I agree with you Simonkenton. I grew up about 50 miles from Macon.
High schools were not segregated until 1966 or 1967. Thankfully I was out of high school by then.
I graduated from a big high school in Atlanta in 1968. We got integrated in 1966. We had 1,400 students. In the fall of 1966, they moved 105 black kids in to my school.
We had plenty of badass rednecks and I thought there were going to be some big problems. In hindsight, I think that the football coach and the principal must have gotten the 10 biggest, baddest football players together and told them "Integration is a fact of life whether we like it or not. We do not want to be on the cover of Life Magazine as the redneck school where two black kids got beaten half to death. We want you to meet up with the bad guys in school, we all know who they are, and we want y'all as student leaders, to tell these bad redneck boys to lay off the new black kids, or else, y'all redneck boys are going to get your ass beat."
I think that must have happened because we had no racial incidents, much to my surprise. In fact one of the black kids, named Arthur Samilton, came out for the football team and he was pretty good. I found that interesting to get to know a black kid I had never even spoken to a Negro before I met Arthur.
