Good Morning POU!
After reading about the bombing of Clinton High School in retaliation for black students whose parents tax dollars were supporting the school and had the audacity to want to also attend and receive the benefits of better facilities and books unlike what they were subjected too, I wondered about other bombings and threats made during this time. Exactly what did black people have to suffer all because they dared to want their children to LEARN? To have a better future?
However, Black Americans denied their rights as citizens from the founding of the country—rights as basic as the vote and decent schools—would not be denied. Many whites saw the demands that black men and women judged reasonable, as threats to their way of life—a life built on the assumed inferiority of blacks. Horrified whites would not easily give an inch, especially with the power of their states behind them.
African-American students on whose behalf the Brown v. Board of Education case was taken to the Supreme Court
The historic Brown v. Board of Education decision was handed down on May 17, 1954. The timing of this decision allowed for school systems to prepare to desegregate for the 1954-55 school year. It also allowed for avowed segregationists to plan and terrorize African Americans seeking to provide their children with a brighter future.
On October 1, 1954, an angry crowd of 800 white adults and students attacked four black pupils in front of a south Baltimore high school. Violence flared in protest against desegregation ordered by the local school board.
In 1954 and succeeding years, hundreds of school systems abandoned racially segregated schools, but in many instance, not without turmoil. In Prince Edward County, Virginia, the public schools were closed down for five years, from 1959 to 1964, leaving 1700 black children without schooling during the period.
By 1957, there had been at least seven bombings of public schools and threats of bombings in dozens of others. Two black schools, three schools with racially mixed classes, and two all-white schools were hit with actual explosions, with damage ranging from shattered windows in Champaign, Illinois grade school to virtually complete destruction of a new junior-senior high school in Osage, West Virginia.
The first big bombing was at Hattie Cotton school in Nashville. Three carefully timed explosions went off between 5:17am and 5:31am on Tuesday, September 10, 1957. The explosions were regarded by police as the work of an expert, which could not be said of the next three explosions.
The second bombing took place at a black grade school in Chattanooga in January 1958. The school was the largest black school in Hamilton County and one of the largest in the state. The third was in Charlotte, North Carolina, where school planners got caught. An explosion at a black high school in Jacksonville, Florida did minor damage.
A blast in Clinton, Tennessee was timed for Sunday morning when no children would be in class. The explosion wrecked 16 of 22 classrooms in the high school. Two bombs hit schools in Illinois during this time. They were at Champaign on October 21st and Chicago on November 12th. Both bombs were pipes filled with black powder and they did minor damage.
In July 1960, three white men in Little Rock intended to bomb both a public school and a black college dormitory. FBI agents caught two of the three just as they touched a lighted match to 40 sticks of dynamite under the college building. Two hours later the public school warehouse blew up and the federal agents arrested the third man. The college building was in the vicinity of Central High School, which had operated peacefully in the previous year. This was the third bombing in Little Rock in less than a year.
L. Alex Wilson, editor of the Tri-State Defender (Memphis), was assaulted during his coverage at Central High in Little Rock, Arkansas. Wilson had reported previously from the Korean War, but it was in Little Rock that he was badly injured, his refusal to show fear a provocation for angry whites.
Stock footage of black parents bringing their children to school and subsequently white parents take their children out of the school to applause.