Valley residents recall life in segregated South

June 29, 2014 at 12:02a.m.

YOUNGSTOWN

Connie Hathorn, Youngstown schools superintendent, can never forget the tyranny of racial segregation he experienced as he grew up in Mississippi.

He also recalled in a recent interview that the vestiges of segregation persisted years after Congress enacted, and President Lyndon Johnson signed, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed racial segregation in public accommodations.

One of Hathorn’s early memories of segregation was that of a police officer tapping him on his shoulder when he was 6 and pointing to a “whites only” sign when he tried to get cold water from a drinking fountain in the courthouse in his hometown of Louisville, Miss.

“My mother grabbed me by the hand and took me out back. You had a water hose hooked to a water hydrant. That’s where the blacks had to get water,” he recalled.

“Being 6 years old, I really didn’t quite understand. I just knew I must be different. I could not drink out of that cold water fountain,” Hathorn said.

“We couldn’t go to school with white kids. ... We could not go to certain parts of town,” Hathorn said. “If we went downtown, we had to get off the sidewalk when we saw a white lady coming. You know, just get out of the way and stop and let her by,” he added.

At a local restaurant, “The whites would go in and have a seat at the counter. We could not. We had to go to the back door and order,” Hathorn said.

“It was tough, you know. At the time, I just thought that’s the way it’s supposed to be. I didn’t know any better,” Hathorn explained.

Hathorn recalled picking cotton for one cent a pound beginning when he was 12. “If I got 100 pounds of cotton, I got $1 for 12 hours of work,” he said of that task, which was done exclusively by African-Americans. After a year, he moved on to grass-cutting and leaf-raking because those activities paid more.

Hathorn’s hometown was about 20 miles from Philadelphia, Miss., where the June 21, 1964, slaying of three civil-rights workers, which spurred final enactment of the civil-rights law, occurred when he was 13.

“There were times when we’d be walking home at night when I was in high school, and a car’s headlights would flash on and off. That was the Ku Klux Klan. It meant you’ve got to run,” because the Klansmen would chase black students, he said.

“They sent the new books to the white school. We got their books,” second-hand and outdated, Hathorn said.

Despite the U.S. Supreme Court’s unanimous 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision that outlawed public school segregation, the all-black high school in Louisville, Miss., remained open until 1970, he said.

Hathorn played football for the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff.

When he later became an assistant football coach at an Arkansas high school, the head coach told him to go to the fieldhouse attic on a 100-degree August day and count hundreds of pairs of athletic shoes.

When he returned, his clothing soaked with perspiration, and told the coach the number, the head coach asked if they all had shoestrings, Hathorn recalled.

A white assistant coach intervened and told the head coach: “That is wrong. He’s not going back up there,” Hathorn said.

“He stood up for me, and, at that point, I saw that all whites are not alike. That made me feel better,” Hathorn recalled.

“I don’t hate anybody in the white race because the white race didn’t do this to me. Individuals did this to me,” Hathorn said of those who inflicted racial discrimination on him.

The suffering Hathorn endured under segregation motivated him to better himself.

“That’s probably why I went into education — to get in a position where I made the decisions that affect all students, not just white kids or black kids, because I thought people had to be treated fairly,” Hathorn explained.

In contrast to Hathorn’s Mississippi childhood experiences, the segregated environment in Charlottesville, Va., was not hostile, according to June Ewing, of Youngstown.

Ewing, a retired nutrition program agent at the Ohio State University Extension Office in Canfield, grew up in Charlottesville and graduated from high school there in 1953.

“Everything was separate: drinking fountains, riding in the back of the bus, the theaters, public restrooms. In restaurants, you had to go the back,” Ewing said.

“It didn’t bother us at all. We all thought: ‘You know where you belong.’ There was no conflict,” Ewing said.

“We made our own communities. We had our own people that we looked up to. At that time, black people were becoming teachers, principals of schools and undertakers,” she explained.

However, she said she had the same experience with second-hand textbooks as Hathorn.

“We didn’t even hear anything about the Ku Klux Klan. We walked back and forth to school and to church, and, when white people would see us walking, they would stop and give us a ride,” Ewing recalled.

“We were not allowed to go to the University of Virginia. We knew that growing up. But we knew that we had black colleges and that was our aspiration — to go to a black college,” she concluded.