Ms. Rankine, a poet and playwright, is the author, most recently, of “Triage.”
To mark The Times’s 175th birthday, Times editors asked writers to reflect on — and imagine a little bit about — the newspaper’s front page on the day they were born. Look up your own birthday page here.
Turns out the great experiment of racial integration was legislated to maintain its status as an American dream. On Sept. 4, 1963, the day I was born, the front page of The New York Times showed a photo of a Black girl, Millicent Brown, surrounded by a sea of white girls with bouffant hairstyles and quizzical expressions. The Black girl, sporting the same hairstyle, was integrating a South Carolina public school. There’s another photo, right below the first, of two Black girls at a school cafeteria counter in Louisiana; the irony is not lost on me, given the Greensboro sit-ins in North Carolina three years earlier. The girls are being served by a woman who appears to be Black. She hands a tray to one of the two girls. The caption informs us, “Twenty-seven Negroes attended four previously all-white high schools in Louisiana’s capital without any serious incident.”
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It’s taken me six years to create a classroom at New York University that looks like the integrated streets of New York City. My first year teaching at N.Y.U., the Black and queer poets filled most seats. Then the straight white and Asian women started showing up. This semester, no doubt because of all that is happening outside the classroom walls, everyone is here. All my students are starting to understand how rigged the system is. I hope it turns out that they build friendships that last a lifetime and are lifelines, as it turns out that there’s no turning away from the problem of white supremacy and the pervasive inequalities it generates over generations.
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