The dozen plus of us who made up our core group bonded like war buddies. Half were White males just out of college. But we also had an Egyptian, a Hawaiian, and a Vietnam vet; a pure colorblind woman from Tennessee; and a Black guy with a huge Afro. He hung out with me and a curly-haired White guy, which caused the students to christen us the Mod Squad. But even if the faculty beyond our group was civil and even cordial in the teachers’ lounges, there was a certain carefulness between Blacks and Whites, especially between the obvious bigots and the racially liberal.

How I got to Beaumont was luck of the draw. The education department at St. Louis University assigned me to do my required two months of practice teaching there. All I knew about it was an incident that had happened when I was a junior in high school. My friends and I from our all-girl Catholic prep went trolling for dates at a football game played between an all-boy Catholic prep and the Beaumont Blue Jackets. The preppies won the game but lost several fights in an alley afterwards.

When I told my mother where I would be practice teaching, she looked faint and begged me to check with my supervisor. In particular, she wanted to know if the student teachers sent there were returned in one piece. The professor in charge assured me that I’d not only survive but love Beaumont.

It turned out I did. Loved my students, a least, who were protective and kind to newbie teachers. As for the rest, I felt like Alice dropped down a very strange rabbit hole. My White supervising teacher spent many class periods having her students read out loud, a pedagogical technique I’d last experienced in second grade. The school was so crowded that overflow teachers who didn’t have classrooms of their own had to roam, using rooms vacated by other teachers during their planning periods. The audio-visual supervisor had decided if he never loaned out the equipment, it would never break, and so he daily locked himself in the AV room and refused to answer both the door and pleas for projectors and overheads. Bunkered likewise in the main office, the administration seemed most concerned with receiving attendance forms in triplicate and interrupting classes with garbled PA announcements.

The biggest shock was the rigidity of the system itself. In my required education classes, the professors had urged us to be creative and assigned projects devoted to devising brilliant lessons and comprehensive unit plans. We’d entertained our naïve little selves with grandiose flights of educational fancy, imagining we could order up any books we liked and teach what we wanted. For example, we might assign a play and then take our class to see it, or discuss the film version of a novel we’d read, or compare how different genres handled the same topic, or do all of the above and more. We’d have guest speakers and field trips and cross-cultural experiences.

It would’ve been more useful if our professors had told us to flap our arms and see if we could fly; at least then we would’ve gotten some exercise. In the real world of Beaumont, the books were chosen by the school board, and since there were only enough volumes for a few teachers at a time, we were locked into an assigned schedule, whether teaching them in that order and at that moment or at all made sense or not.

But after I’d spent several weeks of mostly listening to students read, my supervising teacher finally instructed me to “plan something creative” in order to run my first class by myself. So I organized paper bag dramatics for Scenes Shakespeare Never Wrote. I filled three grocery bags with various props for skits showing scenes that are referred to but not actually dramatized in Macbeth. For example, one bag was full of branches and cardboard swords to depict the soldiers disguising themselves as Birnam Wood. The kids were excited (possibly in part because they were doing something other than reading), the skits were hilarious, and the next day an artist in the class gave me a giant charcoal sketch he’d done of the Bard. But on their exam the students remembered those scenes they’d acted out with so much more clarity than any in the actual play, you’d have to say the pedagogical results were mixed.

I loved the kids. They had life. So when I applied for a teaching position after my graduation that February, I requested that I be assigned there. Apparently, I was the first person – possibly of either color, but definitely the first White in at least a decade – who’d volunteered. Rumor had it that a record number of Beaumont teachers had been submitting repeated futile requests to be transferred out; as the lone person who wanted in, I’m sure I had the job as soon as the interviewer saw that I appeared generally sane. He verified that I’d really asked to work at Beaumont, and then we spent a pleasant half-hour discussing safe driving in hazardous weather. The only reason I can think he chose this topic was to verify that I did not easily panic in a crisis while not actually telling me that I might soon have ample opportunity to practice this talent in my classroom.

I can’t tell you how good a teacher I was then, but I’d been educated by some great ones, and my enthusiasm made up at least in part for my lack of experience. The lone official marker of my ability came from Dr. Julia Ramspot of St. Louis University. She looked like Lena Horne and allegedly left the bones of under-par practice teachers strewn in the hallways of academia. When she showed up unannounced to observe one of my classes, I felt as if I’d just been set in front of a firing squad. But afterwards she congratulated me on my technique, told me what I was doing right, suggested a few improvements, and gave me eight credit hours of pre-grade-inflation A. Positive, specific. This enthusiastic feedback from someone so demanding was the single most useful moment in my teacher training, “single” being the operative word in that it was the only really helpful advice I got, before or after.

With her blessing, I was ready to solo.

I vaguely remember an orientation session for new teachers in the system, but it had to do with pay and policy, not actual teaching. Since Beaumont was obviously already sending up red flags, I find it curious that someone in charge – the school system, the principal, or our department heads – didn’t hold teacher workdays or at least an orientation meeting to prepare us for the problems that were surfacing. We could’ve discussed successful teaching approaches, or ideas for dealing with the limitations we would have to work around, or how to handle at-risk or problem students. Something, anything.

I took over for a Black teacher who was moving on to a counselling position. I had three A track junior and two B track freshmen classes. The first day, in order to get a sense of them and their skill levels, I asked them to write anything that was on their mind. One paper was seemingly in a foreign language that, when translated, turned out to be a summary of every available drug and the proper usage for getting the maximum high. It was a lengthy tome with a particular warning about Robitussin; too much too fast and you’d throw up, ruining whatever buzz you had going. Already I had learned something.

Several other papers listed famous Black people, including Hannibal, Cleopatra, and Jesus. That night at dinner I showed these lists to my roommates who agreed that Cleo was Greek, J.C. was a Jew, and Hannibal was North African brown rather than sub-Saharan Black. As poster children for White privilege, we could reel off a stack of information about these historic figures, but none of us had ever before thought of them in terms of race. Race didn’t impact our lives in any ways we were conscious of, and consequently, we didn’t sort by color because we’d never had to.

But before I could debate ethnic backgrounds the next day, the juniors in my third period class staged a riot of sorts. “Of sorts” only because torches, weapons, and cops weren’t involved and no physical damage was done. But a riot all the same. As I took my place at the front of the room to begin the lesson, the kids in the back stood up shouting and shaking their fists. They wanted to read Black literature. They wanted a better education. They seriously didn’t want another White teacher, and since I was undeniably the wrong color, they were going to drive me out of the school.

I looked at the wall of angry Black faces and accidentally did the smartest thing I would ever do in my teaching career: I burst into tears.

It was a brilliant move I cannot take credit for. I’d had nothing in my polite and proper background to prepare me for their anger, and consequently no appropriate response, save for pure shock. The good news was that a weeping White girl threw them off completely. They’d expected a counterattack of threats and name-calling. Hostility was what they were used to. When they got the opposite reaction, it was as if they’d rushed a closed door that suddenly opened and left them standing in a place they’d never been.

The kids not screaming at me were almost as stunned as I. They came up after class, told me the militants were wrong in not giving me a chance, and promised to discuss what happened with them. That night I lay awake long after midnight trying to make sense of the incident and wondering if my teaching career was over before it got started.

The next day the class was dead quiet. Since I wasn’t sure what to do either, I had them take turns reading aloud. I know, more reading, but that seemed a safe way to kill time until I could figure out a response. I spent another wakeful night, but by the second day after their demonstration I had a three-point plan.

After all, they were right. They were asking to read literature in which they would see their own experience examined and reflected; they wanted more of what was relevant, that holy grail of the late 60s, and recognition of the Black contribution to and place in American history and culture. They were demanding to be respected and better educated, and no teacher should ever argue with that.

First, I told them I would collect seventy-five cents from each of them, the cost of a paperback anthology called Black Voices, and I would teach that book along with the official curriculum. If anyone couldn’t afford a copy, I’d fix them up. But they had to keep their mouths shut. Getting approval for this plan through proper channels would take so long they’d all be graduated before it happened, if it ever did; the administration didn’t need to know how radically we were speeding up the reform process.

Second, if anyone wanted talk about what was on their minds, they could retrieve me from the teachers’ lounge during my free period, and we could hang out in the auditorium. We would have a discussion group. A rap session. Whatever they wanted to make of it.

Third, they were never going to rip up one of my classes ever again. Never. Ever.

We started over. In the next couple of days, the money for Black Voices came pouring in, and we began reading Chestnut, Toomer, Hughes, Wright, Baldwin, and Ellison. I brought in other books like American Negro Poetry to start a classroom library. I planned my lessons as double-deckers – what I was supposed to teach and what they wanted to learn. As in martial arts, going with the energy was more productive than going against.

A group of boys began collecting me from the teachers’ lounge on a regular basis, and we sat around talking in the auditorium as promised during my free period. Usually there were six to eight in the group, but the two regulars were Joseph Henry, a non-militant who’d spoken out against the unfairness of the classroom disruption, and Alfred House, the angriest of the angry, prime minister of the Beaumont Black Student Union, and leader of my classroom riot.

Tall, slender, and good looking, Alfred would tilt his head back, watch and listen. He’d obviously been reading and educating himself and knew so much about the Black Muslims that I assumed he was one, even without the required suit and bowtie. One of the first things he told me was that according to Elijah Mohammed, White people were devils who had evolved from pigs. I’m sure I earnestly tried to explain this couldn’t literally be true before realizing the pig part had nothing to do with Darwinism. And so it went, back and forth. They kept trying to explain how the world was for them. I kept listening because I wanted to understand. Eventually, I could hear the hurt under the surface of the angry words: Why were they buked and scorned? De jure equal, but de facto still only three-fifths a man?

What they taught me for starters was that I didn’t know jack about the Black experience in America. Sure, I knew in a general, academic way about problems with civil rights that had been all over the news for years, but I saw race as an issue confined to the Deep South, redneck Whites, and other ignorant people. I’d grown up in a small town near St. Louis that had integrated without dissent seconds after Brown v. the Board of Ed was announced. I’d witnessed my parents treating Whites and Blacks with exactly the same respect, and knew my father paid his Black employee more than the White one with the same job because he had a child to support. When he brought her along to our house and the neighbors called to report I was playing in the yard with a Negro, my mother told them to mind their own business. I assumed my parents’ ways were the usual, and this meant that when humans were decent to one another, race ceased to be an issue.

Alfred House and my other students taught me the experiences that had been missing in my insulated world and how decency was only the beginning of equality. I’d never been refused service at a restaurant, admittance to a swimming pool, or matriculation in a school. I’d never had a teacher call me insulting, degrading names. Never been told my whole race was ugly or been compared to a monkey. Never been kept from living in a neighborhood or being hired for the job of my choice.

I had never been followed through a store because a clerk assumed I must be a shoplifter. I had never been threatened or called derogatory names by strangers on the street. Never been shoved to the floor during an athletic event while the ref looked the other way. Never felt in danger while going about my everyday business. Never been harassed by a cop.

In fact, cops had always been very nice to me. On the several occasions when they’d stopped me for driving like a bat out of hell, they’d given me warnings instead of tickets.

My students and I roamed through an exhaustingly broad spectrum of topics. The biggies like slavery, their missing heritage, and the reason Black Muslims took X as their patronymic – to replace the slave names that had in turn replaced their true and now lost African names. The mid-level issues like the problem of Black children having only White dolls and rarely seeing anyone of color on TV or in the movies, at least not playing a role more important than a servant. The lesser problems like the pressure to process their hair and the rarity of clothing designed to accommodate a Black woman’s larger rear. We discussed the proper names for the hundred shades of Black skin ranging from high yellow to ebony, and whether that skin tanned or not. Some showed me how to jive walk down a street in a way that intimidated White people for a little payback. Others explained why “Black Is Beautiful” and “Say It Loud. I’m Black and I’m Proud” were so important to counteract negative self-images. Not only the guys in the rap group, but all my students served me an endless supply of Facts about Black. We talked and talked, and occasionally a freshman girl would ask if she could pet my hair, so different from her own.

I rushed to catch up with some on-the-job training, assigning myself a crash course on the Black experience and loading up with books. Freshman year in high school my classmates and I had passed around a copy of Black Like Me, a primer for Whites on racism. John Howard Griffin, a White man, had artificially darkened his skin before traveling through the Jim Crow South. Though nothing had changed but his skin color, he was now threatened, vilified, and segregated. His experiment was helpful, but I again got the idea that race was a Southern problem that could never happen where I lived. The nice people I knew wouldn’t discriminate. They certainly wouldn’t beat, terrorize, or lynch.

But my students were assuring me that in St. Louis and everywhere else in the country Black people suffered variations on the same themes Griffin had written about. The difference was he could go back to being White whenever he liked. I kept reading.

Somewhere along the line I learned how our cultural scripting forms us. How we automatically pick up values and ways of seeing the world, just by living in a certain place. How these dictate our beliefs and behaviors without our even being conscious of what we’re doing. How often these scripts are just plain wrong, concocted by a society in order to defend questionable practices.

The script concerning Blacks had evolved to justify slavery and rationalize all its permitted horrors. Though often contradictory, it was still shaping White perception of all Blacks as either lazy and incompetent or potentially as violent and dangerous as the slave owners feared their slaves would be if not beaten down and terrorized. Blacks were creatures to fear, animals that might attack without provocation, and this in turn forced Blacks to adapt defensive behaviors in order to protect themselves in a society that perceived them as less than human. Black males, especially, were taught to know their place and shelter there for their own protection; straying out of that space could bring injury and death on themselves and their communities.

And as if the Black-White conflict weren’t complicated enough, the question of how to respond divided the Black community between the Martin and the Malcolm camps that in turn often pushed any reaction into a question of identity. If you cooperated with the status quo to avoid conflict, were you an Uncle Tom, an Oreo, or a house Negro? Or did you stand strong and defiant, demanding your due, no matter how dangerous that was for a Black person in America?

Not confined to the South as I’d assumed, but daily business where I lived, and so embedded in our collective unconscious that legislation was only the beginning of the solution. Being Black in America was a 24/7 condition I didn’t fully comprehend, and it was far, far from the state of grace in which I’d grown up; I took it as my duty to understand how it was for my students to live in their skins.

They were still in the game that spring of 1969, still trying that semester when an outside evaluator from the accreditation association showed up unannounced to observe my first period class. Usually that group was cooperative but not lively early in the day. Yet when that official with his evaluation sheets sat down in the back row, the class went into overdrive. Hands shot up. Students asked questions, knew answers, and made me look like Annie friggin’ Sullivan. Afterwards, the evaluator ushered me into the hall. “That was just amazing,” he exclaimed. “How do you get them so excited about learning?”

I shrugged and mumbled because what he’d seen had been generated by the kids without any prompting from me. In hindsight, I believe it was a combination of them having both my back and pride in their school. They wanted all of us to look good, and they showed that official there to grade them that they deserved a big, fat A.

Just proves that with the right conditions things could still work at Beaumont, in spite of the fact that so much else was wrong-headed, substandard, and just plain bad. Not to mention it was the late sixties when the entire country was agitated over Vietnam, civil rights, and feminism. I got married that summer, a few days after Stonewall and yet another race riot, a few weeks before the Days of Rage over the war.

So not surprising that on October 15, 1969, the Black Student Union called the first walkout in support of the national moratorium to protest the war in Vietnam. Black soldiers were being killed and wounded in disproportionately high rates compared to Whites, and some Beaumont students took exception to the prospect of being given full dying rights in a foreign country when they didn’t have full living rights in their own. The protest wasn’t scary or disorderly. At a given time, kids just got up and left. My students walked me to the sanctuary of the lounge, and after the school was closed for the day, my teacher friends and I spent a pleasant afternoon drinking beer at O’Connell’s Pub.

Walkouts were new and unique then, especially for a high school, and I understand the administration’s problem at suddenly having 3,000 of its charges pour out onto the streets. I get how that was a crisis they had to act on. Like a lot of people then, I had mixed feelings about the appropriate way to protest a wrong war and was still going through the approved but ineffective channel of writing my senators irate letters. But raised on stories of the saints who did the right thing even in the face of death, I also admired the kids who were taking a personal risk to change what they believed was wrong. At their purest, at least for the BSU kids who were dedicated and disciplined, the walkouts were Thoreau’s civil disobedience and Gandhi’s non-violence as practiced by King and the other models of civil rights.

After the uproar of the Vietnam walkout, things returned to what passed for normal. The thermostat in my classroom went haywire so that even with all the windows wide open to the December cold, the heat was so intense that we all felt too nauseous to think. Four days in a row I called maintenance, four times various men in overalls appeared, tapped the thermostat with a screwdriver, and told me it was fixed. On the fifth day I gave up trying to teach in impossible conditions, let my class go to early lunch, and waited. Five minutes later an administrator charged into the room.

“Your class is loose in the halls!” he shouted.

“Because it’s too damn hot for them to be in here,” I shouted back.

Within the hour, he had the problem fixed, which made me wonder why it took five days and extreme measures to make that happen.

But other problems had no solutions, at least none I could do anything about. A pregnant student asked me for help, and so I filled out a referral to the school’s social worker. I did the same for several other kids with behavior or family issues. Only later did I discover that our social worker was not only in charge of 3,000-plus Beaumont students but countless others at several other schools; I might as well have folded that referral into a paper airplane and sailed it out my classroom window. Response time was six months, minimum, by which point the children in question would have had their babies or been beaten or arrested or sent to the alternative school or dropped out.

My only sphere of influence was my classroom. I closed the door and tried to provide a safe house where the students took better charge of their learning. Metaphors and similes? Find them in your music, and if you’re correct, we dance. Using mostly the Temptations and Four Tops, they nailed that lesson in a day and taught me how to do the Four Corners besides. Tired of sitting quietly and being lectured to? Plan your own lesson and run the class. When an administrator walked in in the middle of what can only be called a “spirited” discussion led by a freshman at the podium, he blanched, if that’s possible for a Black man – until he saw me sitting at the back of the room and realized I hadn’t staged a walkout of my own. Still, I got the impression he wasn’t thrilled at the noise level or a student in charge, though other than the five minutes he was there that day, neither he nor any other administrators ever observed my classes.

So it went, until February 14, 1970, when the Black Student Union held an assembly for juniors and seniors in honor of Negro History Week, the precursor to what in 1976 would become Black History Month. The year before a Black theatre group had presented a short play on the assassination of Malcolm X. This was mostly remembered for the moment when a BSU member, playing the assassin, stood up in the audience to shoot the prop gun, couldn’t get it to work, and was forced to shout “Bang, bang!” at the crucial moment.

Even so, the skit had made the White principal so nervous that he’d asked to be replaced by a Black principal ASAP, and to make sure the 1970 production that next February was within approved bounds, the Black assistant principal demanded a preview and then cancelled the assembly. The three faculty sponsors of the BSU told the members that they couldn’t back the program but recommended that the students make up their own minds about presenting it. Of course, the students decided they should go ahead and sent two young women from the BSU to sweet talk the new principal into over-riding his assistant’s decision.

Despite this pre-program uproar, neither the teachers nor students I’ve spoken with have a clear memory of what exactly happened at that assembly. According to an article in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, several BSU members gave talks that denounced the failure of their school’s administration, the lie of the US Constitution for people of color, and the rape of their grandmothers by their White owners, points no one could really argue against. Somewhere along the line the words “pig” and “honky” were used. Since the main goal of the BSU was to encourage the study of Black culture, they also presented several skits dramatizing events the BSU members had studied on their own, most notably the hanging and skinning of Nat Turner. Sensationalistic and rage-inducing? Of course. But historically accurate, if you’re telling the whole truth, which wasn’t happening in most of their classes.

But that was just the warm-up to what was going to start the real fire – a skit about a White teacher who dissed her students and in turn was attacked by them. The principal, a quiet Black man more suited to teaching Sunday school, came on stage and attempted to stop the program. A member of the BSU took the mic away from him and wouldn’t give it back.

I’d heard teachers in the lounge call their students “stupid” and “nigger,” and though it was even more shocking to think they’d ever done that to their kids’ faces, it wasn’t a leap to believe it had happened. I’d also spent enough time with Alfred House and other members of the BSU to understand why they felt the need to make these points, even if they had to over-ride accepted behavior and decorum.

Black history was their Rosetta stone for making sense of their place in the country. Not many Blacks and virtually no Whites knew the long history of terrorism against the Black community, the many impressive accomplishments by Blacks in all fields, the fight to be allowed to risk their lives in the military, and the constant effort to rise in terms of education, finances, and other markers of mainstream success, only to be beaten down again or killed. Black history proved the lie of created false stereotypes, and once anyone really learned that truth and factored it in, one had to re-evaluate the racist history of White America and their own participation in that system, however blind they had been to their culpability.

Don’t get me wrong. I’d had more than average exposure to the literature and concepts of racism before my crash course at Beaumont. Still, it was difficult to have the long litany of White offenses and outrages laid out bare and in such quantity. It was even more painful because I was coming to know these kids personally and wanted to protect them. But before the assembly, I’d had time to get over the shock and my initial defensive reaction that those lessons in history produce. I’d heard my student venting their outrage with tough language in my rap group, and so for me, sitting with my class in the back of the auditorium, the skit was more of the same – a gage of their righteous anger and sheer frustration rather than a literal call to violence.

But other faculty took it as a personal threat. By the next morning the woman who’d supervised my practice teaching returned with a note from her doctor saying she was under too much stress to stay at Beaumont; she cashed in her accumulated year of sick leave, cleared out her classroom, and left. More importantly, the administration freaked, and the three Black teachers who sponsored the BSU were dismissed for allowing racially fueled skits to be performed, even though under duress they had withdrawn their support. The day after that, the BSU demanded to have their sponsors back, and when their request was refused, Alfred House as their spokesman called for another walkout, followed by a school boycott until the teachers were reinstated.

This time we knew the drill: lock up and head for the pub. But a general rage had been set loose among the students, a stubbornness to not be ignored, and the walkouts took on a life of their own. The fired sponsors asked Alfred House and the other BSU leaders not to get in more trouble by supporting them, and members agreed to stay in their classrooms until the school was officially closed after each walkout so they wouldn’t be blamed for instigating them. But they also picketed the Board of Education and felt guilty for the trouble they’d brought on their teachers. Yet other students had become energized by the initial rebellion, word got around, and every morning that week, three thousand kids showed up for class and a few hours later, spontaneously flowed out of the building like the Mississippi over a broken levee.

Once, two of my friends were on their way down to the packed lunchroom when the lights went out, an event triggered by a trashcan fire under a fuse box, lit by a student running through the crowd with a torch made of rolled-up paper. Once, some fools set fire to the office and, on another occasion, to a storage closet. Once, a teacher and a cafeteria worker were taken to the hospital for smoke inhalation. Those were the only injuries I ever heard about, but it was a big school, and in all the uproar it was impossible to know what was going on, especially when the administration never informed us. On one occasion, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported that 20 students had destroyed school property and confronted the police. Others allegedly did violence to a Bi-State bus and a police car. I didn’t see any of that, but I could appreciate the irony that the BSU militants, who’d organized the first two walkouts and were being demonized and blamed for the rest, weren’t the kids doing the damage or starting the rumbles.

No one remembers the exact number of walkouts or how long the school was officially closed. A week at least. But through it all, I was never threatened and never afraid – unlike the teacher who carried a concealed .38 snub-nosed in his jacket, and another who kept a chair rocker under his desk as a weapon, and yet another who showed his classes the pistol in his briefcase and gave his students nightmares about being shot. My students always came by and escorted me to the teachers’ lounge or the nearest large male teacher they could find. Once, one of my afternoon kids burst into one of my morning classes and shouted, “There’s going to be trouble. I’m getting you a gun!” I shouted back, “I’ll shoot my foot off. Just come get me.” And they always did.

Rumors were always floating around that outside agitators – possibly communists – had come into the school to trigger the walkouts. Or the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) or the Black Muslims or the BSU had kept things stirred up, but it was all pure speculation. The militant group was small, the number of students doing damage even smaller, and many who walked out in the protests just kids glad to get out of school. In truth, many teachers felt the same, like the bunch of us who spent those afternoons in what was left of Gaslight. We had no idea what we could do to help.

I don’t recall much conversation among our group about the turmoil, no more than any of the other SNAFUs we dealt with daily. We all had 100 to 125 students each, many in need of support that didn’t exist. Teaching was challenge enough; trying to sort out the crossfire between the students and the administration was overkill. We enjoyed these free afternoons that often extended into early evening. When we wandered home after our usual arrival time, we were often met by upset family members who’d seen the walkouts on the news and concluded we must be in the ER or dead. We’d shrug and explain it wasn’t scary as the reporters made it seem.

But moments from two of the walkouts stick in my mind. As my escort students that day dropped me off in the safety zone in front of the main office, I noticed a mob of reporters milling around and recognized one of them as a good buddy from high school. I did not want him to interview me about what was going on; I truly didn’t know, and I didn’t want to be prodded to choose sides. Of course the administration needed to get the situation under control before people were hurt or killed; you can’t hold class in a building that’s literally on fire. But the serious protestors were taking a moral stand about what was wrong in their school, and walkouts were the only means available for them to make their point. I didn’t believe I could explain that complexity in a quote that wouldn’t get garbled in translation, and so I did an about-face and hid in the women’s lounge.

The other vivid image came from the final walkout. I was locking my classroom door as Alfred House and another BSU officer came down the hall. Without a word they got on either side of me with their arms folded over their chests and their eyes straight ahead. They walked like that, with me close between them, until we got downstairs. When they saw the big Nam vet I carpooled with coming towards us, they peeled off to either side and melted into the crowd as if they’d never been there guarding a White teacher.

The walkouts ended when the Board of Education sent in one of their toughest administrators to restore order, mostly by threatening to expel anyone who stirred things up, to have college scholarships revoked, and to withhold diplomas from the class of 1970 if there was more trouble. The latter was particularly effective in that it activated an avalanche of peer pressure against the BSU. Even some grads from previous years got involved, worried their senior girlfriends or siblings wouldn’t graduate. The principal and assistant principal also made official visits to the leaders’ homes, and some parents, like Alfred House’s father, forbid their children to protest. Better to be safe than to have your child make himself a target.

The administration called a Sunday PTA meeting to discuss the walkouts, though despite the seriousness of the occasion, I don’t recall the faculty was urged to attend or even notified. Bizarrely, the meeting began with a song and dance program put on by the students that traced “Negro” cultural developments; it had been scheduled before the troubles, but no one had the presence of mind to realize how inappropriate it was for this gathering. Some parents began to leave, and one man jumped on stage to demand they begin discussing the protest problem. But the White district superintendent, there to explain the school board’s position on firing the three teachers, refused to answer any questions about their dismissal. The militant parents got in a shouting match with the parents who weren’t and competed for control of the mic. As more in the audience left in disgust, a woman pleaded for them to stay. “We’ve got children here, and we’ve got to stand behind them.”

Beyond scheduling another meeting with more of the same, no one was successful in defining the root cause of the unrest or addressing any problems in the school. No one insisted that the militants were making valid points and should at least be listened to. No one tried to figure out just why some kids were so damn angry they wanted to tear the place down. Instead, it seemed the main goal was to put the clamps on those who had risen up and return to the status quo. As the PTA president said, “We hope to find out what the real trouble is. I still don’t think we have it.”

True words, especially when trouble came from places unimaginable. A Black guidance counsellor wrote the colleges and universities where the BSU members had been accepted and reported that these students had been instrumental in the protests that had closed the school for more than a week. Based on this information, Morehouse College revoked the acceptance of one BSU leader, though that student hadn’t participated in any of the objectionable skits, set fires, or otherwise caused disruption. Another was rejected by one of the Missouri state schools on the same grounds. The parents of the former sued in order to get their son reaccepted, the latter was admitted only after a state senator intervened, and the counsellor stuck to her story that the unsolicited information she sent was not intended to persuade the schools to reject the students.

The overall message was impossible to miss: Shut up and accept this lesser place assigned you, or punishment will come from all sides.

The most militant core of the BSU graduated that June. When I came back in September, I was newly pregnant and feeling constantly exhausted and sick. The White administrator who assigned rooms had given mine away to a new hire and was not sympathetic to my seniority, squatting rights, or physical condition. Besides the stress of being a small person in the crowded halls and migrating from room to room between each class period, I no longer had a place to keep teaching materials and enrichment books, and my students couldn’t always find me if they wanted to talk. But that was a moot point anyway; a new policy required that all teachers had to sub during their planning periods, and I no longer had free time.

If I weren’t disgusted enough with conditions in general, late in the semester the new Black principal, a political appointee who’d replaced the one humiliated at the assembly, called me into his office. In front of a Black parent and student already seated there, he demanded to know why I hadn’t given the boy credit for work he’d turned in. The kid had been so consistently absent all term that I didn’t recognize him, and when I asked to see the paper in question, I almost laughed out loud.

“This is a history paper,” I told the principal as I tossed it back on his desk. “I teach English.”

In January I was required to go on maternity leave at four months. Before our baby arrived my husband was transferred, and we moved out of state, which took the decision whether to return to Beaumont out of my hands. I’m not sure I would’ve come back. I loved my friends and the kids there, but by then I understood why students dropped out. The system didn’t allow you to do your best – far from it – and it sometimes actively worked against you. Why knock yourself out only to be derailed and disrespected? What was the use?

Like Griffin, I was White and could leave rather than struggle to sort it out. But in spite of my disgust, I was always deeply touched by the memory of Alfred House. I’d started off as the White teacher the Black militant wanted to run out of school. But he and I had made a separate peace, and in the end he protected me, his one-time enemy.

After Ferguson exploded, I went home to St. Louis and was shocked to hear even liberal friends still damning Michael Brown and exonerating Officer Wilson as if there was no grey area to discuss. As at Beaumont, the reasons that caused the situation were dismissed as inconsequential or non-existent; the looters provided an excuse to condemn the entire minority population and disqualify their side of the story; and an ignorance prevailed, coupled to an iron resistance against any wider point of view. It was the same pattern I’d seen in microcosm almost fifty years before that had forever changed how I saw race. Wanting to write about how my students had taught me to understand, I searched for Alfred House in order to once more have him teach me.

Instead, I found his obituary. Dead at age 60, he’d never given up on trying to make a change; in spite of health issues, he was for many years a volunteer math tutor, and he’d left unfinished the restoration of a farm intended to serve as a refuge for urban youth. His family had written his tribute. “A scholar, a leader, a protector, a gentle man who loved and gave his utmost…a spiritual seeker…dedicated to helping young people reach their highest potential…he made a difference.”

I was especially saddened over the passing of this true searcher in heart and spirit, dedicated to doing right even when risking himself. And yet the energy that should have been used on his behalf had been used instead to silence and contain him. What if we all had listened? How much would have been changed for the better now if the wrongs then had been corrected? For this I also mourned, for what was kept from him has been subtracted from what could have been, and this great loss is owned by each of us in this divided country.