Busing, 1971, by Marshall Poe

From MemoryArchive

Who: Marshall Poe
What: Busing and Race Relations
When: 1971
Where: Wichita, Kansas

I didn’t even notice when the black kids showed up at my all-white grade school; they just did. It was 1971, and I was in 4th grade at Price Elementary School in Wichita, , Kansas. I’m sure there was a huge controversy over busing, and I’m sure my mother, the principal and teachers prepped us for the huge changes they thought were coming. But when the buses came, and the black kids spilled out, none of us really thought a thing about it. I don’t think I’d ever met a black kid, but I wasn’t prejudice or even curious in the way you might expect. Perhaps I was unusual, but I just thought of them as kids—classmates, kickball players, and potential friends or enemies. They fit right in, at least from my perspective. I suspect they viewed it different.

There was one major change: the black kids got these packaged lunches every day, whereas those of us who ate at school (most of the white kids walked home) brought our lunch. Now I remember thinking that the pre-fab lunches looked a bit unappetizing, except for one thing—they got desert everyday. We didn’t. The black kids generally ate together, at least most of them. But there was no hard and fast rule. I ate everyday with my friend Brian Emmanuel. Brian’s claim to fame was that he was a great kickball player and that he could put an entire Hostess Ding Dong in his mouth. He used to do it just to show off, and we would fall out laughing. Until one day Walter didn’t come back to school. I ask what had happened. These were the days before “sensitivity training.” Our teacher said, “Walter has leukemia and is going home to die.”

There was racial tension, but we didn’t really know how to express it. One black kid, Walter Bean, took a disliking to me. That was easy to do, because I was a smart mouthed brat. One day he got his pals together—all black—and jumped me at the bicycle rack. I was more worried about getting in trouble with the principal than I was about them. And I didn’t really think of the gang as “black”—it was just Walter and his guys (Rocky and Rod). Another time, Walter hit me with a baseball bat. The kid was just crazy and everyone knew it; even Rocky and Rod. We got in trouble, of course (paddled by the principal, if I recall), but Walter wasn’t kicked out of school. I didn’t really care, and I didn’t think of it as a black-white thing.

The biggest blow up between Walter and me occurred one day in 6th grade. We had a substitute teacher who was, well, a bit creepy. He saw Walter and me mouthing off at one another during recess. He then said, “Hey, everybody get in a circle.” The class did, and then he called Walter and me to the center. He said “You want to fight, well fight.” So Walter and I wailed away at each other like drunken sailors for what seemed like forever. The kids—both black and white—loved it. I was bigger than Walter, so I had the upper hand (it was then that I learned that the key in fights is to get hold of the other guy with one hand and beat him with the other). I felt pretty good about my showing, and figured the contenders would back off. That was wrong: Walter’s buddies immediately wanted to fight. We scheduled fights, but when the fateful day came around, we just forgot about it. Besides, everyone knew who the top dog in the class was—a huge black girl named Ethel. No one messed with Ethel.

I only really learned about serious racism in junior high, but that’s another story.