Katrina Blew Away These Schools’ Racial Barriers

St. Peter the Apostle, an all-black parochial school, was the only school Elishea Cunningham had ever known. Two miles away, Camryn Miller had attended Resurrection, a nearly all-white Roman Catholic elementary school, since kindergarten.

Without the wiles of Hurricane Katrina, these two fifth-graders might never have met. But when the storm knocked down St. Peter, they became classmates, and about 100 years of racial separation came to a halt.

“What humans and social circumstances had constructed, Mother Nature destroyed,” said Father Mike Kelleher, pastor at Resurrection’s parent parish, Sacred Heart.

With the bricks of St. Peter strewn like dominoes, Resurrection opened its classrooms to the entire student body. The transition was so seamless that the biggest problem was whether the St. Peter students could still wear plaid uniforms, or whether they had to switch to Resurrection’s navy-blue shorts and white shirts.

“The fact that this has not happened long before now is the story, I suppose -- long, long before now,” Kelleher said. “It doesn’t matter whether it happened here or at St. Peter’s. It should have happened a long time ago.”

But tradition weighed heavily in the old South. St. Peter was established to educate the children and grandchildren of freed slaves about 100 years ago, when blacks were not welcome in most Mississippi schools. The Josephite religious order that ran St. Peter was founded a century ago to serve the African American community.

The school drew its pupils from a predominantly African American neighborhood about 2 1/2 miles from the Gulf Coast waterfront. The majority of students -- 70% of those enrolled for the fall semester -- were not Catholic.

In this city of 26,000, St. Peter was surrounded by small homes and apartments, some catering to low-income residents.

The area around Resurrection boasted brick and wood-frame homes six blocks from the waterfront. The neighborhood, Kelleher said, is 90% white.

So the evolution of the two schools’ student bodies “had nothing to do with race, and yet it had everything to do with race,” he said.

Long after public schools were desegregated and most Catholic schools followed suit, St. Peter remained an all-black institution. As recently as 20 years ago, the school excluded itself from a consolidation plan with other schools in the Biloxi Diocese, Kelleher said.

“Keep in mind, we are striving to maintain our own culture, our own heritage, our own spirituality,” said Father William Norvel, the priest at St. Peter. “In order to do that, we have maintained our black Catholic schools and churches -- not in a segregated way, but in a way that kept this kind of education open to blacks.”

Norvel, 70, is African American. He grew up in Pascagoula and was educated at St. Peter. He acknowledged that St. Peter’s existence as an all-black school did “feed into a racist stereotype.”

The fact that the two schools coexisted in what amounted to racial isolation reflected a larger pattern of institutional segregation in the modern South, said Susan Glisson, director of the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation at the University of Mississippi.

“What you are looking at most likely is residential segregation,” Glisson said. “This was probably not deliberate or overt or intentionally malicious. It was demographics, and it was habit. They thought that was the way it always was, and so that was how it stayed.”

Glisson, who teaches civil rights history, said blacks and whites in the South talked about a racial comfort zone, which also perpetuated separation. “ ‘People like to be with their own kind.’ I wish I had $5 for every time I have heard that,” she said.

Glisson said public schools in Mississippi did not begin serious efforts to integrate until 1970. But most white students transferred to private schools known as “segregation academies.” Today, 97% of the state’s children attend public schools that remain racially separate because of residential segregation, Glisson said.

Resurrection, flooded by Katrina’s 52-inch tidal surge, sustained $1 million in damage. Windows were broken and all the classroom doors were blown off. Books and nearly all of the furniture were wrecked. The cafeteria was unusable.

But the school reopened in two months after contributions and volunteer labor poured in, and Catholic schools from around the country sent furniture.

Its student body of 280 grew by 42 -- more than half of the 80 pupils who had been enrolled at St. Peter. The remaining St. Peter students left the area because of the hurricane and have not returned, Kelleher said.

To accommodate the increased enrollment, some of St. Peter’s teachers were hired at Resurrection.

“The storm was a tragedy, but in this case we didn’t just lose -- we gained,” said Doris Hill, who taught physical education at both schools. “It was a blessing to get these groups together. In a funny way, God did us a favor.”

Hill’s students, performing jumping jacks and calisthenics outdoors, appeared oblivious to the attention generated by the two schools’ amalgamation.

“They’re children being children,” said Julie Hite, a fifth- and sixth-grade teacher. “They were being separate by parental choice. Now they are playing together, working together and learning together. It’s a big deal to us, but it is no big deal to these children.”

Waiting to pick up her son and two nephews after school, Angela Lewis said the children had been unperturbed by their move to Resurrection.

“I think the racial thing was overrated,” said Lewis, 32. “I mean, I didn’t see a problem, and the kids didn’t see a problem.”

Keith Miller said his fifth-grade daughter and third-grade son barely mentioned their new classmates.

“Kids are kids,” he said. “I’m not sure they see color. I think they see other kids.”

His daughter Camryn said that when she heard the St. Peter students were coming, the only thing that concerned her was whether she would like them.

“You never know what to expect when anyone new comes in,” she said. “But now I really like having them. They are my friends now.”