Racism continues to run ramped on our streets, inside retailers and within police ranks. Such is the case of a White high school principal who wouldn’t allow students to graduate if they protested. But times are changing, albeit slowly, as so many of the wrongs committed against people of color are being noticed and brought to a sort of justice.
The latest comes from the Washington Post on a 51-year old incident that marred the graduation of many Black students near their graduation day. Diane Contee had to make a choice. The girl was in a typing class that morning in 1969 and could hear the footsteps of students already rushing through the hallway. She knew where they were headed. Word had spread around La Plata High School that, at 10 a.m., a sit-in would be held in the cafeteria.
At the time, the reason for their demonstration — to protest the selection of only one Black girl to the school’s cheerleading team — might have seemed trivial. But Contee, a senior, knew it was about more than majorettes. The school had integrated just a few years earlier, and the discrimination never relented. So, Contee, normally shy, stood up. The teacher stopped her.
“If you leave the classroom, you’re going to be in trouble,” the teacher told her. She walked out anyway. On Saturday, 51 years later, Contee and nine classmates, including her sister, gathered in a chandeliered, linen-draped ballroom in Waldorf, Md., to be honored by the Charles County branch of the NAACP. Contee’s teacher, as it turned out, had been right. As punishment for the students’ activism, the school refused to give them their diplomas at that year’s graduation, an act of contempt that lingered with some of them for decades.
“We need to give justice to the Class of 1969 for the disgrace that happened to them,” Wanda Woodland, former president of the Charles County branch of the NAACP, told a crowd of more than 100 people at the weekend’s ceremony. By May of 1969, just 13 months after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, the frustration among La Plata’s Black students crested. Every one of them had faced some form of racism, often from staff members.
Contee’s sister, Dale, had faced it in chemistry class. One day, she recalled recently, the teacher announced that none of the Black students in her class would receive better than a C. Driven to disprove her, Dale worked hard and excelled — but was still given a C. In Kenneth Shirriel’s history class, a teacher refused to allow him to write about Nat Turner, explaining that “Black history is not allowed.”
In his trade class, the instructor assigned him and four White students to build a section of a brick wall. When the teacher gave all of them but him a passing grade, one of the White students objected, pointing out that Shirriel’s section was better constructed than anyone else’s. “Mind your own business,” the teacher responded. Students sometimes told Shirriel he didn’t belong and called him the n-word. One of those slurs triggered a fight, and when a White teacher intervened, Shirriel accidentally struck her. To his surprise, she pleaded with the principal not to suspend him, convinced he hadn’t hit her on purpose.
Some of the White teachers cared about their Black students, he said, but the prospect of being ostracized meant such acts of public support were rare, leaving children of color isolated and, by the end of that school year, angry. The story of the discrimination they faced is drawn from their personal recollections as well as a state investigation, a 45-page account from one parent and news articles from the time.
