Mahree Skala is a retired public health official living in Columbia, and she spoke with the Missouri on Mic team at the State Historical Society of Missouri’s bicentennial event, Together for ’21, in August.
She spoke about growing up in Fulton during school integration in the 1950s and 1960s, as the civil rights movement was changing the structure of the American Education system.
Missouri on Mic is an oral history and journalism project documenting stories from around the state in its 200th year.
Mahree Skala: My parents were Westerners who had moved to Calloway County to work, and they were shocked and horrified at the Jim Crow segregation system that was in effect, at the time of my childhood in the 50s.
We lived in the country. So, I went to a one room Country School, which had some advantages, but also some disadvantages – one of them being that our entire library was one barrister’s bookshelf.
It had a lot of books in it, but some of them were published in the early 1900s, and still depicted “plantation life” as being a wonderful time when everyone was happy, and the slaves were taken care of, etc.
But fortunately, it also had a copy of Uncle Tom's Cabin, and reading that and talking with my parents helped me understand what I would not have understood otherwise.
"When I was in high school – I graduated in 1968 – that was probably the least segregated space I've ever been in because that was post Brown v Board of Education."Mahree Skala
Then actually, when I was in high school – I graduated in 1968 – that was probably the least segregated space I've ever been in because that was post Brown v Board of Education. All of us went to school together – there was only one high school in Fulton – and we rubbed elbows in every aspect of that: sports, band, choir, classrooms.
Although, I was in the college prep class and there was only one African American in those classes. There was no expectation that any of the African American students would go on to college. If they did, they had to do that completely on their own without help or support from counselors or the people in charge at school.
They were… when Martin Luther King was assassinated my senior year in high school, the African American students were herded into the auditorium and threatened within an inch of their life if they did anything to protest, or express discontent about that, and knowing that still makes me shake with rage.
Obviously, the overt segregation days are over, but we still see the fruit of that even here in Columbia with residential segregation – the fact that whole areas of our town are built out with very, very expensive homes that are 98% owned by whites – and therefore the schools that serve those areas have only tiny fractions of minorities.
So, that housing segregation, I think, goes on and is reflected in our education system sadly.
So, I would like to see us get better at actually having dialogue and understanding different perspectives and gear our efforts toward a more equitable society.
