To mark The Times’s 175th birthday, Times editors asked writers to reflect on — and imagine a little bit about — the newspaper’s front page on the day they were born. Look up your own birthday page here.
Turns out the great experiment of racial integration was legislated to maintain its status as an American dream. On Sept. 4, 1963, the day I was born, the front page of The New York Times showed a photo of a Black girl, Millicent Brown, surrounded by a sea of white girls with bouffant hairstyles and quizzical expressions. The Black girl, sporting the same hairstyle, was integrating a South Carolina public school. There’s another photo, right below the first, of two Black girls at a school cafeteria counter in Louisiana; the irony is not lost on me, given the Greensboro sit-ins in North Carolina three years earlier. The girls are being served by a woman who appears to be Black. She hands a tray to one of the two girls. The caption informs us, “Twenty-seven Negroes attended four previously all-white high schools in Louisiana’s capital without any serious incident.”
Turns out “without any serious incident” is up for debate. The title of the article below the photos states that the “South Is Orderly as Schools Open.” An article to the left of the photos is titled “U.S. Ready to Use Troops if Needed in Alabama Crisis.” Eleven days after these articles were published, four Black girls were killed in a church bombing on what wasn’t a school day.
Turns out “over your dead body” will always be the thing. Years ago, I was surprised to learn that during the 1950s in multiple states, officials closed schools rather than comply or continue with the integration project. Both the baby and the bathwater were tossed. The school boards and the state legislators understood that true integration was about sharing resources and power and not just about who was sitting in the chairs. What is left out of the narratives in the newspapers and the history books makes the inevitable surprising rather than inevitable.
Turns out only time was needed to defund and disintegrate the public schools, while white Americans came up with a new legal form of the same “separate but equal” rhetoric that had marked the Jim Crow era. The impossibility written into that “separate but equal” phrase functioned in tandem with redlining. The Fair Housing Act passed five years after the articles written on my birth date didn’t stop white flight, which lowered property values and led to underfunded schools that the integrated Black children now had to themselves, as if integration was ever only about spatial proximity. Public schools with majority Black and Latino children are not “bad” schools when they are properly funded, resourced and staffed.
Turns out my own neighborhood school, P.S. 89 in the Allerton neighborhood of the Bronx, didn’t meet my mother’s educational standard, despite its diversity. True integration, as my friend the sociologist Prudence Carter has been telling me for years, means shared power, equitable resources and deep multicultural fluency — defined as the practice of working across social differences woven into daily routines. It was never just about the class photo. After one year, my mother moved me into a Catholic school.
Turns out in the early fall of this year, as school began for so many, I followed the various reactions to Nikole Hannah-Jones’s article in The Times, which addressed her daughter’s reaction to her mother’s earlier decision to place her in a local public school despite its ranking. I couldn’t help but compare Ms. Hannah-Jones with my own immigrant, working-class mother. My mother, evidently, did not feel equipped to ensure that her children were educated properly, given the state of the neighborhood public school. She certainly did not feel she would have the time, resources or community with other parents needed to invest in changing the school. Or maybe she instinctively knew that structural change needs more than good intentions.
Turns out my mother once told me that she was told two things when she arrived in the United States from Jamaica. First: Do not trust white people. And second: Do not send your children to the public school if you wish them to get an education. She was given good advice on both counts, if you understand “white” to communicate a commitment to white supremacy and a legacy of what Prudence has called pervasive inequality. This means some of the white people are Black people who maintain the structures that are dedicated to their own erasure.
Turns out the closest Catholic school to where we lived in the North Bronx seemed a better option to my mother and her pocketbook, though its classrooms were predominantly filled with white students and frustrated white nuns who liked to pummel the students no matter their race or ethnicity. Lord have mercy. There I learned not to trust white people who can be violent for no good reason. I already knew what Black people were capable of doing.
Turns out many of the responses to Ms. Hannah-Jones’s article rarely considered the incapacity of parents to address the ills of white supremacy and its pervasive inequality. The invisible costs of living in an anti-Black society speak to the immeasurable that Ms. Hannah-Jones felt she should be addressing in her leave-no-child-behind mind-set. But no single mother can save us as the entire system works against us.
Turns out I wouldn’t presume to put myself in either my mother’s or Ms. Hannah-Jones’s place, since the only thing that should be judged is the society that sets the obstacles in place, ensuring that these kinds of compromises and negotiations must be made. Sometimes there are no good choices, no right answers. The thing is rigged, you all.
Turns out we do our best negotiating the education system, and still hundreds of thousands of educated Black women were released from their jobs last year, as reported by The Times, largely based on the whims of white people in a government dedicated to the advancement of white people. Some call this fascism; I will stick with our enduring racist, anti-Black form of democracy. Presumably, some of these unemployed Black women are mothers with children in schools all over this country. Presumably, many of these schools are underresourced.
It’s taken me six years to create a classroom at New York University that looks like the integrated streets of New York City. My first year teaching at N.Y.U., the Black and queer poets filled most seats. Then the straight white and Asian women started showing up. This semester, no doubt because of all that is happening outside the classroom walls, everyone is here. All my students are starting to understand how rigged the system is. I hope it turns out that they build friendships that last a lifetime and are lifelines, as it turns out that there’s no turning away from the problem of white supremacy and the pervasive inequalities it generates over generations.
Claudia Rankine is the author of eight books, three plays and many video collaborations; a co-founder of the Racial Imaginary Institute; and a professor of creative writing at New York University.
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