Crawfordsville

Crawfordsville is a small farm community in Crittenden County with an all too familiar distinction of having a set of railroad tracks to serve as a physical reminder of its history of segregation. Margaret Woolfolk, an historian of Crittenden County history, records that Crawfordsville participated in the "freedom of choice desegregation plan" during the 1966-67 school year. Twelve black students integrated what was locally referred to as "the white school," that year. Two years later, the Justice Department mandated full integration. The campus that had once formed the white school were designated for elementary education and the McNeil campus (formerly the black school) housed junior high and high school students. I enrolled in the fall of 1973 in the inaugural kindergarten class.

Unlike the rest of the school, Crawfordsville's inaugural kindergarten class had no distinct segregated past. To my recollection, the class was nearly equally divided between white and black students. Mrs. Hampton, a kind and loving teacher I had known from church, had an elderly white teacher's aid named Mrs. Joiner, who seemed to know and dote upon white students. In retrospect, Mrs. Joiner's presence in the classroom was likely a compromise for the comfort of white parents. Although I had previously had some contact with white children, kindergarten was by far the most social interaction I had ever had with children who were not black. I was geographically separated from white children on our family farm, and I rarely engaged with white people until kindergarten. As a result, I was totally indifferent to the race of my classmates and counted racial difference as equivalent to all other new experiences of kindergarten. I loved school and enjoyed playing with my classmates, black and white. I didn’t carry the weight of integration history into the kindergarten classroom because I was ignorant of it.

By the time I was in second grade, I came to realize that my first two Edenic years of education were not indicative of the racial climate of the town, itself. While children played peacefully together at school, parents and city leaders fought over what school integration symbolized within the power structure of the community. For some, the process of integration necessitated a reimagining of segregated institutions, but made over as close to segregation as before. As a result, most of the teachers at the elementary school happened to be white and most of the teachers at the junior high and high schools happened to be black. I do not know what became of the white high school teachers or black elementary teachers, but the faculty on both the elementary and high school campuses tended to reflect the two schools' respective segregated pasts, at least initially. In Crawfordsville, LeRoy and Viola McNeil, the black school's namesakes and educators with a near 40 year tenure at the school, remained for a time, but their days were numbered.

By the mid-1970s the superintendent and school board had begun applying pressure on the McNeils to retire. Mrs. McNeil had always assumed the role of food service supervisor. When the superintendent demanded her resignation and hired a replacement, members of the black community organized a school boycott and demanded that Mrs. McNeil be reinstated. This meant that as a second-grader, I participated in a boycott by not attending school on prescribed days of the week. The superintendent fired my mother, Mildred Lanos, a high school food-service worker, for her involvement in the boycott and for refusing to use her influence to end it. The boycott went on for weeks and finally concluded after organizers could not agree on a continued strategy and the McNeils asked the organizers to end the boycott.

African-American activist organizations like the Action Council and the NAACP in Crawfordsville worked to increase voter registration on plantations and to increase the number of African-Americans on the district's school board. The school board was comprised largely of white farmers and business owners, many of whom had no children in the school district. At the same time that a group of African-Americans were advocating for greater agency in the newly integrated district, groups of prominent white citizens throughout the Arkansas Delta region were seeking alternatives to integration through Christian academies and enrollment of white students in other districts.

This district maintained a modest number of white students through the early to mid-1970s, but those numbers declined as the 1980s approached. By the time R. J. Johnson and Henry Valentine had become the first African-American school board members in the district's history at around 1979, white flight was nearly complete. The white students I had known from kindergarten through fourth grade disappeared entirely from the rolls by fifth grade. By six grade I had only three white classmates. The railroad tracks had ensured that our paths would not cross in the future. My mothers has said that the initial superintendent and school board never planned for long-term integration. By design, white flight was always the endgame.

The school is now closed. The last graduating class finished in 2004 and the school formally consolidated with Marion the same year. Although the "white school" campus has been razed, black churches and private citizens have purchased buildings on the McNeil campus. Aside from church functions the buildings are used for reunions, basketball tournaments, and other public gatherings.

The first five years of my education were filled with positive interactions with my white peers. The main difference in my interactions with them and other black children was that I did not see them in church or visit their homes. My mom and I visited Teresa Upton's house once for a retail party. I am sure Teresa insisted that I be invited. We were that close. In fourth grade during recess, Cynthia Sanford, Debra Brown, Teresa Upton and I planned to share an apartment like Jack, Chrissy, and Janet on Three’s Company. I remember taking that vow so seriously and looking forward to my adult life with my three best friends. I have always wondered whether our cloistered fourth-grade friendship could have survived the external stress of integration. I would like to think so.