Every ethnic group has a mythology... Until 'Roots'... there was nothing in the popular culture to refute the paragraph in elementary school history class that said, 'Slaves picked the cotton, were happy and life wasn't so bad.'
It's very hard to be a kid, especially in a predominantly white school or white town where other people want to police your body and hair.
I wrote my first report about Madam Walker when I was a senior in high school in 1970.
There are schools that have rules against afro puffs. They say it's distracting. But nobody is saying that about a little girl who has ponytails.
She used her wealth and philanthropy to contribute to Black schools and colleges, she gave the largest gift the NAACP had ever received to it's anti-lynching fund... Madam Walker's life was one of transformation and re-invention.
I was never really good in school.
My children went to Bethesda Elementary School. I wouldn't do anything to endanger the safety of Bethesda.
Brain power improves by brain use, just as our bodily strength grows with exercise. And there is no doubt that a large proportion of the female population, from school days to late middle age, now have very complicated lives indeed.
I was in high school when Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru unfurled India's flag in New Delhi.
I developed a mania for Fitzgerald - by the time I'd graduated from high school I'd read everything he'd written. I started with 'The Great Gatsby' and moved on to 'Tender Is the Night,' which just swept me away. Then I read 'This Side of Paradise,' his novel about Princeton - I literally slept with that book under my pillow for two years.
