Word: taliaferro
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...father William, Jimmy's grandfather, was killed in 1903, 50 miles south of Plains in a fight with a man named Taliaferro (pronounced Tolliver): "My daddy went over to his place to argue with him about a little desk that he took off. They fought in his store with bottles. They had barrels of beer bottles. They stood there busting bottles over one another's head. My daddy got out and started home, going this-a-way; and Taliaferro got out and started his way, his home was out thataway. And Taliaferro run off out there about...
After four trials, Taliaferro was freed; and Nina Carter brought her children to Plains to be near her husband's brother there. Alton was 15, went to work in the store where he still works daily (then a general store), helped support his family on $25 a month, acquired the store in time, and saw Jimmy's father grow and pass him in success: "Everything Earl laid his hand down on, when he picked it up, there was three or four dollars. When he died he left about 4,000 acres of land and a heap of money...
Choice of Schools. After black parents filed suit in the U.S. district court charging that their children's rights were being violated, a three-judge panel placed the Taliaferro school system in federal receivership under Claude Purcell, the state superintendent of schools. To give blacks as wide a choice of schools as whites, Purcell demanded that schools in other Georgia counties take any of Taliaferro's blacks who applied; 42 blacks did transfer out and were accepted peacefully. Purcell also ordered the reopening and desegregation of Alexander Stephens. This done, the court took the school system...
...Although Taliaferro's two schools have been technically desegregated for a decade, not a single white has attended them since the court takeover. Nonetheless, they are still run by Lola Williams and an all-white school board. Taliaferro's white students have moved either to private academies (five have been set up since 1965), or to public schools outside the county. Some white families have moved out of the county, and Taliaferro's population (then 62%, now 64% black) has dropped from 3,300 in 1965 to 2,400 today...
...Taliaferro whites are still bitter about the federal receivership, claiming that the order destroyed the county's school system. Blacks are simply resigned. Says George Hughes, a Crawfordville black leader: "The courts did the only thing they could do. But you just can't force white students to go to the public schools...