World News: Lessons about racism

Thursday, October 27

1970 Syosset (N.Y.) High School yearbook photos of Jill Lawrence, left, and Pam Gipson.

Reconnecting with Pam: Her story shows racist history is still with us

Today's newsletter focuses on a history lesson we can't ignore.

More than 50 years ago in Mississippi, a Black teenager named Pamela Gipson decided to spend her junior and senior years at a blindingly white high school on Long Island in New York. She was 15 years old, and she missed home so much that sometimes, she says, "I would walk down to the street and through the woods to see a major highway, just to see Black people driving."

What on earth led her to leave everything and everyone she knew at that age?

The simple answer is that her parents wanted her to have an excellent education and a limitless future. She wanted all that, too. Syosset High was an exceptional school with far more resources than her segregated high school in Jackson. "The whole idea was to broaden my horizons, to better myself, to have a better opportunity," she says.

Pamela Gipson dressed as a gift coming out of a box at a party the Perlsteins hosted for her in 1968 shortly after she arrived in Syosset.

Family photo

There were good high schools closer to home, and a few Black students were starting to attend white schools in Jackson. But "back then, there were all kinds of dangers for integration in schools," Pam says. Rather than subject her and themselves to those fears, her parents agreed to the safer alternative: Going North. "My daddy told me years later that my mother cried every day," Pam says.

I was one of her classmates, and I just learned all of that this year. Read more...

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