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What Is Color Of School Disruption?
"You just got to face it,
man. If you're talking to the I
Man, but he ain't listening, I
you just got to do something
to get his attention and show
him that you mean it — even
if it's just to break a window
or something."
— Black Student
Is black the color of school
disruption?
A harsh question, perhaps,
but an inevitable one. Grimsley
High School, the scene of recent
disruptions, is a case in point.
According to school officials,
there has not been a single reported instance at Grimsley this
year in which whites attacked
blacks. However, school officials say, there have been a
number of incidents in which
groups of blacks attacked or
■robbed individual whites, and
the recent disorders there were
It must be pointed out and
emphasized that even at the
height of the Grimsley disruptions, only about 75 of the!
school's 465 black students were j
involved. Most went their own
way, peacefully.
But the teachers, guidance
counselors and administrators,
black and white, interviewed for
this series agree that black students are quicker to take collective action than their white-
counterparts. A single incident
involving an individual student
who happens to be black can
immediately provoke a reaction
from other students whose only
connection with the incident is
a coincidentally common skin'
color.
THIS HAPPENED during the
recent Grimsley disruptions
when the arrest of a black stu-
I dent a block off the school
grounds for disorderly conduct
sent scores of other blacks
.streaming out of their classrooms in protest.
As one teacher put it, "Black
students consider themselves
blacks first, students second."
Spencer Gwynn, the assistant
principal at Grimsley, is black
and he understands why black
students find it so easy to think
and act as a group. "It's something that has built up over the
years, a feeling of unity among
blacks," he explained. "It's easy
for these kids to feel it because
they are always so aware of
being outnumbered, and they
figure anything of a racial nature affecting one black student
is bound to affect them pretty
soon, too."
A similar observation comes
from Gerald Austin, the head of
the new Optional School at
Grimsley, a special program for
dropouts and others who cannqt
achieve in a regular high school: i
"Any incident has a much greater uniting effect on a minority
for the simple reason that the
majority never experiences the
psychological inferiority of
■ being outnumbered."
BUT OTHERS see the volatility of some black Students as a
legacy of the activist Sixties.
"Blacks have learned this way
to vocalize their discontent," a
guidance counselor commented.
"The encouragement to be disruptive is just not a part of the
middle class white culture. A
white kid having problems in
school will be told by his parents to go talk to the teacher.
And he'll probably also be
warned that if he gets in troubje
at school, he'll be in trouble at
home, too. But black kids are
often encouraged at home and
by community leaders to stand
up for their 'rights' and take direct action."
And direct action can spark
school disturbances.
There is another side of this
phenomenon, however.
It's the age-old struggle of
means and ends. The question
is, if a desired end (such as the
goals of the black students at
Grimsley) is used to justify certain means (school disruption),
then can any means be justified
by the same goal? As John
King, a guidance counselor, at
the Optional School, notes:
"The Sixties gave blacks a political and racial framework in
which to justify their behavior,
and I think we must face, unpleasant as it may be, the fact
that some will exploit this
framework to justify undesirable behavior. It isn't popular to
say it, but I think it's true."
WHAT KING is saying is that
the Sixties gave scoundrels a
readymade philosophical con-
[ text by which their activities
I could be vindicated.
j Another guidance counselor
,| put it more succinctly: "A white
hoodlum is just a hoodlum, but
I a black hoodlum can call him-
J self as a freedom fighter. He
• can just parrot all the things
he's heard from other students
and outside."
In addition, at the same time
black kids have been given
swaggering black heroes in
books and on the screen, white
kids have become more passive.
"White students are more withdrawn," a school official observes. "They've been through
the flower power fad and the
love movement and drugs and
now they just shuffle along, in
their ragged biuejeans. In the
meantime, black kids have been
getting .more aggressive."
But the teachers who taught
i'some of the disrupters, a num-
1 ber of whom are no longer in
school, say it is unfair to characterize them as a single, malevolent type. One teacher pointed
out that only a few weeks before the Grimsley trouble, two
students later kicked out of
school for their participation in
it had, on their own, collected
money for the family of a friend
iwho had been badly burned by a
caustic solution while on the job
at a local bottling plant.
ANOTHER SAID that several-
of the so-called "ringleaders" of
the disruption have after-school
jobs to help support their families. "One of them I'm thinking
about is a good worker (at a local textile mill). He's impulsive j
and lacks judgment, and I'll admit he loves to fight, but he is
certainly not a hooligan. In fact,
he has one of the best characters as far as caring about people is concerned."
.Those in the schools are divided on the question of whether
the disrupters represented the
true feelings of the majority of.
the black students at
One guidance counselor
thinks not, calling them outcasts
within a minority. "Most of
these kids are not even making
it where they live, let alone at
school."
A school official comments,
"These kids — the real ringleaders — would be in trouble wherever they were — here, Smith,
Page or Dudley.",
But another guidance counselor thinks the disrupters have a
larger constituency. "These kids
are the. cutting edge of discontent, and they act first because
they have the least to lose. Oth
er black kids with better grades
and social standing are not prepared to take the risk. They
might be willing to sit around a
table and talk about the problems but that takes time, and
other black students are ready
to act, how."
THAT OPINION draws some
support from what happened at
Grimsley. School officials were
shocked and disappointed to
find several top black students
involved in the disruptions; particularly the shouting, matches
that developed when the superintendent of schools came to .
talk with the 75 or so who had j
walked out of class. Additionally, black students interviewed
for this series expressed general
support for the disrupters, although several disagreed- with
the tactics used.
j A story told by one guidance
I counselor illustrates the explosive sensitivity of black students
to inequality, real and imagined: "A student of mine, a fine
boy really, came by one day and
told me he had lost the after
school job I had helped him get.
I asked him why, and he said
because his boss was a racist
and expected him to do *de-
meaning work..
"I talked to his boss — he was
working in an auto repair shop
— and l^js boss said he had lost
his job because he had a chip on
his shoulder about being black.
They had asked him to clean up
the shop at the end of the day,
and he had refused because he
had too much pride to do that
kind of work.
i "It turned out that there were
seven guys working in. the shop
and each week one of
lie 11 to ikturn
This student had been working
there six weeks, and on the seventh week, when it came his
turn to clean up, he refused and
'dt , It was okay with him
for the six white guys to clean
up, but when it was his turn, he
was being made to do it just because he was black."
IT IS THIS, kind of impulsive
querulousness that transforms
trifling events and issues into
school disruptions.
As one guidance counselor
puts it, "Black students have
been taught to be i
They've been taught to jump
brick walls, not build
Act Togethe
