On June 11, 1963 Alabama Governor George Wallace blocked the doors of the University of Alabama to keep Black students from registering and said ”segregation forever!” I was four years old and two years later attended an all Black, separate and unequal, Jim Crow elementary school in East Texas because I could not, by law, attend the all White elementary school closer to my home because I was Black. I did not understand the situation at the time because I was six years old. I studied from hand me down books, but the information was the same. Two years later The laws changed and my original school was shut down and I attended the formerly all White school closer to my home. My prior teacher prepared me well with those second hand books and I was like water. You see, water will find a way in, around or over any obstacles place in front of it. I knew what I knew. I knew what I was taught. I was not going to pretend to be less than anyone else regardless of their race, background or socioeconomic standing.
I progressed through elementary, junior high and high school and did my best, even when I was one put in, what I called a warehouse class and my friends asked me, “What are you doing in here?” They knew me and I was moved to another group. Later I realized some students were set aside and given up on by their schools, many of them minorities, but like water I went around that. After finishing high school I was recruited by an HBCU for their business school and graduated Summa Cum Laude. I didn’t have a legacy of higher education in my family, I was the last of nine children and the first to go straight to college and earn a Bachelor of Science degree, but other siblings earned even higher degrees later on in their lives because they were like water also and would not be denied.
I came back to East Texas with my shiny new degree and went into business to business sales, but when I walked into establishments with my suit on, the question I got most often was not, what do you have of offer, but where are you from. The implication was that I must not have been from around there or I would have known I was out of my place walking into their business like that. I was you and newly married and thought, these people aren’t going to stop me, so I relocated, not far, but different. I was like water again and was able to utilized everything I knew and was taught to grow, provide for my family and prosper, then I came back on my terms.
Sixty years after George Wallace blocked the doors to the University of Alabama the Supreme Court of the United States of America essentially overturned Affirmative Action in the ability of colleges to use race as a factor in deciding who is admitted to their schools. You see, I’m the same person who could not attend a nearby elementary school because I was Black and in my same lifetime the SCOTUS said it is all even now. On June 29, 2023, 60 years after George Wallace blocked a university’s doors to keep Black students out, the Supreme Court determined everything was even. Slavery began 400 years ago and in 1966 I was legally barred from attending elementary school with White children, so now the SCOTUS has determined the weight of that oppression has been lifted. Native Americans were forced from the lands onto reservations and it is like a mulligan in a golf game and all even. Hispanic Americans relegated to the underclass for years laboring in fields, domestic work and exploited and it’s all equal now.
Do not allow that Supreme Court ruling on Affirmative Action stop you from achieving your dreams. Behave like water and go around, through and over obstacles place in your path. Those before you did it and you can too!
