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At Gainesville High School, a girls' physical education class is predominantly black: the instructor explains that white girls are taking the required one year of physical education and no more. In the cafeteria, students save seats at their tables for friends; the blacks eat on one side, the whites on the other. A transfer of teachers to balance racially the faculties of the Atlanta public schools turned out defiant crowds of students and parents, and brought threats of mass teacher resignations. Black students were resentful when their schools were arbitrarily closed to keep the identity of white schools alive; they mounted protests in Athens and Atlanta. Black teachers found themselves downgraded, out of jobs, or bearing the brunt of white criticism over the quality of education.
Many school districts quietly followed HEW guidelines and court orders. At La-Grange, a textile town near the Alabama border, a white parent complains bitterly about the poor education her children are receiving. Then she adds: "I can't afford the private academy, so all I can do is try to find some way to help upgrade the teachers." A student at upper-class Northside High School in Atlanta describes a short-lived rebellion: "We threatened to walk out when the black kids started coming here, but our parents threatened to take our cars away from us if we did." In small-town Woodbury, a black cook summed up: "If I had just had the opportunity my child is getting, I would think somebody had given me a pot of gold."
The inequities of generations do not vanish overnight. The continuing complaints about the competence of black teachers constitute white Georgians' first experience with the awful toll of separate and unequal. Says Dr. Benjamin Mays, retired president of Morehouse College and chairman of the Atlanta school board: "If a black teacher is not good enough to teach a white kid, then he shouldn't be teaching black kids either. Black teachers were never said to be incompetent until they were sent to teach white children. We are in chaos and we are going to be in it for some time." Despite the upheavals, integration still carries one great promise: young Georgians have come to know, as their parents never did, the athletes, youthful scholars and leaders of another race.
Both black and white share more than a common stake in their schools. Economic prosperity, though far behind the white level, has reached into the black community. Atlanta has had a large black middle class for several generations. Centered on the five colleges and theological institute of Atlanta University Center, these blacks have long controlled their own economic and political life. Shut off from white financial channels, they developed alternative economic institutions—banks, insurance companies, small businesses.