Did any white students step out as real allies, going beyond a smile or a “hi”?
There was one girl named Mary Anne who would actually walk beside me in the hall. We didn’t become friends or anything, but I knew she put herself at great risk. I thought she was brave. The truth is, though, her kindness couldn’t balance out the bad. I understand the human need to believe people are fundamentally kind, and young people in particular don’t want the world to be unfair. Even small children have a strong sense of what is fair and what isn’t. People want to know if there were nice kids, because they want the world to be fair, but what happened at Central High was not fair. And almost all of the white people were either mean or neutral — “silent witnesses” whose silence spoke volumes. I don’t think the white students knew how to be fair. White supremacy and black inferiority are part of the American training. They couldn’t conceive of me as an equal person. When you were growing up, part of that “American training” was segregation. What was it like to live in segregated Lit
