experience with the tensions of integration occurred in Morris, which, despite the integration of its schools, remained an all-white town. Though not a “sundown” town in the purest sense, no blacks resided in Morris. We bought our groceries there, and went to thepost office there, but we did not
live
there. Even as late as 1983, when a black family started building a home on the outskirts of town, arsonists destroyed it before it could be completed.
But even though the social structure set very real lines of demarcation between blacks and whites, my parents insulated us from extreme forms of racism. I often wonder at how they were able to do so, in a society not unlike the Deep South, where so much racial division still remained. By the time I was born my parents had many years, even generations, of experience living and raising children in a segregated society.
Despite the early Supreme Court challenges to Oklahoma’s racial separatism and despite the fact that the very first lunch counter sit-in took place in Oklahoma City in 1962, much of the civil unrest experienced in the South escaped Oklahoma. Those of us living in rural areas of Oklahoma watched the movement on television and read about it in the newspapers. As a family we watched and waited in silence, though each member, I suspect, wondered how our lives would be changed by what we saw and heard about. I was at home when the announcement of the assassinations came over the airwaves. In April 1968, as we ate our dinner on a balmy evening, reports of Dr. Martin Luther King’s death came on the nightly news. My father spoke of it in knowing terms. It was “predictable,” he declared, given the intense hatred King’s denouncement of segregation had brought. My mother agreed.
We did not customarily talk of politics at home, and though this tragic event provided a rare opportunity, we did not speak of politics then, either. Nor did we speak of the assassination at all the following day at school. In June, with Ray, I watched the news films of the shooting of Robert Kennedy. Still no discussion from my parents of the politics of our times—the times that would change their children’s future. The times were so different than those my parents had known that they knew no language in which to speak about them. My parents’ lives were more like their own parents’ than the lives of their children. Uncertain of the relevance of their observations, they mostly kept quiet. We never discussed why the family never ate at the lunch counter in Newberry’s during our trips to Okmulgee but instead ate our Dairy Queen hamburgersin the car. Or why the rural black folks gathered and shopped at Norman’s Grocery Store rather than the larger and newer Neal’s, where the whites gathered and shopped. Or why black people were always interred by Dyer’s, Ragsdale’s, or Brown’s funeral homes and never one of the white-owned mortuaries, whose names even today I’m not aware of. The civil rights movement was a remote and abstract experience. In Oklahoma we certainly identified with its goal, but its activities never reached the rural areas except over the television.
There were few incidents of physical resistance to the integration at Morris in my experience. When I arrived there as an eighth grader, Ray and the five other black students in his class had paved the way. Though the black boys had opportunities to mainstream in the high school culture in sports, the black girls’ access to the fields of distinction in school culture—cheerleading and homecoming activity—remained limited. None of the black girls were encouraged to participate on the girls’ basketball team, which in Morris had a history of state championships. For me it was all the same. I was not athletic, nor did I think myself beautiful in the homecoming queen way. I had a pleasant round face that from age seven was adorned with glasses thick enough to correct my nearsightedness, and that did not seem
live
there. Even as late as 1983, when a black family started building a home on the outskirts of town, arsonists destroyed it before it could be completed.
But even though the social structure set very real lines of demarcation between blacks and whites, my parents insulated us from extreme forms of racism. I often wonder at how they were able to do so, in a society not unlike the Deep South, where so much racial division still remained. By the time I was born my parents had many years, even generations, of experience living and raising children in a segregated society.
Despite the early Supreme Court challenges to Oklahoma’s racial separatism and despite the fact that the very first lunch counter sit-in took place in Oklahoma City in 1962, much of the civil unrest experienced in the South escaped Oklahoma. Those of us living in rural areas of Oklahoma watched the movement on television and read about it in the newspapers. As a family we watched and waited in silence, though each member, I suspect, wondered how our lives would be changed by what we saw and heard about. I was at home when the announcement of the assassinations came over the airwaves. In April 1968, as we ate our dinner on a balmy evening, reports of Dr. Martin Luther King’s death came on the nightly news. My father spoke of it in knowing terms. It was “predictable,” he declared, given the intense hatred King’s denouncement of segregation had brought. My mother agreed.
We did not customarily talk of politics at home, and though this tragic event provided a rare opportunity, we did not speak of politics then, either. Nor did we speak of the assassination at all the following day at school. In June, with Ray, I watched the news films of the shooting of Robert Kennedy. Still no discussion from my parents of the politics of our times—the times that would change their children’s future. The times were so different than those my parents had known that they knew no language in which to speak about them. My parents’ lives were more like their own parents’ than the lives of their children. Uncertain of the relevance of their observations, they mostly kept quiet. We never discussed why the family never ate at the lunch counter in Newberry’s during our trips to Okmulgee but instead ate our Dairy Queen hamburgersin the car. Or why the rural black folks gathered and shopped at Norman’s Grocery Store rather than the larger and newer Neal’s, where the whites gathered and shopped. Or why black people were always interred by Dyer’s, Ragsdale’s, or Brown’s funeral homes and never one of the white-owned mortuaries, whose names even today I’m not aware of. The civil rights movement was a remote and abstract experience. In Oklahoma we certainly identified with its goal, but its activities never reached the rural areas except over the television.
There were few incidents of physical resistance to the integration at Morris in my experience. When I arrived there as an eighth grader, Ray and the five other black students in his class had paved the way. Though the black boys had opportunities to mainstream in the high school culture in sports, the black girls’ access to the fields of distinction in school culture—cheerleading and homecoming activity—remained limited. None of the black girls were encouraged to participate on the girls’ basketball team, which in Morris had a history of state championships. For me it was all the same. I was not athletic, nor did I think myself beautiful in the homecoming queen way. I had a pleasant round face that from age seven was adorned with glasses thick enough to correct my nearsightedness, and that did not seem
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