Story Map 1947-1959
WHY A STORY MAP?
I have lived through nearly eight decades of American change. Rather than tell that life as a collection of memories, I am mapping it against the world changing around me, laws, politics, race, family, education, economics, work, art and opportunity.
Each period asks two questions: What was happening around me? And what was I becoming within it?
This first Story Map begins with 1947-1959, the years in which segregation was simply the environment I knew, and the years in which those times began to change.
The Weather I Was Born Into
I was born in 1947 Ito a segregated America. My family lived in Arlington, Virginia, across Key Bridge three miles from Washington, DC. We were American citizens living under the same Constitution as everyone else, but we did not experience the same America. As a child, I did not think of myself as living under Jim Crow laws. It was simple the world I was born into.
I WAS BORN ACROSS THE RIVER
My mother crossed the Potomac to give birth to me. I was born at Garfield Memorial Hospital in Washington, D.C., in 1947, although my family lived across the Potomac in Arlington, Virginia. Arlington Hospital did not admit Black women to its maternity ward. Garfield admitted Black patients, but Washington’s hospital system was itself segregated too; Black and white newborns being placed in separate nurseries.
THAT WAS SIMPLY MY WORLD
As a child. I didn’t wake up thinking that I lived under Jim Crow. That was simply my world.
My grandfather, a trade-school graduate and builder, with my grandmother moved from Goldsboro to Arlington. He built two houses between one block, backyard to backyard. My world was my mother and father, brothers and sisters, grandparents, neighbors, church, school and the kids who lived around us.
Our Halls Hill community was segregated, but to a child it felt self-contained and safe. Our house was small and crowded. My father had two sons from his first marriage whose mother had died in childbirth. My mother helped raise them along with the four children she and my father had together. Three boys and three girls lived in our two-bedroom home.
We didn’t have much money, although I don’t remember thinking we were poor. We managed within our means—or did without.
WALKING MADE OUR NEIGHBORHOOD A VILLAGE
My mother walked. When we had no transportation for Saturday grocery shopping, we children walked with her and helped carry groceries home. We walked to elementary school. We walked to church and to the clinic. We walked to the playground, community center and birthday parties. The neighborhood store was at the end my street where we could buy food.
Walking made our neighborhood a village. As children we understood ‘eyes’ were everywhere.
There were three churches Baptist Methodist, and Holiness next to our house. I mostly played in the yard: hopscotch, jumping rope, jacks and marbles. I climbed trees and threw rocks. I danced the boogie woogie to the piano music of my two brothers.
I learned ballet at the community center and performed ‘A MidSummer Night’s Dream.’ I dreamed of becoming a ballerina before our teacher moved away. On snowy days I stayed inside drawing cartoon characters enjoying mother’s cookies.
THE WORLD AROUND THE TABLE
My father had a habit of challenging his children’s thinking at the dinner table. Somebody would make a statement and he would ask:
“How do you know”
If you claimed to know something, you needed to be able to support it. We had World Book encyclopedias, and sometimes one of my siblings had to get up from dinner to look something up. Then we all become automatically involved researching the question and finding a better answer.
Decades later, I recognize something in that experience. Before I knew the words research, critical thinking or evidence, my father was teaching us not simply to accept what somebody said.
Other family activities involved my father, his sons and friends from the community going fishing early Saturday morning. They brought home fish that my mother prepared for breakfast.
By midsummer, fruit trees my grandfather had planted – apples, pears, cherries – and his grapevine were in full. When the black cherries came in, my big brothers would climb high into the tree and cut branches that fell to the ground for us younger children to pick and pit. Mother baked cherry cobbler and saved some of the for canning.
The Halls Hill community was my world and my backyard was a Garden of Eden during the summer.
DISCOVERING ANOTHER WORLD
In 1953 I went to live in Washington, D.C., to attend first grade. I stayed with my godmother, Lenora, my father’s first cousin; her husband, Bud Howell; and her mother, my Great-Aunt Emma. Aunt Emma was petite and respected, with extraordinarily long gray hair that the wore in a bun. I felt protected by her. And I loved breakfast there: grits, scrambled eggs, bacon, toast and orange juice.
My godfather was one of the kindest men I knew. He treated me and neighborhood children with care. I considered him a father figure. He worked underground at the Library of Congress, and sometimes he took me riding on the book carts through the basement corridors . To me as a little girl, that enormous building with a maze of hallways was a thrilling adventure. Years later, as a high-school student, I would return to the Library of Congress to do research in the Main Reading Room under the dome.
I attended first grade in Washington, to remain one grade behind Gloria without skipping a year. I remember double dutch, board games going to the movies and my next door neighbor and friend Janice. When I returned to Arlington for second grade, It was confusing because I encountered lessons I felt I had already learned in the first grade sometimes taught differently. That was the first time I had to adjust to a different sequence of learning.
At John M. Langston Elementary School, I loved learning about other cultures through dance. We did crafts and were taught by teachers who lived in or near our neighborhood. Our teachers were intent on our success from grade to grade.
In the fifth grade, I will never forget, that my Christmas gift exchange. My beautifully wrapped gift turned out to be a piece of one-penny bubble gum. I was so disappointed that I cried. I already knew that we didn’t have much money. That day I learned there were children who had less than I did.
THEN HISTORY ENTERED THE HOUSE
My mother belonged to the NAACP. Families in our community became involved in the legal struggle to desegregate Arlington’s public schools. My eldest sister, Clarissa was the first named student in the lawsuit brought on behalf of several children challenging segregation in Arlington schools.
My sister Gloria was considered a strong student. Under Virginia’s pupil-placement system, Black students seeking admission to white schools were subjected to screening that included academic achievement. The court record shows that the four students seeking admission to Stratford were performing about two years above the Hoffman-Boston school norm and nearly one year above the national norm. Even so, school officials initially argued against their transfer.
As the effort to desegregate Stratford Junior High moved toward its historic moment, adults prepared her and three other well tested boys from our neighborhood. There were meetings, drills, etiquette, new clothes and instructions about what she might encounter.
I wasn’t directly involved. Instead, I played with Ann Marx, the daughter of Barbara Marx , a German-born NACCP member and activist who worked with my mother and others in the struggle over Arlington’s schools. Ann and I played at her house and my yard while the adults met. I noticed Gloria getting new clothes, but I was still in sixth grade on my daily routine schedule.
Then, on February 2, 1959, Gloria Thompson walked into Stratford Junior High School with Ronald Deskins, Lance Newman and Michael Jones. The four became the first Black children to desegregate a public school in Virginia. The county’s historical archive records nearly 100 police officers positioned around the school that morning. Arlington Public Library My sister made Virginia history.
History books naturally remember the courtroom decisions, lawsuits, demonstrations and firsts. A child remembers something else: who got new clothes, who was outside playing, what happened at school, what was for dinner, and whether she could keep up with her sister.
I didn’t yet understand the boundaries surrounding my childhood world.
Eventually, I would. Because it would be my turn to cross them.