“I hope that schools have changed since I was a little girl. My memory of the teaching of the public schools is that it showed the brutal incomprehension of children.”

“Now, I have nothing against the public school system as it is presently organized, once you allow the humor of its basic assumption about how it is possible to teach things to children....”

“My heart was a little bit broken, but I still had to go to school. I buttoned my dress shirt over it and my winter coat, too. I hoped it didn't show too much.”

“Fifty years after Brown, we should have learned that there is no magic in white classmates. The magic lies at the intersection of educational opportunity and attitude—the coming together of teachers who know how to teach and children who are ready to learn. No one thing—not the ballot, not changes in school governance, not desegregation—will produce that happy confluence. We have to demand that the schools get ready for our children. But we also have to make sure, using every resource at our disposal, that our children are ready for school.”

“If I could have, I would have erased the entire night from my memory. I felt changed, soiled by the brutality of all I witnessed. Something had finally replaced teenage girls on my list of things most heinous, and I didn't even know what to call it.”

“My intellectual achievement was retarded when I went to high school. I sort of sank into a black hole because I had to go to the high-achieving, academic public high school.”