Free My Mother the Cheerleader by Robert Sharenow Page A

probablywouldn’t sign him anyway. The racism of the Red Sox management was a boon to New York Giants fans like me, but a disgrace to baseball.
    My heart sank. M. I. Miller was a Giants fan. Morgan did not work for the FBI. He was one of them. Worse still, he wasn’t just one of them: He was an editor, a person of authority on the Daily Worker .
    Some tiny alarm bell went off in my head, telling me that I should go to William Frantz Elementary School right away. At the Citizens’ Council meetings the speakers blamed the Communists for inciting the Negroes. Would I find Morgan holding a sign or passing out pamphlets or just generally inciting civil unrest? I stuffed everything back into the bag and ran to find out.

CHAPTER 13
    I t’s important to remember that the Cheerleaders weren’t some crazy fringe group. Literally everyone I knew supported segregation. Nearly every elected official in the state of Louisiana had marshaled all available power to block integration. In the months leading up to the beginning of the school year, the state legislature had passed more than two dozen new anti-integration laws. Governor Jimmie H. Davis himself swore he’d go to jail before he’d let Negro kids into a white school.
    To my mind it seemed as if the only white person in the entire state of Louisiana who supported schoolintegration was U.S. District Court Judge J. Skelly Wright. I heard Judge Wright called every nasty name in the book, from “nigger lover” to “Communist spy” to plain old “nut job.” Kids in the neighborhood referred to him as “Go-to-Helly Wright” or “Old Smelly Skelly” or simply “Judge Skelly Wrong.” Whatever he was, Judge Wright seemed to be determined as a mule to let school integration proceed.
    Since every single white parent had pulled their children out of my school, Ruby Bridges was the sole student in the building at the beginning. Eventually a few white parents broke the boycott, but in those first few months it was never more than a handful. And no one ever dared to join Ruby Bridges’s class. She was taught by a single teacher all by herself for the entire year. None of the regular teachers at Frantz would go near her, so Ruby was assigned to someone new to the school system who was an outsider. Rumor had it that the teacher herself was a Northern agitator, specifically planted by the N.A.A.C.P. I heard some of the ladies gossip that this teacher waseverything from a Communist to a beatnik to a nymphomaniac who specifically liked to have sexual relations with black men.
    Since November, big crowds had gathered in front of the building two times a day every week-day—once in the morning when school began and once in the afternoon when school let out. Typically, the crowd in front of the school consisted of the following groups in varying numbers.
    Â 
    The Cheerleaders
    Rednecks and good old boys (like Royce Burke)
    Local police officers
    FBI agents
    Journalists
    High school boys
    Random spectators
    Neighborhood kids
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    I rode my bike down North Galvez, and the crowd grew thicker and thicker as I neared the school. I arrived on the scene just before eight thirty A.M . and stowed my bike between two parked cars near the corner of Alvar Street. I scanned the crowd and breathed a small sigh of relief when I didn’t spot Morgan or his Chevy Bel Air anywhere in the vicinity. I passed along the fringes of the crowd, careful to go unnoticed.
    Right away I could tell that the CBS television crew had not shown up, because my mother stood toward the back of the group of Cheerleaders, smoking a cigarette with her friend Nitty Babcock. Approximately thirty ladies gathered that day, and no one jockeyed to be at the front of the pack.
    Royce Burke and a few of his friends leaned against a pickup truck nearby, eyeballing everything that went on. There was a tremendous amount of eyeballing going on at all times. Whenever an