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By Root 904 0

to the operation of the church and voiced their opinions. Importantly, they expected just as much from the girls in the church as from the boys. Even more importantly, by example, they taught me about concern for the collective—the community. Some Sundays family members and friends assembled at our home around 2:00 P.M. for Sunday dinner. It was as though they just materialized. We had no telephones to communicate an invitation or to announce an event. Miraculously, or so I always felt, whether there were ten or thirty extra mouths to feed, my mother always seemed to have enough food. Each of those days seemed like a mini-reunion that gave me a sense of being in touch with people outside of the farmwork and my everyday school life.

Neither my parents nor the other people in rural Oklahoma were naive about discrimination and its impact on their lives. No doubt that is why Erma and Albert Hill insisted that their children finish high school and provided for their education beyond high school. In the fall of 1945 my parents had eight children and one due shortly. Elreatha, my oldest sister, then seventeen, graduated from high school in the spring. My parents were both thirty-four and neither of them had finished high school. My farmer parents’ vision extended well beyond their circumstances. They sent “Reat” to college at a time when only 5 percent of the black women in the country had white-collar jobs and 60 percent were working as domestics. On the average in Okmulgee County, females completed 8.9 years and males 8.6 years of formal education. Yet Elreatha was one of the few hundred black women who that year would begin her college education. The fact that Oklahoma made it a criminal offense to educate blacks and whites of any age together was not a deterrence. All of the children in the family attended segregated schools.

Before Oklahoma became a state, parents of two black children in a town named Guthrie challenged unsuccessfully the dual education system in Oklahoma Territory. Again, in 1946, a woman named Ada Lois Sipuel began to challenge educational segregation in a case argued in the U.S. Supreme Court two years later by Thurgood Marshall, Sipuel v. Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma. Though, in 1949, she ultimately won her right to attend the School of Law at the University of Oklahoma, the victory in the case only affected professional and graduate schools in the state. The practice of segregated education for elementary, secondary, and undergraduate education continued until well after the 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education. Elreatha attended Langston University, the historically black college set up in the state to avoid integration of such institutions as the University of Oklahoma and Oklahoma State University. She never graduated, choosing instead to marry and raise children—eleven, in fact.

Eleven of my brothers and sisters attended segregated schools. In 1958 JoAnn was the first to begin her education at the integrated Eram School. Neither she nor I, who followed her in 1962, ever attended segregated schools. Interestingly, Eram School was integrated because of fiscal necessity rather than because of the mandates of the law. Eram was a rural school district whose size in a dwindling farm community would have required its closing without the numbers of black children who still resided in the area. Rather than close, the board made the choice to integrate in 1958, and Carlene, John, JoAnn, and Ray began attending there. Prior to attending Eram, Ray had been in classes at Lone Tree.

All of my brothers, except for one, chose to go into the military following high school. My parents waited patiently at home as each went off to duty. Amazingly, only one, Albert, Jr., was involved in combat. The promises of the military to give young men the opportunity to see the world was fulfilled in my brothers. The promise to promote their educational development was not as readily fulfilled. Yet each enlisted in a branch of the service one after the other, until my youngest brother, Ray, broke the