An African American Remembers Growing Up in Segregated Louisiana

The Jim Crow system emerged during Reconstruction, when Southern legislatures controlled by whites adopted laws designed to deprive African-Americans of their basic rights and keep the races separated in nearly every sphere of social life. In this oral history excerpt, Charles Gratton remembers his experience growing up in segregated Norwood, Louisiana, where he attended a "colored" school miles from his home, despite living only a block and a half away from the white elementary school.

Charles Gratton: When I got old enough to know myself, uh, to really know I existed…I mean I was born into this thing, and raised in it…I can remember very close in my mind when my mother would have the occasion to send me to this grocery store I told you about that was approximately a mile away, which was the only grocery store in Norwood, uh, she would give me instructions before I'd leave home and tell me, say, "Son, now you going up to the store and get this or that for me, now if you pass any white people on your way, you get off the sidewalk. Give them the sidewalk. You know, you move over. Don't challenge white people."

And so I was just brought up in that environment uh, they also had a park, uh, it was about …about a block from where we, from uh, where I was born and raised and where I lived, and it was known as the white people park, you know they had a tennis court there, and nice palm trees…and blacks weren’t allowed in that park, I mean we just couldn’t go there and it was just one of those things…a couple was the school thing, you know like I say some days that I would be sick and I could hear the school children playing during the lunch hour…down at Norwood Elementary which was all white, and that’s what really stuck in my mind. I say now, you know this is a shame that I have to walk so far to school every day when I hear those school children playing, you know, and I say here I am a block and a half from the elementary school and I’ve got to walk six or seven miles to school every day, and it really, you know, it really, even now you know I can almost hear those kids, that is those white kids, that is that elementary school, playing and you know the noise and laughing and playing, and I’m at home sick ‘cause I guess basically most of it might have been from the exposure walking those six and seven miles to school everyday whether it was raining or not I had to go. So those were some of the memories that I have of my childhood growing up in Norwood.