Saw the following headline in the Chicago Tribune Tuesday and it brought back memories of my hometown, Easton, Maryland:

In Maryland, there are county school systems.

When I started First Grade in 1948, I walked a couple of blocks to school.

Two or three blocks east of South Aurora Street was a black neighbofhood.

There were no colored (as they would have been called then) kids in my school.

I attended Easton Elementary School through Fifth Grade when we moved to Salt Lake City, Utah, where I, as a non-Morman, learned much of what I know about discrimination.

Our family continued to subscribe to the Easton weekly paper, the Star-Democrat, in which we followed the integration of schools in Talbot County.

(Talbot County is where Frederick Douglass escaped from slavery.)

The County Board ran local government, except for the local towns. (My father was elected President of the Easton Town Council without opposition in his early thirties.)

There was not a separately elected school board.

After the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court school desegregation order, the county fathers decided to integrate one grade at a time.

I don’t know whether that meant starting with kindergarten. (There was no public kindergarten when I started school.)

Regardless, every year the integrated grade was one step closer to full integration.

We also subscribed to Life Magazine.

After we moved to Salt Lake City, I was reading Life Magazine one afternoon and saw a picture of the front of my old grade school. 

Besides the cut line, it was easily recognizable from the two granite banisters beside the front entrance.

The reporting was about how someone had blown up a little bomb at the back entrance of the school.

That door was below the fire escape from the third floor Fifth Grade classroom from which the boys had to go down after the girls and climb back up before the girls. No panty peeking allowed.

In Kent County, two counties to the north, where my aunt Louise Stevens taught commercial courses, the situation was quite different.

I was visiting my grandparents in Church Hill, Maryland, in the mid-1960’s, probably 1966.

My aunt, who had an apartment in Chestertown. where she worked, came back to Church Hill on weekends and sometimes during the week.

At dinner, she announced that a countywide meeting had been held of high school teachers at which the announcement had been made that all students would attend the new high school being built. (The school opened in 1970, twenty-six years after the Supreme Court integration decision.)

My aunt expressed reservations about the quality of the black teachers.

My grandfather, whose ancestors had owned a few slaves whom I discovered were buried in the family’s farm grave yard, had a different reaction.

I’m not quite sure how he phrased it, but what I remember was that he said that would have to be “for the next generation.”

We played bridge after dinner.

When I awoke, I was told my grandfather couldn’t get out of bed. He had has a stroke from which he never recovered.

Back to now.

Pre-kindergarten schools are largely segregated.

Op-ed writer Professor Bruce Fuller of Berkeley argues Biden should require integration as a condition of new subsidies.