STARKVILLE — Starkville’s school integration nearly 50 years ago didn’t see the same level of violence and conflict as some in the South. But Ann Rice still feels the scars of that time.
She was one of dozens of guests at a documentary showing and panel discussion hosted by the Starkville-Oktibbeha County Public Library Monday. Originally a student of the all-Black Maben High School, Rice was part of the first integrated class to graduate from Starkville High. She said, however, that the transition was marred by her old school being burned to the ground the year integration went into effect.
“I heard all the insults about the county and how we couldn’t go to the city school,” she said. “To this day, in my horror, I cannot support the city school. It was so brutal. It was like we were nothing. We were just children. … I can’t even begin to describe the burden that a lot of us still bear. We don’t talk about it much. But it’s there.”
Rice, and others, shared their lived experiences from Starkville’s desegregation during a panel discussion and screening of “Mississippi Turning: The Pivotal Role of School Desegregation in a Southern Town.” The event was held in memory of Chris Taylor, a founding member of the Unity Park Committee who passed away in 2024.
The documentary was made in the 10th grade by Starkville High documentarian Walt Giesen. The film went on to place eighth nationally in the Washington, D.C.’s National History Day 2024 film competition.
It outlines how after federal courts ordered Mississippi’s school desegregation in 1970, the community took one vote on how to go about it, redistributed teachers by lottery, and proceeded to teach Black and white students together without any major violence. But it also challenged the narrative of easy integration in Starkville’s past and present.
Giesen, now a junior at Mississippi School for Mathematics and Science, was one of three featured during the event’s panel. He was joined by Starkville resident and chair for the Mississippi University for Women department of education Bob Fuller and Ward 7 Alderman Henry Vaughn.
“There are still kids in this community that don’t know people different from them,” Fuller said. “In 1970 we integrated, but we didn’t fully integrate until 2015 (when city schools) consolidated with the county schools and brought everybody into town. And we’re still not totally desegregated. Until we are, those fears of the unknown will be hurting our community.”
But with more than a hundred people in attendance, the open question section of the discussion quickly turned into a chance for the dozens of guests who had actually lived through segregation to share a more personal history of Starkville’s integration.
Giesen’s documentary notes that students could voluntarily switch schools before the integration order, but only around 3% of the Black students did, with no white students joining them.
Charles Ware, who graduated from Henderson High School in 1967, recounted that five young Black men who transferred to SHS managed to finish the year. But the school forced them to attend summer school so they couldn’t walk down the graduation aisle with the white students, he said. One of those was Harold Williams, who went on to become the city’s first Black alderman.
“They completed the year, but they didn’t march,” Ware said. “… Some of those kids were very bitter.”
Starkville stopped offering extracurricular activities during integration, ostensibly to avoid tension, but maybe also to prevent racial mixing, Vaughn said. But canceling football was out of the question, he said, and the Black and white football teams merged the summer before integrated education started.
Vaughn remembered how their cooperation seemed to set the stage for a peaceful integration.
“The football team really set the whole tone for Starkville,” he said. “When school started in the fall, they saw how well we got along and that really helped us all to move forward. There were also biracial student committees that met quite often to prepare for the change.”
Vaughn and Fuller remained optimistic that Starkville would continue its path toward still-greater racial equality, as long as adults don’t get in the way of their children’s better instincts.
“Kids do not look at color,” Vaughn said. “Kids just look at kids and go off to play. … (Integration) took a long time to come, and it’s still going on. We’re still trying to tell kids who to be their friends, and that’s not right for humanity. That’s not right in the sight of God. And that’s why we keep struggling, because we’re not doing what we’re supposed to – letting kids be kids.”
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