Taylors American radio

Chants from the Schoolyard

I started elementary school in 1963 in Asheville, North Carolina. It was segregated and many whites vocalized and put in to print that blacks had everything that they needed and could not understand why blacks wanted to go to school with white children.

The science labs, reading material, and audio-visual equipment as it was called at that time was greatly inferior. I saw what were called filmstrips at the "colored" elementary school that I attended. When integration took place in the mid 1960s, out of the blue, came science equipment and, as it was called back then, moving or motion films.

I remember vividly a chant that white students would sing when standing outside of Aycock Elementary School when black children from the Burton Street area of West Asheville began attending that school when integration was implemented. The words were:

Bonnie and Clyde
Were sitting by the river
Eating chocolate liver
Along came a nigger
And pushed them in the river
I'm grateful that I had a family and a community that stood fast and weathered the storm.

Travis McGahee
Antioch, CA

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I think this would be very scary and dangerouse to go to school if their was only a couple black kids at your school. And if they were always chanting mean racist comments about you even though you did nothing wrong. The only real options for a black person at school would be not to get an education or live through all the descrimination.