| Introduction
This interview was with Julian Rappaport. Mr. Rappaport is a parent whose
children were bused to Washington School after desegregation. He is
professor emeritus in the department of psychology at the University of
Illinois.
Tiera Campbell, a 9th grader at Central High School, conducted the
interview. She is one of three students who participated in this project
last year. She helped teach skills to 12 new students from Franklin Middle
School. All 15 students worked with WILL-AM 580 on an oral history project
documenting the actual desegregation of Champaign’s public elementary
schools in 1968. The students used parts of this interview for their
60-minute radio documentary, More Than a Bus Ride: Desegregating Champaign
Public Schools.
Tiera conducted the interview on March 24, 2005 at the WILL-AM 580 studio,
300 N. Goodwin Ave. in Urbana, IL.
TIERA: What is your full name?
MR. RAPPAPORT: Julian Rappaport.
TIERA: What was your profession?
MR. RAPPAPORT Um, a professor in the Psychology Department.
TIERA: Where were you born?
MR. RAPPAPORT Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
TIERA: When were you born?
MR. RAPPAPORT Oh I have to tell you that huh? 1942.
TIERA: Where did you grow up?
MR. RAPPAPORT In Philadelphia until I was 21.
TIERA: Was your neighborhood predominantly black or white?
MR. RAPPAPORT: Predominantly white.
TIERA: How did they make you feel? Did you feel like you wanted to be around
just all whites or did you feel that you should be able to be in the same
neighborhood or community with blacks?
MR. RAPPAPORT: Mhm. Well, I could talk for quite some time about that
question if that’s a topic that you actually want to engage. Um, in 19 –
well, I grew up in the 50s, right, I was born in 42 and I graduated from
high school in 1960. The neighborhood was a working-class – if you know
Philadelphia, Philadelphia’s got a lot of row homes and so it was row houses
all stuck together on a block and my family background in Jewish and we
moved from an old Jewish neighborhood that at that time it was called
Strawberry Mansion when I was 9 years old, and I think part of the reasons
that the family moved was because the neighborhood was becoming more African
American – well they wouldn’t have said African American at the time. And so
the family moved out to this – kind of edge – still in the city of
Philadelphia but it was predominantly white, working-class, we rarely saw
black folks except when I played sports in high school we would play against
some of the teams that were in the African American neighborhoods. It was a
pretty racist environment, I think. By the time I was in high school Martin
Luther King was already doing things and I think he had been on the cover of
Time Magazine but there was no real conversation about that in my
neighborhood but I was vaguely aware of it. My mother was pretty – I guess
she’d be sort of progressive in the ways that – if you know about Eleanor
Roosevelt in that time frame was kind of a bit of a sort of condescending
sort of progressive attitude. But so, my environment was, I think, not
really a very good one for racial relations.
TIERA: How did people relate to one another in this town?
MR. RAPPAPORT: Which people are you asking me about?
TIERA: African Americans, Caucasians…
MR. RAPPAPORT: So you’re talking about relationships between black folks and
white folks – in my neighborhood or more generally in the city?
TIERA: In the city…?
MR. RAPPAPORT: Yeah, well I’ll tell you a story about – if this – you tell
me if this is getting far a field from what you really want to talk about.
But, something that will tell you about what racism was like in Philadelphia
in that time actually happened around my high school. Because the
neighborhood I moved to was brand new, they built a new high school and it
was in the northeast part of Philadelphia so they decided they were going to
name the school Northeast High School. Well there was already a Northeast
High School in Philadelphia that had been there for – oh probably before the
turn of the previous century – before 1900. It was an old school, which had
a terrific history of academic as well as sports figures, famous people had
gone there and the neighborhood had become primarily African American by –
we moved to our neighborhood in 1952. By 1952 the neighborhood around – what
came – what we thought of as the old Northeast High School had become
primarily African American. And when they built this new school out in this
edge of the city and decided to call it Northeast High School, they not only
took the name but they also decided that – they took all the teachers, they
took all the trophies, they took all the traditions, and they said this is
now Northeast High School, it has a new building and they renamed the old
school in the old neighborhood Thomas Edison High School. And I was some –
not aware of all of that when I was 15 years old but surely after I left
that high school and started at college and started to think about the
world, I realized what had happened and there had not been any discussion
whatsoever. So my view is, the Philadelphia schools, the Philadelphia
government, my neighborhood, my community were pretty darn racist and people
got away – imagine what they got away with, taking all of that away from
that neighborhood and telling people, “Well you have this old building but
now you’re the new school.” So I think that sort of captures what the time
was like in my experience.
TIERA: Were your schools integrated or segregated?
MR. RAPPAPORT: Well they weren’t legally segregated by law because it was
Pennsylvania but they were de-facto segregated. Um, there was – I believe
there was one African American student in my three years of high school – it
was a three year high school – 10th, 11th, and 12th grade and so the
neighborhood was essentially – you know the housing patterns were segregated
so therefore the schools were segregated.
TIERA: Let’s move on to some questions about your children. How many
children do you have?
MR. RAPPAPORT: I have two adult children.
TIERA: What are their names?
MR. RAPPAPORT: Lauren and Amy.
TIERA: Where do they live?
MR. RAPPAPORT: Lauren is the oldest and she lives in Mundelein, Illinois and
she is married and hast two children and Amy, my youngest daughter, lives in
Champaign and has two children also.
TIERA: Which school did your children attend and were they integrated or
segregated?
MR. RAPPAPORT: Um, they both went to elementary school at Washington in
Champaign and then they went on to Edison and Central. And then they went to
the U of I, but…that was their progression in public school.
TIERA: Is there anything that you would like to tell me about them?
MR. RAPPAPORT: Well they’re wonderful children. <laughs> Is there anything
you’d like to know in particular about em?
TIERA: Um, well what did you expect out of your children academically?
MR. RAPPAPORT: Well, when you’re a university professor you kind of imagine
that everybody else also wants to be a university professor so, like all
parents you think your kids should do exactly what you do. But they didn’t
have any interest whatsoever in becoming university professors. So but we
expected them to pay attention to school and enjoy it and do well at it and
– although they didn’t have perfect records as young people they did
eventually both go through university, did fine – my youngest daughter has a
Master’s degree. My older daughter has a – just a Bachelor’s degree but she
has a pretty good job and works for insurance firms in the Chicago area. My
youngest daughter is a school social worker by training, although she’s a
stay at home mom at the moment so…
TIERA: How involved were you as a parent in your children’s lives and
schooling?
MR. RAPPAPORT: How involved were we? Um, well, education’s always been
important in my family so we paid close attention to what they were doing
and how they were doing it – I’m not exactly – I guess it depends on what
you mean by involved. I think – you know, we try to support them and both of
the kids got involved in music, so they were in various choruses and
madrigal singers and so on and we would have kids come over to the house and
had some of their parties at our house and so we were kind of – my wife
loves teenagers so we always had kids around the house and we were always
involved with the kids and we were pretty attentive to what was going on in
their lives, I think.
TIERA: So did they ever feel like they could pursue a career like in
singing?
MR. RAPPAPORT: My oldest daughter was interested in doing that. To be
perfectly honest with you I was not necessarily all that encouraging about
it. She ended up – when she came to the U of I – majoring in Community
Health and that’s the general field that she’s stayed in. So she considered
it at the time that she was leaving high school but ended up not pursuing
it.
TIERA: Were you a member of the PTA or any other groups during the time your
kids were in school?
MR. RAPPAPORT: Sure. We would always join the PTA, although I wouldn’t – we
weren’t the most active PTA parents. I never thought the PTA was all that
interesting, to tell you the truth. But we did join and you know, we’d go to
events when they happened.
TIERA: Tell me about Washington School. What reputation did it have? Why did
you want your children to go there?
MR. RAPPAPORT: good question. Um, we came to Champaign in 1968. My youngest
daughter – my oldest daughter – my youngest daughter wasn’t born yet – my
oldest daughter was two years old. So within three years – maybe about 1971
– she was ready to start school – Kindergarten – and we – from the time we
arrived here we had heard about Washington School. Booker T. Washington was
– had become a magnet school – a magnet being – in the sense that at that
time, because the Champaign schools were de-facto segregated, there was some
effort at the policy level to create a school that would – in the African
American neighborhood, since Washington is right by where Douglas Center is
– in the African American neighborhood to have – attract white families so
that kids would be – in the interest of bussing kids for integration
purposes they wouldn’t only be African American kids who were being bussed.
So they – Washington School was an attempt to attract white families and it
seemed like a good idea to us for our kids to get to know African American
kids as well as white kids. And also Booker T. Washington – the way they
went about making it a magnet school was that they had developed programs in
association with the university, they had a big grant from the National
Science Foundation to improve science and math, they were teaching foreign
languages they – it was a pretty active school and it got very good
publicity among the university community. So within the three years that I
had been working at the university it seemed to us like a good idea to send
– to try and send our kids there. You had to apply for it – get on a list
and then get selected and I think it was – I don’t think you got selected on
any particular merit basis. I think it was random based on who was on the
list.
TIERA: I understand that they were bussed. How old were they when they were
bussed?
MR. RAPPAPORT: How old were they? That’s right from five years old when they
started Kindergarten. They would – we lived at that time pretty close to
where South Side School is now or the Champaign schools administration
building is right there – the Mellon Building. We lived within two or three
blocks of there and a bus would come there to pick – we’d walk them to the
bus and then wait until the bus came and then they’d take the bus to
Washington school – right from the very beginning.
TIERA: How did you feel having your children be bussed to another side of
town?
MR. RAPPAPORT: Well we were choosing to do it because we thought – you know
I would like to say that it was entirely for – because we thought of the
social issues of integration being a good idea – which we did – but to be
perfectly honest about it we also thought the education they would get at
Washington School would be very good. So those two things together made it
seem like a desirable thing for us and that the getting on a bus and – I
thought it was pretty safe and seemed ok and it just didn’t – since they
experienced it right from the beginning that this is what you do when you go
to school – and then we had these little books you could read about getting
on the yellow school bus and you know the big kids get on the bus and so
they were pretty excited about it too. So it was an ok thing from our point
of view.
TIERA: So Washington School – was it a school that really helped students on
their education or they weren’t like a big – it wasn’t like a really big
concern but they were at the same time concerned? Like, what I’m trying to
say is they focused mainly on education more than anything.
MR. RAPPAPORT: Mmm…what else did you have in mind?
TIERA: Well you said cause they got a good edu – it was – you knew they
would get a good education there so I’m saying like, so it was a school that
really worked with students, although they were at a different race they
really worked with them on their education a lot?
MR. RAPPAPORT: Well, this was – I would say in retrospect that the education
was fine. I don’t think it was the very best possible education that one
could imagine but I don’t think there was any serious difficulties with it.
It was also the first time we had children and I had gone – my wife and I
had both gone to the public schools in Philadelphia. It never occurred to us
that our children wouldn’t go to a public school. We liked the idea of
supporting public education. So I thought that the education was fine and
that the people at Washington School did a good – they seemed to be caring
and attentive to children and the teachers seemed fine with us.
TIERA: What was it like – what was it that like, this question’s messed up.
KIMBERLIE (Project co-Director): I see where you’re at Tiera. I think he
already answered that one – go – try the next one.
TIERA: Tell me about the students and teachers your children met at
Washington School. Like, how did they feel about them or whatever?
MR. RAPPAPORT: Ok…let me start by saying, which I probably should have said
when you were asking me about Washington School initially, we actually
visited the school before we sent our older daughter there. And my older
daughter is six years older than my younger daughter so they never were
there at the same time because she went for her five years and then my
younger daughter started but by then – so we were in the school for 10 or 11
years – or I guess it’s 12 years if you count Kindergarten…yeah. So, but
they were not overlapping. So by the time my second daughter went we already
knew the school pretty well…but my – before we started my youngest daughter
in 1971 we visited the school and we were immediately struck by the social
environment – especially the principal at that time – a woman named Mrs.
Wesley, who was African American principal, very warm, she obviously – her
eyes light up when she saw kids. As we walked in the hall…I always remember
her – little kids running down the hall to her and her picking them up and
hugging them and it just seemed like such a nice place to go to school. It
seemed like the kids felt comfortable there and it seemed like a loving
environment and my own sense was that the principal often sets the tone of a
school and creates a social climate and it seemed like just a good one. So
we were as concerned about the social climate as we would be about the
education, per say, so we liked that. Now you were asking me about how did
my kids feel about the-
TIERA: The students and the teachers.
MR. RAPPAPORT: My memories of the kids – my own children – is that they
liked being there. That it was a school they enjoyed being at. I thought
that there were – one of the things that you might expect - and we sort of
anticipated this without knowing exactly how it would play itself out – it
wasn’t just that there was a mix of race at the time of the students, but
there was also a bit of a mix of socioeconomic status. So – let me be
explicit about this. Some of their peers, who were African American kids,
were middle-class African American kids who were probably more similar
family-wise to me and my kids than some of the white kids. And some of the
kids in the school were from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, or poor
families, and they were probably a little more different than my own kids.
And when economic status and race combined and so you had some neighborhood
African American kids who were also from relatively less-advantaged
economically, then I think my kids were in for some surprises and some –
about how kids relate to each other and the ways they communicate and style
of communication and so on and that took my kids a little bit of getting
used to. So sometimes they would come home and talk about how so-and-so was
mean to her and they’d talk for a little while and they’d talk about the –
“You know the black girls were being kind of difficult,” and I don’t
remember the details of what they would say but I know that there were
incidents like this when they would come home – and they were pretty little
at the time – you know I’m talking about between Kindergarten and maybe the
first couple of years at Washington School – and those experiences were
really good for our family because what they did is let us have what we
thought of as teachable moments in which we could talk about differences
between kids and their communication styles and separate out questions about
race and not make them be so scary and not let them develop stereotypes that
would account for – well why some kid was being mean or another kid was
being nice. And so I think they grew up then in a pretty short amount of
time having friends that were black, white, not well off, well off – it
didn’t really – it became easier for them. So, retrospectively I think that
in terms of my own kids’ experiences in the world, it was good for them. I
can’t say how good it was for the other kids but I know that – I think I can
see in both in my kids – in my kids’ social attitudes and understandings of
the world that they seemed to be pretty easy with cross-race, cross-class
kinds of life experiences and I think that being at Washington School had a
lot to do with that.
TIERA: Did your children have any – you answered that. How did you feel
about your children being taught by African American teachers?
MR. RAPPAPORT: Well, here’s one of the ironies of the experience. There
weren’t very many African American teachers, which looking back on it seems
surprising. In fact, when I agreed to come be interviewed, I was trying to
remember if I was remembering it wrong. So I called my older daughter up in
Mundelein, which is just one of the suburbs of Chicago – northwestern suburb
of Chicago, and I said, I asked her, “Hey back in elementary school, tell me
about – were there African American teachers?” And she went down the list of
teachers she had and she said she never had an African American teacher. The
principal was African American even after Mrs. Wesley left Mrs. Suggs took
over and she became the principal during the time that both of my kids were
there. My younger daughter said that there was an African American
Kindergarten teacher and I knew here – Mrs. Sessions was her name and we got
to know here but – actually my daughter never had her. Some friends of mine
did have her in class and she had a great reputation for being a wonderful
teacher. But, I guess so – ironically, although they had African American
peers, the staff did not – at that time at least – have many African
American members. Which I suppose tells you something else about Champaign
Public Schools.
KIMBERLIE: What does it tell? What do you think it tells?
MR. RAPPAPORT: Well, I think that historically the Champaign Public Schools
have been quite remised in attending to the African American community. The
fact that they have never really developed African American staff in any
large numbers, that they weren’t concerned about the fact that African
American kids were not being taught by African American teachers at the time
that they started to integrate. Now of course there was a period of time,
ironically, prior to integration, when – I understand although I didn’t
experience it – that the schools that were in north Champaign had African
American staff members in larger number. I’m taking that on faith, I don’t
know that personally. And one of the things you’ll see is that at the point
at which Champaign Schools decided to integrate, which is – sounds like a
noble idea – and certainly as I said was a good experience for my kids – at
that time they also started to – they didn’t think, other than Washington
School, that integration meant that the white community kids should be
bussed to the African American neighborhood schools. In fact, what they did
was close many of the schools in north Champaign. A lot of them had been
neglected for years so the buildings were run down, they didn’t fix them up,
they sold some of them, some of them got turned into apartment buildings,
some of them got sold to private schools – um…so that presently, the number
of schools in the traditional African American community is quite small. And
you know – so – I think that that social policy represented a marked
disregard for the well being of African American students and it’s only now,
under court order that it’s actually being attended to at all.
TIERA: How did parents of other children from other – hold on. How did
parents of children from other races treat you?
MR. RAPPAPORT: My memory is that we got along fine with the other parents.
We would – Washington School would have sort of events for students and
parents and it was all pretty friendly. I think people got along ok. I don’t
remember any serious difficulties among the families who were going to
school there at the time. Here you might want to check my figures on this
but my recollection is that only about 20% of the students at Washington at
that time were African American and a lot of those kids – maybe the 20% were
from the neighborhood and there was a larger number of total African
American kids but a lot of the African American kids as I say were from
middle class families and people we would have interactions with normally in
our every day life – I don’t remember – we did know some of the kids who
were from the neighborhood and when we had – as I said my wife really liked
kids so we would often have school parties at our house and that sort of
thing so often kids from all over the city who had gone to the school would
come over to our house and – but it was for those formal events – I don’t
remember – we didn’t have a lot of really informal relationships. Usually
through your kids you meet family members that you wouldn’t necessarily
interact with every day and so we did some of that – and I think all that
was good. It was fun and the kids seemed to get along ok and we got along ok
with the people - although none of them were really close friends.
KIMBERLIE: I’m going to interject. Could you tell, Julian, Tiera a little
bit about Mrs. Wesley and the recruiting efforts in the neighborhood and
things like that?
MR. RAPPAPORT: Sure, um…now and some of this is things that I only learned
in retrospect so I didn’t – wasn’t really fully aware of it at the time that
we were sending our kids there, but um…I think one of the reasons – my sense
is that what happened was when they designed Washington School as a magnet
school, they must have thought that they needed to have um – I don’t know
how they set the numbers but I think they didn’t want it to be over
represented with neighborhood and they wanted to have some balance. My
impression now in retrospect is they wanted to actually have more white kids
than African American kids, because that’s certainly the way it came out.
The way this transpired is that in order – now of course they couldn’t say –
you couldn’t – you would not have been able to sort of say that, “We’re
going to assign people based on race,” but I think the way they did this is
you had to apply to get into Washington School. So as I said earlier, we had
to put our kids names on a list and then if you didn’t – so the default or
expected option for going to school would be that you would go to your
neighborhood school – except Washington School. So Washington School was
declared not a neighborhood school. So anybody who wanted to go there,
including neighborhood kids, would have to apply to go there. I – it’s not
clear to me how many neighborhood kids or neighborhood families understood
this and not very many neighborhood families would sign their kids up to go
to Washington School. I think, not realizing that they had to sign up to go
there, and plus Champaign was already bussing large numbers of African
American kids to other schools so they thought that they would just get
bussed to whatever school they were assigned. We know that most people like
their kids to go to neighborhood schools so I’m pretty sure there would have
been interest in it, however, because they hadn’t signed up they often
didn’t have enough African American kids going to the school. So people like
Mrs. Wesley and other staff members would actually have to go out into the
neighborhood and recruit kids to sign up to come to Washington School. I
don’t really fully understand – you might be able to get some – it’d be
interesting to hear what people who were actually doing it were saying about
it but it was definitely under-attended by neighborhood kids and they had to
make some effort to get neighborhood kids to go there.
TIERA: How did desegregation affect your neighborhood?
MR. RAPPAPORT: My neighborhood? The one I lived in?
TIERA: Yes.
MR. RAPPAPORT: How did desegregation affect it? You mean – you talking about
school desegregation or?
KIMBERLIE: Was your neighborhood affected by it – did kids in your
neighborhood change the way they went to school?
MR. RAPPAPORT: Mmm…not very many. Um, my neighborhood itself was, I would
say, minimally integrated. It was as I said right near South Side School so
you know, do you know who Vern Barkstall was? He was the director of the
Urban League for many years and he lived about a block and a half from us
and my daughter – I always forget which daughter it was – I think it was my
older daughter who was friends with his daughter, and they lived in the
neighborhood. The thing that – I don’t think there were very many kids
picked up. I’m trying to remember how many kids got picked up at South Side
to get bussed to Washington – not very many. I don’t know where the other
kids went to school, actually, now that I think about it because at that
time they had temporarily closed and then only later reopened South Side
School, so some of them were being bussed to other places. But I think at
that time they were pretty much being assigned, unless you signed up fro
Washington – being assigned in whatever way the school district dealt with
their attempt to integrate. So, what I do remember is later – probably by
the time my older daughter was going to Washington and South Side was
reopened, when I would take her to the bus the bus would drop off African
American kids and I remember them as very little kids getting off in this
neighborhood where they didn’t know anybody and I often felt that it seemed
like it would be difficult – a lot of their parents didn’t have
transportation or were working during the day and it seemed like they were
kind of being left in this neighborhood where they didn’t know anybody. I
remember feeling uncomfortable for them at the time. But my neighborhood
itself had a – it was a neighborhood that had a fair variety of people
living in it. There were apartment buildings there as well as single-family
homes so – although it was still predominantly a white neighborhood. The
public library was about two blocks away from where we were so the kids
could walk down to that neighborhood – to the public library and there there
were lots of kids from all over the city who often hung out at the library –
certainly by the time they were in junior high school – or I guess they call
it middle school now.
TIERA: What were some of the school board’s expectations of the schools?
MR. RAPPAPORT: Of Washington School or of the schools more generally?
TIERA: Um…I guess more generally.
MR. RAPPAPORT: So, you want to know the school board’s expectations?
TIERA: Yeah.
MR. RAPPAPORT: I’m not sure what you’re asking me about here. My – what I
was trying to say earlier was that I thought the school board with respect
to race relations was pretty oblivious. I think they didn’t do a very good
job of keeping schools in the north part of the city, where most of the
African American families traditionally lived, open and viable. They over a
long period of time neglected the buildings. So I think that the school
board did not really attend to these until people like John Lee Johnson, who
is a local community organizer, started to bring a lot of issues to their
attention and then ultimately organized families to file legal complaints
with the Office of Civil Rights and the Department of Justice and eventually
the school board was forced into a consent decree. In order to avoid going
to court they agreed to engage more explicitly in issues of equity for
African American kids in the schools. But I think that was forced upon the
school board…and then of course there’s been some new people elected to the
school board and most recently they actually – with encouragement and
support from lots of community groups – ended up hiring a African American
superintendent who’s currently pretty attentive to these kinds of issues.
And while perhaps not perfect, I think in lots of ways we’re seeing some –
at least serious efforts to attend to the education of African American
kids. Although I think there’s a long way to go and there’s a whole culture
of schools to overcome. I do think that without the court intervention we’d
still be nowhere. Whether or not it turns out to be a good thing – that is
whether or not it turns out that the schools become better places for
African American kids remains to be seen. But at least there’s some
conscious effort being made at the present time and I think that goes
against the history of the public schools in Champaign. Historically we have
every reason to think that they would continue to – I don’t – I guess I
would call it soft racism, the kind where they don’t expect very much, don’t
put much effort into it – I don’t think there would – there was – been in
Champaign not a tremendous amount of the kind of overt, mean, obvious racism
but I think there’s a long history of ignoring and not caring so…whether or
not that can be changed – I don’t know. I’m going to be optimistic about the
possibilities.
TIERA: What did you think about the making of Washington school into a
magnet school? Was it good for the Unit 4 school system? What were the
benefits and what was the costs?
MR. RAPPAPORT: Well it’s always easier with hindsight to see things that
might have been better. I thought that at the time – and that’s why I sent
my kids there – I thought at the time, which was a time when people were
very hopeful about ideas for desegregation and people were willing to say,
“Well it shouldn’t just be African American kids that get bussed, but white
kids ought to get bus so that we can have desegregation,” at the time I
thought that it was a good thing to do. As I said earlier, it certain –
ironically, I think it maybe – well, it certainly did – I guess it’s not
ironic, I just wouldn’t – I think what I’d say is that it was good for my
children. I don’t know how much good it did for the education of African
American kids from the neighborhood. I’d have to look and see what happened
to them. Did they have successful academic careers? Since there weren’t,
collectively speaking, large numbers, it didn’t really change the school
district and the way the school district dealt with African American kids,
so in that sense it was not a big success. I don’t think desegregation
generally in Champaign schools was very successful for the – enhancing the
formal education of African American kids and the reason I say that is
because we can look at the record of how African American kids have done in
Champaign public schools and see that there’s a huge achievement gap. I
think that achievement gap is attributable to naďve – at best naďve
assumptions on the part of educators – that somehow just putting kids
together, blacks and whites in the same school, well then they’d get an
equal education. I think that the school district needs to attend more
specifically to the needs of African American children and to work very hard
against their, I guess I would say maybe even inadvertent expectations for
lesser performance. I think there’s a lot of implicit racism and negative
expectations that among teachers and staff members - that takes a lot of
concrete active work to overcome. So I don’t think that desegregation in and
of it self – that is putting black kids and white kids in the same building
necessarily achieves the ends of equality of outcome or equal education. I
think it takes a lot more conscious effort to overcome implicit as well as
explicit racism. And so, is it good? I think desegregation has – there’s
some ways in which it’s a very good social policy. I’ve been also convinced
that sometimes it’s good for kids to go to school in their own neighborhood
and get a lot of attention and have – I certainly think that there need to
be more African American teachers who know, understand, love and engage
African American kids. And that may be more important than having black kids
and white kids in the same building. But I don’t want to say that
desegregation is a bad thing, I just don’t think it’s enough. I think a lot
more is required.
TIERA: Were you involved with Project Promise at all? Was your department
involved at all?
MR. RAPPAPORT: Well since I don’t know what it is <laughs> maybe not. Tell
me what it is.
KIMBERLIE: I don’t think you were. It was where kids, before integration,
desegregation, some kids were tested by the university and then they were
bussed. They were trying to get high achieving white and black students to
go to a school before the desegregation plan.
MR. RAPPAPORT: No, that was probably prior to my kids actually being in the
school.
TIERA: What do you know about the university helping make Washington a
magnet school?
MR. RAPPAPORT: Well these are old memories <laughs> but I believe that the
dep – the people in education, in the College of Education here got grants
from places like the National Science Foundation in order to make it a kind
of experimental, exciting, learning environment. And there were people – I
believe Max Biberman, who was a person in Math Education, developed some of
his ideas around what was called the new math while he – at Washington
School. And so that - the university was involved maybe in the ways that you
think about people – you know when Uni High School was started here it was
because it was supposed to be an experimental learning environment in which
people could test out curriculum and develop new ideas and so on. I don’t
know if it – I don’t that it still carries on that mission – I won’t get off
on a subject of Uni High School and what it does and doesn’t do, but I think
at the time that Washington School was being developed as a magnet school,
it had some of those ideas behind it. That it would be experimental,
exciting, a relationship between the public schools and the university and
that was its appeal to both people in the College of Education and to
parents who thought it would be pretty exciting to have their kids go to a
school that had that kid of university connection.
TIERA: What do you – you were involved with sensitivity groups after the
riots at Centennial. What were those groups like?
MR. RAPPAPORT: Oh yeah…let’s see. I’m not sure I can date it now but it was
pretty soon after I arrived in Champaign, and I arrived in Champaign in the
Fall of 1968. I don’t remember exactly when the – I never actually thought
about them as riots but there was racial disruption and disagreements and so
on going on at Centennial in that time period and I was involved because –
well at that time this whole idea of sensitivity groups was that you could
get people together and have them understand one another by sitting around
and talking. And so we arranged some conversations that were between blacks
and whites and students and parents and staff members – and this was a long
time ago and I didn’t do it as research so I never really wrote anything
about it so I don’t have anything to go back and look at now. So what I’m
telling you is out of my memory…I remember at the time feeling like these
conversations were really fruitful for the people who were in them. That is,
you began to hear teachers and other staff members talking with high school
kids and with parents – and some community members, I’m not even sure they
were all parents – but people began to share ideas and they actually did
develop some common understandings. And the part of it that I thought was
unfortunate was that – and I wish I could tell you exactly what we had come
up with as plans about things we might do but there were a lot of ideas that
were developed by the groups. My role, and the role of some of the other
folks that I was working with, was to just moderate those groups. And so as
moderators we got to hear people talk and we encouraged them to talk to one
another and some of the ideas – I remember that there were some ideas that
the teachers and the parents and the kids wanted to try out. But as we began
to move from just talking about it to thinking about what actions might be
taken, the teachers and staff members all felt – I’ll say this nicely – I
think – well I’ll say it not so nicely – I think they felt that they had to
chicken out because it seemed dangerous. They felt like they couldn’t get
the staff – the administration to support them. I think at the time the
principal was viewed as someone who was pretty insensitive. I can’t speak
from personal experience of this principal or the administration at the time
– it just fits with my sense of what it was like in the Champaign schools at
that period of time, which I think there was a tremendous insensitivity to
the needs of the African American community. And so I felt like the teachers
who got themselves – and the staff members who were interested in doing
things to change the environment at Centennial really backed off because
they were afraid about their own jobs and they didn’t feel like they would
get good support from the administration. So in terms of any kind of action,
nothing really came of that even though there were, I thought, some pretty
good discussions going on. And I didn’t – I confess I did not figure out at
the time, a way to pursue it any further as people began to feel that they
just couldn’t do anything.
KIMBERLIE: Do you have a follow-up to that? I do if you don’t. Can you think
of any actions – do you remember any actions that maybe they wanted to take
that weren’t taken?
MR. RAPPAPORT: That’s what I’m trying to remember now and you know – and –
you know – again this would be pretty vague because it’s now, what? 35 years
ago and I think that – what I want to say is that there was a lot of talk
about having a – creating opportunities where there would be more of what I
think of as democracy and action, where the students would actually begin to
have a say about the rules of the school and how things were carried out,
and that a lot of the teachers were sympathetic to that. And I’m talking now
primarily about African American kids having a say in that. And we just
never could figure out how to get – and they never could figure it out and
felt like to get it to the point where they would actually take some action
they were putting their own jobs at risk. People would say they weren’t
disciplined enough or they were being bullied or they – so it just never
really got off the ground. And I have to confess that I wasn’t all that good
at helping them figure out how to do it, either. So I don’t want to appear
like I was some sort of hero here, I was merely a moderator and what I
remember is that there was a good will by intention but nobody in the school
seemed able to figure out how to actually make it work.
TIERA: What about the boycotts in 1960’s of Grands and JC Penney’s. What do
you know of these? Were you involved in them at all?
MR. RAPPAPORT: Those were prior to my being here, in this. I didn’t – as I
recall that – am I right about that? I don’t know now because I know that
happened and – do you know what years that took place?
TIERA: It says on here in the 1960s.
KIMBERLIE: Do you remember Mrs. Slates was talking to you about that?
MR. RAPPAPORT: Yeah.
KIMBERLIE: It was some time in the 60s – it might have been before – just
before you got here.
MR. RAPPAPORT: It might have been before I got here. I got here – 68 was the
same year that the university did its – do you know about Project 500? In
which they decided they were gonna – the university was going to bring in
500 African American college students because they had hardly any African
American undergraduates at the U of I. And so that was the big event at the
time that I arrived but I don’t recall – and I’m thinking – and I know what
you’re talking about in those boycotts but I think it’s because I read about
em later on, rather than because I directly experienced them so I wont be a
very good source of information about that.
TIERA: Ok. Well I just want to say thank you for giving us your time to
interview you. That was nice, thank you.
MR. RAPPAPORT: Thanks for having me.
TIERA: You’re welcome.
END
|
