anybody, really. So I kind of isolated myself, just on the assumption that I didnât know these people and they werenât going to be nice to me.â Eric was a skinny kid who said very little. When he spoke, it was in a voice so subdued that it was hard to hear what he was saying. If a teacher called on him in class, he tended to look down at his desk and mumble his answers. One day not long after the school year started, he refused to return to Lakeside.
The school administration scrambled to get him back, conferencing with his parents. One of our more amiable classmates was dispatched to go to the Hampton house and play with Eric. Eric heard his mom and dad shouting at each otherâhis dad wanted him to go back, while his mom said he should be allowed to make his own choice about where he wanted to go to school. Finally, it was agreed that Eric would give Lakeside another try.
No one among the students at Lakeside said anything about Ericâs absence. Our English teacher, Mr. Bayley, finally broke the silence, telling us at the end of a class period that there was something he wanted to talk about. Our small class sat around the perimeter of four long oak tables that had been arranged to make a square as Mr. Bayleyâwho, like every single teacher at the school that year, was whiteâstood up in his brown cardigan sweater with a look of disappointment on his face. He sucked in a long, deep breath and began to speak very deliberately.
âIâm sure that youâve noticed that Eric Hampton has not been in school,â he said. âWeâve been talking to his parents, and heâll be coming back tomorrow. Heâs had a hard time adjusting here. You should treat him like you treat anyone else. Just because heâs black doesnât mean that there is anything different about him. Please make an effort to make him feel comfortable. I want you to go home tonight and think about it.â
We collected our books and filed out silently, hanging our heads in the exaggerated way kids do when theyâre expected to look contrite. I felt guilty but didnât really know why. The first few weeks had been a disorienting battle to be accepted. Ericâs isolation came largely from his own shyness, which was compounded by his one obvious difference from everyone else. You wanted to be friends with him but didnât know what to sayâhis race was something you registered but also tried to ignore. The easiest thing to do was to stay quiet.
To get to school throughout his years at Lakeside, Eric caught the bus and rode downtown, where he usually met up with âthe other little black kids from Lakeside.â They transferred to another bus that took them up to the North End. They were, both literally and figuratively, traveling away from a public school system that had been in disarray for years.
As Seattleâs black population grew throughout the 1950s and 1960s, its public schools became increasingly segregated. Garfield High School, for example, went from 4 percent black enrollment in 1940 to 75 percent in 1972, the year Willie McClain graduated. By then, black and Asian kids also made up the majority enrollments of several elementary and middle schools in the Central Area; schools in the North End were almost entirely white.
In the 1970s, school desegregation became a civil rights battleground across the country. Activists, looking for ways to implement the legislative and legal victories of the previous decades, began to file lawsuits against school districts that had not integrated. In Boston, where a federal judge in 1974 ordered a mandatory busing plan, whites rioted and threw bottles and rocks at buses full of black students. Seattle by then had already tried voluntary desegregation, which had failed after too few families took up the offer. With civil rights groups threatening litigation, the city had to take action. It came up with its own mandatory busing plan,
The school administration scrambled to get him back, conferencing with his parents. One of our more amiable classmates was dispatched to go to the Hampton house and play with Eric. Eric heard his mom and dad shouting at each otherâhis dad wanted him to go back, while his mom said he should be allowed to make his own choice about where he wanted to go to school. Finally, it was agreed that Eric would give Lakeside another try.
No one among the students at Lakeside said anything about Ericâs absence. Our English teacher, Mr. Bayley, finally broke the silence, telling us at the end of a class period that there was something he wanted to talk about. Our small class sat around the perimeter of four long oak tables that had been arranged to make a square as Mr. Bayleyâwho, like every single teacher at the school that year, was whiteâstood up in his brown cardigan sweater with a look of disappointment on his face. He sucked in a long, deep breath and began to speak very deliberately.
âIâm sure that youâve noticed that Eric Hampton has not been in school,â he said. âWeâve been talking to his parents, and heâll be coming back tomorrow. Heâs had a hard time adjusting here. You should treat him like you treat anyone else. Just because heâs black doesnât mean that there is anything different about him. Please make an effort to make him feel comfortable. I want you to go home tonight and think about it.â
We collected our books and filed out silently, hanging our heads in the exaggerated way kids do when theyâre expected to look contrite. I felt guilty but didnât really know why. The first few weeks had been a disorienting battle to be accepted. Ericâs isolation came largely from his own shyness, which was compounded by his one obvious difference from everyone else. You wanted to be friends with him but didnât know what to sayâhis race was something you registered but also tried to ignore. The easiest thing to do was to stay quiet.
To get to school throughout his years at Lakeside, Eric caught the bus and rode downtown, where he usually met up with âthe other little black kids from Lakeside.â They transferred to another bus that took them up to the North End. They were, both literally and figuratively, traveling away from a public school system that had been in disarray for years.
As Seattleâs black population grew throughout the 1950s and 1960s, its public schools became increasingly segregated. Garfield High School, for example, went from 4 percent black enrollment in 1940 to 75 percent in 1972, the year Willie McClain graduated. By then, black and Asian kids also made up the majority enrollments of several elementary and middle schools in the Central Area; schools in the North End were almost entirely white.
In the 1970s, school desegregation became a civil rights battleground across the country. Activists, looking for ways to implement the legislative and legal victories of the previous decades, began to file lawsuits against school districts that had not integrated. In Boston, where a federal judge in 1974 ordered a mandatory busing plan, whites rioted and threw bottles and rocks at buses full of black students. Seattle by then had already tried voluntary desegregation, which had failed after too few families took up the offer. With civil rights groups threatening litigation, the city had to take action. It came up with its own mandatory busing plan,
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