Pi Gamma Mu 2017 Triennial Keynote Address: Small's Little Bit of History.

• Date: 15 December 2020
• Author: Small, Clara

Thank you for the kind invitation to speak at Pi Gamma Mu's Triennial Banquet because it is truly an honor to have been asked to speak to this august body, and to, hopefully, offer some advice from lifelong experiences. This is truly an honor to be here, because I am usually giving speeches and talking to various groups about my research and publications regarding African Americans on Delmarva and not discussing my background. Delmarva is that little area of the country which consists of Delaware, the Eastern Shore of Maryland, and the Eastern Shore of Virginia, areas that appear on maps to be almost totally separated from mainland Virginia and Maryland by the mighty Chesapeake Bay.

Again, it is an honor to be here, because you must understand that I am what you would call an anomaly. I was not supposed to succeed in life because I was born to "dirt poor parents," one of which only had a fourth-grade education when he passed away in January of 2010. I was born into a totally segregated society in 1946 in northeastern North Carolina, where the black schools were separate and unequal; where colored and white water fountains and restrooms were separate, as well as Bibles that were sworn upon in court; if I ordered food from a restaurant or lunchroom counter, I could not sit or eat it there; or if I purchased an item of clothing I could not try it on in the store to determine if it fit properly. Those were some of the realities of life I was born into, but my parents had the foresight to want my four stairstep siblings and me to be better than they, so they sacrificed and encouraged us to obtain an education.

In the first grade, I walked about a mile to a small country school, regardless of the weather, because there were no school buses to transport us to the school. As we walked to school, white children rode the buses and often pelted us with water balloons and rocks, and sometimes yelled racial slurs and obscenities at us. By the second grade, I was fortunate to attend a brand-new school about five miles from our home. That school was built solely for the purpose of preventing integration with white students. The school was built at that time because the legal process that led to the Brown v. Board of Education, Topeka, Kansas decision of May 17, 1954, in which the United States Supreme Court ruled that "to separate children solely on the basis of race was unconstitutional" had already begun its journey through the courts.

However, we had a new school, but it did not have an adequate supply of chemicals, Bunsen Burners, and other equipment for a chemistry lab; there were no new books--only the raggedy, discarded, cast-off, hand-me-down books that had often been retrieved from the dump from the white schools in the county. Yet, we had to pay rent on those books as if they were new. Those conditions persisted from the first to the twelfth grades. The only alternative was for my parents, other parents, and most teachers to host annual homecoming contests to raise funds for basketball, football, band uniforms, and equipment. They also raised money to purchase activity buses to transport the athletic teams and students to sports events and the few cultural events that were available to us. That was the nature of things at that time.

That did not mean that it was right or fair. However, there were other problems as well, such as classism among African Americans, including competition between those who lived in the country versus those who lived in town. My family lived in the country, but remember, that it was, and still is, all country in northeastern North Carolina. An example of classism is that I played basketball in junior high as well as in high school. In the eleventh grade, our team won the girls basketball championship, and I was voted the Most Valuable Player in the conference by the referees and all of the coaches, except my own coach. The night I received the MVP trophy, my coach asked for the trophy so that he could purportedly put it in the trophy case at school, which was not the normal procedure. I soon learned that he wanted another player on our team to have the trophy. The other player was a tall, beautiful, model-like, light, bright, very fair player, who happened to have been my second cousin. The coach had no idea that we were cousins, simply because of our skin color, even though he was very good friends with my cousin's older siblings. Nor did he know that as second cousins our very own great, great grandfather was Caucasian. Apparently, the coach had erroneously related skin color to ability. The sad part of this particular scenario was that my basketball coach was also my mathematics teacher. He became angry with me because I did not give him my hard-won trophy, so he and several of my other teachers, his "buddies," took it upon themselves to change some of my grades on my report card and to make sure that I did not win any other awards.

Unfortunately, those scenarios continued into my twelfth grade. Even though I was the valedictorian of my class from the first grade to the twelfth, the teachers in my all-black high school refused to help me...