We were somewhat disappointed in what we heard from the Board of Education at that time. From the chairman of the Board, she could not understand why Blacks were trying to integrate the schools because they were paying such little county taxes.

At that time, she [May Russell] was the president of St. Mary's College. Her statement was that she couldn't understand why we would want to integrate the schools because at Carver we had the cutest little toilets of anybody in the county for Black students. And I was really surprised professionals would suggest that was the reason for not wanting to integrate the schools.

They are referring to over at Carver Heights you had enlisted men club. In fact you had a club where all Black military personnel congregated sometimes. After that they turned it over to St. Mary's County Public Schools. Now the government, when they constructed the building which was a recreation facility for enlisted personnel, they had small toilets for the children at the younger age . . .

The first student that entered this [Great Mills High] school was the Groves kid--two of them, brother and sister. And that was in the early '60s. And we only had two, at that time, to integrate the public school system in St. Mary's County. The Board of Education decided that we would integrate Great Mills High School but it was a volunteer situation. At that time, I entered my three younger kids, the youngest I had, in Lexington Park Elementary School. . . . the Board of Education did not integrate the transportation and the school system at the same time. Transportation was a segregated transportation system. I withdrew my children from Carver Elementary School because I wanted them to have an integrated education. It wasn't that the teachers were inferior, but I wanted them to know what Black and White was all about - an integrated education.

For Joanne [Groves] and her brother--it was like being on a foreign soil where someone else is speaking one language and they were speaking another. And even if they communicated, it wasn't a friendly welcome atmosphere at all. It was a scorn, a resentful attitude as if you had taken something from me. It was disgusting how they were treated here.

And let's not forget now, we had a problem getting Blacks to attend this so-called volunteer integrated system. Blacks were not climbing the fence to integrate by no means. We did not get integration until it was consider a forcible situation from the Board of Education. If you want to say Whites wanted to go to Carver and Blacks wanted to come to Great Mills, forget it. (chuckles) It wasn't like that. No one was climbing the fence to go one way or the other. It was completely satisfied, status quo. And that's what we lived with in St. Mary's County for some time well into the '60s.