this is an author panel on education issues. [inaudible conversations] >> good morning. welcome again to the 2016 mississippi book festival. >> [inaudible] all right. i think we're ready to get started. welcome to the 2016 book festival. this is our panel this morning on schools and change. i just have a few housekeeping rules. please remember to silence your cell phones. books of these and many of the

other authors here today will be available outside the state capitol building. the booksellers are out on mississippi street, and signing tent is directly opposite that. you'll see in the back of the program the full book-signing schedule with authors and the times that they'll be signing today. we're delighted to have c-span broadcasting live with us today from jackson, mississippi. i want to thank the state legislature for allowing us the use of this facility today to come together. i want to thank the authors and the moderators today for helping us celebrate literature and the written word together. also today's, the sponsor of this particular panel, i want to thank the mississippi humanities council for their continuing support of the humanities and what we're all doing here today. i'd like to introduce charles bolton who will moderate today's panel. he's professor of history at the university of north carolina at greensboro. he's the author of the book "william winter and the new mississippi: a biography," also

hardest deal of all: the battle over school integration in mississippi 1870-1980, and the book poor whites of the antebellum south, tenants and baylorers in central carolina. welcome and thank you. >> thank you. [applause] good morning. we have the authors of two memoirs this morning both that look at public education after mississippi schools were desegregated. one looks in the 1970s which was immediately after integration occurred, and one looks at it a few decades later in the early 21st century. i thought i would start off, though, by just giving a little bit of historic call context

which does draw on my own book, "the hardest deal of all," and we have a little bit of extra time, i think, because unfortunately you may have noticed two of our panelists couldn't be here today because of unforeseen circumstances, and they actually were both more history than memoir. so i thought i could maybe provide a little bit of context. so i promise i won't give you a full-scale lecture though here. so for much of the 20th century, probably you're all aware mississippi had a dual school system, had a black school system and a white school system. and that did present some difficulties for a poor state like mississippi because it could barely afford to fund one school system, much less two. and yet for many whites, especially in the, you know, early part of the 20th century into the mid 20th century, one of the most important things was that in looking at a quality education was that schools be

segregated and other kind of educational measures were not nearly as important. but the consequence was that what really was created in mississippi was a somewhat mediocre school system for whites and a sorely underfunded school system for blacks. and that system of education came under attack from at least two fronts throughout the 20th century. one was from black parents and black educators who from the very beginning were with trying to get more resources for black education. the other was from a federal government that increasingly was concerned with this issue of ending racial segregation, and there are a lot of complicated reasons for that. but segregated education was perhaps the most obvious example of why the jim crow system was

inequitable. if you wanted to look around and see that separate but equal was really not equal, the best place you could look was the schools. i mean, there were all kind of aspects of southern life were segregated during the jim crow era. you had segregated water fountains but, you know, everybody at least got a drink of water even if, you know, the fountains themselves maybe looked different. but in schools almost everywhere you looked, it was unequal. the materials, the training for teachers, the pay for teachers, the length of time that people went to schools, the actual school facilities, and that's why it's no surprise that when there is a legal challenge to segregation, that it comes in education. i'm sure most of you are familiar with the brown decision in 1954 which is about education, that the supreme court ruled that segregated

educational facilities were inherently unconstitutional. and it was a relatively -- it took a long time, but it was a relatively easy case for groups like the naacp to make because the evidence was kind of overwhelming. the federal government support, there's a variety of reasons for why over time the federal government became more interested in ending this, and i won't go into all that, but certainly by 1954 when the brown decision was handed down, it was a unanimous decision by the supreme court. but even then the court was a little bit unsure how to implement it. the implementation decree of the brown decision said that schools should be desegregated with all deliberate speed, which as you probably recognize doesn't make a whole lot of sense. deliberate means slow and speed means fast -- [laughter] so, of course, white people fastened on the deliberate part and said, yeah, we'll get around to that one of these days and the blacks, of course, thought it should happen right away.

and it didn't happen right away despite the efforts of black parents and other black activists to try to make it happen. in fact, for ten years there was absolutely no school desegregation after the brown decision. the first school desegregation in mississippi doesn't happen til 1964. and part of the reason why it started to increase there was, again, because the federal government became a little bit more active. in 1964 there was the 1964 civil rights act in which the federal government said that schools could lose their federal funding if they discriminated. the next year there was another piece of federal legislation, the elementary and secondary education act, which for the first time the federal government allocated millions of dollars for elementary and secondary schools. again, mississippi is a poor state. they needed that money. and to get that money, they were going to have to change, and they were going to have to start or ending the dual school system. and so there, again, there are further changes, but there's

also continued resistance. and while there's some kind of token desegregation from '64 until '70, there's -- the dual school system is alive and well in mississippi. and finally there's another supreme court decision in 1969 which was a mississippi case, the alexander v. holmes case in 1969 in which the supreme court sort of revised that all deliberate speed timetable. basically said that the time to do this had long passed and that schools must be desegregated now. and they meant that especially for those mississippi districts that were party to that suit, they meant not even wait until next school year started, they meant we're going to do it in the middle of the year. and that's part of the story that tina and john are going to tell you about. and so it does happen in mississippi pretty quickly. so i want to go to tina honor

and john jones who are authors of the first memoir haha we're looking at today, it's called "lines were drawn: remembering court-ordered integration at a mississippi high school." tina horne lives in houston, mississippi, but she grew up here in jackson. but in houston in addition to an author, she's a dentist, a small business owner and a farmer. john lives, till lives here in jackson -- still lives here in jackson, and in addition to being an author, he's an attorney here in town. and they were students at murrah high school here in jackson which was one of the historically white high schools here in jackson. and they were in that first group of students that were there when the schools were finally integrated on a massive scale because of the alexander decision in the spring of 1970.

so, john and tina? >> impressive crowd. i don't know if there are any murrah high school graduates out there. i see one or two, three, four, good. good. and everybody holds their hand up high. tina and i graduated in 1973 from murrah. in 1969 the fifth circuit court of appeals had the case involving the jackson public schools and said thou shalt desegregate -- first, they said on december 1st of '69, we're going to flip-flop faculty and staff by the time the christmas holidays are over. they gave us a couple of extra weeks off for christmas vacation, which was pretty cool. we had no idea what we were coming back to because the court

said this ten days thou shalt flip-flop student bodies as well. so it became the most radical desegregation that the courts could come up with without really having an underlying plan. it was kind of chaos, at least in the early years. we, i went to bailey junior high. the first morning that it happened, there were -- i tell in the book -- when the, about 3 or 400 black kids showed up on riverside drive right out from bailey. it was like a bomb had exploded in bailey, and every girl and most of the guys were fighting for the only pay phone in the facility in the school calling their mom and dad and said, they're here! we didn't realize it was going to be this. and what we always heard was, well, all during that day, you know, moms and dads were pulling

up to bailey junior high to pick up these white children and take them back to our comfy neighborhoods out to the northeast. we always herald that that night jackson -- heard that night jackson prep got started at a meeting in the basement of the first presbyterian church. it was not responded to very well. by the time we were in the tenth grade, the court went one step further. i went to brinkley which was a previous all-black high school near the jackson mall. i was so ignorant, you know, growing up in northeast jackson i didn't even know where brinkly was until we had to find it on the first day of school. but we went over there. the fifth circuit had predicted we'd have 507 white people attending brinkly. we had 83. 671 black children. and we were thrown together without any cushion or anybody telling us really what was going

on to sort of make it on our own. and we did. after a tough start. by the time we got to murrah in our junior and senior year, we had, frankly, gotten to know our black classmates well must have as individuals -- well enough as individuals that it really worked. integration was a success in 1972, '73. actually at murrah through 1975. we had about 35% white student roll, student enrollment, 65% black, but it really worked. it was probably desegregation's best success story. and i have looked it up. it probably was. we had really good participation, and we got together and became close friends in a way we would never have accomplished had we been left to our own devices.

in 1977, long after we -- well, the year we graduated from college, there was a second mass exodus out of the jackson public schools by white parents. now murrah is majority african-american. it still offers a splendid educational opportunity for people who go there. but i think what it shows is that the radical desegregation that we went through that made integration really work for the first time over an extend period in the history of mississippi didn't work over the long haul. and it's a real shame. it should have. we've still got a long ways to go on it, but our experience was a very positive one after a rough start. and it just shows to us anyway that if you have, if you're close enough in proximity to

people, then race becomes an irrelevancy. you just learned about each other as individuals, and you can move on with great success. and that's what happened to us. i wish it lasted. this is tina freeman horne. she was a cheerleader at murrah high school in my time. [laughter] and became a dentist and now lives in the houston, mississippi, but this book wouldn't have happened but for tina's hustle and kicking me in the rear end every time she needed to. this is teen from a. tina. >> morning, and thank y'all for having us here. i'd like to thank university press for publishing our book and the people that put on the mississippi book festival. this is a lot of fun. the first time i've been here. our book, to set the stage, i was born in 1955 which is where most of the participants were born in that year. and mississippi was different back then.

we didn't have all the electronics that we have today, we spent a lot of time playing outside, and our lives were built around the neighborhood schools. we had power elementary in jackson, bailey junior high school was right up the hill x then there was murrah are high school. and if you wanted to enroll in college, it was just right around the corner, and then there was a medical center right across the street. so our lives in the white area where we grew up were safe, and our education was pretty good. most of us were just rolling along, happy and ready to go to murrah. that was our dream, to go to murrah high school and be a cheerleader or a murrah miss. murrah high school had a great football team back in the day, and i don't know how they do now, but they were always the big eight champions. and the quest for excellence was something that was instilled in

us in elementary school through junior high school and on up. we thought, god, i want to be good. i want to win. i want to be a national merit scholar like all those other more or rah miss -- murrah mustangs. but then in our ninth grade year, just unexpectedly to most of the general public that didn't understand all the historical backgrounds that were going on within the legislature in our state, they changed the schools. and where we used to walk to school, we were supposed to then bus. but actually, mamas had to take us all the way across town to an area hay didn't know anything about -- they didn't know anything about. and this not only, this was the same for many of the white kids and many of the black kids at that time. we were all confused, you know? in the black neighborhood, many of the participants were wanting to go to brinkley which was at

that time a very good athletic school and had wonderful teachers, and so they were excited about that. so we were forced as a social experiment to integrate. and we did. and at first the schools we were sent to, i mean, we were all confused. we didn't know what was going on. we weren't happy. some of us got pushed around, hit, things happened, and you can read all about this in the book. but we have 63 participants that give a different story, and that's the beauty of it. everybody's got a different idea and brought home different takes from it. so it's set up on a timeline. we talk about being a child in mississippi and what we experienced, remembering the black and white water fountains. y'all remember that? and then just the segregation that existed at the time.

and then we go through elementary school and up to junior high school and our experiences, and then we start talking about the chapters on where the radical desegregation actually happened. and my part that was -- i went out and collected some stories, and the interesting thing for a lot of us was the mixing of the cultures. we had different ideas about what a band was supposed to be like. we had testimony about the band director, and he wanted the band to play the good ship lollipop. well, robert gibbs said, no. [laughter] you know, you're going to have to change that. and it took time for him to change. and what was a real stiff band and stiff white culture with dancing a certain way, we learned how to move in a different way. and our black classmates told us we had no soul. so they taught us how to have soul, and we learned a little

bit about each other through time. by time we got to murrah high school, we had what we described as a camelot which is where we all got along, and we loved our school, and we all cheered together for a football team who had lost every athlete on the football team except one. they all left and went to jackson prep. and a coach -- this makes the story so good -- is a coach came in after jack carlyle left and went to jackson prep named bob stevens. and bob stevens walked -- he was a real cool, calm guy. came from central high school. he walked into the gym, and he would pick out a boy and say, son, how would you like to play ball? i can help you out, we're going to have a good team. and we had a winning team that year, it was wonderful. i mean, we built something out of nothing. you know, we took deaf station, and we -- devastation, and we

made some beauty out of ashes. it was a great time. and johnny and i recognized that we lived through something wonderful. and through the years our classmate -- our class has been very close. we would have, like, five-year reunions and all, and johnny sent out afternoon -- an e-mail which started all this. and he was complaining about the state of the jackson schools. i didn't really understand it because i live in north mississippi, and my children go to a public school, they've been since kindergarten, and it was a fully integrated system. and it's a very good public school in houstonen high school, and my kids enjoyed it, and it was very normal. and i just can't understand that jackson had regressed and was not going the way that our little school had gone. in the community to turn out the way that the integration and the desegregation was supposed to turn out. so in his e-mail he said something about the republicans, and i'm republican, and he's a democrat -- [laughter] and so we had an argument.

and that's how the book got started. he said, well, you write your story, and i'll write mine, and we'll see what happens. so we did it, and we gathered other stories. alan huffman, who is a classmate and an author who's written many books that university press has got some on on display outside that you can get, and then clay byrne barksdale who is in charge of the barksdale reading institute at ole miss later, he taught for one year at murrah high school after he graduated from ole miss. and he helped us with the book too. so this is, i wanted to just read a little bit a story from robert kelly. robert kelly was one of our classmates, and i went to visit him in birmingham. he and his brother have kelly construction. they had big -- i was a little

intimidated when i saw how big it was and all the machines and all, but he sat down and talked to me for several hours and just shared some really good memories that go all through this book along with a lot of the other classmates. i grew up in shady oaks, and when they integrated the schools, i was in the ninth grade. i remember that year. we were sent to bailey. and we got to bailey, mike adams' mother dropped us off, and i realized that i did not know one white perp in the world. white person in the world. not one white person. i remember that day, and it was like, wow, which was really weird because in itself it showed how segregated we were as a city and a community. to think, what were we, 14 or 15 years old in ninth grade, to be on earth that long in jackson, mississippi, and did not know one white person. i remember that day, it was very uncomfortable for me because i was very anxious and just didn't know what to expect.

i also remember how it was when we went to the first class. all the black kids would sit on this side, and the white kids would sit on that side, and we're all looking at each other because it was just a new experience. now looking back, i'm so glad i got a chance to experience that. i think it was not only good for our city, but it was good during that time for the entire country. he also said he really liked the lunches at bailey junior high school much better than he liked the lunches in his school. i wanted to read another one. this is by freddie. freddie was a football player at murrah, and he became fast friends with charles irby. i don't know if y'all remember the irba family. he had several children. well, charles was in our class. and freddie sometimes would visit with charles irby, they would ride around town in his family's house in east jr.

over -- eastover, the city's most affluent neighborhood. we started sharing with each other, i would go to charles' house, and charles' mom was a great lady. she wasn't outspoken, she didn't come out much. she was just a mother at home, and she did a great job. charles told me one time that the thing you have to realize in life regardless of what you do or how you do it is you have to deal with certain people at a particular time, and by prolonging it, it was going to make it even longer and harder to deal with. to to get tossed over in the salad. toss it up and make it happen. and that's why their business was so successful in town, because they dealt with so many different people. but interesting stories. y'all get the book. [laughter] >> let me, let me get -- bring michael into this discussion. the other memoir that we have represented here today is written by michael copperman,

it's "teacher: two years in the mississippi delta," and it's literally just right off the presses. i think michael saw a copy of it for the first time last night actually. [laughter] but michael currently lives in oregon but from 2002-2004 he worked for teach for america, and he taught fourth grade in the mississippi delta. after 1970 the mississippi delta was interesting in that almost all the white people left the public schools in the mississippi delta. and literally there was a new dual school system created in the delta of a public school system for blacks and a private school system for whites. although as one black man from the delta remembered, he said that white people had always had private schools in the delta. he said the only difference was that after integration they had to actually pay for them. [laughter] okay. so, michael, you want to tell them about your -- >> yeah. so i'm, my book is called

"teacher," and it's about years that i spent teaching in the rural black public schools of the delta. i'm not a historian nor did i grow up in mississippi, and so in part by story, i guess, is about an outsider, thoroughly outside of the black binary of the delta, coming to a place that, you know, was utterly foreign to me where in some ways i didn't, at first, belong at all. of course, i'd never felt i wronged much in oregon where -- belonged much in oregon where i was born and raised because i'm, you know, part russo-polish jew and part japanese-hawaiian. [laughter] went to public schools where i was often the only asian student os to the only minority or one of a very few. and i went to stanford, and as people do in college, you know, found my calling, i thought, fighting for right, you know, organizing the multiracial issues forum around, you know,

advocating on the census to be able to check one more box. and then i, then i ended up joining this organization to called teach for america and marking mississippi and being sent to a place that was really unlike anything that i had ever known. i haven't written a book that's ideological or that's rhetorical or didactic. it may be political in ramifications, but it's not a political book. it's not a sociological or historical treatise, and it's also not, as i just noted, it's not a story about a white teacher entering a rural or urban ghetto and saving minority children, you know, from the poverty that afflicts them. that wasn't my story at all. it's not purely a story of success, it's mostly a story about children. and their stories and their voices and how they stayed with me, haunted me, changed me and made me into the educator that i

have been for the last ten years in oregon where i teach low income first generation students of color at the university of oregon in a sort of modest attempt to retain them. the delta made me into a teacher. and the book is basically a reflection in many ways. it also considers the public school system and the public school system here and elsewhere. i wanted to say as i come back to mississippi and face a mississippi audience, but i suppose outward-facing since there are those people who watch c-span2 somewhere in the world, that i think that the tendency of most americans outside of mississippi is to want to dismiss what is said about mississippi or about segregation of the public schools as being about backward mississippi. as if this was purely a problem that could be contained within the state of mississippi. my ten years in oregon teaching students who remind me of children i taught have shown me that this is not, in fact, a

mississippi problem. things are starker here. the history, perhaps, is more immediate. but socioeconomic inequality and educational inequality is an issue we see all across the cup. it is not a mississippi problem at all, and it is a shared problem. it's not something which outsiders from mississippi can dismiss as just being mississippi's issue any more than, i think, for mississippians or the sort of mississippians who come to a panel on schools in jackson, you know, have the right to say, well, that's just the delta, and the delta is backwards. be you're american, i think -- if you're american, i think you are a part of that history. i thought i was outside of the history and realized i had benefited from privilege of various kinds, not racial privilege, but other ways in which i had had an easy way of things. i went to excellent public schools that provided me excellent opportunities. i had the opportunity to go to

stanford. and i had always been able to take advantage of the things around me. i had enrichment. children that i encountered in the delta, they had something really different than that. and since i heard tina reading a little bit, i wasn't going to read anything, but then i thought, well, i could do more with a few minutes than probably i could do trying to talk at you about a book. this is from near the end of the book which is mostly about children and their stories. this is all there is. the world tells delta kids. these fences to keep you in or out, these sippedder bloc -- cinder bloc walls. this queue of tin roof shacks, these skin-scorched flats and this ragged edge of cot upon thefield that you can't claim or sow or reap, you can't. i came and declared, you can, saying it again and again hoping each time it would sound less hollow.

people speak of how idealism ought to be tempered by experience, growing older, becoming wiser. they're wrong. you can't restore faith. i wouldn't have been teaching a decade now at the university of oregon if it weren't for those two years of delta, would long after have are that traded in a day -- i see fourth graders grown up that i taught, and a part of me imagines somehow i'm speaking directly for the children, directly to the children for whom i wanted so much. yet back in promise, the children i taught walked the dusty streets headed nowhere, and i don't have it in me to help them. to fail again to save a child who doesn't have a fighting chance. trying to get back to the man i was and imagine choices. if i could trade my comfortable life for theirs, if i could free them from poverty, would i? it's easy to say of course when there are guarantees. instead, i dream of carrying children to safety from fires,

of weaving the way through a dark wood with a line of children following grudgingly blinded until we arrive at a city with clean, bright streets and they're with me despite all our doubts. we've arrived. but when i wake, the relief is bitterly lost. i'm alone in a high-rise apartment, and those children are worlds away hearing the bark of a stray dog, the whistle of a train, a train bound elsewhere. and if i close my eyes, i can still hear their voices. hey, now, how you going to do me like that? that don't count as no strike. what the capital of oregon is, mr. copperman? everybody live in a tree out there, right? laugh how come you got to always talk so careful, mr. c.? like hello, my children. today is a day when we speak using all the words in our dictionary. mr. copperman, how come you not black and you not white, but you

say you like nos? don't you got some asian person music so you ain't stealing folks' music? but, mr. copperman, how you know you don't like a kool-aid pickle if you ain't had none? mr. copperman, this is a poem i wrote for you. roses are red, violates is -- violets is blue, you making a face like you stepped in poo. [laughter] here's a real poem. roses is dead and violets dead too 'cuz i on fire and this just burned you. that ain't no poem. you can't use no swear words in .. shaped close on the boys and braided into tight braids on the girls, the uniformed polos starched, sitting straight and listening, slouching with arms crossed or buried in a bean bag chair. or speaking while doing the heel

toe two-step at a sock hop beneath the strobing lights, arms and hands waving, demanding my attention and calling out joking, being absurd and serious and smart and so full of joy and anger and outrage and curiosity. such kids. and so it is that the further i am from the delta, the clearer i hear them. perhaps nearness in distance is how the past clarifies as it resides for reach. too perfect to bear. those kids are, after all, no longer children but full-grown men and women who likely have jobs, children of their own, aspirations and adult burdens. they're no longer my charge, but they're with me as they were, their faces bright and voices loud. and because what happened then is inalterable, it's possible to love them purely as they were without the need to have them behave or achieve. perhaps that's why i've begun to forgive myself for having failed them buzz might be i didn't fail -- because maybe i didn't want to fail them.

while i could with ugly in all my frustration and all the arrogance be naivete of youth, i was not such a bad teacher. not as good as they deserved, but as good of a teacher you should the circumstances as i could manage. there was nothing wrong with me or wrong with them, but there was so much trauma and loss that for a decade i couldn't understand why i kept gazing back, mulling over what was gone. i left a part of my heart in the delta that. since i left, i've always held back a little. i'm willing to risk everything again back when i didn't know you couldn't change the world through force of will. a part of me will always remain with those kids, to see their upturned, eager faces and have time for just one more chapter if allowed, one more times table and one more lesson, one more chance to be with them and so be whole again. to be simply and only teacher. [applause]

and that's what my book is about. [laughter] >> okay. well, i think we'll go ahead and open it up to questions from the floor. there is a mic here in the, at the podium here in the middle of the room, so if you would come there to offer your questions. >> michael, i don't mean to exclude you from this question. your chance of answering it would be as good as mine would be. and i grew up here. so, john and tina, during i guess about 25 years ago there was another influx of caucasians into the public school system mainly in elementary school and neighborhood schools. and so my question to you is why do you then think there was then another outflux of caucasians from those schools? >> well, thanks, george.

because my children were that age. there was a serious effort made by white parents who had grown up and gone to murrah high school and so forth starting an organization called the parents for public schools that has now -- that is now a nationwide organization with chapters all across the nation. and it's worked in most every place except jackson, mississippi. now, i don't know what it is about jackson. i've got my own theories, but there's a lot wrong with what has happened here that we didn't have from the very beginning to this day almost any leadership on this issue. we had william winter, our great governor and our great hope, i think. i'm a big fan of governor winter's.

his girls went to school with us. but beyond that we've had very, very little leadership. and there is something about the way the white community responded to serious desegregation efforts in the early 1970s, and that was to move to the northeast as fast as our cars could carries. as soon as we -- carry us. as soon as we got to the northeast and filled up all the areas along the colonial country club, we busted over into madison county and rankin county and created those great neighborhoods and, frankly, those great public schools. madison central high school is a great public school. northwest rankin high school is a great public school. all full of children that should have gone to murrah high school. but it was the way that the white community responded where we never had any white leadership to come before us and

say, slow down, let's get together and think about this seriously. and i'm, i think that's as good a reason as anything else, george. >> i'm going to jump in here. i know i'm not part of the panel, but i've lived in jackson for eight years, and my daughter was part of the jackson to public school system, and i was proud to have her at a fantastic performing arts magnet school as part of jps. this fourth and fifth grade, there were five white students in the entire school, and my mom asked me one day, she said are any of those families from mississippi who have their kids there? and all of us or were from somewhere else who had those students. and that experience was both one of the hardest things, but also the very best things about being here. and i feel it changed my fourth grader, now fifth grader in a new part of the country. race means something so different.

it means something and nothing for her, which i think is the best thing that could have happened. so i hope that we keep having these conversations, because it has to change. >> amen. >> my question is for mr. copperman. i actually read the precursor to your book in the oxford american, your article, and at the time i read it, i had just started teaching in a title i school, a high school in mississippi. and i was from the the outside, i was from charlotte, north carolina, area. so it really resonated with me, your article. so my question is, because i'm still at that same school nine years, ten years later, why did you, why did you leave and what words would you have to those of us who are still, you know, under the weight of that feeling of, you know, trying to move these children? >> i put it in the book, but

i -- a part of me still hasn't forgiven myself for leaving any more than i think the kids i taught understood why i would leave. at time, i thought i was leaving about a girl, so that's my easy answer. [laughter] but mississippi and especially the public schools in mississippi, they need educators like you. maybe my place wasn't in mississippi, it was a difficult place to be me, as i discuss in the book. but the little girl that that oxford be american piece centers around that's at the center of the memoir, right, who was a genius and who was out of the public school system by the age of 9, she deserved better. she deserved more opportunity. she deserved teachers who were more able than i was or who would become more able than i was then. i'm sure, as you know, two years that is, you barely know what you're doing. nine years? maybe. i still learn something in the

classroom every day because i'm really doing something closer or to teaching public school in many ways with the children i teach than i am acting like a college teacher or most college teachers. but what would i say? i would say, i would say you're stronger than me, and i hope that everybody appreciates your service. mississippi needs people like you. [applause] >> hi. i actually had the privilege of working for a ram very similar to teach for -- a program very similar to teach for america in little rock, arkansas, really great. and i found that while i was from the south and so kind of, sort of had an idea what southern schools were like, a lot of people who came from other places had a lot of assumptions about those schools, obviously. how have y'all seen those assumptions affect the way that

we educate and the way that we deal with our schools? >> are you refer aring, i'm not sure if this question is for me, are you referring to teachers? >> teachers -- [inaudible] y'all really. >> i think, let's see. i think that, i think that there are a lot of assumptions that young, idealistic people have when they have no understanding not just here many mississippi, but -- here in mississippi, but what our public schools are like all across the country in low income areas which are often minority area ares, right? because of history -- areas, right? because of history. i was immensely naive, and i think that i did harm at times in imagining that i understood what was happening or what i needed to do or why children were misbehaving or believing somehow it was about me which is, i think, a tendency of any young person who is 22, but especially someone who comes and

does a service teaching program that has a year or two-year stint. and i think, i think that the answer is that people coming in need to be more humble and to do better. i don't think we should justify people's assumptions about children or about schools under any circumstances. at the same time, i think you have to recognize probably the difficulty for somebody who has no experience both of the south or of poverty or of our public schools and doesn't know the craft of teaching. they probably have, as you would know because you've taught, right? they have a lot to learn. and i just hope that people come to schools with humility, understanding that they're not there to impose their will or vision onto the children or the schools. ..

which was exactly the same thing folks coming down from northern college is for a very noble effort to try to get some kind of education to black students who are not getting a good education, but he also as he points out who oftentimes i even made the assumption that the students admitted they were and what their capabilities very because they were not part of this culture. it is kind of a recurring issue i would say over time. >> i wanted to add some thing from my city that has about 4000 population. we have a biotech center.

i feel like and i mention this, instead of upper metaphors for people to go there, build it so people want to come. we have our boat tax center company may have read about this sentence solar car team. we've won a national championship of the winston dell solar challenge in their division for the last 15 years competing against new york city and in many other places and this is a small town where they built an acidic class they have to take for two years as kittens build a solar car and raced across country when you're in another year in dallas around the track. kids want to be on this team. they'll get scholarships to be on the team. why not put things into the school that only the public schools can really afford like teaching them a trade and then

everybody would want to come back to the school in my opinion. had the business owners come in, helped jackson, help others close and teach them what it takes to get a job when they finish because self-esteem to me is the most important thing a child needs when they graduate from high school. bob stevens built out that building a football team. because self-esteem and this young boys that had they been on. never would've had a a chance to play folk all before, but putting confidence in them so they graduate with confidence and feeling like they can make it in the world. >> other questions? >> i graduated from central high school and one of the things -- we were a very mixed school. it was like, wait, hispanic, but now we see a lot of white

flight. they were enjoying it. but they take their kids out and say various common like my kid is not going to central africa. how do you curb weight flight? >> how did we encourage? >> the truth is a 1973 n/a teeth and 74, the united states supreme court and what is happening with radical desegregation here and elsewhere, ensuring weight flight is the best response in the inner cities of chicago, detroit, middleton versus bradley moore instead of forcing the focus back on inner-city schools and what around the board was really at no instead

it was inherently discriminatory to black children to be held back by being an isolated schools. that was a constitutional interests at stake that the court was indicating. it later became by the time we were there for a reason to integrate public schools was to, quote comic at around four to remedy 300 years of intentional discrimination against black people. well, that was a massive task. i mean, if that was the end, and he means could be justified. it is so strange that within four years so that the court was enshrining white flight is the way to get around programs that i could focus on what tina and i went through because the only way you get around the assumptions that teacher was

talking about is to be in close proximity in high school or someplace like that and spend a lot of time together. that is the hope of integration in the works for us. >> john, i want to ask you in tina one of the things they observe in the process of your writing and especially talking about the book after it was published. my sense of it was still a learning process and the reconciliation process. can you talk a little bit about how that works in the discussion of the book after it was published? >> to me. robert gates is a lawyer, former judge here in town. an african-american fellow and a good friend. he said this book is the first chapter of another chapter that

is going to be coming from the african-american perspective a little bit more. it still raises the same pressure points. he hit the same pressure points. it still is a matter of great defensiveness on the part of the white community. it is a source of great anger still that the blood children -- brings the high school was one of the best performing high schools in the state of mississippi in 1969-70. it basically ceased to exist. it was sacrificed on the altar of desegregation. they put their championship trophies in your arms and folded them up and put them away. brinkley is now a junior high school. there's still a lot of anger about and what we learned in doing the book is made up the way people were the ones that gave it up for immigration for

desegregation. they have our liberal backs patted, excuse me, not you, eugene. last night but it was the black kids that gave up a lot or then we did to achieve as much as we achieved and that is the truth. some of them are still really angry about it. >> there's a chapter where we talk about what we learned and how we feel about it and there's a lot of different opinions about it. shoddy and i both feel in our profession that it helped us to become better health care professional he an attorney to represent her people meeting has held that we don't think twice about what color people are what their religion is so whatever, their patients that come into her part to his and i help them to the best of our ability. we wonder, what we have been

like that so we are thankful because it opened our eyes to a different segment of society. it opened our hearts to understand people that didn't have what we have. not that we had that much. this isn't about a lot of rich white people, but we were all rich. we did learn that spirit of excellence to try to take it with our life to be better people and serve our communities. it's amazing to me. it is amazing in ninth grade we learned anything. some of us had problems to get to the point that we should have got to college. we caught up, went on.

>> issue of comment on how you think this experience of what might become the failure of desegregation in jackson, how this might have an impact on attitudes about public schools funding in mississippi. last night's >> immediately after the schools were integrated, public school funding declined. a lot of that wasn't state funds, whose estate is if everybody knows and the most obvious example was in the delta when all those white folks let the delta schools, one of the first things they did was lower than millage rate for the schools. all of a sudden the schools are getting less money not because the state reduced appropriation

but because local governments were giving those schools as much money. i know mississippi has tried to do more. governor winter is education reform act in 1882 and then the adequate education reform act, but that has never been fully funded. they try to equalize the inequities that you see with some local government, but it's on the books. but it's not been funded. it definitely became an issue. >> the last bond issue passed in jackson was an ada to air condition the jackson public schools. if there's been one since then that has passed, i don't remember it. it is with the community at-large speaks most clearly

when you talk about doing something to improve the public schools. >> to java question, sir? >> eric here. i have been go to power baileys millsap school several years ahead of you out there think it would be appropriate and i'm not a teacher, but i admire everyone at them for us to recognize every person in here who lives there has been a teacher just by raising their hands. >> look at all the teachers. [applause] >> as we talk about public schools which i mentioned public schools. in one week the superintendent was recognized in this past

week, the next week they were put on probation for failing 22 out of 31 categories or something like that. we're speaking of leadership. we don't seem to be paying attention. who's driving the terrain and great teachers for the most part and teach for america, mississippi teacher court and others. what are we doing so dramatically wrong in the city of jacksonville really throughout this date? >> one with a brief question. >> i think it's a good question to be asked. anybody who has ideas about how to improve it, it is a clearly losing battle that we are not fighting very well.

you know, it in 1954, right after brown that mississippians would first take to the street with guns to fight against desegregation and he said i think he was drinking a little bit, he said that bennett would include them. mississippi can afford to finance to set our schools. school districts are forms of school that started out to be exactly right. it is really true and the answers have not become very clear. i think a little leadership would help. >> i keep thinking about this question. i think that's a question but i think it's framed in the wrong way. the question is how do we make the public schools better so st