HuffPost: 'Her Teacher Was A Klansman,' Two Sisters On the Death of Nolan Wells
A story about that one time in St. Louis when my sister found out her teacher was a Klansman. Now live on HuffPost.
When I first approached my little sister Deidre about us writing a story together about race in schools for HuffPost Black Voices, we were talking about the tragedy of Nolan Wells, a Black teen found dead on a sandbar in Mississippi after spending the Fourth of July holiday with a gaggle of young white people he thought were his friends.
As Deidre remembered how our mother wouldn't let her go over to most of her white peers' homes growing up, she told me something she had never told anyone.
One of her fifth-grade teachers was a Klansman.
From HuffPost:
She was standing in line in the hallway, waiting to enter her next class, when she overheard her social studies teacher talking to her English teacher about how he had a Ku Klux Klan meeting he was excited to attend that week.
The English teacher just stared at him. Then they both noticed Deidre’s eyes watching them. She had overheard something she knew she wasn’t supposed to hear. The teachers looked at each other and remained quiet, as she eventually filed into the classroom with the other students. Deidre had always found the social studies teacher odd, as he was only nice to the white students in his class while he rarely interacted with the three Black students. She often felt as if he didn’t want them there.
And now she knew why.
I was shocked, but not surprised, as our region was known for Klan activity, especially in nearby Southern Illinois where we would both live during college years later. (For those who keep acting like what happened to Nolan was a Mississippi thing, they must have never visited Missouri. Or any state within the continental United States. America has a problem, indeed.) My sister admitted she didn't tell anyone what she overheard, not even me, until that day we were chatting about Wells.
But I understood her silence.
We went to some weird schools where messed up things happened all the time, and the administrators knew and did nothing. Employing a Klansman who felt comfortable enough to discuss his Klan-tivities at his job, an elementary school, seemed about right.
Deidre and I both grew up in the North suburbs of St. Louis in the 1980s and '90s. Around 1990, our family moved from a mostly Black, working-class-to-middle-class suburb outside of Black Jack, Mo., to a more tony suburb outside of Florissant. It was a big deal for our parents, who came from the Jim Crow South, went to HBCUs, and made a way out of no way for themselves. As the daughter of sharecroppers and the son of a day laborer and domestic worker, they were able to build a brand-new home from the ground up and made everyone, from our grandmother to their friends, incredibly proud.
But our new address came with a price — racism.
Our education system is often set up to keep Black children “running.” Because it can’t be that Black schools are underfunded and neglected while white schools are a hotbed for racism and the annihilation of Black children’s self-image and self-esteem.
But it’s more than just the racist teacher who undermines your work and tries to give you an F. Or the self-hating Black school administrator who tells a Black kid they’re “dumb.”
Even if those things aren’t there, there’s a bigger problem — the children themselves. White kids who would tell you they were “beautiful” because they were white and how you couldn’t be because you weren’t. White kids whose parents resented you for even being in their home, even if you were one of their child’s few friends of any race. White boys who needed to tell every racist joke they knew whenever around a Black kid, while the other kids would stare.
