As a 15 year-old Black teenage girl in Baton Rouge in the summer of 1965, I hadn’t personally experienced any of the type of brutal treatment towards freedom riders that I was seeing on the nightly news or other racial indignities. I don’t even have a recollection of the word “racism” being used on those TV broadcasts. What I knew was that my people were protesting for what they felt was rightfully theirs: the right to vote, the right to equal housing, the right to equal education, the right to equal pay and the right to social justice.
The public schools in Baton Rouge had desegregated years earlier but for some reason, the Catholic schools held off doing the same until the fall of 1965. I found this odd, given the church’s teachings of mankind being in God’s image. Nowhere did it say just white people were in his image.
My first real memory of personally experiencing racism was when I was one of about 20 Black girls to integrate St. Anthony Catholic High School, a small and previously all-white, all-girls’ school in north Baton Rouge. The following year another 15 or so Black girls enrolled at St. Anthony.
I don’t recall many details from my first few months at St. Anthony, but I do vividly remember feeling out of place, under a magnifying glass as if everyone was waiting for something to happen. The lay teachers, as I remember, were friendly enough, but I recall feeling held at arm’s length for two years by the nuns and priests. This was confounding and bewildering, and I remember philosophically struggling mostly in religion class, where emphasis was on God’s benevolence for all his creatures and that we should all love one another as he loves us. There was no teaching that God loved Blacks less than whites.
Outside of the school day, we Black students had no contact socially with our white classmates. I remember as a junior seeing the flurry of activity by the seniors decorating the gym for their senior prom and hearing the girls talk about plans for their senior trip to New Orleans. I remember anxiously waiting for my turn the next year but it never came. As March 1967 of my senior year came and went, we began to hear rumors that the same senior celebrations might not happen for our class. Then a letter arrived home from the school’s principal stating that some of the parents had expressed concern about the mixing of the races socially. The letter included a form for the parents to vote either “yes” they would support a racially mixed senior prom, or “no” they would not.
When the responses were tallied, the school did not have the parental consensus for a prom. I was not surprised but I was deeply disappointed, which was compounded when I learned that our white classmates did have a prom, offsite, and did go on a trip, just without us. Even 50-plus years later the feeling of marginalization, disrespect and rejection still stings. I felt let down and it was an emotionally traumatic reminder of the Catholic schools and the community’s failure to practice as God’s words taught.
The senior class of 1967 was the first and last integrated class to graduate from St. Anthony as the school closed the summer after I graduated. The reason given was the lack of financial support. But I wonder, even today, if that was just a veiled excuse to close the school because it was becoming “less white.”
I just want to note that a friendship still flourishes with one of my white classmates from those days. Once while reminiscing, we realized that we both shared the same racially-motivated but innocent anxiety of those early days, simply wondering what the girls of the other race would be like. She shared that they had been “briefed” that “we” were coming and that even though we were “different” we were all God’s children. In truth, the beauty of real friendship transcends race; yet the hypocrisy of the parents and school’s leaders stings even today because what was taught as Catholic doctrine was not practiced.
Racism is not a trait that someone is born with; it is a behavior of dominance and disrespect transmitted by the one practicing it, and then adopted by others who observe it. Unfortunately, racism still exists in many who practice Catholic rituals but don’t live as Christ taught us to live, and by those who expound equality under the law but don’t practice it.
Racism and intolerance will only be vanquished when those who perpetrate it acknowledge their role in its existence and vow to extinguish it through true dialogue and commitment to change.
“I tell you the truth, when you did it to one of the least of these my brothers and sisters, you were doing it to me” (Mt.25;40).
CARTER has a MPA from Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey and is a retired program manager from Montclair State University in Montclair.