Massive Resilience- Black History Month luncheon today. Pretty incredible.
Massive resilience
Another interesting Black History Month lunch and learn at work today. Our guest speaker was a woman who lived in Prince Edward County during "massive resistance". Schools were closed for 5 years rather then integrate them. She went to a school in the basement of a church for 2 years. Those years were lost for those who didn't got any kind of school. The man who would one day be her husband graduated high school at the age of 21 to give you an idea.
Her father, with the help of some coworkers on the railroad, found an abandoned house just over the county line in Appomattox. Mom put up some drapes and dad changed the locks and put up a mailbox to make it look like a functioning house. Each day he'd dropped 5 kids off on his way to work. They'd wait behind the house and when they heard the bus coming they'd go in the backdoor and out the front as if they lived there. Word grew and it ended up with 21 kids passing through the house. She said the questions from other kids were "21 of you live in that house?" "How can you have 3 people in 5th grade and 5 in 9th?" She said they were just told to shrug it off and not saying anything. No county officials ever asked for proof of residence of legal guardianship- maybe they were just turning a blind eye to the obvious. They graduated from high school. She went on to earn a college degree and end up retiring from a job in the Prince Edward County Administration.
= new reply since forum marked as read
