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4

Douglass. I would mention the painters, Bannister and Tanner. My teachers answered [[strikethrough]] superciously and after superciiously [[/strikethrough]] smugly and often angrily. The histories from which we were taught, they would say, were written by competent people, and whatever they did not mention was simply not important enough to mention. When I spoke up about these ignored great figures, I would be told to sit down and shut up. [[strikethrough]] As [[/strikethrough]] In public speaking classes, whenever I had a chance to speak, it would be about these discoveries of mine. The other Negro students were often embarrassed by this. It had been deeply ingrained in them, as in me in my first school years, that to be a Negro was something of which to be ashamed; that the Negro people were an inferior people, illiterate, uncouth. And this was intensified by  the [[strikethrough]] portra [[/strikethrough]] clownish role forced upon Negroes in cinema, by thousands of barbs and shafts in the comic strips, in the newspapers, in casual conversation of white people. Everything characteristic of Negro culture was isolated and distorted into an object of hilarity. And so it was considered best not to mention this embarrassing word or subject. It is a terrible thing, this turning of children against their own parents and ancestors, robbing them of their heritage and the riches of their past, leaving them spiritually fatherless and motherless.
      
I grew to dislike school intensely. Many times I was [[strikethrough]] about to be [[/strikethrough]] on the point of being expelled. I was called stupid and arrogant. My mother was asked to come to school, and receive a list of complaints. And so whenever I didn't feel like going to school I just didn't go. Playing truant, I would go to the Art Institute of Chicago and wander about its art galleries, looking at the paintings, and dreaming of becoming an artist. Outside of my art teachers, who would come to my rescue when I got in trouble, [[strikethrough]] and a few other students, [[/strikethrough]] I was very lonely in school. But I did find a small group of students struggling to break down discriminatory practices in school, and joined them. Thus at sixteen I had my first experience in an organized movement to attack some social problem.