Darlene Quarles Robinson

I remember going to the guidance counselor to set up my schedule for the following year, and I don’t remember who she was that asked me about going to college.  And I said to her, I don’t think I can go to college because my parents can’t afford to send me to college.  So, the guidance counselor signed me up for a lot of bookkeeping, occupational type classes, and I remember that Miss Bell got my schedule and she looked at it, and she called me up to her and she said Darlene, why are you taking all of these classes? She said, you can go to college.  I said Miss Bell, my parents don’t have money to send me to college.  She said, Darlene, don’t you know you can get loans? You can get grants, scholarships.  So, she took me and my schedule back down to the guidance counselor and changed it.  So I became on that track of college-bound students.  I was already, what I feel, a little isolated from a lot of Black students because I was tracked into these classes in which I was a handful of people in the class.  So, once I got to Albemarle High School, I was really in classes where I was just maybe one of two or one of three students in that class.  The only class that I was in that had a lot of Black students, was when they put in the Black history class, and I took that.