White Girl: A Story of School Desegregation

White Girl: A Story of School Desegregation

by Clara Silverstein
White Girl: A Story of School Desegregation

White Girl: A Story of School Desegregation

by Clara Silverstein

Paperback(Reprint)

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Overview

This poignant account recalls firsthand the upheaval surrounding court-ordered busing in the early 1970s to achieve school integration. Like many students at the vanguard of this great social experiment, sixth-grader Clara Silverstein was spit on, tripped, and shoved by her new schoolmates. At other times she was shunned altogether. In the conventional imagery of the civil rights era, someone in Silverstein's situation would be black. She was white, however—one of the few white students in her entire school.

"My story is usually lost in the historical accounts of busing," Silverstein writes. At the predominantly black public schools she attended in Richmond, Virginia, Silverstein dealt daily with the unintended, unforeseen consequences of busing as she also negotiated the typical passions and concerns of young adulthood—all with little direction from her elders, who seemed just as bewildered by the changes around them. When Silverstein developed a crush on a black boy, when yet another of her white schoolmates switched to a private school, when she naively came to class wearing a jacket with a Confederate flag on it, she was mostly on her own to contend with the fallout. Silverstein's father had died when she was seven. Another complication: she was Jewish. As her black schoolmates viewed her through the veil of race, Silverstein gazed back through her private grief and awareness of religious difference.

Inspired by her parents' ideals, Silverstein remained in the public schools despite the emotional stakes. "I was lost," she admits. "If I learned nothing else, I did come to understand the scourge of racism." Her achingly honest story, woven with historical details, confronts us with powerful questions about race and the use of our schools to engineer social change.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780820345093
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Publication date: 07/01/2013
Edition description: Reprint
Pages: 168
Product dimensions: 5.50(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.20(d)

About the Author

CLARA SILVERSTEIN is an editor and writer for the Boston Herald. She is also a published poet and the program director for the Writers' Center at Chautauqua in upstate New York.

CLARA SILVERSTEIN is an editor and writer for the Boston Herald. She is also a published poet and the program director for the Writers' Center at Chautauqua in upstate New York.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgmentsix
Prologue. Bedtime Stories1
A School Bus, a Mother's Tears3
Joined Hands5
My Father's Last Moments8
Ann and Lee, Mom and Dad12
Packing It In14
You Talk like a Yankee16
Tomboys19
Freedom of Choice-Yes! Busing-Never!24
"Model" Schools27
Interim Integration29
Busing Hits Home32
Manners37
Jim Crow's Legacy42
Liberal Teacher, Southern Lady48
The Buses Roll52
No One Wants You Here55
Black Is Beautiful57
Self-Segregation61
Separate Soundtracks64
In the Classrooms67
My Flag, My Shame70
Girl Talk72
Ebony and Ivory74
The White Boys80
Filmstrip in the Dark82
The Fox-Trot, the Cha-Cha85
Invisible87
Voice of Loneliness93
The Liberals95
Legacy of Defeat98
No Yearbooks, No Good-Byes103
Singing "Dixie"105
The Open High School110
I Surrender!115
Belonging and Not Belonging118
Driving Lessons120
Preppie Envy123
A Shell Tossed into the Ocean125
The Education Mom127
Racial Differences Still Evident130
Was This a Good School?134
My Father's Words137
I Am Lee's Daughter141
Splinters of Glass144
Epilogue. Binford Middle School, 25 Years Later148

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"This wonderful memoir inverts our understanding of desegregation, reminding us that the white students on the bus were just as heroic as their black counterparts. The story is at once a vivid description of a controversial social experiment, an intimate chronicle of a girl's turbulent journey through adolescence, and a loving tribute to a visionary father who died too young."—James S. Hirsch, author of Two Souls Indivisible

"White Girl is a fascinating memoir told from a perspective not often considered in histories of school integration. We learn not only what it was like for Clara Silverstein to be one of a handful of white students placed in a formerly all-black school, but also what it was like to be an adolescent girl experiencing the social changes of the late 1960s and early 1970s—the fashions, the music, the smoke from other people's marijuana."—Jennifer Ritterhouse, coeditor of Remembering Jim Crow

"There are few personal narratives written by whites that chronicle their desegregation experiences, as most of the attention has been focused on black pioneers, and with good reason. But in White Girl, Clara Silverstein has written an honest, balanced, and deeply personal memoir. With lively prose she describes what it felt like to be perceived as 'the enemy' and explains all the inherent contradictions in her own coming of age."—Robert Pratt, author of We Shall Not Be Moved: The Desegregation of the University of Georgia

"Wistful and evocative memoir . . . Silverstein has written an engaging account of her unhappy childhood. Moreover, her intensely personal reflections on this troubled time serve as an important addition to the existing literature.”—Southern Jewish History

"Clara Silverstein's account of the loneliness, despair, and fear experienced by a white adolescent caught up in the struggle to integrate Richmond's city schools in the early 1970s forcefully reminds us of the psychological and emotional costs of racism and segregation. This courageously honest work also informs us that not only can the ideal of racial justice be taught, it also can triumph over the adversities imposed by those who find identity and comfort in racial exclusiveness, a message as welcomed and needed today as three decades ago. Silverstein does, indeed, have much to tell us about racism and its evils, and she tells us with conviction and compassion."—Melton McLaurin, author of Separate Pasts, Growing Up White in the Segregated South and Celia, A Slave

"Sizes up integration well, both its vision and its pitfalls."—Chautauqua Literary Journal

"When readers of Clara Silverstein's White Girl: A Story of School Desegregation put down this book, they will not feel good. They will, however, better understand the destructive and dangerous, as well as poignant and painful, impact that racism has had on both white and black Americans."—Journal of Southern History

"It's easy to feel Silverstein's anguish, but her message is that positive social change is possible."—Library Journal

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