As a child, I didn’t know what you were. I knew you as an old building. I hardly even looked at you. On a sunny day, you even seemed unreal with your broken windows, overgrown ivy and unkept grass. Off limits to me, even now, with your chain-linked fence. You weren’t safe.

But I know what you are now, Furlow Grammar School. You were never made for me or anyone like me. I wasn’t meant to wander past your chain-linked fence. I was never meant to look past your bricked exterior or your grand windows, three men tall. I know what you held in your hallways: innocents unaware of the Plague of Jim Crow. They just knew things were how they were…and were meant to be.

And yet miles away, on the outskirts of town, my grandmother knew this was how things were but were never meant to be. With her hand-me-down books and single classroom school building, she still had the courage and luck to dare to learn. To stand in a town crowded by Black people just like herself, suppressed by the parents of those who walked your halls.

And here we are. With me behind the lens of this camera imagining the laughter. The cheers. The shuffle of feet. The slamming of car doors. The school bell. I imagine no malice. No purposeful intent to suppress—to terrify. But that was the result. Intent is not important, but the result…

And now I think of your new form. Integration wore you down, didn’t it? You had to be tired. You put up a good fight. And like a caterpillar, you slowed down. You took your time to prepare for your new life amidst this time of change. You did everything you could to save your children from the Black swarm endowed with the right to walk your halls.

And then you emerged. In 1966 you took to the air as your new self. Armed with new rules. New regulations to avoid the swarm. Not even the government could touch you now. Out of reach, you can’t be grounded. You would go by a new name: Southland. Southland Academy, home of the Raiders. Ain’t you proud? You weren’t prejudiced. Of course not. Despite the lack of melanin that roamed your halls, you were nothing but elite, prestigious. You had higher standards. Standards that were based on “merit”. You and your segregation academy brethren that popped up across the South.

So tell me, Southland, how does a school within a town where 63.5% of the population is Black tout a student body with some 95% Caucasian student body? Tell me, what happens when the child that walked your halls all her life, from pre-schools to graduation, emerges and encounters her high-melanin equivalents? Does she understand that we are all “equal”? Or is she prejudiced? Tell me, in a town where 38.6% of the population reports living below the poverty level, how do you feel about your $7,000 tuition requirement? And didn't those rich folk take their money with them? From the public schools where the Black kids go? But your intent is not to discriminate...

Yes, I know what you are. And you inspire me to tell the world what you are. But what I don’t know, yet, is what the new charter school that took the place of my elementary school is. I don’t know what Fulow Charter School will become. It’s too soon to tell. But if it is your relative, then I will tell the world about it, too. Even if people don't care about small town Americus, GA.

I will shout it from the rooftops: Segregation never ended.