Bernadette Whitsett Hammond

There were some positive and negative experiences there.  I think they could have been worse.  There were students who paved the way for us initially, like the [Martins?], and even Garwin, the Pages, people who had gone there and kind of gotten the ball rolling in terms of integration and that Black and white students would be attending school together.  So, there was the understanding.  Still, you did have people who were resistant to that.  I had teachers who -- I look back on it now.  I would not have wanted to have had them because they were not fair, and, I mean, and they didn’t really make it -- it wasn’t something that they hid.  They were just openly discriminatory.  There were teachers who, on the other hand, that were not.  And, for Lane to be the size of the school that it was, it had very few African American teachers.  I just think about it, and I can hardly remember that many.  There just were not many Black teachers there during my time.