'My People Would Be Victorious'
Ms.
Jean
Latting,
Houston,
Texas
It was 1960. I was 15 years old, living in Memphis, Tennessee, and sent by my parents up north to a Quaker preparatory boarding school. A few months after my arrival, I noticed a petition posted on the school's bulletin board. The petition, already signed by several students, teachers, and administrators, called for the elimination of racial segregation and support for the sit-in movement.
The petition was like an electric shock to my system. I was acutely aware of living in two different worlds--one segregated and one integrated. At home in Memphis, I lived in the segregated South, where the only white people that I interacted with were store clerks. My boarding school, on the other hand, was as integrated as I could imagine. The school had managed to create an oasis where racial/ethnic differences were acknowledged and respected, yet individuals were recognized and accepted on their merits. We even had interracial dating--remember, this was 1960! A Negro boy had been elected president of the predominantly white student body and was dating a white girl. A white boy was actively courting me, a Negro girl.
A few weeks after I saw and signed the petition, I traveled home to Memphis for spring break and decided to take the bus downtown to shop. As required by law, I went to the back of the bus and sat down. For the first time in my life, this felt intolerable. After arriving downtown and shopping for awhile, I needed to go to the restroom. I thought of the dismal, dirty water closet in the basement of the building, and instead, I took myself upstairs to the third floor to the white women's restroom and walked in.
There were several white women there, all visibly shaken by my presence. As I was washing my hands, one said to the other, "Don't they have facilities for 'the little people' downstairs?" The other nodded. But no one asked me to leave. At that instant, I knew, without knowing how I knew, that those women somehow recognized the injustice of my having to go to the basement to use the dirty restroom and, perhaps, could not ask me to leave for that reason. They might complain, they might hold up their noses, but they would not take that step of asking me to leave because, just maybe, they knew in their hearts that it was wrong.
In that moment, it became crystal clear to me that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was doing the right thing and that we--my people--would be victorious in the battle against segregation. With a flash, I saw how the little oasis of racial harmony that had been created in my boarding school could be possible in the rest of the world. I stood up straighter, walked out of the restroom, took a sip of water from the whites-only water fountain, and went home. I never drank out of a coloreds-only fountain or went to a coloreds-only restroom again.
