Word: taliaferro
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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...
...system could attend the school of his choice. But when 88 blacks said they wanted to transfer to Alexander Stephens, Williams and the all-white school board simply closed the school. They explained that all of Stephens' pupils had asked to transfer to schools in adjoining counties. Taliaferro school buses were then used to carry the whites to schools outside the county. When black students tried to board the buses, their way was blocked; in one demonstration, the Grand Dragon of Georgia's Ku Klux Klan attacked a black student who was trying to climb...
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...