Jackie and Me

He was three years older than me, Jackie. And in the vernacular of my childhood time and place, Colored. I'm thinking about Jackie tonight because the elementary school I attended and where 30 years later, I found myself principal, is celebrating its 75th anniversary. Jackie's school experience and mine could not have been more different. Let me get you up to speed.

A few weeks ago, my brother, John, still living in the town of our birth, saw and informed me of a piece in the local newspaper inviting former students, teachers, and parents both to contribute to and attend a celebration of the longest-continuing school in the district. Naturally, I contacted the writer.

This past Sunday, my wife and I attended a meeting of parents and former students who were planning the big event. Except for current PTA officers, we were the "babies" of the bunch. One gentleman was, in fact, among the first students of the school, having begun 1st grade in 1937. He is a former mayor of the city and a testament to everything I remember as both student and principal about the school. Park Street School created leaders, all without the help of End-of-Grade tests. Imagine that.

Park Street School was then and now set off a tree-lined street of middle- to upper-middle-class homes only a few blocks from the center of town. The street and school was named for the grassy five-acre, oak-treed park across the street from the school and linked to the school by a pedestrian tunnel. It was then our playground. If those tunnel walls could talk, they would tell of chewing tobacco, first kisses, and childhood dreams in technicolor.

There was no way I could have known then that my classmates and I had the best of everything. The best textbooks, the best lunches, the best facilities, the best teachers.  At Jackie's crosstown school on the "Hill," not so much. There was a certain adjective that prefaced "Hill," that I will not repeat.

So you know, Jackie was the son of our domestic housekeeper, Ellen. Jackie was big and strong for his age, and I remember he loved baseball. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Jackie had no Little League team, no Kiwanis or Rotary Club sponsor. Jackie had only his sandlot friends with whom to play. With the "Whites Only" water fountains and restrooms downtown and the "Balcony Reserved for Coloreds" signs in the local theater, that was just the way it was.

Years later, education historian, Diane Ravitch, would write that public school Black students in the Carolinas routinely used the hand-me-down textbooks of the White schools and enjoyed only one-fourth the fiscal resources. Moreover, the state spent only 1/100 of the cost to transport Blacks as it did Whites. Neither Jackie nor I knew it at the time. That was just the way it was.

So now I find myself at the end of my career in public education and at the beginning of the next chapter of my life enjoying an opportunity to revisit the way it was in my childhood. I will locate in my attic all the artifacts I can find that may bring life to who we were then to a new generation. They will marvel at how we looked, how we wrote, how we measured success, and they will know nothing of our experience. And that is just the way it is.

Me, well, I went on to earn an academic doctorate and enjoyed a successful career as an educational innovator. I have been an award-winning high school band director, a professional musician, a principal and assistant principal, a director in a regional education research and development laboratory, a graduate school professor, an author, and director and executive director of an organization building leadership capacity in the highest-performing school districts in North Carolina.

Jackie? He never lived to see fifty, in part I am convinced, because he, except for the abiding love of his family, had the worst of everything. The worst education, the worst diet, the worst access to health care, the worst career opportunities.  I am humble enough to know that who I am is as much a product of chance as of my own effort. To some extent, the same holds true for Jackie. Jackie chose neither his skin color nor the place and time of his birth. He played the cards he was dealt.

On the other hand, where Jackie went to school, how his school and adult life were resourced was more a matter of policy and practice than of chance. The way it was was not an accident.

When I attend the 75th anniversary of my elementary school, I want to talk about Jackie and me, good luck and bad luck. But most of all, I want to underscore how policy and practice favored me and not Jackie. That is not my fault but it is my opportunity.

So I hope Jackie's grandchildren will be there. I hope to tell them the story of their grandfather, my friendship with him, and the way it was then. I intend to leave them with a message of hope and a vision of how it may be. And that is just the way it is.