All across the district I live in, these last two weeks have marked the end of an era indeed. It is graduation season for Greenville County and some surrounding districts. I always looked forward to graduation when I was teaching. I taught a lot of seniors and seeing the excitement build as that cap and gown date drew closer and closer always made me smile. It reminded me of my own graduation so many years before.

My senior year was an unmitigated disaster, a trainwreck if you will, that I couldn’t help but participate in. Between school, work, and home, I can honestly say that nothing went right for the entire academic career, but I’m not writing about that because I’ve written about it elsewhere and I’m not going to go over it again right now. I am going to mention my actual graduation ceremony though, because it was a fitting cherry on top of the year.

The school where I taught and most other Greenville County Schools graduated in one of the huge venues in the county like the Bi-Lo Center or the Furman University Auditorium. No so Laurens 55. We graduated in the gym. Now we had a big gym, but it wasn’t well equipped for a ceremony so large. The year I graduated the class was 399 graduates and a crap ton of faculty and staff. We sat all up on one another on the basketball court. We barely had room to fit everyone in a cap and gown.

Now I don’t know if you remember your own graduation however long ago it’s been, but those cap and gowns are not nice breathable cotton. Nope. Pure polyester. Polyester is a plastic in the strictest definition so 399 soon to be former students and a lot of teachers sat on the floor of the gym wearing the equivalent of a plastic rain poncho.

Observing the proceedings were our parents and friends. Well, at least as many as we could shoehorn into the building. See, we had a limit of six tickets for every graduate. That meant not everyone who a graduate wanted to be in the audience actually got to be in the crowd. I had to make some decisions of my own. I had to not give Papa John a ticket so my stepmother could have one. I didn’t want my stepmother watch me graduate; I wanted Papa John, but Mama, in a bid to keep me calm and avoid any more rancor than what I’d already endured year to date, pointed out that due to his recent stroke, Papa John couldn’t manage the steps in the building, nor could he sit for the duration of the ceremony. I gave in because I was just too damn tired of fighting everything and everybody for nine months. In the end, I just wanted to get it all over with.

We didn’t have speeches at my graduation, so even though I graduated second in my class, I didn’t get to make a speech. Of course, no one in the administration was going to let me near a podium with a microphone after all I’d said and done my senior year. The reason we didn’t have speeches was interesting. Laurens 55 High School was created out of four tiny small town high schools: Gray Court – Owings High, Ford High, Hickory Tavern High, and Laurens High. Those four schools were white. They merged with four Black high schools that were as small or smaller. Eight high schools squeezed into one in 1972.

Yeah, you read that right. 1972. Almost twenty years after the Brown decision integrated the schools and Laurens was JUST integrating in 1972. South Carolina was one of the last states to integrate and it took the threat of Federal troops to get it done. So tensions were high all 1972. Each school had its own graduation and speeches by the valedictorians and saludatorians. The powers that were decided to avoid having to decided between black and white students so no valedictorians and saludatorians were chosen that first year and it continued on down to my class and as far as I know, that’s the way it’s still done.

So our class president made a speech. It was the only one. We didn’t even have a motivational speaker. Of course, it took two hours just to call out 399 names so we didn’t really have time to listen to anyone pontificate. So they called out the names, we walked across the stage and that was that. I haven’t seen most of those 399 people in the intervening 35 years. Some, I’ve wanted to see and couldn’t, others I want to forget.

That’s what I used to point out to my seniors I taught. I tried to make them understand that all the people they were so close to for the last, in some cases, twelve years were not going to be around after the walk across the stage. I’ve seen enough of them in recent years to know they understand now and they tell their own children the same as they are getting ready to graduate these days.

So that’s another year in the books. I wish I was back in the audience to watch some seniors I taught walk across a stage, but that era ended too. So there’s that.

In any event, y’all be careful. Love y’all and keep those feet clean.