High Point, by the way, is just a few miles from Greensboro, where in 1960, there were black kids who sat in at a Woolworths, a fact I didn't learn until my 20s, when my boss, Chris Kennedy (RFK's son) took a group of coworkers to that location to tell them the story. I was thunderstruck.
Parker's widow's memoir is a scatterbrained peek into Parker's origin stories, but it reads more like legend and myth than details about his thoughts and words. There's no direct quotes from the man. Just random memories about Parker finding lost paperwork and praising god for the miracle of it.
The standout chapter, though, was a rambling incoherent mess centered on Dr. Parker's tenure teaching education at Winston-Salem State University. His widow claims that he was so beloved there, that he garnered the nickname, "Color-blind Clyde."
I contacted the archivist at the uni to request newspapers and yearbooks, and any other resources. I got them yesterday, and it's awkward to determine if he taught alongside other white professors judging from grainy black and white images.
So my reaction was to think, "Well, maybe Dr. Parker was truly colorblind." Then I thought, wait, he was a professor of education. He taught future teachers. If he truly was colorblind, why did he not emphasize hiring the very students he taught to teach kids at Wesleyan Christian Academy?
The answer seems clear to me. I can count on one hand five black students at Wesleyan during my 12 years there. Only one of them graduated (I think). Weighing in my parents' and grandparents' racist statements and actions, teachers who were full on white supremacists,
... now I know for a fact that my school and upbringing were centered on a purposed racist memetic discipline. Then teacher Terry Moffitt taught us that desegregation was not Christian. Brown vs. Board was an atrocity to be turned over. He also taught that school vouchers would usher in secularism..
... and humanism into Wesleyan, so at the time, he and our white parents were against vouchers. Things have changed. The crackers of the south LOVE vouchers, because they can get welfare checks to send their white kids to segregation academies. At the time, it was a badge of honor to not only ...
fork out tuition for your white kids, but it was known that you were contributing tax revenue to public schools. Double the tuition. What a racket. So I'm changing the lyrics of Ben Folds Five song, Redneck Past, to "I'm finding a hundred ways to reconcile my racist past."
youtu.be/Y85cWXnLnds
#wesleyanchristianacademy, #segregationacademy #confederacy #history #race #racism, #whitesupremacy #winstonsalemstateuniversity #blackcolleges #blackuniversities