Further in the interview, Hedges and Schrecker turn to her more recent book, and they cover the history of higher education in the “long ‘60’s” (from the mid-1950s to the early 1970s.) They emphasize civil rights, since many of those who ultimately protested the Vietnam war started by advocating for these rights at black colleges, such as Philander Smith.
I can’t speak to this subject out of my own experience, as we had very few African-Americans in my school during this period. This subject does overlap with another educational topic I think worth discussing here, though. What should children be exposed to at what stages of development? I use “education” in the broadest sense here, a sense that includes the media.
This overlaps with “civil rights” in that it is my first interaction with an African-American. He was a little boy my parents took in through the arrangement of some kind of church program. (I think it was only during the daytime – perhaps while his mother worked?) I remember very little about it – As I recall, it was around when I was taking ballet lessons, because the downtown area where we drove him home was also where I took lessons, so it didn’t look too foreign to me. I remember there was a scene in a children’s show around that time, a scene that led to an embarrassing incident with him. I can’t find any reference to it on line – The episode quite likely led to similar incidents, and was probably consequently pulled or the scene was edited* – but a little girl (I keep picturing Buffy from Family Affair) asked a boy if he was “black all over.” He was too embarrassed to answer, and she started to pull her shirt below her shoulder, saying, “I’m white all over.” The boy ran away. I seem to have had the same effect on our visitor. Our arrangement with him didn’t last long, and the only clear mention I recall of it was overhearing my mother commenting that “it didn’t work out.”
I’m wondering now if this incident had sparked off what my eldest brothers did to me that same year. The scene was not overtly “sexy,” but the innocent and humorous appearance of it made it seem worth trying to my seven-year-old self, and it perhaps had devastating consequences not only for me and the boy, but for others of the same age and those affected by the ritual abuse of the time.
*I never watched the reruns, perhaps my readers can find the episode. The girl who played Buffy may also have been affected by this scene, considering her early death of a drug overdose.
Jones in 1970 from Wikipedia
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