Bridging Social Divides Through Peer-Groups: A Socially Tolerant but Politically Inactive Student Body (1970–1985)

Abstract

Miller High students, as earlier suggested, associated mostly on the basis of common interests and affinities within interracial, cross-track, and sometimes even cross-gender peer-generated groups. Describing the cafeteria, Tim Whittle recalled that “male jocks [black and white] had a table, girl jocks [black and white] had a table, the eggheads [black and white] had a table…,” and so on. Overwhelmingly, graduates remembered blacks and whites getting along within and across the peer groups.¹ African American Joanne Pet’s recollection captured the civil rights mood of the time:

Given that it was five or six years after Martin Luther King and the civil rights [movement], I was right there on the crest of it. So I didn’t feel the effect of racism… I don’t remember any incident that I felt that I was discriminated against because I was black…My friends, basically, they were all white.