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For Yazoo City youngsters, that education will inevitably be social as well as academic. Black and white youngsters at the Bettie E. Wool folk Elementary School were seen sliding together on a patch of playground ice. Black high school students casually joined their new classmates to integrate the Town and Country Kitchen, a previously all-white teenage hangout a block from the school. ∙
Even more encouraging is the attitude of the community's white parents. While many simply cannot afford to send their children to the area's three all-white segregation academies, an equally large number are convinced that, given time, white and blacks can coexist. "Those of us who are here have got to learn to live together in this situation," explains Don McGraw, personnel director of the Mississippi Chemical Corp. "It is upon us." Like McGraw, a majority of Yazoo City whites are willing to keep their children in the public schools unless the ratio of blacks to whites gets too high, something that is not likely to happen if the parents themselves refuse, as they have commendably done so far, to panic.