64 until 70, theres the dual School System is alive and well in mississippi. And finally theres another Supreme Court decision in 1969 which was a mississippi case, the alexander v. Holmes case in 1969 in which the Supreme Court sort of revised that all deliberate speed timetable. Basically said that the time to do this had long passed and that schools must be desegregated now. And they meant that especially for those mississippi districts that were party to that suit, they meant not even wait until next school year started, they meant were going to do it in the middle of the year. And thats part of the story that tina and john are going to tell you about. And so it does happen in mississippi pretty quickly. So i want to go to tina honor and john jones who are authors of the first memoir haha were looking at today, its called lines were drawn remembering courtordered integration at a mississippi high school. Tina horne lives in houston, mississippi, but she grew up here in jackson. But in houston in addition to an author, shes a dentist, a Small Business owner and a farmer. John lives, till lives here in jackson still lives here in jackson, and in addition to being an author, hes an attorney here in town. And they were students at Murrah High School here in jackson which was one of the historically white high schools here in jackson. And they were in that first group of students that were there when the schools were finally integrated on a massive scale because of the alexander decision in the spring of 1970. So, john and tina . Impressive crowd. I dont know if there are any Murrah High School graduates out there. I see one or two, three, four, good. Good. And everybody holds their hand up high. Tina and i graduated in 1973 from murrah. In 1969 the fifth Circuit Court of appeals had the case involving the jackson Public Schools and said thou shalt desegregate first, they said on december 1st of 69, were going to flipflop faculty and staff by the time the Christmas Holidays are over. They gave us a couple of extra weeks off for christmas vacation, which was pretty cool. We had no idea what we were coming back to because the court said this ten days thou shalt flipflop student bodies as well. So it became the most radical desegregation that the courts could come up with without really having an underlying plan. It was kind of chaos, at least in the early years. We, i went to bailey junior high. The first morning that it happened, there were i tell in the book when the, about 3 or 400 black kids showed up on Riverside Drive right out from bailey. It was like a bomb had exploded in bailey, and every girl and most of the guys were fighting for the only pay phone in the facility in the school calling their mom and dad and said, theyre here we didnt realize it was going to be this. And what we always heard was, well, all during that day, you know, moms and dads were pulling up to bailey junior high to pick up these white children and take them back to our comfy neighborhoods out to the northeast. We always herald that that night jackson heard that night jackson prep got started at a meeting in the basement of the First Presbyterian church. It was not responded to very well. By the time we were in the tenth grade, the court went one step further. I went to brinkley which was a previous allblack high school near the jackson mall. I was so ignorant, you know, growing up in northeast jackson i didnt even know where brinkly was until we had to find it on the first day of school. But we went over there. The fifth circuit had predicted wed have 507 white people attending brinkly. We had 83. 671 black children. And we were thrown together without any cushion or anybody telling us really what was going on to sort of make it on our own. And we did. After a tough start. By the time we got to murrah in our junior and senior year, we had, frankly, gotten to know our black classmates well must have as individuals well enough as individuals that it really worked. Integration was a success in 1972, 73. Actually at murrah through 1975. We had about 35 white student roll, student enrollment, 65 black, but it really worked. It was probably desegregations best success story. And i have looked it up. It probably was. We had really good participation, and we got together and became Close Friends in a way we would never have accomplished had we been left to our own devices. In 1977, long after we well, the year we graduated from college, there was a second mass exodus out of the jackson Public Schools by white parents. Now murrah is majority africanamerican. It still offers a splendid Educational Opportunity for people who go there. But i think what it shows is that the radical desegregation that we went through that made integration really work for the first time over an extend period in the history of mississippi didnt work over the long haul. And its a real shame. It should have. Weve still got a long ways to go on it, but our experience was a very positive one after a rough start. And it just shows to us anyway that if you have, if youre close enough in proximity to people, then race becomes an irrelevancy. You just learned about each other as individuals, and you can move on with great success. And thats what happened to us. I wish it lasted. This is tina freeman horne. She was a cheerleader at Murrah High School in my time. [laughter] and became a dentist and now lives in the houston, mississippi, but this book wouldnt have happened but for tinas hustle and kicking me in the rear end every time she needed to. This is teen from a. Tina. Morning, and thank yall for having us here. Id like to thank University Press for publishing our book and the people that put on the mississippi book festival. This is a lot of fun. The first time ive been here. Our book, to set the stage, i was born in 1955 which is where most of the participants were born in that year. And mississippi was different back then. We didnt have all the electronics that we have today, we spent a lot of time playing outside, and our lives were built around the neighborhood schools. We had power elementary in jackson, Bailey Junior High School was right up the hill x then there was murrah are high school. And if you wanted to enroll in college, it was just right around the corner, and then there was a Medical Center right across the street. So our lives in the white area where we grew up were safe, and our education was pretty good. Most of us were just rolling along, happy and ready to go to murrah. That was our dream, to go to Murrah High School and be a cheerleader or a murrah miss. Murrah high school had a great Football Team back in the day, and i dont know how they do now, but they were always the big eight champions. And the quest for excellence was something that was instilled in us in Elementary School through Junior High School and on up. We thought, god, i want to be good. I want to win. I want to be a National Merit scholar like all those other more or rah miss murrah mustangs. But then in our ninth grade year, just unexpectedly to most of the general public that didnt understand all the historical backgrounds that were going on within the legislature in our state, they changed the schools. And where we used to walk to school, we were supposed to then bus. But actually, mamas had to take us all the way across town to an area hay didnt know anything about they didnt know anything about. And this not only, this was the same for many of the white kids and many of the black kids at that time. We were all confused, you know . In the black neighborhood, many of the participants were wanting to go to brinkley which was at that time a very good Athletic School and had wonderful teachers, and so they were excited about that. So we were forced as a social experiment to integrate. And we did. And at first the schools we were sent to, i mean, we were all confused. We didnt know what was going on. We werent happy. Some of us got pushed around, hit, things happened, and you can read all about this in the book. But we have 63 participants that give a different story, and thats the beauty of it. Everybodys got a different idea and brought home different takes from it. So its set up on a timeline. We talk about being a child in mississippi and what we experienced, remembering the black and white water fountains. Yall remember that . And then just the segregation that existed at the time. And then we go through Elementary School and up to Junior High School and our experiences, and then we Start Talking about the chapters on where the radical desegregation actually happened. And my part that was i went out and collected some stories, and the interesting thing for a lot of us was the mixing of the cultures. We had different ideas about what a band was supposed to be like. We had testimony about the band director, and he wanted the band to play the good ship lollipop. Well, robert gibbs said, no. [laughter] you know, youre going to have to change that. And it took time for him to change. And what was a real stiff band and stiff white culture with dancing a certain way, we learned how to move in a different way. And our black classmates told us we had no soul. So they taught us how to have soul, and we learned a little bit about each other through time. By time we got to Murrah High School, we had what we described as a camelot which is where we all got along, and we loved our school, and we all cheered together for a Football Team who had lost every athlete on the Football Team except one. They all left and went to jackson prep. And a coach this makes the story so good is a coach came in after jack carlyle left and went to jackson prep named bob stevens. And bob stevens walked he was a real cool, calm guy. Came from Central High School. He walked into the gym, and he would pick out a boy and say, son, how would you like to play ball . I can help you out, were going to have a good team. And we had a winning team that year, it was wonderful. I mean, we built something out of nothing. You know, we took deaf station, and we devastation, and we made some beauty out of ashes. It was a great time. And johnny and i recognized that we lived through something wonderful. And through the years our classmate our class has been very close. We would have, like, fiveyea