This was the same educational environment in which Horace Tate was immersed, first as a student at Fort Valley State University, and later as a teacher and then principal in the still-segregated schools of small-town Georgia. And that’s not what I’m trying to say at all,” said Walker. “I was afraid (readers) would think I was trying to suggest that Brown was wrong and desegregation was wrong. “They were trying to find ways to help black children know who they were, and to believe they could be full participants in American democracy,” she said.Īfter the book came out, Walker worried her heartfelt appreciation of black educational excellence could be misread. “They had a principal and teachers who cared a great deal about them.” Despite struggling with chronic underfunding and limited resources, these black schools helped children build solid self-esteem even in a society that discriminated against them. “I discovered that, while everybody was mad about not having the facilities and the resources, they actually had a very resilient school,” Walker said. She soon abandoned the project she’d been working on so that she could figure out what black communities meant when they said they liked their segregated schools. “I never heard anybody say anything about a black school during segregation good.” “Well, you know, I got my fancy doctorate from Harvard,” Walker said. I hate to think about them closing the school.’
“Everywhere I’d go,” Walker said, “they’d say, ‘It was such a good school.
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