I learned recently that at the end of the school year, the powers that be where I grew up will retire a piece of my childhood.
Nearly half a century has passed since I attended South Columbia Elementary in Columbia County, Georgia, where I transformed from carefree child to anxious pre-teen as a nerdy fifth through seventh grader.
It was the mid ’70s. Fun was skating at the nearby roller rink and riding bikes with my brother and our friends and stumbling into adventures like Kwai Chang Caine on Kung Fu, the classic ’70s TV show. Around the same time I discovered rock music. I still own Destroyer by Kiss and the Eagles’ Hotel California, the first albums I got.
At the time, South Columbia was a brand new elementary in a fast-growing county (a few years later, Columbia County would make a list of fastest-growing counties in the U.S.) I did not know these facts at the time, all I remember of South Columbia were the epic kickball games and reading Homer’s epic The Iliad (I remember liking it, but not understanding it completely) and experiencing my first brush with unrequited puppy love.
It was a formative time. Only years later would I learn how significant my experience at South Columbia was.
The happenings in the grown up world of the 1970s — Watergate, Richard Nixon’s resignation, the end of America’s involvement in Vietnam — mostly eluded me, as did a much larger story I was a part of but knew nothing about until much later.
At South Columbia in the mid 1970s, White and Black children were learning and playing together. Nothing special. Only later did I realize how truly special it was. For most of Georgia’s history, up until a few years before I started elementary school it would have been abnormal to see Black and White children learning together in an elementary school classroom.
For generations, school children have learned the Supreme Court ended public school segregation with its 1954 ruling, Brown v. Board of Education. What’s less known is nearly a decade and a half had to transpire before most Georgia elementary schools were integrated.
The state of Georgia fought integration every step of the way after the nation’s top court had handed down its historic ruling. Around the time I was entering first grade at T. Harry Garrett Elementary in Augusta, Georgia was integrating elementary schools around the state.
I was lucky. Integration was my baseline experience of public schools, leading to a parade of memories. One of the most vivid was of needing a couple of pennies to afford a carton of milk from the cafeteria. A classmate named John lent me the money.
The next day, my parents sent me to school with the pennies to repay John. He wasn’t in class that day, or the rest of the week. In fact, I never saw John again. I’ve wondered over the years what happened to him. Did John’s parents take him out of T. Harry Garrett elementary?
Did they think they were placing him in harm’s way as an African American child amid so many White people. For centuries, White Southerners had shown a capacity and willingness to exact horrific violence when it came to questions of race and where African Americans belonged.
To this day I think of John’s kindness.
A few years later, my parents joined the exodus from Augusta, Ga. to a rural county next door which was growing rapidly. It was there I attended South Columbia elementary where I remember Black and White children learning and playing together as if that was always how the world was.
I think a lot about my childhood these days as I watch from afar the political battles that are taking place in my home state of Georgia, and across the country.
Some days, I wish kids were in charge of the world.
Trip Jennings started his career in Georgia at his hometown newspaper, The Augusta Chronicle, before working at newspapers in California, Florida and Connecticut where he reported on many stories, including the resignation and incarceration of Connecticut’s then-governor, John Rowland, and gang warfare in California. Since 2005, Trip has covered politics and state government for the Albuquerque Journal, The New Mexico Independent and the Santa Fe New Mexican. He holds a Master’s of Divinity from Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Ga. In 2012, he co-founded New Mexico In Depth, a nonpartisan, nonprofit media outlet that produces investigative, data-rich stories with an eye on solutions that can be a catalyst for change.