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In the summer of 2004, I was finally old enough to take Driver’s Ed. My school, however, didn’t offer the course, so my parents signed me up for a summer class with the public school district instead. For one week that summer, I went to classes held at Conway Middle School to learn all about the ins and outs of driving a car.

If you knew me back then, you’d know I’m a pretty quiet person. I prefer to listen and observe, instead of speaking. Still do, honestly. And going to a class with a bunch of people I didn’t know in a place I didn’t usually attend meant that I was interested in doing a lot of observing during that week.

And one thing I noticed – that has stuck with me 20 years later – was how we sat in that classroom. The white students, including me, sat in the first two lines of desks, while Black students filled the rest. You could have drawn a neat line straight down between us.

There was no assigned seating in the class. We just somehow settled into sitting like that.

Separated.

I thought it was weird then. I still think it’s weird now. And ever since, I usually make a point to observe how people divide themselves, intentionally or not, in our society today.

I don’t know why we do this. I’m sure smarter researchers than me have studied the subject and come up with complex answers. (Nothing is ever truly simple with society, after all.) But I still have my own thoughts and theories about it too. I believe it takes intentional work to change years of ingrained separation, and that doesn’t happen overnight.

Think back first to the early history of our nation. There was a time when Black people were taken from their homes across the sea and brought here to be enslaved. This happened so often and for so long, that whole generations of people were born into bondage. I can only imagine the mindset of the people in power back then. If they wholeheartedly believed they could own another person, then they probably didn’t even think of those people as human.

What a damaging way of thinking.

It took until the Civil War in 1860s before slavery was stopped. People fought and died over the issue.

It’s no stretch to think that people at the end of the war didn’t change their mindset immediately either. After decades and decades and decades of thinking about enslaved people as just a regular part of life, I don’t think many of them went home after the war and said, let’s all be friends now.

No, instead, our society decided it would be better if everyone was segregated. Put visible and invisible walls between us. Attempts to share power were stopped.

Take what happened in Wilmington, NC on Nov. 10, 1898, for example. At the time, both white and Black men were serving in several leadership positions in the town, including some elected ones. But a group of white leaders didn’t like that idea, and encouraged violence until it actually happened. Businesses burned, families fled their homes, and a lot of Black people were killed.

It was not until the 1960s that our society started seriously trying to put an end to segregation – about 100 years since the end of slavery. Isn’t that a long time to wait before making such a big change?

Why did it take so long? Why did we even try to separate ourselves from each other instead of learning how to live side by side?

The changes of the Civil Rights Movement did not come easily. I remember learning about many things people did in order to bring about that change. The boycotts and the sit-ins and the marches. The Greensboro sit-ins, for example, which were largely led by local college students, helped kick off a national movement. And eventually, their work paid off: they no longer had to sit in a separate section when they wanted to eat lunch at local businesses.

But what’s most memorable to me are the photos of desegregating schools. Look them up and you’ll see angry adults yelling at teenagers. You’ll see protestors holding abhorrent anti-integration signs. You’ll see men – sometimes armed military men – having to escort children to school for their safety.

I can’t imagine the anti-integration people changed their minds so quickly, even after they gave up on protesting on sidewalks in front of schools.

What I mean to say is that, unfortunately, some things may be so deeply rooted after so many years – centuries, even – that it will still take more time to fully change society. You can’t point the blame at any one person. Separation was simply something embedded in everyone’s way of life. It was built into the very framework we lived by.

It can be easy to think the Civil Rights work ended with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and others in the 1960s, but I don’t believe we’re quite there yet. There are still people in power out there who want to divide us up, put us in little boxes, and draw neat lines straight down between us.

February is Black History Month, so I encourage everyone to take the time to brush up on that history. Because you have to know history in order to understand the present and prepare yourself for the future.

Observing the world around you is a good place to start.

Holly Taylor is a Staff Writer for Roanoke-Chowan Publications. Contact her at holly.taylor@r-cnews.com or 252-332-7206.