I was one of many who started a new school in town in 67,and it was the year they started mandatory desegregation. We had five or six brave lonely kids who came to be part of Callaway High School. I am ashamed to say that by that time I was so indoctrinated by the south that I made no effort to meet those kids. I was not mean,just drifted with the crowds desire to register our protest by not being friendly. Sometimes change takes a long time. Ironically, the school and neighborhood is almost all black forty years later.
The one thing mandatory desegregation could never prevent was white flight, and the town farther out around Jackson began to grow. Today, downtown Jackson is a shell of its former self and all the movie theatres, car dealerships, and new shopping centers are in places like Madison/Ridgland, and Pearl, and Clinton. We would find out later that the tranformation really took place in the younger grades, where kids had not been taught to hate. My daughter would grow up in a different world. So the change did in fact take politics and exposure to change attitude long held in the south.
All this would change for me, and it was not legislation, or the civil rights movement, it was conversion to faith in Christ that opened the door to inter-racial friendships. More on that tommorrow.
P.S. Cinderella died Thursday Morning, We attended the new season of the Chandler Symphony Orchestra tonight. They are all volunteer and wonderfully talented.
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