Speaking Truth to Power - Anita Hill [22]
We did not customarily talk of politics at home, and though this tragic event provided a rare opportunity, we did not speak of politics then, either. Nor did we speak of the assassination at all the following day at school. In June, with Ray, I watched the news films of the shooting of Robert Kennedy. Still no discussion from my parents of the politics of our times—the times that would change their children’s future. The times were so different than those my parents had known that they knew no language in which to speak about them. My parents’ lives were more like their own parents’ than the lives of their children. Uncertain of the relevance of their observations, they mostly kept quiet. We never discussed why the family never ate at the lunch counter in Newberry’s during our trips to Okmulgee but instead ate our Dairy Queen hamburgers in the car. Or why the rural black folks gathered and shopped at Norman’s Grocery Store rather than the larger and newer Neal’s, where the whites gathered and shopped. Or why black people were always interred by Dyer’s, Ragsdale’s, or Brown’s funeral homes and never one of the white-owned mortuaries, whose names even today I’m not aware of. The civil rights movement was a remote and abstract experience. In Oklahoma we certainly identified with its goal, but its activities never reached the rural areas except over the television.
There were few incidents of physical resistance to the integration at Morris in my experience. When I arrived there as an eighth grader, Ray and the five other black students in his class had paved the way. Though the black boys had opportunities to mainstream in the high school culture in sports, the black girls’ access to the fields of distinction in school culture—cheerleading and homecoming activity—remained limited. None of the black girls were encouraged to participate on the girls’ basketball team, which in Morris had a history of state championships. For me it was all the same. I was not athletic, nor did I think myself beautiful in the homecoming queen way. I had a pleasant round face that from age seven was adorned with glasses thick enough to correct my nearsightedness, and that did not seem to change much with age. I looked and indeed was very bookish. I remained that way during high school and college.
Much of the classwork came easy, the rest I studied so intensely at times that my father worried. The time that I spent talking to my friend Pocahontas Barnett on our recently acquired telephone came only after I had completed my homework. Being bookish paid off, however, as I graduated at the top of my high school class, an honor that had been denied JoAnn. When she graduated from Morris High School three years earlier, she was told that even though her grades technically put her at the top of the class, the fact that she had transferred into the Morris system in the middle of the freshman year made her ineligible to be valedictorian. That honor went instead to her friend Clara Ivy, who, since elementary school, had been used to the top spot in her classes at Morris. JoAnn was made salutatorian. JoAnn, who even by then had developed a pretty good temper, did not complain, though she must have been hurt deeply. When I graduated, none of my classmates seemed surprised or disturbed that I was first in the class, least of all the salutatorian that year, my friend Susie Clark. And next year Susie and I went off to college at Oklahoma State University, in Stillwater, together.
I always knew that I would go to college, though only a few of my classmates from high school would. As you can imagine