Northwestern<\/p>\nHigh School<\/a> interviewed two people for our oral history project<\/p>\n
on the desegregation of Prince George’s County schools<\/b>. One interviewee<\/p>\n
was the first African American student at the school. (He was still the<\/p>\n
only one when he graduated three years later). He said: "Initially<\/p>\n
I was actually hoping that it wouldn’t work. My parents had said that<\/p>\n
if there was a lot of violence, we would back up. … Instead of violence,<\/p>\n
there were three years of hostility." His main motivation was to<\/p>\n
be "part of something bigger," the Civil Rights Movement. He<\/p>\n
later became a successful chemical engineer. I found him enormously appealing—and<\/p>\n
easily understood what he meant in his understated way, but the kids took<\/p>\n
his reticence about his own emotions as evasiveness. <\/p>\n
The second interviewee was a current member of the County Council, a<\/p>\n
white man who was formerly a civil rights lawyer. He had sued to force<\/p>\n
bussing in the county schools and then arranged the settlement that ended<\/p>\n
bussing. He moved to the County in 1971, and his family was the only White<\/p>\n
one in the local community. At a community meeting, "I said I was<\/p>\n
a civil rights lawyer and I wanted to be active in the community."<\/p>\n
A community leader said, "Man, you are a phenomenon. Most white people<\/p>\n
are trying to move out of here." In the 1970s, roughly 100,000 African<\/p>\n
Americans relocated to Prince George’s County (mostly from Washington),<\/p>\n
and roughly 100,000 White people left—a pattern that continued for<\/p>\n
the next 20 years. "Those folks who moved in the seventies were running<\/p>\n
from black folks … In the eighties and nineties, it had more to do<\/p>\n
with the aging of the population and the changing of circumstance."<\/p>\n
People left for upper income housing and better schools. <\/p>\n
"My dream in the early eighties was that this is the place where<\/p>\n
we would make it work. This is the place where we would demonstrate to<\/p>\n
America that it can work like it says in social studies books. Today I<\/p>\n
would say that we are still working on that."<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I spent most of the morning advising a potential applicant for the Rhodes Scholarship—something that I do on the side because I feel that Maryland students need coaching. (We haven’t won since the mid-1970s.) In the afternoon, our class at Northwestern High School interviewed two people for our oral history project on the desegregation of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4122","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education-policy","category-a-high-school-civics-class"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4122","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4122"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4122\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4122"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4122"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4122"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}