Jack Kingston, the former Georgia congressman, was going on about how high school students who had survived the massacre down in Florida were being hijacked by lefties.
Others were postulating that their anti-gun messages were far too well-crafted to be coming out of the mouths of mere teenagers – surely, these were planted “crisis actors.” Still more thought it was just unseemly for well-bred young members of the Class of ’18 to skip class and take to the streets, the state capitol building in Tallahassee, and even Washington D.C.
Had I owned a pearl necklace, I would have clutched it.
And then the perfect antidote arrived – an email from a longtime family friend with news of what was happening in Zebulon.
Forty-nine years ago, the students at Pike County Consolidated High School, an all-black institution, emptied into the street to protest the way desegregation was being handled in their community.
By way of punishment, the entire Class of 1969 was barred from graduation. All seniors were refused diplomas.
Next Saturday morning, they'll finally get what they earned so long ago. According to the local newspaper, 31 still live, 13 don't. But dead or alive, all will receive real, state-approved diplomas. Plus something like an apology from the Pike County Board of Education.
Some people choose protest, to be sure. For others, whether now or a half-century ago, protest is something thrust upon them.
“Our school was the black school,” began Charles Davis, now a funeral home operator in nearby Griffin. African-American students, from kindergarten to 12th grade, were housed under the single roof of Pike County Consolidated.
But 15 years after Brown v. Board of Education, state-ordered integration was finally coming to Pike County. Two black teachers had already been installed in the all-white Pike County High School in Zebulon, where African-American students would be going the next year.
But the school superintendent decided that he would not renew the annual contracts for any of the teachers or administrators in the black school, Davis said. They would be cashiered, including Consolidated’s principal, D.F. Glover.
“When we went to meet with the superintendent, he refused to consider any of the teachers we had in our system,” Davis said. “We were in a county where there were no blacks in any kind of office. None of the banks, no blacks at the courthouse, none in the judiciary system – there were no blacks anywhere.”
“We decided, as the class of ’69, we were going to do a demonstration,” Davis said.
The school emptied out, and the students walked the seven miles from Concord to Zebulon. Davis remembers the helicopters hovering, the state troopers, and the TV cameras from Atlanta.
“We were going to go back and graduate, but the superintendent told us that because we marched out, that we were not going to receive our diplomas,” Davis said. “We didn’t worry about it. We just kept marching, and kept protesting. It was a long summer.”
Their own protests were non-violent. Yet a house was burned and a young girl died, Davis remembered. Black people were put in both the hospital and jail. “It was a very nasty situation,” he said.
But that summer was also cathartic. The county began opening up. The principal of the black high school was given a position at Pike County High. The woman who would became Davis’ wife became the first black employee of the local bank.
The Class of 1969 produced several entrepreneurs. Others joined the military. A few even made it into college. Davis left Pike County, got a few college credits, and landed a long-term job as an engineer for a cookie factory. He opened his funeral home 15 years ago.
Every now and then, the topic of the confiscated diplomas would come up. But nothing happened until six or seven years ago, when Geneva Woods had a sleepless night.
She was one of those two black teachers initially allowed inside the all-white Pike County High School in 1967. Woods taught science – everything from applied biology to physics, until her retirement. She’s 84 now, living with cancer.
“I was lying in bed one night, and I couldn’t sleep. And I said, there ought to be something I can do for somebody before I leave this world,” Woods remembered. “I thought about the children that did not graduate. I left them behind when I went [to the all-white school].”
Her project moved in fits and starts, hampered by illness and access to school transcripts. “In transporting the records — these records from the Consolidated School to Pike County High, they said the records blew off the truck. That was what they said,” Woods recounted. “All these years later, they decided that the records blew back on the truck and were safely deposited in Zebulon. I don’t know how that happened. Somebody’s a magician.”
Many, including school board member Fred Blackmon, a local pastor, give credit to Pike County’s current school superintendent Michael Duncan for the shift in attitude.
Last November, the school board passed a resolution that authorized diplomas for the Class of 1969. “It was a unanimous vote, long overdue,” Blackmon said.
A bit of the resolution’s wording: “We honor all of those students, families and educators who struggled through those turbulent times, and we recognize that the lens of history allows us to acknowledge that prohibiting a student to graduate under similar circumstances would not be consistent with practices in place today.”
One of the speakers at Saturday’s ceremonies will be Davis, the funeral home operator. I asked him whether he and his fellow ‘69ers felt any kinship with the marching students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla.
Of course, Davis said. He’d been at an organizational meeting of the Class of 1969 last week. “We all said that if we had to do it over again, we would do it over again,” he said. “If we don’t pay attention to what our children are saying, we’re saying we don’t care about our tomorrow.”
More specifically, Davis recognized that his Class of 1969 then and the students in Florida now were acting with the fatalism that often accompanies the existential threat, the life-or-death situation.
No student today should have to worry that he might come home in a box rather than a school bus, Davis said.
He felt much the same way in 1969. “If you want to kill us, then we might as well serve a good purpose — that’s the same attitude that we had,” he said. “What use is it for us to receive an education to move forward in life – and not be given an opportunity to serve in any capacity within our own town?”
In 1969, the case could be made that if you were old enough to carry a gun and walk point in Vietnam, you were certainly old enough to engage in protest.
Today’s parallel: If at 18 you are old enough to purchase an AR-15 and dream of gunning down your classmates, then perhaps you are also old enough to act out in loud, peaceful ways to thwart that gunman who would send you home in a box.
True then, true now.
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