Word: yazoo
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...desegregation bring a measure of integration. In Columbia, where whites outnumber blacks 3 to 1, high school students ignored eight pickets outside and sat down together in an assembly hall to cheer a black student leader who urged them to make their town "a lighthouse in Marion County." In Yazoo City, where the student population is almost evenly divided between whites and blacks, a majority of the whites showed up for registration and classes (see box opposite...
SQUATTING tiredly on the banks of the river from which it takes its name, Yazoo City is an arche typical Mississippi community. Dependent on the cotton crop, it is, like the rest of the state, a land of hill and Delta where traditions are respected and segregation is not just an institution but a way of life. In one important way, however, Yazoo City differs greatly from other communities in this bastion of the Old Confederacy: it has not only accept ed the inevitable and desegregated its schools, but has actually gone out of its way to make integration work...
...support the public schools rather than abandon them. School administrators worked through the Christmas holiday to shift classrooms and equipment, and persuaded all of the system's 186 teachers to stay on the job. Even stu dents joined in the effort to pre serve their schools. The Yazoo City high school newspaper, the Yazooan, called upon students to remain in school. ∙ Yazoo City's efforts have so far proved successful. As teach ers stood guard inside the doors and police cars passed by reg ularly to guard against violence, the city's six schools reopened last...
While a few adult whites gath ered to watch in tight-lipped silence, black children marched into once nearly all-white schools. Within an hour, Yazoo City's schools, though not their classrooms, were integrated. However, school officials, who had reas signed entire classes rather than in dividual students, promised to rectify this situation promptly. Total registration came to 3,150, only 650 less than the 3,800 students who were attending school when classes recessed for the Christmas holidays...
...Yazoo City youngsters, that education will inevitably be social as well as academic. Black and white youngsters at the Bettie E. Wool folk Elementary School were seen sliding together on a patch of playground ice. Black high school students casually joined their new classmates to integrate the Town and Country Kitchen, a previously all-white teenage hangout a block from the school...