ABSTRACT
I began my career as a teacher in 1967, the first year of desegregation in a junior high school in rural central Florida. I worked as a school counselor for 30 years, first in middle school, then in a career technical setting, and finally as the ninth-grade counselor in a medium-sized high school in Alabama. I finished high school and attended college during the civil rights years. When I entered college every aspect of the lives of both blacks and whites in the South was regulated and separated—separate bathrooms, separate entrances and waiting rooms at hospitals, separate water fountains, and especially separate but unequal schooling ten years after Brown v. Board of Education (1954). There were no programs in place to confront the past and no truth and reconciliation initiatives similar to the aftermath of apartheid in South Africa. Outside of the machinations of school boards and legislatures and courts, and the rhetoric of the politicians, there was nothing to prepare a generation of educators, black and white, for desegregation.
