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Toni Morrison & School Integration
The late Pulitzer-winning author wanted today’s children to know about the sacrifices of youngsters in the past
In Remember: The Journey to School Integration, Toni Morrison collects more than 50 photographs from the era of school busing. As commentary, she offers her own imaginings about what people were thinking at the time the picture was taken.
Here are U.S. marshals sent by President Eisenhower–white men in dark suits, thin ties, and hats–watching over a tiny African-American first-grader carrying a plaid portfolio at her new school. Here are two black youths inside the circle of a jeering mob, their heads hung down as if expecting a rain of blows at any minute. As Huckleberry Finn once said, “It’s enough to make a body ashamed.”
Children often had to pay for what the Bible calls “the sins of the fathers.” Indeed, Morrison dedicates her book to the four black children murdered by members of the older generation and the Ku Klux Klan in the 1963 bombing of a Birmingham church.
At the same time, the situation was sometimes different among the younger generation…
