What they didn’t teach us: Lessons Gen X Black Kids had to learn on their own

In this episode, I explore the lessons Gen X Black kids weren’t taught in school—but learned through life, family, and experience. From forgotten Black high schools to KKK terror parades, and from the strength of the Black church to quiet legacies of integration, I reflect on the stories we inherited and the importance of capturing them while we still can. History isn’t just what’s written—it’s what’s remembered.
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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
There's history in the textbooks, then there's history that we live,
history that's not always in the textbooks. In your educational systems,
a lot of times there are decisions made about what
parts of history that you include in the course of
the discretion, whether this be for elementary school, junior high, high,
and even in the college ranks. So what ends up
happening is there's often a great breadth of information that's

(00:23):
not always shared, and that means it leads it up
to the individual to have to take it upon themselves
to find out things. A lot of times those things
have found out not necessarily deliberately. It can be just
found out through accident or just normal conversations with people
who actually lived those experiences. Today, I'm going to share
with you some history that I learned not in school,

(00:47):
and from dealing with my family members, friends, and from
my lived experience as well. If your generation X like me,
that means you came behind a generation of people who

(01:07):
lived through segregation at its height. If you lived in
the South, Jim Crow laws was the norm, and unfortunately,
most institutions, whether it be county, city or even the state,
separated educational systems in terms of black and white. So
when I was growing up, I was aware of the
fact that we had two black high schools, Merrill High

(01:31):
School and Southeast High School, and we had one white
high school, Pine Bluff High School. But the reality is
that I didn't realize about these about the school in
particular until I got to Southeast Junior High School, which
was actually Southeast High School and it had been converted, because,
quite frankly, coming up through my educational system, there was

(01:53):
actually no discussion of the fact that there were two
black high schools in addition to a white high school.
And so during the course of my time, my education
and the information that I received about the presence of
these schools were limited to just my mother and my
uncles and my loved ones sharing their experiences. The First

(02:16):
Amendment guarantees you right to freedom to a symbol, and
we oftentimes talk about the freedom to assembol whenever we're
talking about marchers, protests, or any type of group assembly
intended to express our displeasure with something or just merely
to exercise our particular voice. This is a rite that's
extended to all individuals, but taking it in context, it

(02:39):
can be utilized in a manner that can be utilized
to terrorize as well. When I was growing up, I
used to see a lot of visual depictions of the
Ku Klux Klan and almost everyone that I saw, you
typically saw them in group gatherings, whether it be they
were in town basically protesting something, or they would be
in large assemblies where they were out open fields with

(03:01):
burning crosses and individuals wearing sheets and roads. This is
the normal representation that I'm pretty sure a lot of
people have historically seen. So at setting the stage, you
have the clan rally that occurs, and then what they
would routinely do is after the rally was occurring, they
would march through black neighborhoods. But the thing that I
found interesting was that I didn't learn about this until

(03:24):
I got out of high school. It took conversations with
loved ones to be informed that this was the way
they terrorized, and understanding that that was a piece of
history that was left out, it gave a greater degree
of context when I see similar types of actions being
done in modern times. So as opposed to treating it

(03:46):
as an isolated incident, you have to now take in
consideration from a historical standpoint, is this merely a continuation
of attacktic that has been utilized over the last hundred years.
Nineteen sixty five, my mom left Pine Bluff and attended
to Skegee Institute, to Skegee University, great University in Alabama,

(04:10):
which brought me to an interesting thing where I asked her,
in the course of me taking some courses in school, Hey,
did you participate in the rights movement? To my surprise,
she turns to me she said, yeah, I actually participated
in the march. So she's telling me how in the
course of participating in this march that she was approached
by young men of the Student Nonviolent Coordinated Committee, who

(04:32):
are famously known for their efforts and voters registrations, voters
drives as well as the sit ins. So in this
particular day, the young men from this organization primarily were
approaching young people asking them to participate in a march
on Montgomery, And of course my mother participated. But the
thing wasn't the march that caught my attention. It was

(04:54):
the logisticals instructions that she received in preparation for the
march that rate my ears of it. So, in order
to go for the march, one of the things that
she received was basically a briefing on how she needed
to conduct herself so that this way she could participate
in the march in a safe manner. Remember this is
a time where marches were nonviolent, but the mechanism for

(05:19):
breaking up those marches were very violent. So my mother
was being informed of a few things. She was informed
that when they marched, the men would march on the outside,
whom would march in the middle. She was informed that
in the course of the march, violence was going to happen.
She was told that they were going to either get
water hoses, they're gonna get dogs, they were gonna have
horseback or riding policemen coming at them. It was going

(05:41):
to happen. So she was then told that if that happens,
what's going to happen is that the men will make
a circle and the women will be in the middle.
Fascinatingly enough, she said, they stressed to them the importance
that whatever happens, whatever that's being done, don't break out
of the circle. If this were to occur. She was
informed that as a collective union, they were going to

(06:03):
move to the nearest black church, any black church. She said, yes,
any Black Church, because what she didn't know was she
was informed was back during the Civil Rights movement, black
churches routinely left the doors of their churches unlocked so
that if any protesters or marchers found themselves in trouble,

(06:26):
they had a safe space they could go to. Whether
the storm of the violence, churches understood the importance of
their role as a part of the logistical success of
the nonviolent movement, and part of that with success was
recognizing that in order for people who were going to
put themselves in harm's way, they had to have someplace

(06:47):
they could go that would give them some reasonable degree
of safety. So here I am, and I am going
from Pine bla of f Arkansas to go through basic
training at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri. And in the conclusion
of basic training, in order for us to leave, we

(07:10):
had one requirement. We had to wear our full dress
uniform all the way back to our original home of
homoport duty station, whatever word you want to utilize. So
my mom actually met me at the gate when I
got there. So of course here I am. I'm wearing
my full class A uniform. So as we pull into
Pine Bluff, I'm getting ready for the fact that as

(07:30):
soon as I get home, I'm getting out of this uniform.
She turns to me again and she says, no, we
got to stop and see your grandparents first. But when
I walked through the door, the first thing after he
smiled to me was to tell me, you know, I
was stationed at Fort Lynnerwood. But I sit quietly as
my grandfather shares story after story about what it's like
for him to be in the military. But then it

(07:51):
dawned on me as I was listening to him, he
wasn't merely talking about what it was like to be
in the military. He was talking about what it was
like to be in a second gregated military. These segregations
of the military didn't occur until after World War Two,
so that meant I was actually on a Dudas station
that was segregated when my grandfather went there. A lot

(08:19):
of times, what happens when people are living history in
real time, they don't appreciate it, and even you don't
until they casually mention something, which is exactly what my
mom did with me. My mom was a kindergarten teacher,
and she was a teacher for about thirty plus years.
Because she started teaching I want to say around seventy

(08:39):
three or seventy four. I love when I have conversations
with some of my elders and they always lead off
with did you know, Because in my mind I'm like, no,
I didn't. She's like, did you know that my class
of teachers, meaning the teachers who taught with me during
that year when I taught my first year as a
kindergarten teacher, we were the first ones to teach integrated

(09:01):
class of kindergarten students. That means that generation, which probably
was the class of eighty five or class of eighty six,
and then my class were the first generation of students
to come through in entire K through twelve in a desegregated,
integrated environment. My mother often asked me the question why

(09:30):
I'm always so enamored to ask questions about her past
and what she went through as it relates to her
and as it relates to me, And I have to
remind her of two very important points. One in painting
the discussion and the contextual narrative of our country. In
the history of our country, I often have concerns that

(09:51):
if you leave out parts of history, you don't have
a full and enriched view of history as a whole.
History is not supposed to be good, bad, ugly, or pretty.
It's just history. It's designed to give you a clear
picture and allow you to make an informed decision so
that you can one learn from the lessons of the
past and ensure those things don't happen in the future.

(10:11):
But a lot of times, those impactful parts of history
get left out when we don't prevent a greater and
fuller picture, and we only want to provide snapshots and
leave it up to people to fill in the blanks.
But the other reason why is because with each passing day,
the stewards of that old history pass on and every

(10:32):
story that comes with them, serving in the military in
a segregated military plan, marching through black neighborhoods, being the
first integrated in an integrated kindergarten teacher, all of those
stories are things that need to be passed on because
there we are quickly coming to a point that the

(10:53):
people who live those experiences are leaving us, and if
they take those stories with them to the beyond, we'll
never be able to share them with the next generation,
and most importantly, they'll never be able to share it
with every generation behind them. So if you've got loved ones,
if they're you still have some baby boomer relatives out there,
generation relatives like myself and so forth. If you have

(11:16):
relatives who have those stories that they can share, capture them,
record them, share them so that we can all benefit
from the fact that we all have a common connection.
We have history together, and whether we like it or not,
every piece of history that we have that we've gone
through collective is shared history, and it should never be

(11:38):
selectively eliminated for the benefit of any one group or
the other. It should be embraced by all so that
we can learn from that history, give reverence to those people,
and give acknowledgments to the people who trail blaze through
that history, and can provide guidance so that we can
make sure we don't make any of the mistakes that
was made in the past. Hi