MIDDLEBURY, Vt. – Four adults will gather at Middlebury College on October 26 for a conversation about their experiences when Jones County, North Carolina, integrated its public schools in 1968. At the event, “How I Shed My Skin: Fifty Years Later,” the group will share their recollections of their time as white and black students and former classmates.
“This timely and candid conversation will be unlike any event held on campus this year,” said Roberto Lint Sagarena, one of the event organizers and the director of Middlebury’s Anderson-Freeman Resource Center.
In the fall of 1968, Dorrine Rose, Fernanda Copeland, and Rose Strayhorn, three black girls, entered the all-white sixth grade classroom at Alex H. White Elementary School in Pollocksville, North Carolina. That village, like all the towns, hamlets, and cities in eastern North Carolina, remained a segregated enclave governed by the same Jim Crow laws that had been in place for generations. The legacy of slavery, civil war, and reconstruction provided the backdrop for the segregated social order.
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Rose, Copeland, and Strayhorn will participate in a conversation with Jim Grimsley, whose memoir, How I Shed My Skin: Unlearning the Racist Lessons of a Southern Childhood, tells the story of the three women and their impact on him, a white boy in that sixth-grade classroom who found himself confronted with his own ideas about race and difference by the presence of three black girls.
Grimsley spoke at Middlebury last year about his experience of school desegregation in the South. This year's event with Grimsley, Rose, Copeland, and Strayhorn is part of the College’s Critical Conversations series and is sponsored by the Alliance for an Inclusive Middlebury.
The discussion will take place on Thursday, October 26, at 7 p.m. in Wilson Hall in McCullough Student Center. It is free and open to the public. For more information, contact Michelle Davis at mjdavis@middlebury.edu.