The Black Table is Still There by Lawrence Otis Graham
Summary & Background on School Segregation: This essay, originally published in the New York Times in 1991, is included in Graham’s 1995 essay collection, Member of the Club: Reflections on Life in a Racially Polarized World. In “The ‘Black Table’ Is Still There,” Graham returns to his largely white junior high school and discovers to his dismay how little has changed since the 1970s. For example, the Supreme Court in 1954 found segregation of public schools unconstitutional; From the mid-1960s to 1972, the number of African-American students attending desegregated schools jumped from 12 percent to 44 percent. By the 1990s, however, this had begun to change as the Supreme Court began to lift desegregation orders in response to local school boards’ promises to desegregate voluntarily through magnet schools and the like. A study published in 2003 showed that two-thirds of African-American students attend schools that are predominantly minority and more than 15 percent attend schools that are 99 to 100 percent minority, a significant rise since 1989.
Graham's essay The Black Table is Still
There discovered something he had thought he would never see again
at the lunch table where only black students sat in the cafeteria of his high
school, something he had forgotten about in his years of adulthood. He then
went into a flashback to his early years to explain why this particular lunch
table had such an impact on him. He starts his flashback by noting that he was
frequently the only black boy participating in activities he would otherwise
have been a part of, such as his high school tennis team, summer music camps,
and his Princeton eating club. A group of African American teenagers would gather
around this all-black table and sit there together.
Lawrence
expressed disdain toward the all-black lunch table by saying that he didn't
want to sit with the teenagers there because he was worried he would lose his
white friends by doing so and that he would be making an anti-white, racist
statement. "At the same time, there were at least two tables of athletes,
an Italian table, a table of Jewish boys and girls, where I typically sat,
and a table of middle-class Irish youngsters, who liked heavy metal music
and marijuana. The African American teenagers seated at the all-black table
weren't isolating themselves; rather, they were simply copying what everyone
else was doing and sitting together with their particular group of friends. He
came to this realization because, while there was an all-black table at his
school, there was also a table where all the athletes, Italians, and Jewish
boys would sit.