INTEGRATION BY CHOICE

My aunts were born into a wealthy Syracuse family. My grandmother sent them to an impoverished inner-city school. By the time my dad was in Elementary School, Syracuse had begun a bussing program to integrate schools. I decided to interview my dad, Dr. Blair Tuttle, to get a full report on my family’s experience with integration. This is what I learned. (Some quotes have been modified for clarification and conciseness)

My aunts were the first white children to go to an all-black school.

“When my sisters were in kindergarten, first grade, that was 1967. And even though Brown v. Board had passed, school districts were pretty slow to integrate.

My mom and her neighbor [Mrs Edwards] were part of the urban league, which supported integration and urban rights. Even though we lived in a wealthy neighborhood, they were part of organizations and activism for civil rights. The school district had been dragging its feet on integration and Mrs. Edwards convinced my Mom to prove that it’s not so scary to other parents by sending their wealthy white kids to black schools.”

My aunts, Leslie and Pam, and Mrs. Edwards daughter, Helen, were sent to the all-black Elementary school whilst the city was still refusing to integrate. They were the only white students at the school.

My aunts had mixed experiences

“Leslie just went to the school for a few years and transferred back to the all white school.”

“Pam graduated from the black elementary school. She had made a friend named Sheryl who was really her protector in the Elementary School. They remained friends. Sheryl had her first child when she was 14… It was the seventies so that was fairly common. Our family kind of adopted her family and helped with holiday presents and that sort of thing.”

“We lived in a white neighborhood, we went to white country clubs, we lived an upper class, wealthy lifestyle that led to very little intersection with black people. The relationship we had with [Sheryl’s] family was something we never would have had if we lived normally — segregated.”

Integration did not mean integration

“When I went to high school in 1974, all the schools had been integrated. So they would bus in black kids from the poor neighborhoods and our school was about — I don’t know — one third black.

I vividly remember having a friend named Brian when I was really young. But by upper elementary school we weren’t friends. I think his family moved around the city a lot because they were so poor.

Even though there was busing, there was a lot of segregation in the school. I didn’t have any black friends in elementary school. The school developed a pretty strong gifted program that was all white and tracked kids, so I didn’t have classes with black kids. On the playground, we stayed pretty segregated.”

Violence and bullying in the school was blamed on African American students.

“There were some race riots. Not race riots. There was a group of tough black kids and a group of tough white kids and they would fight. Occasionally. But it was just part of the vibe.

I was victimized a few times. I remember going home and crying because a black kid had beaten me up on the playground. So my first impression of integration was not positive. In middle school, kids were still bused in. Our classes were still segregated due to tracking, but we did have specials. That bully [who had beaten me up on the playground] was in one of my specials classes — home economics. I was not a social kid. I was shy and into physics and math. But my friend Tom [Thom Felicia], who grew up to literally be a T.V. star, was very social. And I remember walking in one day and he was talking and joking with this bully. He had somehow formed a relation with that kid. I talked to Tommy about it later and he was like “that kid didn’t like you very much, he wanted to beat you up, but I convinced him not to.”

So I had very limited interactions with the kids bused to my school, and most were negative.”

There is more to diversity than skin color.

“In highschool, I switched from my local high school to one that was near The University. I had done well on some standardized test and a teacher told me to switch high schools so I would be around more college — bound kids and opportunities. There were African American kids in my highschool who were the children of professors, but they were upper-class and culturally very similar to me. I really wasn’t spending time with kids who were very different then me”