Creativity and Chaos: Reflections on a Decade of Progressive Change in Public Schools, 1967–1977

By Charles Suhor and Millie Davis

In Creativity and Chaos: Progressivism in New Orleans Public Schools and the Nation 1967-1977, Charles Suhor brings to life the bold challenges to the status quo in education during a decade of national turmoil. The regimentation and rote learning of traditional schooling could not have escaped the restless temper of the times—Vietnam war protests, racial strife, assassinations, hippie communes, the sexual revolution, an emerging drug culture, and daring innovations in pop/rock music. Suhor describes his immersion in post-World War II popular culture of New Orleans as a rich backdrop for his years as an impassioned educational reformer at local and national levels. A risk-taking teacher and district supervisor of English, he plunged headlong into controversies over black literature, censorship, ebonics, the "new grammar," faculty integration, testing, standardization, and computer technology. He demonstrates how the sweeping national trends often took quirky, distinctive turns in a city that delights in marching to a different drummer. Suhor's engaging account takes the reader into classrooms as well as the intrigues of central office politics and national leaders' disputes on how to best teach students in a time of change. In no sense a doctrinal liberal, he lambastes the errors and excesses of the progressive moment and traces its decline and the backlash demand for a return to basic skills. Suhor concludes with an update on innovations that have waned or persisted in today's schools.

• Language: English
• Publisher: NewSouth Books
• Release date: May 5, 2020
• ISBN: 9781588383938

Charles Suhor

A native of New Orleans, CHARLES SUHOR was a high school English teacher and supervisor in the public schools of the Big Easy. Subsequently, he moved to Urbana, Illinois, where he was Deputy Executive Director of the National Council of Teachers of English, working extensively as an anti-censorship activist. He had a parallel career as a writer and jazz musician, publishing numerous articles and poems and playing drums with Al Hirt, Pete Fountain, Buddy Prima, and others. Among his books are the Scholastic Composition Series, Teaching Values in the Literature Classroom: A Debate in Print, Dimensions of Thinking, The Book of Rude and Other Outrages, and the award-winning Jazz in New Orleans: The Postwar Years Through 1970. He retired in 1997 to Montgomery, Alabama, where he is a freelance writer, speaker, and percussionist and a member of Parents, Families, and Friends of Lesbians and Gays.

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CREATIVITY AND CHAOS

ALSO BY CHARLES SUHOR

The Growing Edges of Secondary English (ED. WITH JOHN S. MAYHER AND FRANK D’ANGELO, 1968)

American Dream (ED., IN RESPONDING TEXTBOOK SERIES, 1973)

Gallery (ED. WITH OLIVE NILES AND J. JAAP TUINMAN, IN SIGNAL TEXTBOOK SERIES, 1977)

Speaking and Writing, K–12 (ED. WITH CHRISTOPHER THAISS, 1984)

Scholastic’s Composition Grade 11 (1980; AND ED. OF THE SERIES)

Dimensions of Thinking, with Robert Marzano, et al. (1988)

Teaching Values in the Literature Program: A Debate in Print with Bernard Suhor (1992)

Jazz in New Orleans: The Postwar Years Through 1970 (2001)

The Book of Rude and Other Outrages—A Queer Self-Portrait (ED., 2007)

NewSouth Books

105 S. Court Street

Montgomery, Alabama 36104

© 2020 by Charles Suhor

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.

Published in the United States by NewSouth Books, 105 S. Court Street, Montgomery, AL 36104.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Suhor, Charles, author. | Davis, Mille, author.

Title: Creativity and chaos : reflections on a decade of progressive change in public schools, 1967–1977 / Charles Suhor ; foreword by Mille Davis.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019018015 (print) | LCCN 2019981428 (ebook) | ISBN 9781588383921 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781588383938 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Public schools--Louisiana--New Orleans--History--20th century. | Progressive education--Louisiana--New Orleans--History--20th century. | Educational change--Louisiana--New Orleans--History--20th century.

Classification: LCC LA297.N4 S85 2019 (print) | LCC LA297.N4 (ebook) | DDC 371.0109763/35--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019018015

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019981428

Design by Randall Williams

Printed in the United States of America by Versa Press

NEWSOUTH BOOKS: Suzanne La Rosa, publisher; Randall Williams, editor-in-chief; Lisa Emerson, accounting manager; Lisa Harrison, publicist; Matthew Byrne, production manager; Beth Marino, senior publicity/marketing manager; Kelly Snyder and Isabella Barrera, editorial and publicity assistants; Laura Murray, cover designer.

The Black Belt, defined by its dark, rich soil, stretches across central Alabama. It was the heart of the cotton belt. It was and is a place of great beauty, of extreme wealth and grinding poverty, of pain and joy. Here we take our stand, listening to the past, looking to the future.

Dedicated to all who lived in this country during the decade of social upheaval and educational change, with special gratitude to classroom teachers and other colleagues whose wisdom, energy, and friendship were inspirational over the years. Notable among these were Kathy Behrman Weitzner, Shirley Trusty Corey, Edwin Friedrich, Peter Gabb, Robert Hogan, Lou LaBrant, James Moffett, Betty Monroe, Alan Purves, Malcolm Rosenberg, John Simmons, Cresap Watson, and Velez Wilson.

Contents

Foreword

Preface

1Up from the Ninth Ward: Grow as You Go

2Contexts for Change

3Change Agents in New Orleans

4Literature: Life After Silas Marner

5Grammar, Usage and Oral Language

6Writing

7The Media Movement

8Mass Testing: The Battleground

9The National Decline: Backlash from the Right

10The Decline of Progressivism in New Orleans

11Update: The (Non-)Persistence of Innovation

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Notes

Image Credits and Notes

Index

Foreword

MILLIE DAVIS

I don’t know how to separate the person from the work or the prevailing circumstances from either. Creativity and Chaos: Reflections on a Decade of Progressive Change in Public Schools, 1967–1977 doesn’t try. It offers one an insider’s view of education in this era of progressivism, a delightful tapestry of Charles Suhor’s personal experiences woven together with what was happening in education in that decade, nationally and in the city of New Orleans.

Charlie’s fluent, readable, and clever style makes this book anything but an educational policy snooze. Yes, it’s an educational history, but it’s also a memoir, sprinkled with remembrances of real people and events.

I was fascinated to read of a Charles Suhor I didn’t know in 1989 when I first came to work at the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), where he was deputy executive director. Initially we were two employees working in the same building, and my impression of Charlie was of a scholar who spent a good deal of time in his office drinking chicory coffee, editing papers, and directing the governance mechanisms of NCTE. But at some point Charlie became my supervisor, and we began a different collegial relationship, working on handling censorship challenges and spreading good will to affiliates—things I still do since his retirement.

The Charlie Suhor of this book, unlike the one I knew, is a bit of a renegade, with understandings of and feelings about his school district superiors that, frankly, mirrored feelings I had experienced as a teacher trying to do what was ultimately best for students and teachers. He notes:

Progressive leaders needed to be research-savvy teacher educators. They had to be both aggressive and humble in selling new programs and methods. They needed to select and train teachers in the new concepts, then observe how they were incarnated in the classroom.

I’m awfully proud and grateful that Charlie brought these qualities to share with NCTE and with me.

Reading Creativity and Chaos from the teacher’s perspective, I was fascinated to get an insider’s view of progressivism and how it played out in the work of an English supervisor. I also appreciated Charlie’s deft comparison of the particulars of what did and didn’t happen in New Orleans because of its culture or because of his and others’ intervention when similar education wars were being fought elsewhere.

New Orleans and districts across the nation experienced not only educational waves that changed what was taught and how, but also swings in the central office personnel that made or broke programs. Over the decade of the late 1960s through the 1970s, districts struggled with how to handle oral language skills—Standard English versus Nonstandard English—what literature to offer, how to open up the canon of mostly dead white men to authors of color, and what to do about testing and how to make assessment meaningful.

Fresh out of teaching in a high school English classroom in the Richmond, Virginia, public schools when I arrived at the NCTE, I had lived many of the philosophical changes in education that Charlie describes in Creativity and Chaos. I had suffered and, as much as I could, worked around the back-to-the-basics push that our large district prescribed, opening my eyes and practice to writing process and urging me to attempt to diversify the old masters curriculum in a district that was at least 90 percent African American. Ironically, or not, these are topics that are still prevalent in education today, making true now what James Fleming Hosic said in NCTE’s 1912 English Journal inaugural editorial: The fact remains, nevertheless, that there are numerous unsolved problems of English teaching; witness the discontent.

Ah, politics and the ever-changing and re-changing of programs within the system were the norm! In Creativity and Chaos we witness the tension between doing the right thing and rocking the administration’s boat, all through the bird’s-eye view of an English supervisor caught in and working through the mechanisms and hierarchy of a big-city school district administration. This on-the-ground account of the changes in education circa 1967–1977 demonstrates that what goes around and comes around does so mostly because of, or despite, the individuals involved.

But then, isn’t all of education an assemblage of individuals’ views of the subject, of teaching communities sharing their knowledge within central office politics and local and national education policy?

And isn’t education something that changes and changes back again, echoing one of George Santayana’s more famous statements: Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

Millie Davis is former Senior Developer, Affiliates, and Director, Intellectual Freedom Center, National Council of Teachers of English.

Preface

The late 1960s and early 1970s were a time of tumultuous social change. Those years saw the Vietnam war, widespread racial strife, assassinations of national leaders, hippie communes, the sexual revolution, a rapidly emerging drug culture, and a new radicalism in popular music.

Parents of the baby boomer generation were aghast. After World War II, they wanted a calm, secure, squeaky-clean Ozzie-and-Harriet lifestyle. They didn’t know what to make of the youth counterculture that challenged their most cherished values. Indeed, the term generation gap leaped into popular usage in the 1960s.¹

What would become of the boomers? Timothy Leary was urging youth to turn on, tune in, drop out.² Civil rights leader Jack Weinberg warned them, Don’t trust anyone over thirty.³ The iconic phrase, sex, drugs, and rock & roll, came to characterize countercultural values.⁴ To the older generations, the nation’s social fabric, restored so painstakingly after the Great Depression and the World War, seemed to be unraveling.

When I turned thirty-one—that untrustworthy age—in 1966, I was the father of five children and in my seventh year as an English and history teacher in New Orleans public schools. Neither I nor my students had an inkling of where the increasing social unrest would lead, but there was prophecy in Robert Burns’s poem To a Mouse in our grade twelve textbook: Forward, tho’ I canna see/ I guess an’ fear!⁵

Of course, the challenges to traditional values did not start in the elementary and secondary schools. But longstanding conservative education programs and practices could not avoid the wave of change that was washing over American society. Weinberg notwithstanding, I was young enough to relate to the crescendo of protests, but I knew that mine was not the way of the hippies. I had long been working within the system, as the phrase went—bringing in lively materials beyond the stodgy textbooks, encouraging open discussion, and agitating for causes like school integration, collective bargaining for the teachers’ union, and advancement of the then-neglected art of jazz.⁶

From 1967 to 1977 my work as English supervisor for New Orleans Public Schools and concurrent involvement with the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) became settings far beyond my expectations for participation in groundbreaking innovations at local and national levels. During those years, the city’s schools were part of the sweeping national progressive education movement, reaching a historic peak of invention and creative struggle.

My goal in this book is to describe the dynamic of the revolution in K–12 English teaching in New Orleans and the nation and to trace its decline as a conservative response overrode many of its programs in the mid-seventies. Of course, the progressive movement cut across all subject areas and grade levels. But arguably English language arts was the field of greatest controversy and ferment, locally and nationally. The changes in that field serve well as an exemplar of bold action during the progressive years.

The developments in New Orleans schools were variations on themes of the national progressive movement. Certainly, the profession at local and national levels dealt with racial and regional dialects, phonics, free writing, creative dramatics, multimedia instruction, book censorship, and standardized testing. But local innovations were not merely a bandwagon phenomenon. As with the literal bandwagons in the city’s offbeat musical history, the New Orleans style of educational change was distinct in many ways, unfolding in the city’s laissez-faire atmosphere.

As a researcher I’ve worked to ensure that the facts are in order, citing sources extensively and reporting on interviews with surviving colleagues. Clarity and accuracy are essential, but interesting times aren’t well defined by mere information. The tone and energy of the years of rapid change are best represented in the experiences of those who lived them. Much of this book is, then, a documented memoir, depicting interrelations among the national, local, and personal during the movement. I will interweave facts and reportage with my own perspectives, insider anecdotes and pertinent asides. In the midst of discussions of trends I will describe classroom activities, teachers’ meetings, and other real-world situations to evoke a sense of presence. For readers whose school experiences were touched by the trends of the times, this might be a nostalgia trip. For others, it will reveal times of unique, often zany, ferment.

Unique, indeed. But it seems that all educational eras have one thing in common: they introduce both new terminology and vacuous jargon. I’ve tried to avoid needless in-house language as much as possible and explain specialized terms that are important for an understanding of trends and events.⁷

I won’t disguise my position as an unabashed activist or shrink from offering opinions, but I trust my account will show that I was not a doctrinal progressive. I believed that liberal proposals had to meet the tests of sound theory, research, and common sense. Allowing for differences in perspective and emphasis, my descriptions of innovations and countermanding forces of reform should comport with other accounts of what was happening in the city, the schools, and the nation.

CREATIVITY AND CHAOS

1

Up from the Ninth Ward: Grow as You Go

I could not have imagined that my life as a child in the forties would set me up for the heady, turbulent years that followed. But the experiences of my youth and early career in New Orleans are the backdrop for my activities in the progressive years.

I was the youngest of five children in a socially liberal Catholic family in the upper Ninth Ward. Our shotgun-double house on Bartholomew Street was three blocks from Washington Elementary School (later renamed Drew Elementary) and Nicholls High School (later, Frederick Douglass High; now, KIPP Renaissance High). Edwin Friedrich, my eleventh grade English teacher at Nicholls, was an inspiration in his openness to thoughtful class discussion. Malcolm Rosenberg taught journalism to my oldest siblings, Mary Lou and Bernard. He had a reputation as a strong teacher and a no-nonsense taskmaster. Rosenberg, a stern father figure, and Friedrich, the puckishly hip uncle, moved into administration. They came to play key roles in the New Orleans public schools during the progressive decade.

In our working-class neighborhood, my parents were among the few white-collar workers. They were children of French and Croatian immigrants, deeply devoted to Catholicism, family life, and the American dream. My father, Anthony, was an accountant, later the comptroller, for WDSU radio and television. My mother, Marie, was an elementary school teacher. All of us children were encouraged to read books like Treasure Island, Tom Sawyer, Little Women, Little Men, Life with Father, and endearing animal stories. The genre of young adult literature, with contemporary themes and realistic dialogue, was not to blossom until the innovative sixties. We were given 78-rpm records of what was considered serious classical music among aspirants to middle-class status—Rhapsody in Blue, The Nutcracker Suite, and Strauss waltzes.

POPULAR CULTURE AND ACADEME

Immersed in the popular culture of the era, I rejected my mother’s salutary reading and listening lists in favor of jazz, comic books, movies about World War II and wise-cracking detectives, and Saturday night serials like Dick Tracy and Captain Marvel. Fortunately, my father was an amateur painter and wannabe cartoonist. He delighted in my homemade adventure comic books and talked at length and in depth about the different drawing styles in the Sunday funnies, from Barney Google to Prince Valiant. This, and a book titled The Comics, by Coulton Waugh, became a playful back door into the world of close analysis.

I had persuaded my parents to buy the Waugh book for my twelfth birthday. It was a lively, scholarly survey of the history of comics by the illustrator of the popular Dickie Dare strip. I read through it several times. In later years this evolved into an interest in the comics as a unique visual/verbal literary genre. My first article in a national education journal was Comics As Classics? in Media & Methods, the magazine that emerged as the favorite of progressive teachers.

The Waugh book was the only full-length book I read until high school. By then I had become more smitten with jazz, reveling in magazines like Down Beat, Metronome, Band Leaders, and Jazz Record. My older brother Don, who was becoming a fine jazz reed man, persuaded me to play drums and over the years gave me an informal survey course in jazz that was richer than Waugh’s probing of comics. A canny and insightful listener, Don explained the subtleties of jazz styles and the evolution of the music. Caught up in the joy of it all, I had no idea that this was another oblique entry into intellectual rigor.

At Nicholls High School I had no interest in difficult academic courses. Declining to elect chemistry, physics, calculus, and world history, I took twenty-two semesters of subjects like art, band, speech, and physical education along with the minimal twenty-six college preparatory courses. The latter were typically neither rigorous nor interesting. But Edwin Friedrich’s English program was one of the exceptions. He was schooled in John Dewey’s classical progressivism, forerunner of the progressive movement of the late sixties.³

Friedrich allowed me to do the required eleventh grade term paper on the widely publicized Dixieland vs. bebop controversy. I illustrated the title page with drawings of Louis Armstrong and Dizzy Gillespie. The paper was a solid effort, laced with references ranging from Down Beat to Saturday Review. It was the only enjoyable writing of my high school years. I avoided reading the traditional literary works, but I respected Friedrich too much to do fake book reports based on Classic Comics. He recommended Mrs. Mike, a popular novel by Benedict and Nancy Freedman, and James Fenimore Cooper’s Deerslayer. I found the Freedman romance unbearably sappy, and Cooper’s prose seemed as contrived as Natty Bumppo’s frontier adventures—an opinion, I discovered years later, that was shared by Mark Twain.⁴

Since academic and nonacademic courses were not weighted differently in determining rank in class, my grade average was inflated, and I was named valedictorian—fraudulently, I thought. In 1952 I went to Loyola on academic and music scholarships to study English education—a fearsome prospect because I knew I was ill-prepared for college. I was astonished when I fell in love overnight with literature and the humanities. The world of ideas in academe was wonderfully new and stimulating. I didn’t realize at the time that the extensive and intensive exploration of comics and jazz had prepared me intellectually for the work. Although the products of popular culture would be scorned in higher education until the late sixties, they had helped me cultivate tools of analysis and habits of aesthetic response at an early age. Many graduates of rigorous programs like Jesuit High School seemed jaded, worn down from a premature forced march through standard academic programs. I was bowled over by the fresh experience of studying literature, composition, sociology, history, theology, and philosophy.

And classical music. The concert band director, George Jantzen, had us playing the well-known classical melodies I had heard over the years, but he brought out heavy materials from all eras that began a new part of my education. Early jazz had prepared me well for a lifelong love of baroque music. As I sat back with no percussion duties during rehearsals of Bach fugues, the wonderfully interlocking parts reminded me of the great counterpoint of the front line—trumpet, trombone, and clarinet—in traditional jazz ensembles. Also, the flowing lines of the fugues had a parallel in the artfully spun phrases of Charlie Parker and Lee Konitz, two of Don’s favorite modern jazzmen.

Loyola Big Band. Paul Guma, conductor; myself, drums; Don Suhor, clarinet (second from right, front row).

I played swing era arrangements with the Loyola big band but was fondest of the floating modern jazz jams in the music school basement and the underground of black and white modernists who were active in the city. This took an interesting turn in my junior year when I formed a bebop quintet with students from Loyola and from Xavier University to play during the judging of an integrated citywide Catholic high school talent show. The event, though well publicized, was highly illegal under Louisiana segregation laws. But the risk was low. This was New Orleans, after all, and the police were not about to raid an event at the Jesuit High School auditorium sponsored by SERINCO (Southeast Regional Interracial Commission), a coalition of four local Catholic universities. This exercise foreshadowed, in principle and temerity, similar dances on the razor’s edge during my years as an English teacher and supervisor.

From Loyola I went directly to Catholic University in Washington, DC, for a master’s degree, majoring in counseling in education and minoring in English. My parents offered to continue paying tuition if I wanted to go right on for a doctorate. I was grateful but aghast: "But I haven’t done anything!" I thought it would be fraudulent to hold a doctoral degree in education without ever having taught.

So I returned to teach at Nicholls, Rabouin, and Franklin High Schools between 1957 and 1966, except for a year as bandsman in the army in 1958. At Fort Chaffee, Arkansas, I met a beautiful, petite girl named Jessie Miller. We were married soon after my transfer to Fort Jackson, South Carolina. I received an early release from the usual two-year draftee stint because of the teacher shortage in New Orleans. We settled down on Wilton Drive in Gentilly, and I completed my military duty with the National Guard band at Jackson Barracks, where Pete Fountain and other local stalwarts had served.

In my first years of teaching I had no concept of a career, let alone a career path. What looks in retrospect like a linear development of early interests and a well-laid career progression was in fact a function of grow-as-you-go events. As a liberal Catholic idealist, I had a deep work ethic and orientation towards service. There was a strong teaching tradition in my family—my mother, an aunt, and two of my older siblings—so my inclination was towards teaching. Realism was optional. I thought it might be interesting to teach successively at every senior high school in the city, making the rounds so I could understand different students and their learning styles. Interesting, but impossible, with a dozen high schools and a state law against faculty integration. The pull of music was strong, too. Maybe I could take off a couple of years and go on the road as a drummer.

At Kennedy High School, 1971.

As for possible dreams, I knew I had a master’s degree in counseling in my back pocket. But at the time, the counselors in New Orleans schools had little interaction with students. They were visible mainly in scheduling students according to formula and walking around with clipboards. I had a vague idea of someday teaching in a college, but that seemed decades down the line. As it turned out, I was confronted over the years with fortuitous opportunities, and I leaped in with enthusiasm and presumption, trying out my luck and my skill without portfolio or compass.

TEACHING YEARS: THE GOOD AND THE HORRID

The profession proved to be lively in ways I didn’t anticipate. Nicholls, Rabouin, and Franklin each had different student populations, which provided perspectives that were enriching at the time and useful in my work during the progressive years. Unlike today’s test-driven environment, in all those settings I had freedom to teach what and how I pleased, as long as it cost the school little more than ditto paper.

Nicholls, my alma mater, was created on the model of a comprehensive school when it opened in 1940. It included not only the usual offerings of regular and advanced academics, art, instrumental and vocal music, and physical education but also courses in drafting, architecture, motors (with a full repair shop), an array of business-oriented subjects, and a split schedule of school and work. I was comfortable with the students, who were overwhelmingly from Ninth Ward working-class families like those in my neighborhood. As a child I spoke the distinctive, déclassé Yat dialect (from the common greeting, Where y’at, cat?). A broader understanding of different dialects would become a hallmark of change in English instruction in the sixties.

Rabouin and Franklin were citywide specialized schools—basically precursors of magnet schools, though the term had not yet been coined. Rabouin Vocational Junior-Senior High was intended as a hands-on, workplace-oriented training center and a sympathetic haven for students who struggled with academics, but its goals were abused in practice. The vocational designation masked the function it also served as a dumping ground—the actual phrase used throughout the city—for behavior problems and slow learners. When I returned from military service in the fall of 1959, I was too late for reassignment to Nicholls, so I received the fearsome assignment to teach a grab bag of classes at Rabouin—reading, business English, vocations, and arithmetic. These were literally the leftovers after the main schedule had been constructed for existing staff.

Some of my students were seriously engaged in academic catch-up and programs of commercial art, electricity, drafting, industrial arts, and secretarial skills. But most were needy castoffs from other schools, ranging from a mildly retarded girl to earnest slow learners to violent juvenile offenders. My reading classes were necessarily remedial and individualized, incorporating excellent methods I had studied at Catholic University. The saving grace was the teaching staff, led by a good-cop principal, Marie Godelfer, who had a compassionate understanding of just what was going on in the school and the district. The excellent assistant principal, Margaret Hymel, was a sheep in bad cop’s clothing and a righteous alter ego to Godelfer. They helped me through my rookie problems with classroom discipline and invited me to return for the 1960–61 school year, but I went back to Nicholls, feeling I had earned a battlefield commission and confident that I was, indeed, a teacher. I delighted in that. If someone said about me, He’s an English teacher, I’d be thrilled, whether it was intended as information, admiration, or insult.

Benjamin Franklin High School for Academically Talented Students was established in 1957 with Superintendent Carl Dolce and former Nicholls teachers Edwin Friedrich and Malcolm Rosenberg as the prime movers. It rapidly became known as one of the best college preparatory schools in the nation. Although the programs in general were notoriously, even boastfully traditional, in my four years teaching at Franklin (1962–1966) the English teachers were given immense freedom in choice of materials and methods. I tried to bring the joy of learning classical and contemporary materials to students in the pressure-filled environment. Students tended to be from education-oriented middle class homes, but the diversity of backgrounds made for wonderful classroom discussion of ideas and issues in literary works. Teaching composition was exciting as well. Among my students were James Nolan and Tom Sancton, who became writers of international stature. They and several other students have become lifelong friends.

The good times of my teaching years were good, but the bad times were horrid. Two crises arose—the school integration debacle of 1960–61 and the teachers’ strike of 1966. The former was by far the worst, but both left the public traumatized and weary of controversy, diminishing the appetite for objections when progressive changes began.

I was teaching at Nicholls during the integration crisis. By state mandate, all K–12 faculties were required to read and discuss a blatantly racist book, ironically titled Race and Reason. The legislature’s intention was to bolster support for segregation at the building level through explication of the author’s reasoned arguments. I volunteered to do a part of the presentation at Nicholls, quoting from the book and casually contrasting it with scholarly sources, like Gunnar Myrdal’s classic An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, which refuted its biases. One faculty member ineffectually raised questions, but my subversion had no negative consequences.⁵

During the previous summer I had a frightening preview of the hatred that would fuel the segregationist response. I was playing the summer season with the New Orleans Pops Orchestra. After rehearsing in a small room in the Municipal Auditorium, I wandered to the large side of the building and saw an anti-integration rally in full sway, led by Leander Perez. I had seen Perez on television and observed his lordly manner when I played for events in