Personal Narrative: Amarillo High School

We lived in the North Heights area of Amarillo, across the train tracks and I guess we would considered urban. Growing up in the 60’s we had neighborhood schools, I attended kindergarten at Miss Rosenberg’s Kindergarten, we graduated with white caps and gowns and I was really happy. She was a black woman with a Jewish sounding name, who was our leader who taught us the basic of learning. I attended North Heights Elementary School beginning in first through sixth grade Our high school, Carver High School was forced to close its doors to integrate and become a junior high school by the order the president of the United States. As I mentioned we had teachers that taught us, because they were like us, we didn’t experience a great deal of discipline

That was the purest form of racism, however, I didn’t know it or call it what it was, I knew it didn’t feel good in my heart. I would not experience another black school teacher at Amarillo High, they stayed at Palo Duro. Our neighborhood was not diverse until a black man would show up with something akin to “poor white trash” and they would produce beautiful children, then we would be diverse. It was a commonly know that we as a black race would accept anyone into our culture, the one drop rule applied, if the father was black, so when a black man got a white woman, she was accepted. I always felt that it was unfair because a white man wouldn’t look at a black woman for nothing other than a sexual object. The adage “once you go black, you never go back” was a rule. We had a neighborhood store- Mr. Glenn’s. He was the only white grocer on our side of town, he would inflate the prices of his goods, however, we knew that he was a little shady, still we frequented the store until he closed and moved out of the community. We patronized Piggly Wiggly, Safeway or some other grocery chains out of our immediate surroundings. We would supplement our income by collecting S&H green stamps, Gold bond stamps, which were redeemable for home goods, or cash. My brothers and me collected aluminum beer cans to sell at the recycling site. Mama would get us up early on