Lloyd Snook

At Lane at that time, if you were on the football team, you were a step above everybody else.  And so the people who did well, Kent was one, obviously.  Robert King was another, simply by that additional cache.  There was also the place where, and I was just looking back through old Chains Yearbook last night, the place where it mattered the most, it seemed was in who got to be a cheerleader.  It was a big deal my second year there, which of course would have been the second year of meaningful integration, when we had one Black cheerleader.  And then by our senior year, the homecoming queen was Cheryl Williams, Black.  But that was largely because the selections for these things were happening by teachers, not by students.  Because the teachers understood, the administration at that point understood the need to move faster than the student body as a whole was willing to move.  One of the things that changed in that respect was when we got a new principal the second year of integration.  That was Jack Huegle.  And Jack was very much concerned about the racial divide and trying to give students a chance to work things out.  And one of the ways they were doing that was, frankly, they took away some of the power to be as overtly racist as the students had been expressing to that point.  Because if you look at the majority vote of most of the people who did anything, most of the students who would vote in things like, who would you want to be the homecoming queen or whatever, most of them were white.  Most of them were very white.  And the way the system worked, there would not have been a possibility of somebody like Cheryl being the homecoming queen.