50 years ago today . . .

. . . some kids went to their new school for the first time.

NPR has already had several stories about the Little Rock Nine and plans to have some more throughout the year.

Some comments about my daughters' small participation in the legacy of that day below the fold.

I know what I said in my previous post, but this morning I saw the above picture over at Washington Monthly and couldn't stop thinking about how that day seems simultaneously so distant, for me, and so Now for my daughters.

There's more than one way to integrate a school system, and Mobile (where my children live) has chosen a combination of gerrymandered school boundaries and a magnet school program in which students' parents express their interest in participating and are selected by lottery. They get to remain in the magnet program by maintaining a "C" average, but they're initially selected according to a complex system of ratios, one of which is race. I have no idea whether this plan would pass constitutional muster in light of the recent Supreme Court decisions regarding the Louisville and Seattle desegregation plans, but it seems to me that the facts that the only kids in the magnet schools are those whose parents want them to be there and who continue to do well academically would be points in its favor. Moreover, I know that far more kids, white and black, want to be in the magnet program than there is room to accommodate them (academically, the schools are among the very best in the state, public or private), and that my daughters' mother and I are thrilled that they are lucky enough to be in it.

But. Though the public schools there are, de jure, integrated, education in Mobile remains segregated. The public schools have majority black and other minority populations; a large number of private schools, most of them run by conservative Protestant churches, are mostly white. Thw official reason these "academies" exist is that the public schools have become "Godless," but no doubt the nearly-concurrent appearance of court-mandated school desegregation gave some folks added impetus to push their churches to establish them. Mobile, a city with deep Catholic roots, also has a large parochial school system that has existed since the city's earliest days--that system is more balanced.

Both my daughters have close friends at school who are African-American. Their being in the magnet program of course has something to do with that; they also have their mother's example: she has several close friends who are black and whom she sees socially. But my older daughter recently had to defend one of her black friends from the racial slurs of another person--someone she had also considered her friend. And that's something that has struck me about what happened at Little Rock, by some accounts one of the more socially-integrated cities in the South back in the '50s, as I've listened to some of the NPR stories and looked at the picture here: race is indeed still a faultline in this country, but one of the paradoxes of the post-civil rights movement is that it's harder now to see what might or might not trigger rumblings along that faultline. What's happening in Jena, Louisiana, is not the sort of thing I'm referring to here: one can't get much more blatant than hanging nooses from a tree without actually putting someone's head in those nooses. I mean all that history and fear and prejudice and hatred and misunderstanding that still sits below the surface of not just Southern but American life--sometimes waiting quietly, a sort of Pavlovian response that suddenly lunges out and that people don't "really mean;" sometimes seething.