Sheri Parks, Storyteller
SHERI PARKS, UMD Professor of American Studies
At first, I was not even looking. I was just a little kid at her teenaged sister’s school performance, playing with some toy in my lap, when I felt the air go still. It was 1968, the end of segregated education in Asheville, North Carolina. My sister’s class would soon move from their all-black school to the much bigger, all-city white school, leaving behind a safe and caring community to go to a place that did not want them.