When one thinks of the civil rights movement, the first thoughts are often of events that took place south of the Mason-Dixon line. Images of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., marches, boycotts, and desegregation instantly pop into one 's head. Though the north was a much more welcoming environment for African Americans, it still had its fair share of inequality to balance . One place this struggle played out was Proviso East High School, located in a suburb of Chicago, Illinois called Maywood. My family is from Chicago. My father Jim Anderson and my aunt, Francine Hilb, both attended Proviso East in Maywood in 1968. James was a sophomore at Proviso, while Francine was a junior. During this year, Proviso East High School was caught up in the racial …show more content…
When I asked them if their experiences at Proviso East changed the way they viewed other races of people, my father offered some insight into how he viewed the race struggle of the civil rights movement. He said in the moment it affected him, but many of our experiences regardless of what they are in high school do profoundly affect us, but I had a lot of friends of different color.” He told a story his father told him. “ Once my father had gotten a flat tire on Lake Shore Drive. It was a very busy highway type road, with no room to pull off. People were speeding by, and with my mother in the car, he got worried. The only person to stop and help them was a black man. That story was what influenced my view of other races, more so than my high school.” When I asked if their experiences changed the way they viewed education, they both said no. “We had all sorts. There was even a guy who used to come to school on heroine, but all of the kids at my high school had every bit the same opportunity I did. We didn 't have separate teachers or classes, there was no busing and the school had been integrated a long time.” Although the civil rights struggle was different in the north from what was going on in the south at the same time, there were still racial tensions and inequalities occurring all