Dr. King and world changes for us in 1965

As this country is piecing together today the famous Dr. Martin Luther King, the African-American who was speech-giver in the 1960s. Elsewhere, huge preaching and songs were focused to "make equal" the treatment of blacks in this country, does deserve despite hazy history.

When I was a white 9 years old, not quite that was 10 in spring 1964, we the Carrolls did move from Japan, where my dad was in the Air Force at Japan since 1962 and I actually went to third, fourth and fifth grades at Japan at the U.S. schools.

Here's the huge one at Japan. In the third grade a black, Ms. Thomas, was by teacher put up by the Air Force. When I was in the fourth grate at Johnson Air Force -- the family moved to Yokota for just a year -- and a man, Mr. DeVille, a difference teacher who did not allow his fourth-graders to learn cursive writing, was also at Johnson's Tyer Park School.

Then, the next one at 1964, I had another black woman as teacher, also her name as Ms. Thomas. However, in March 1964, dad and the family, five kids and mom, we all flew from Yokota to the Louisville airplane airport. It was great to go back, and ended up in Auburn, Ala., and the other town Opelika, next to the University of Auburn where dad, the Sgt. Frank Carroll, taught at officers' training there.

I was still in fifth, but all students were white. No blacks in Auburn were allowed in schools, and zero blacks on the Auburn football teams, either. When I upped to sixth grade, I went to Opelika and, yes, only white kids allowed, not blacks.

But the next year, 1966, dad was transferred to McCoy Air Force, a base that did for years later an Orlando airport. But during my seventh, there was a type to mix up more black kids to whites in the schools,

On the next year, in 1967, fights erupted between whites and blacks students and I just watched them all at Oak Ridge, a high school that also helped junior-high students until a new one was built.

Now, with high schools, blacks from the former Jones High School of Orlando, was all-black, but many were ordered to attend Oak Ridge. The Oak Ridge students, many of them, were ordered to Jones High.

This life really sucked. The U.S. Supreme Court ordered these schools for breaking apart. Even in Kentucky, where I spend a year when dad was sent to Vietnam, we tried to stay around with family partners, but the brutal south images were racist all over the place, and fights all the time.

Did the Dr. Martin Luther King try and stop all that was as felled like madness, schools were a nightmare for the kids, white or black, in Alabama, Florida or Kentucky.

Smart way to go is to advertise all kinds of school naturals, radios, music, food, cars and trucks for everybody -- whites, blacks, Asian people and everyone! It was a shaky life for me in the 1960s, but we were in Alabama and even watched at Dr. King's marches, and just had to figure all this out.

geraldcarroll54@yahoo.com