50th Anniversary of the Desegregation Eastern Shore Schools by Kathleen James-Chakraborty

Fifty years ago I entered first grade at the Chestertown Elementary School on Washington Avenue. There was no public kindergarten yet, so all six classes of first graders, except those few who were repeating the year, were new to the school. I was put in the class of Mrs. Fannie Wilson.

Not all of us were aware that we were participating in a momentous moment in Kent County history, but along with our counterparts in the first and seventh grades in elementary and high schools in Rock Hall and Galena, we certainly were. Each of our classes was fully integrated, and for the first time, white students were being taught by black teachers (a select few blacks had already been added to largely white classrooms). Kent County was finally implementing the decision reached a dozen years earlier in Brown v. Board of Education.

I cannot begin to describe the impact of integration on my African-American classmates, although I can still remember many of their names – Patricia Rideout, who became my best friend, Joy Brown, and Michael Sewell — but I can write a few words about what it meant to me, the direct descendant of slave owners. First, it allowed me to have an absolutely superb teacher, one of the very few in the county with a masters degree, which she had recently earned from Temple University in Philadelphia.

Mrs. Wilson remained my friend until her death in 2001 at the age of ninety-one, and at least one of my classmates also continued to pay regular calls on her for all those years. From her I learned a different history of the Eastern Shore than had previously been taught within these walls, one that featured Frederick Douglas learning to read and Harriet Tubman following the North Star as she navigated the swamps not so far from town. Mrs. Wilson was, she told me in a conversation held years later on her front porch on Calvert Street, among the teachers who had already brought Thurgood Marshall over from Baltimore in a successful effort to get equal pay.

Attending integrated schools meant, as well, that I knew the entire community of kids my age in and around town, especially since those who went to Broadmeadow or, once it was established in 1968 to the Kent School, mostly attended Emmanuel Church with me. Most of the friends I made in college had grown up in suburban school districts keyed quite closely to family income, but in Chestertown in 1966 the mayor’s daughter shared a classroom with the daughter of an Amish butcher and with kids whose parents worked at Vita Foods and Campbell Soup; we were all in this together.

The daily news Mrs. Wilson wrote up on the board, and which we laboriously copied with our thick pencils onto double ruled lined paper, recorded the arrival of new siblings, the visits of relatives, the celebration of birthdays, and all the other momentous events in our young lives. Pulling our appropriately scaled chairs into circles, we struggled to master reading; back at our desks, we unraveled the mysteries of how to tell time. In the cafeteria, we were stared down by the lunch ladies, and on winter afternoons we hooked arms square dancing (the school had no gym). We grew up to be farmers, nurses, police officers, and college professors. Not so many of us still live in Chestertown, but all of us probably share memories of which teachers were particularly kind, which classmates were funny, and which aspects of school were initially scary, in ways that still stun our children when a couple of us get together and reminisce.

Fifty years on, starting first grade remains a key moment in almost all of our lives, and we were lucky to be able to do so as a group, no longer divided by the color of our skin. Many challenges remain in Kent County, the United States, and the world, but, along with learning to read and write, we who entered first grade in Kent County in 1966 were fortunate to gain a sense of each other as equals that had been denied to those who came before us.

Kathleen James-Chakraborty, a historian, is professor of art history at the University College Dublin. She has also taught at the University of California, Berkeley; the Ruhr-Universität Bochum; and the University of Minnesota.  James-Chakraborty received her B.A. from Yale University and her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. She is the daughter of the the late Norman James, chair of the English Department at Washington College.