This poignant account recalls firsthand the upheaval surrounding
court-ordered busing in the early 1970s to achieve school
integration. Like many students at the vanguard of this great
social experiment, sixth-grader Clara Silverstein was spit on,
tripped, and shoved by her new schoolmates. At other times she was
shunned altogether. In the conventional imagery of the civil rights
era, someone in Silverstein's situation would be black. She was
white, however--one of the few white students in her entire school.
"My story is usually lost in the historical accounts of busing,"
Silverstein writes. At the predominantly black public schools she
attended in Richmond, Virginia, Silverstein dealt daily with the
unintended, unforeseen consequences of busing as she also
negotiated the typical passions and concerns of young
adulthood--all with little direction from her elders, who seemed
just as bewildered by the changes around them. When Silverstein
developed a crush on a black boy, when yet another of her white
schoolmates switched to a private school, when she naively came to
class wearing a jacket with a Confederate flag on it, she was
mostly on her own to contend with the fallout. Silverstein's father
had died when she was seven. Another complication: she was Jewish.
As her black schoolmates viewed her through the veil of race,
Silverstein gazed back through her private grief and awareness of
religious difference.
Inspired by her parents' ideals, Silverstein remained in the
public schools despite the emotional stakes. "I was lost," she
admits. "If I learned nothing else, I did come to understand the
scourge of racism." Her achingly honest story, woven with
historical details, confronts us with powerful questions about race
and the use of our schools to engineer social change.
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