A continuing series on local residents and their experiences during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and ’60s.
As a child during the 1960s, Michelle Harton didn’t know the extent of racism and discrimination around her in the South.
Her Nashville neighborhood was a thriving community of black-owned businesses and churches. The family’s home was located near Fisk University and Tennessee State University, two historically black colleges. Her parents were college professors and many of her neighbors were also professionals.
But it wasn’t until she ventured out of her community that Harton, currently president of the District 97 school board, came face to face with racism. Her mother would sometimes take her downtown to go shopping. There was only one store where blacks could shop in the predominantly white area. Harton remembered one particular trip.
“At that time, if a woman was married, you referred to her by her married name, and that was a sign of respect. And the sales gentlemen called my mother by her first name, and she was offended by that. My mother was always cool, calm and collected, but when we went downtown there was a tension,” Harton, 51, recalled. “Something was different and I didn’t like going downtown.”
Her parents shielded Harton and her sister from certain things when they were younger. She was only a toddler when blacks started holding sit-ins at segregated establishments. In 1958, a year after she was born, local black pastors founded the Nashville Christian Leadership Conference, an affiliate group of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
Harton recalled one time when students rioted at the colleges, but she was too young to know why.
“There were things going on as a kid that I was oblivious to,” said the married mother of two daughters. “My parents-I can recall them talking about it, but I was in the first grade and I didn’t know.”
As she got older, Harton experienced racism personally when the Nashville schools integrated. Almost every child in her neighborhood went to all-black Pearl High School in Nashville. Shy and quiet, Harton looked forward to coming out of her shell there. But when the schools integrated during her last year of junior high, Harton was among the first black children selected to attend all-white Cohn High School.
“Everything that I had been anticipating since I was very young was just snatched away, and I was put into an environment where I did not know anything about what was going on there,” she said. “We were bused over there and on the first day of school, there were all these white parents who met us and they didn’t want us there. All of my teachers had been black. Now I’ve got white kids in the classroom. I’ve got white teachers and I’ve got these white parents who don’t want me there. I’m in a neighborhood I know nothing about. It was like you were in shock, and you were in shock for a while.”
Harton was sometimes the only black student in her classes, but was able to make some friends, which created other problems. One night her class had a party in their neighborhood. Harton was invited, but her parents weren’t sure if they’d let her visit a white neighborhood.
“My parents had to make a decision: ‘If we let her go, we risk someone hurting her because she’s in a place that she’s not supposed to be after dark. But if we don’t let her go, then we teach her that she’s different and the ramification of that might be greater.’ So they let me go,” she said.
Nothing happened to her, though she recalled her parents being concerned until she came home. There were also tensions in the classroom.
Her AP honors class one semester had to read Huckleberry Finn-Harton was the only black student in the class. One of the book’s characters is referred to as Nigger Jim.
“That caused the teacher a bit of a problem. What do we call him because she’s in here, and how is Michelle going to respond to the whole class talking about Jim,” she said. “There was heightened sensitivity because nobody wanted this thing to explode. I guess they had seen enough of that on TV and nobody wanted that, especially the teachers.”
The instructor pulled Harton aside outside of class and asked how she felt. He decided to have the class refer to the character as Mr. Jim. Harton said what the teacher did made a powerful impression.
“I think it’s interesting that back in 1970, that sensitivity was there-let’s elevate him to Mr. Jim. People read Huckleberry Finn all the time, and they read it in a classroom setting. And for a student reading that in a mixed environment, the dilemma is still there. How do we refer to him and how does that impact the classroom? My teacher understood that,” said Harton.
“When he elevated him, what he did was communicate to all of those students in the class who were white-he forced them, in their minds, to elevate me in their dialogue with them. Rather than making me do something, he made them lift me up in their eyes.”
She experienced other revelations with her white classmates. Years later, she met up with some of them when they visited Chicago. In high school, she’d been to their homes many times, but none of them ever came to her neighborhood. Harton always felt like an outsider to the group but said her classmates never saw her that way.
She wrote them an e-mail after their visit, explaining her feelings.
“Every day I got up and went to school in their neighborhood. I had to learn how to function in their neighborhood, but in four years of being friends and all of that, never, not ever once, did they come to my house. They never met my mother or my father. They probably didn’t know that I have a sister, but yet they consider me to be a friend. When I wrote to them, it never dawned on them that they never reciprocated.”
Harton doesn’t look back on the past with sadness or bitterness. Her parents taught her not to dwell in anger because young people were expected to focus on their futures.
“I think that most people who grew up during that time have to come to grips with it; with the fear people felt because as a kid, you just knew that something isn’t right,” she said. “Any inequity was part of the norm. You sort of factored that into your thinking, and you didn’t waste a lot of energy on that because that’s the way it was.”
CONTACT: tdean@wjinc.com
