This is a pleasant article for me to write, though it resurrects a reminder of unpleasant times. I hope readers will find the healing nature of what I now report uplifting. It all began with an unexpected email I received last month from Terri Ballard, former Executive Director of the Sedalia Ragtime Festival.
I must begin however, by expressing my profound appreciation to Andy Senior’s faithful publication of The Syncopated Times for allowing my monthly ramble. It rarely fails to bring a contact such as Terri’s and my life is thus vastly enriched by these communications.
Now what Terri had to report was totally unexpected and took me back to the spring of 1972 in Sedalia, Missouri, and the end of educational segregation there. I was a token white teacher in the mostly African-American Hubbard Elementary school. It had formerly been half of the Hubbard high school building that had replaced the earlier Lincoln School on the North Side.
Desegregation, mandated by the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court Decision had been ignored and postponed 18 years and was, by my estimation, finally poorly implemented. I was moved as an elementary teacher across town and my former African-American colleague teachers with our students were divided among the remaining White Elementary Schools. The Hubbard High School students had been previously relocated and bussed to the White Smith
