Time Changes Things

- this photograph was taken from an upper corner on the town park but when I was young it was almost exactly where the North East colored (as they talked then) school was located - I must have been twelve years old, give or take, when it first registered on me that the black kids had to go to this ramshackle wooden building with no electricity, no plumbing and thus no toilets, no furnace just a big cast iron wood stove and although my own home was no better,  the brick and mortar school that I attended stood in sharp contrast to how the negro (another back then polite phrase to talk about those so excluded from normal society) in our town - and by extension the county - was delegated to crumbs thrown down from our white society and my mind slowly awakened to awareness of how unjust our society was.  But amazingly some 16 to 20 years later the county quietly, without federal prodding or fanfare, built a large modern school in Elkton (where the school administration is now housed) and a few short years later, and again without fuss or fanfare - a bit of grumbling from people like my father to be sure but nothing overt - all the county schools were desegregated.