This is the sort of thing people are going to have to get over:
The reunion Saturday is only for those who graduated from Washington High School before it opened its doors to black students in the fall of 1969.Some black leaders say the all-white reunion is sad and painful evidence that 50 years after the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed school segregation, some things have not changed all that much in this community on the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake Bay.
“It’s just as divided as it’s ever been,” said Leon Johnson, a black political activist who worked behind the scenes in Somerset County in 1960s. “The old folks did a good job of teaching the young ones, of teaching them the old system.”
Wait a minute. Let’s assess: 1) Let’s say the class of 1952 wants to hold a reunion and there were no blacks at the school in 1952. Why would black people attend the Class of ’52 reunion? My mother graduated from an all-black, pre-integration high school. Can you guess what color the class reunion attendees were? Good grief.
2) Things have changed. The Brown case sought to outlaw government-sanctioned discrimination, and it accomplished that goal. Alarmist, America-is-still-racist articles like this make me queasy. Pardon me.
In a way, I feel bad that people feel bad about this, but I couldn’t care less if pre-integration high school classes want to have their own high school reunions. Black people hold their own events all the time. You can’t cry foul when the other guy does it, too.
And I don’t care if the reasons or intentions for doing so are vastly different. (They’re usually quite similar.) We all operate under the same rules; there isn’t one code of conduct for this group and another code of conduct for that group. But, unfortunately, some groups like to claim preferences based on the color of their skin. If you can’t take it, don’t dish it out!
Reading further in the article, we learn that the reunion is sponsored by a private group, not the school:
Organizers call the reunion a “Grand Homecoming” for graduates from the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s. The event, last held in 1999, draws about 700 alumni. It is independently organized and is not affiliated with the public school system.
According to our Constitution, we are free to privately assemble. (Hear that, Jesse Jackson?) If the assembly is based on race, so be it. Look, if people want to hang out with their “own kind,” they may do so. This is one of the consequences of living in a free society, folks. If you want to be told who to associate with and what to say, move to Canada.
Next, we get to the heart of the matter: money:
H. DeWayne Whittington, a 1948 graduate of what was then called Crisfield Colored High School, eventually became the first black superintendent of Somerset County schools, in 1988. He won a lawsuit against the county four years later when it did not renew his contract, and the system was forced to name a school for him.Whittington said he is less irritated by the Grand Homecomings than he is by the distribution of scholarship money raised at the event. A total of $9,500 has been awarded in 19 scholarships, but only to children of alumni who graduated before integration…
The separate reunions are a symptom of a lack of black political leadership in the county, Whittington said. No black politicians have pressed for a stop to the practice.
Whittington is misguided and wrong-headed, and his quotes reek of self-pity and sour grapes. I don’t know the man’s heart, and some of his quotes may have been excluded or taken out of context to fit the reporter’s framing of the story. But what I read, I don’t like. This is the sort of stuff you say in private to other blacks, not in a nationally-run article.
If blacks in that town are envious and angry, they need to use that energy to create something instead of complaining about what they don’t have. They need to organize bigger and better reunions for themselves and get the word out. Hey, they can even hire me to write a few snazzy press releases and promotion materials.
Whenever I’m feeling envious toward others, I don’t complain about what I don’t have and how unfair life is and how racist white people are. I do something about it. I turn the energy of that negative emotion into something I can use. Even if I accomplish a small goal or two, I’ve done my best. Envy, I have no use for.
That, in a nutshell, is my advice to people still crying “Racism!” in 2004 America.
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Read Parts I and II of my Brown v. Board of Education columns.
