• Taking Our First Steps
• Patricia Crosby (bio)

On the first school day after the kids and I arrived in Mississippi, Dave and I drove Emilye and Sarah to Richardson Primary School to enroll late for the first semester in 1973. The principal, Horace Wicks, often stood at the main entrance as classes were dismissed and the children scattered to their respective buses. Emilye can be seen in the background headed for bus No. 6.

[End Page 60]

in 1973, my husband and I moved from Evanston, Illinois, to rural Mississippi. Dave had accepted a teaching position at Alcorn A&M College (now Alcorn State University), one of the many hbcus in the Deep South. We had been told that the college was under pressure from accrediting organizations to increase the number of PhDs on the faculty. Although the student body was virtually all Black, in practice, that meant increasing the numbers of white and international faculty, because Black PhDs were being aggressively recruited by white institutions that offered better pay and prestige.

The first question we faced was where to live. Alcorn was isolated at the extreme southern edge of sparsely populated Claiborne County, back a twisting rural road seven miles west of the main highway, US 61. The county's population was more than 80 percent Black, with most of the whites living in the county seat of Port Gibson, where they enjoyed the ownership of banks, stores, the newspaper, and many antebellum mansions. They also controlled city and county governments, including the school board. During Dave's job interview, the president of Alcorn suggested that, if Dave joined the faculty, we would not be invited to join the Mosswood Country Club, Port Gibson's nine-hole golf course with a bar and restaurant. Later, when we went to the Port Gibson Bank to open a checking account, we asked the vice president about potential mortgage loans for houses and were told that no houses were for sale in the town. Not then. Not ever. [End Page 61]

These wooden houses stood directly across the street from Richardson Primary in 1973. They were typical of housing occupied by Black families both in rural areas of the county and in the backstreets of Port Gibson.

Alcorn offered—for reasonable rents—houses, apartments, and mobile homes on campus, seventeen miles from town. It was a self-contained community, and racial animosity and fear kept town and gown apart. We decided to accept housing in a campus mobile home, at least for a while.

The second decision we faced was where to send our daughters to school. We knew in an abstract way that Port Gibson had been the site of a strong Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, including a boycott by the local naacp of white-owned businesses. After more than fifteen years of resisting the Supreme Court's mandate to end separate white and Black public schools, the white community capitulated in 1970 by abandoning public schools and retreating to private academies. The larger Civil Rights Movement, including school desegregation, was met by a colossal failure of imagination in the white community. Its members could not visualize a world in which their children might attend schools where they were a minority in their classes, where they had to compete on an equal footing in athletics and the arts, and where their teachers, coaches, and principals were Black. Those who would enforce the rules, mold the characters, and inspire young minds were, in the whites' worldview, inferior. We believed our girls would survive and thrive in any setting, just as the older two had in Evanston's integrated Martin Luther King Jr. lab school. We were perhaps naïve, but willing to learn. Our girls would catch bus No. 6 with all the other campus children and attend the public schools. [End Page 62]

Marcus Parker and Sharon Smith pose for a picture in the Richardson parking lot/playground in 1973. In situations where I was the only white person, my camera came to function as a mode of...

• 迈出第一步
• 帕特里夏·克罗斯比（生物）

在孩子们和我到达密西西比州后的第一天，达夫和我开车将埃米尔耶和莎拉送往理查森小学，在1973年第一学期入学迟到。校长霍勒斯·威克斯（Horace Wicks）经常站在正门上，因为当时他们正在上课。开除，孩子们分散到各自的公共汽车上。在前往6号巴士的背景中可以看到Emilye。

[完第60页]

1973年，我和我的丈夫从伊利诺伊州埃文斯顿搬到密西西比州农村。戴夫（Dave）曾在深南部众多健身中心之一的Alcorn A＆M学院（现为Alcorn州立大学）任教。有人告诉我们，该学院正受到认证组织的压力，要求增加该学院的博士学位数量。尽管实际上学生都是黑人，但实际上，这意味着要增加白人和国际教职员工的人数，因为黑人博士学位是由提供更高薪水和声誉的白人机构积极招募的。

我们面临的第一个问题是住在哪里。Alcorn被隔离在人口稀少的Claiborne县的最南端，位于美国61号主要公路以西7英里处的一条弯曲的乡村道路上。该县的人口超过80％是黑人，大部分白人居住在县城他们在吉布森港（Port Gibson）拥有银行，商店，报纸和许多战前豪宅的所有权。他们还控制着市和县政府，包括学校董事会。在戴夫（Dave）的工作面试中，阿尔康（Alcorn）总裁建议，如果戴夫（Dave）加入该学院，我们将不会被邀请加入吉布森港（Port Gibson）的九洞高尔夫球场莫斯伍德乡村俱乐部（Mosswood Country Club），那里设有酒吧和餐厅。后来，当我们去吉布森港银行开立支票帐户时，我们向副总统询问了房屋的潜在抵押贷款，并被告知该镇没有房屋出售。不可以 永远不会。[完第61页]

这些木屋于1973年直接从理查森小学（Richardson Primary）穿过马路对面。它们是该县农村地区和吉布森港后街上黑人家庭居住的典型房屋。

Alcorn以合理的租金提供了距城镇17英里的校园内的房屋，公寓和移动房屋。这是一个自给自足的社区，种族仇恨和恐惧使城镇和长袍分离。我们决定至少在一段时间内接受校园移动房屋中的住房。

我们面临的第二个决定是将女儿送到哪里上学。我们以抽象的方式知道，吉布森港曾是1960年代强大的民权运动的发源地，其中包括当地白人拥有的小企业的抵制。在抵制最高法院终止结束白人和黑人公立学校的授权超过15年之后，白人社区于1970年放弃了公立学校，撤退到私立学校，从而屈服了。在白人社区，由于想象力的巨大失败，扩大了包括学校种族隔离在内的更大的民权运动。它的成员无法想象这样一个世界：在这个世界中，他们的孩子可能是上课的少数群体，他们在体育和艺术上必须平等竞争，他们的老师，教练，校长是布莱克。在白人的世界观中，那些会执行规则，塑造角色并激发年轻思想的人是次等的。我们相信我们的女孩可以在任何环境下生存和成长，就像大两个孩子在埃文斯顿的综合马丁·路德·金·金小实验学校一样。我们也许很幼稚，但愿意学习。我们的女孩将与所有其他校园儿童一起乘坐6号巴士，并进入公立学校。[结束第62页]

1973年，马库斯·帕克（Marcus Parker）和莎朗·史密斯（Sharon Smith）在理查森（Richardson）停车场/操场上合影留念。在我是唯一的白人的情况下，我的相机起了以下作用：