The question of desegregation: lesson for our times.

On the courthouse lawn in the town of Moncks Corner, South Carolina--the seat of Berkeley County--there is no Confederate statue. It is the only Southern county where I know that to be true. I have always wondered what brave stories lay behind that fact, what fierce battles were waged by a proud black citizenry who were once in the majority here in these palmettoed plantation lands just north of Charleston. I will probably never know. Much of the knowledge of Berkeley County's black history--like much of the foundation and fabric of its African American community itself--has been quietly blowing away like sandy topsoil, scattered by the winds of integration. Yes, they have come to live with the white folks. But at what cost?

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In Moncks Corner, the people who ran the old segregated school system named the black high school Berkeley Training and the white high school, well, Berkeley High, presumably, on the theory that while white children needed to be taught, black children--like mules and goats--could only be trained. The black folk of Moncks Corner had a slightly different idea. Like most black high schools across the segregated south, Berkeley Training was the central institution of their community, and they were right proud of it. They considered education to have been the chariot ride out of slavery, and educators to be the shining black angels wielding the reigns and guiding the way. A Berkeley Training teacher was only one step below the status of a doctor, minister, or mortician--both in pay and prestige--and the school principal, always affectionately called "prof," stood above all. There were many denominations and churches, after all, but only one Berkeley Training. In the glass case in the hallway outside the school's administrative offices were enshrined the records of an entire people: yellowing photos of long-dead alumni, class lists with names of import circled, championship trophies, spelling bee ribbons and scholar's awards, sunken leather balls once clutched by now-withered hands on the way to a winning score. On football homecoming weekend, when the black Moncks Corner folk came back from Philly and Jersey and Harlem and the other far places to which they had gone to make new lives, they would bring their children to the trophy case in the hallway outside the Berkeley Training administrative offices and point to a name through the glass and say, "Here. That's where I am, and this is where you are from. This shows you ain't from nothing."

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I was living in Moncks Corner in the fall of 1970, in a motel room across the highway from Berkeley Training, when school desegregation ordered by the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Court came, at last, to South Carolina. While Berkeley High School--the white high school--opened its doors to black students, Berkeley Training became no more. Over the summer, it was renamed Berkeley Middle School, with a new ... white ... principal, and a new purpose. "Prof," the black principal, moved over to Berkeley High. He and the white Berkeley High principal became "co-principals," but while the white principal's duties were education and administration, prof's duties were discipline and transportation. The man who had once commanded respect throughout the community--black and white--was reduced to running the detention hall and the buses.

And as for the items in the glass trophy case in the hallway outside the administration office at Berkeley Training? Sometime over the summer of 1970, someone came in and removed them, no one knew who, and no one knew to where. To my knowledge, they were never publicly displayed again. In the course of an afternoon, the archival history of an entire community was wiped out ... all but forgotten ... like the story of how the Confederate statue was blocked, as if such events and people had never been.

Fifteen years ago, I left South Carolina and brought my family to Oakland, California, where ...