The Measure of a One's Life
The measure of one's life is in his or her deeds. The life of Whittier Crocket Witherspoon has been remarkable in its scope of accomplishment and influence. He's been an educator, a school principal and teacher and a political leader who's met with presidents and the political elite of our country.
In 1987 Gov. Jim Hunt awarded him the Order of the Long Leaf Pine (North Carolina's highest civilian award) for a lifetime of service, and his house is a treasure trove of awards, mementos and photographs.
Yet, for all the awards, all the accolades, Witherspoon seems most proud of the lives he has touched and the children who have gone on to successful careers and lives.
"I am pleased to note that I have kids who have received their doctorates, and masters, and are nurses and teachers," he says. "A number are ministers. Many in this community."
He came to the Albemarle area in 1955 as the principal of what was then the Sawyers Creek School, the school for blacks in a segregated Camden County school system.
The U.S. Supreme Court had just ordered the desegregation of schools, and over the next 13 years, as the nation struggled with issues of racial hatred and division, the Marion Anderson School, as it was renamed in 1957, remained an island of calm in the storm.
Although they were turbulent times, Witherspoon did not feel complex answers were needed.
"I told (students) that when they stepped on that bus, they were mine," he says. "I told them they should love one another. I treated everybody the same. My school was run on love. L-O-V-E."
It is a philosophy that comes from the pulpit of his father, a Methodist minister who traveled "all over," in the words of Witherspoon. "I have looked up most of all to my father, and I have tried to follow in his footsteps," he says. "He attempted to train us (Witherspoon and his three brothers), and looking back over the years, I see that he did very well."
The lessons he learned were based on love and respect: to respect oneself, love others and love and respect this country.
Witherspoon served in the U.S. Army in the South Pacific during World War II, island hopping across forgotten atolls and nameless islands.
The theology which appears in the Christian allusions in Beowulf is very vague and indefinete: there is no mention of Christ, the saints, miracles, Mary His Mother, specific doctrines of the church, martyrs of the church, the New Tes...
In 1954, The Brown vs. The Board of Education decision made segregation in schools illegal. New York City’s attempt to integrate the schools was unsuccessful, leaving them more segregated than before.(Podair 30) By 1966, New York City’s black communities were unhappy with the Board of Education’s control of their school districts because of its repeated unsuccessful attempts at integration. Many white groups, like the Parents and Taxpayers Organization, were also frustrated with the current system and called for “The Neighborhood School.” It was their discontent that motivated the community control of the Ocean Hill Brownsville school district. Because of the city’s civil rights movement and their support from many influential people and groups, the district was granted control .(Podair 82)
In May of 1954, the landmark Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court case had declared the racial segregation of American public schools unconstitutional. The Supreme Court had called for the integration of schools, so that students of any race could attend any school without the concern of the “white-only” labels. The public school system of Little Rock, Arkansas agreed to comply with this new desegregated system, and by a year had a plan to integrate the students within all the public schools of Little Rock. By 1957, nine students had been selected by the Nation Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), chosen according to their outstanding grades and excellent attendance, and had been enrolled in the now-integrated Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. But, the Little Rock Nine, consisting of Jefferson Thomas, Thelma Mothershed, Carlotta Walls LaNier, Elizabeth Eckford, Minnijean Brown, Ernest Green, Melba Pattillo Beals, Gloria Ray Karlmark, and Terrence Roberts, faced the angered, white segregationist students and adults upon their enrollment at Central High School. Thus began the true test; that of bravery of the students and that of the ethics of the white community.
“School can be a tremendously disorienting place… You’ll also be thrown in with all kind of kids from all kind of backgrounds, and that can be unsettling… You’ll see a handful of students far excel you in courses that sound exotic and that are only in the curriculum of the elite: French, physics, trigonometry. And all this is happening while you’re trying to shape an identity; your body is changing, and your emotions are running wild.” (Rose 28)
Born in Virginia, to mother Martha Puller and father Matthew Puller, he grew to become a well recognized marine globally (Russell & Cohn, 2012). His father’s dead while he was 10 years did not stop him to achieve a high point career; in fact, his childhood lifestyle of listening to war stories...
The case started with a third-grader named Linda Brown. She was a black girl who lived just seen blocks away from an elementary school for white children. Despite living so close to that particular school, Linda had to walk more than a mile, and through a dangerous railroad switchyard, to get to the black elementary school in which she was enrolled. Oliver Brown, Linda's father tried to get Linda switched to the white school, but the principal of that school refuse to enroll her. After being told that his daughter could not attend the school that was closer to their home and that would be safer for Linda to get to and from, Mr. Brown went to the NAACP for help, and as it turned out, the NAACP had been looking for a case with strong enough merits that it could challenge the issue of segregation in pubic schools. The NAACP found other parents to join the suit and it then filed an injunction seeking to end segregation in the public schools in Kansas (Knappman, 1994, pg 466).
1950-1960 1950: The NAACP decides to make its legal strategy a full-scale attack on educational segregation. 1954: First White Citizens Council meeting is held in Mississippi. 1954: School year begins with the integration of 150 formerly segregated school districts in eight states; many other school districts remain segregated.
The Supreme Court is perhaps most well known for the Brown vs. Board of Education decision in 1954. By declaring that segregation in schools was unconstitutional, Kevern Verney says a ‘direct reversal of the Plessy … ruling’1 58 years earlier was affected. It was Plessy which gave southern states the authority to continue persecuting African-Americans for the next sixty years. The first positive aspect of Brown was was the actual integration of white and black students in schools. Unfortunately, this was not carried out to a suitable degree, with many local authorities feeling no obligation to change the status quo. The Supreme Court did issue a second ruling, the so called Brown 2, in 1955. This forwarded the idea that integration should proceed 'with all deliberate speed', but James T. Patterson tells us even by 1964 ‘only an estimated 1.2% of black children ... attended public schools with white children’2. This demonstrates that, although the Supreme Court was working for Civil Rights, it was still unable to force change. Rathbone agrees, saying the Supreme Court ‘did not do enough to ensure compliance’3. However, Patterson goes on to say that ‘the case did have some impact’4. He explains how the ruling, although often ignored, acted ‘relatively quickly in most of the boarder s...
ultimately the person on whom a child is raised to depend, so it is not
‘Das Leben der Anderen’ (The Lives of Others) is a striking example of how a director can convey narrative links within a film by employing various styles and film techniques. The Lives of Others relies upon these visual means to assist with the telling of the story as much as it relies upon the script. In this selected sequence of the film, several narrative links are drawn here to form the conclusion of ‘Operation Lazlo’. These narrative links are further cemented by Donnersmarck’s use of various lighting styles, diegtic and non-diegtic sound, revealing camera shots and intricate mise-en-scene.
The United States continued to assimilate and provide greater opportunities for African-Americans, on May 17, 1954, the United States Supreme Court handed down its decision regarding the case called Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, in which the plaintiffs charged that the education of black children in separate public schools from their white counterparts was unconstitutional. The opinion of the Court stated that the "segregation of white and colored children in public schools has a detrimental effect upon the colored children”. This historic discission further inflamed the racest in the south, and many ...
In the 1954 court ruling of Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court ruled that segregation of schools was unconstitutional and violated the Fourteenth Amendment (Justia, n.d.). During the discussion, the separate but equal ruling in 1896 from Plessy v. Ferguson was found to cause black students to feel inferior because white schools were the superior of the two. Furthermore, the ruling states that black students missed out on opportunities that could be provided under a system of desegregation (Justia, n.d.). So the process of classification and how to balance schools according to race began to take place.
gods, each given a personality and purpose. And was the subject of many myths and legends that would be told for many generations to come. They were to become the basis for a religion that would last for hundreds of years and would yield thousands of followers to believe in the made stories of these enchanted people or gods as they were called.
“Stuff they had in seventh grade and eighth grades, we were just getting as junior and seniors in black school” Teachers would either not have the materials to be able to teach or intentionally teach slow so the African American kids would have a more difficult time in life. At this time in the south schools were kept separate. Schools up north had already integrated prior because racism was not as much a problem as it was in the south. Little Rock was one of the first schools in Alabama to integrate black and whites into the same school. Little Rock admitted nine African American students giving it the name “The Little Rock Nine”. After the federal law was passed by the supreme court in 1964 allowing black students to go to the school of their choice, nothing happened for three long years. The governor of Alabama (Orval Faubus) employed the national guard to blockade the school only admitted white students. This went on until President Eisenhower deployed the 101st Airborne Division. The national guard backed off and the nine students would attend school. In the beginning it was smooth sailing. People for the most part would not pick on the blacks. This was only because an armed guard would accompany them to and from classes. As time went on there would be less and less security. People would begin to pick on the kid. Most of the time it was
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