Roceal Duke...
[What I would want young people to know about Jim Crow is] that there were too many people who had to struggle in those one-room classrooms with no electricity or very little electricity, and poor books, and poor equipment. Now kids have everything there is: computers, books, access to transportation, and everything else. All they have to do is take advantage of these things to achieve. Also, I'd hope that teachers would remember that these are the best children that they have in their classrooms. They might be a lot different from the children they had 20, 25, or 30 years ago, but these are the best children parents have to send. They don't have any other children at home in the closet. If they had another set of children, they'd take them out and send them. This is it. So, it's the responsibility of today's educators to be as dedicated as our teachers were in educating us. Not only black children, but all children. I'd want everybody to remember that we are people. Not that we are white people or we are black or Hispanic people. We have our own culture, we have our own heritage, but the main thing is that we are people, and education is the key.

Susan Huetteman...
That year, several of my second grade classmates and I became very ill and were hospitalized. It was World War II and our town was home to a military base. Sabotage of the water supply was suspected. My hospital stay was extensive and followed by a long recuperation.

When I finally returned to school, I was heartbroken to find that I was gone so long none of my classmates remembered me. I'll never forget standing alone and frightened on the sidewalk outside my school, when a girl skipped up to me. She told me how happy she was to see me back in school and how much she had missed me. That was the day I learned to form my own opinions. The girl was black. She was my friend.

The fabric of my family has changed over the years. Our Native American heritage, hidden for generations, and European American genealogy are now enriched with Latino, Mexican, African-American, and Native American Blackfeet, Cherokee and Apache cultures. The fabric of humanity is held together in the weaving of our differences. It is the beauty of its colors that enriches our lives.

Edgar Williams...
My greatest regret was being unable to get an education. I was successful in attending several reading classes sponsored by a local university and have learned to read. I was 65 years old when I took those classes. I feel strongly about the importance of a good education, and was determined that all of my children were able to complete high school, and the majority of my children have college degrees. I feel that many of today's black children are missing the opportunity to get an education. This is a shame because blacks have fought and died for the opportunity to get a fair and equal education.

Thelma Williams...
This is something that's going to take us more generations to get over. And it's not a problem only in black communities, it's a problem in white communities I feel strongly about as well. There is a sense of inferiority on the black side and a sense of superiority on the white side that has damaged the psyches of both. And although I think deep inside we felt that they were not superior, everything that we were fed from the cradle suggested that they were. And everything that they read or experienced from the cradle suggested that they were. So we come out with this monster.

At this stage of my development, at 76 going on 77, I am not bitter about the past. I don't know that I've ever had time for a lot of bitterness to tell you the truth. At the same time, I am not hopeful about the future unless we can do something about these scars on both sides of that divide. Being told all your life that you are less than a human being takes a huge toll. Being told all your life that you are a superhuman being takes a huge toll. This does something to your humanity that you don't stop to think about. Unless we can handle those concepts, come to thoroughly understand how damaging they can be, [I don't think we'll be able to] do something about becoming whole. And becoming whole means to me that we treat each other as human beings.

Dr. Oswald Bronson...
The need, now, is for us to approach each other as people of sacred value. When we learn to revere the other, we somehow enlarge ourselves. I enjoy sharing the story and the philosophy of a Jewish theologian, Martin Buber, who talked about the "I-thou" and the "I-it" relationship. When the "I" relates to a "thou," there's a consciousness. There's a feeling [that is not] there when the "I" relates to the "it." The "it" does not respond consciously. It's an object ... [that is] there for my own use....

The problem comes, however, when we seek to make the "thou" an "it." And, when "thou" does becomes an "it," I cannot get from "it" what [I need for] my own growth. Each person I meet can somehow contribute to my own development, my own enhancement. A student may, at some point, be my teacher. How can I cultivate that, so that it will open the doors of my life to receive from you what you have in terms of your own God-given creativity ... so I can grow? If I make you an "it" ... you're kept down. [And, when] you make a person a slave, that person becomes an "it." Or, that group of people becomes an "it." Think of the several of the untold numbers of individuals during the period of slavery--not just in American slavery, but across the world, even when they had whites as slaves in many places--from whom you may have lost their individual creativity because that person was circumscribed to a certain level of functioning.

Approach life with reverence. That's my word. That's number one. Because in this age of technology and lack of growth and great possibilities, when you get caught up in that, you lose that sense of feeling about what the divine may be doing in another person's life.

Clifford Boxley...

Why Teach Jim Crow?

When I speak, particularly during Black History Month, and we go all the way back to the 400- or 500-year experience of slavery, I always ask the question: what lessons have we learned from our history? Because I end it with a pair of handcuffs that might have been used in one of those enslavement forts 500, 400, 300 years ago and with a pair of police handcuffs today. What's changed? Now, there are too many of our youngsters that are symbolized by these handcuffs who are in prison. What have we as adults given them to change them? I write in my book Ancestor's Wisdom, that this is the only place that says we want to educate our youth so that they don't do. And, there's your answer right there: they don't do what we've done. We want to educate our youth so they don't have to go through what we have. But the white supremacy system is alive and well in the world.

Other societies train their adults to transcend and transform, so that they hand the youth a world that is more just and more spiritually balanced. If we learn, we learn from the past. There's nothing to be learned from the future. So, there's your answer. Why teach? Because the life experiences that we have had is what we use in order to teach. There's no such thing as pure mathematics. You have to teach the life applications of the use of mathematics. You have to teach them that your nuclear sciences don't create bombs that destroy the world if you're in harmony with God. Only a fool would create something that would destroy the world the way bombs have been created. If you separate that moral part from the education, then you have failed.

You have failed. Nothing they taught me in school helped me transcend. Nothing they taught me. Are you going to teach me this white supremacy stuff in school? No, I'm challenging you. Especially in college. You're not going to push Abraham Lincoln on me as a good guy. I found some stuff on him, and that's what I'm going to give back to you. When I'm in prison, and you're teaching me this old sad white-dominated whitewashed history, I don't even want to come. When you teach me black history, the jail classes are full. When I teach your white son, white daughter what real human struggle is about and what human success and human triumph are about despite all the odds, at best we hope that it will make him a better human being as he inherits your empire.

One thing I did learn in California. They showed me something--they said education is about teaching you about everybody else's experience and teaching them about yours. I'll never forget it. That that's the purpose of education: them to teach you about other people's experience and you to teach them about yours.

Fred Page...
My father always taught us, "There's good people in all races of people. And there's bad people in all races. You got bad people in colored races, white race and all. Don't judge a man by his color. As long as he treats you halfway right."

You respect humans as you want them to respect you. Respect your fellow students. Respect everyone in the classroom and love your teacher. Love your teacher to death. So that's the one that's going to teach you and give you your knowledge. Now you take the teachers, the nurses, they don't get overpaid. But that's where you get your knowledge. So you're going to respect them. So you be kind. Don't throw your spitballs, don't punch other kids in the back, pluck them on the head, bend their fingers, and upset the class. You respect your teacher and be humble, and kind to her and love her. Then that gives her a chance to use her knowledge. She doesn't have to worry about all these little bad things you're getting into. Might have to wake some of them up once in a while in class, that's common. Some kids just want to sleep. They're not supposed to. So I would say to all young people just put your arms around the leaders and be kind.

Ralph Jennings...
My father had an old adage that he used to pronounce to us. He used to say, "Those people in all the world who forget their history are doomed to relive it." And if that's even possibly true, then it is absolutely essential that everybody learn what human behavior toward humans has been and how gross it can be. And if anyone's ever going to appreciate humanity, man needs to be humane to man. Then these stories ought to be told to clarify that.

Theodore Roosevelt (T.R.) Davidson...
I would tell young people that it's really out there for you...people are waiting for you. You are going to run into some areas that you might be conscious of the fact that somebody may not be too sincere, although they may be in that position to help you out, or to guide you along. But, you cannot let anything like that really deter you from your desire to learn or to get experience or in any way to impede your future. Just don't get yourself excited. Intelligence is the primary reason for you to continue. And anybody, no matter who they are throughout the world, has problems. So, continue to go out there, set yourself a goal and continue to look forward. Say, for example like, you're out there with one of these navigation problems, and you might be lost and disoriented, but you have that old magnetic compass up there. And, by the time you find your general direction, you pick out a point on the horizon and you lay that compass on there and just keep that thing going. Don't matter what's out there...the idea is to go forward to that point. That is true in flying, and that is true in life.

Ed Brantley...
[Here's] what I want to say to these young kids. We have worked hard. We have opened the door of opportunity for them. We want them to prepare themselves, because there are ample opportunities for them to study. People out here [are] just dying to give them a helping hand, but they have to prepare themselves first. You just can't step off the street into an airplane. You have to have some kind of knowledge, and you've got to want to learn. I wish I could turn the clock back. With the opportunities these kids have today? ... They can go to ground school, pre-flight. They can run the whole flying course, and, in most cases, it won't cost them nothing. There's a young man teaching kids in Compton with a flight simulator ... something I never dreamed of. These kids can come in out of grammar school, junior high school, and high school and sit down there, and, in a few months, they're almost ready for soloing. And, they're not taking advantage of it. And, that hurts. When I consider what we've gone through ... it hurts that the kids are not taking advantage of it.

Levi Thornhill...
Here's what I say to students when I talk to [them]. And I say, I'm a mechanic. Good tools are essential if you're going to do a good job. If somebody is paying you to do that good job, that's what he expects. Now, education is a tool. And, you need that for all of the things that you're going to do living and helping others. Because that's where the importance comes ... if you can help improve somebody else, or help somebody else, you've done what you are here for. And, the other thing I tell them [is] ... dreams are very important. You may not get a chance to realize your dream when you think you're ready, but [you should] never give up. I ended up doing what I really wanted to do. And, I love it. How many people in the world can say that they had a job doing what they really wanted to do ... and, incidentally got paid enough to keep both ends held together?

[My dreams were] not frustrated [by being a black man in America]. There were obstacles. And, obstacles only frustrate if you don't do anything about it. You've got choices when you have an obstacle. You can go over it, around it, under it, or what have you. That's your responsibility to do ... to get where you are going. And, your dream is where you are trying to go. That's it. Very simple.

Roger "Bill" Terry...

Well, I would like to say that you should take advantage of your educational facilities and prepare yourself, so if the chance comes where you have to prove yourself, you will be able to do it. Nothing suffices except education and learning how to do whatever you want to do under the proper circumstances. It's kind of tough to say, but...the [African-American] girls have learned it and the boys haven't learned that they have to be prepared. And, most of them are thinking about basketball or football or so doing this, that, and the other and making a fast buck. What is really important is to be solid in your family background and in your education. And then, the sky's the limit.

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