In Norfolk, Va. in 1959 I graduated from high school, just barely, since the schools were closed for much of that year in a last ditch resistance against school integration in that city.

As to how Whites could have allowed integration to happen, here’s what I noticed in my own lower middle class (by the time I arrived) family, all from various parts of Va. and North Carolina.

My grandparents were solid, probably more instinctively and reflexively pro-White down to their bone marrow than David Duke could ever be. No thought was involved nor was necessary…they had been born around 1885 and they knew who they were and knew who blacks were. And understood that Jews were not Christian whites! Their relations with both groups (there were no other) were amicable, and in the case of Jews more or less egalitarian.

(A decade after integration had come, a woman I knew of my grandmother’s generation returned from a trip downtown and complained about all the negro clerks in the stores, saying with some bitterness, “Imagine hiring negros when there’s white people out of work.”)

But my parents’ generation was softer. While their attitudes were very far from today’s attitudes (no one today would say, “I’ve always been good at getting along with the colored,” as I heard a person of my parents’ generation say), they found the attitudes of their own parents a bit harsh. And my generation…we were hopeless. Reeds in the wind, to be captured by whatever the predominant wind was.

But maybe more important, it wasn’t a political era full of social issues like today. There were NO social issues! And few political issues outside of a division into Democratic and Republican voters every four years. Before I attended college, I can’t remember discussing ANYthing with ANYone! Until the integration trouble started, no one in my family of any generation talked about race, nor about anything else outside of personal and family life, AT ALL. There were simply zero issues on our radar to be discussed, and discussion of anything that might be controversial, if by a huge effort anyone could think of such a topic, was deemed not quite nice. I remember being cautioned as a child to never discuss religion or politics.

So the point is, when the trouble came upon us suddenly, there was ZERO tradition of even discussion of issues outside accustomed everyday life, and much less was there any custom of social or political organization or activism concerning any kind of issues whatsoever. People just lived their personal lives and the government did whatever it did in some other world that we had no connection to at all. We were not equipped in any way to respond adequately when the trouble came.

This is just my picture from my own family, but I think my family was like many. And I don’t feel like I’m making excuses…it all makes me very sad now…it was “just the way things were.”

I hope that’s helpful in some way…it certainly hasn’t made ME feel any better!