Igalious Mills Audio Transcript

My basketball skills really prepared me to begin to talk with the teachers, and they all really liked me, and I felt like because of basketball. So I was able to sit down with teachers, specifically the principal, because the principal had a, he was also the coach, the basketball coach, so he had a real vested interest in wanting to see me succeed, and so we had this discussion pertaining to some of the issues that was bothering me and other students there and that was that we didn’t have any black teachers there. You know, the ideal of I really would like to see black teachers in the school. So I actually got down to the point; I was so frustrated that I told the principal that if [I was] good enough to play basketball then certainly I was good enough to have black teachers there, and if I wasn’t good enough for that, you know, [to] have black teachers there, I wasn’t good enough to bounce their basketball. So it came as a shock to him because I was, number one, a good athlete, but the second is that I was true to my feelings about wanting to see this change because other students had talked about it, other parents had talked about it, and you felt this uneasiness and tension in this process, and obviously sports was a way to help mend together the community. So I felt in a position, even at a young age, that these was some of the things that was important for me and that was instilled into me from my mother and father.

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