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Dereke Clements says he felt special in
1968 when, as a fourth grader, he was chosen to leave
his all-black school and take a school bus with other
black children to the formerly all-white Lottie Switzer
School. But it wasn’t long before he realized that
desegregation was going to be harder than he expected.
Veronica Martin, a 9th grader at Champaign
Central High School and a peer educator
for The Youth Media Workshop |
Whereas teachers at Booker T. Washington School had
nurtured black children and looked out for them, white
teachers at Switzer talked harshly to black students.
“That was not a good feeling,” said Clements, now a
marketing director and music/concert producer in
Atlanta. “The white teachers had extremely low
expectations of black students.”
On the positive side, at Switzer the books were brand
new, the pencils and paper were plentiful, and the
playground equipment was abundant. Washington had had
hand-me-down books and few educational resources. “It
was like night and day,” he said. And eventually, the
move to desegregated schools was a positive one for him.
“It was a great transition in terms of my growth,
because it later gave me the feeling and the
understanding that people are all the same.”
Clements is one of 14 former and current Champaign
residents interviewed for a new radio documentary,
More Than a Bus Ride: Desegregating Champaign Schools,
produced by African-American girls at Franklin Middle
School as part of
The Youth Media Workshop, a
collaboration between WILL radio and Innovative Ed
Consulting, Inc., headed by Dr. Will Patterson.
This is the second year a group of girls from Franklin
has produced a radio program focusing on local
African-American life. This year a group of 12 Franklin
students, assisted by three peer educators from last
year’s project, created More Than a Bus Ride.
The Franklin students interviewed teachers, principals,
parents, students and members of the committee formed to
desegregate the schools in 1968. Interviewees talk about
who formed the desegregation plan, why many black
parents pushed hard for desegregation, how black
students were selected to be the first to go to formerly
white schools, and conflicts and friendships between
white and black students and teachers.
More Than a Bus Ride: Desegregating
Champaign Schools was made
possible, in part, by a grant from the Illinois
Humanities Council, the National Endowment for the
Humanities, the Illinois General Assembly and the Unit 4
School District.
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More Than a Bus Ride: Desegregating Champaign Schools