With all the news of stupid school bureaucrats suspending kids for
having tiny toy knives at school, I think they need to learn some
common sense from the past.
I went to a high school where they integrated by simply dumping the
poor whites and poor blacks in the same school. We still had
segregation but it was economic segregation, not racial. My school
was 48% black and 52% white and 100% poor.
Starting even before 9th grade I always carried a pocket knife to
school and did so up till grad school at FSU in the mid 80s. I'd sit
near the front of class cuz my vision was bad and whenever I needed a
sharp pencil I'd pull out my knife and sharpen it right in front of
everyone, nobody ever mentioned it.
Most of us redneck kids carried guns in our cars (when we could beg
the car from our parents). We'd go out in the woods after school and
shoot cans and I assume the black kids did too. Nobody ever mentioned
the guns and no guns were ever stolen from cars.
With this kind of racial mix, if a fight broke out among kids, it had
a 50% chance of being inter-racial but we never considered them to be
racial. Only fight I got into in high school was with 2 black kids but
nobody mentioned race.
We never seemed to have serious racial problems and I think it was
because both poor blacks and poor whites knew we were despised by the
rich so we had a common dislike for the rich (actually not rich, just
upper class). We'd socialize with each other at school some but after
school, they went to their home areas and we went to ours, friendships
did not last that way. Kinda unfortunate cuz I'd like to know where
some of my friends are.
Administrators then either had their hands full with problems that I
did not see or they had more sense than to worry about toy knives.
Somehow school personnel are better educated today but have far less
wisdom.