A Door Opens Slowly

by Angela Green The Supreme Court law integrating schools for whites and blacks passed before I was born, but it wasn’t until I moved to South Carolina in the summer of 1969 that I sat in a classroom with black children. As a third-grader, I was unaware of the political hailstorms that had assailed our country the previous fifteen years. I was sent to school with simple instructions to obey my teacher. Although I can’t recall specifics, I have hazy memories of bullies picking on the black children on the playground. This remembrance exists, I think, not because the confrontations were so horrific, but because of approving smiles from my parents when I told them that I stopped other white children from being mean or making “ugly” remarks to the newest children in our ranks. In my family, friendship with black neighbors was accepted. We lived in a small community. My brothers and I all played on integrated school sports teams. We had always been taught to treat everyone with kindness and respect regardless of their color. Even with all of this “treat everyone equally” rhetoric, there was, however, one underlying understanding within the family: the daughter can be friends, but she cannot date the