McHenry County Blog

Two counties, Talbot and Kent County, are almost next to each other, separated by Queen Anne’s County, the one into which the Chesapeake Bay Bridge has its eastern terminus.

They took different paths in implementing the Supreme Court’s desegregation order.

While Talbot did one grade at a time, starting with the first grade, Kent County did not.

Sometime in the early 1960′s when when I was visiting my grandparents, James Clayland and Helen Roe Stevens, in Church Hill, we had just finished playing bridge with my maiden Aunt Louise, a commercial teacher at the all-white Chestertown High School.

She told of how that day they had had an all county high school teacher meeting at which the superintendent had talked about how a new high school was to be built to which all students, white and black (she probably said, “Negro” or “colored”) would go.

She seemed OK with that, although did mention that she didn’t know whether the teachers from the other school would be as qualified as those at her school.

My grandfather’s ancestors had owned a couple of slaves at the multi-generational relatively small 180-acre family farm near Barclay,   (My grandfather played a mean game of checkers around the wood stove in Barclay on winter days.)

The closest high school to the family farm was in Sudlersville, where both my mother and father attended high school,

But, back to the early 1960′s.

My grandfather shook his head and said something to the effect that that would be up to the next generation.   That night he had a stroke from which he did not recover.

Since I’m talking about the slave holding times of the maternal side of my family, I should mention that the slaves were buried in the family burial ground and, at least one stayed on the farm as a hired hand after he was freed.

Ironically, my father’s oncologist at Georgetown University Hospital in the late 1980′s was a black woman named Stevens.  She was from Minnesota, so I think the odds of her having any connection with the Eastern Shore of Maryland was remote.

More tomorrow.

I got into a conversation at the First United Methodist Church about Harriet Tubman, the Underground Railroad heroine from the Eastern Shore of Maryland, from when my family and I come.

It bought back all sorts of memories of walking to the three-story brick Easton Elementary School 3-4 blocks from our home at 212 S. Aurora Street.  No kindergarten there.  No Velcro either. (Guess who didn’t learn to tie his shoe laces until the day before the first day of first grade.)

There were several routes to school.

The one I took most was straight north on Aurora Street for four blocks, then left for a block and, where the Talbot County Health Department parking lot is now, was the asphalt playground of Easton Elementary School.

That route took me past the edge of a black neighborhood (to the right on the map.)

I wondered why those who lived closer to the school than I didn’t go to school there.

We moved to lily white Salt Lake City as I was entering sixth grade.  Before leaving I attended a couple of days of class with my old classmates at the old high school, which was converted for lower grades.

The only black (I guess it was “colored” then) child I knew was the daughter of our cleaning lady.

We used to play on the concrete-anchored, two-inch pipe swing set my father constructed.  Most of the “colored” section of town was west of the courthouse and library.  And the only time I visited it was when the carnival came.

“20,000 Leagues Under the Sea” was a movie I saw in Easton.

It wasn’t showing at the Avalon Theatre where I usually went to the movies.  It was at the Easton Theater a couple of blocks away.

When we went to the Avalon we liked to sit in the balcony.  I remember being bored by some tap dancer and a magician entertaining on the stage, probably the last gasp of vaudeville.

So, imagine my surprise when I was told only blacks could sit in the balcony.  What a disappointment.

“Weren’t they lucky?” I thought.

That building is gone, but in its place I think there is a museum about local history.  I didn’t see any reference to the predecessor theater and how blacks had not been allowed to sit on the main floor.

Although there were not blacks at Easton Elementary, there was a Chinese boy whose family ran the dry cleaners.  I went over to his family’s apartment one day after school.

One other race-related experience made an impression.  My parents took me to a minstrel show held in the armory.  White guys dressed up in black face.  It was sponsored by some civil organization as a fundraiser.  I remember lots of physical comedy, but nothing specific.

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.

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

Why?

The Talbot County Board (or Board of Education if there was a sub-board) had decided to implement Brown v. Board of Education by integrating one grade at a time, starting with the first grade.

Some resident obviously did not approve and took extreme action.

More tomorrow.