Thank you to author and civil rights activist Miki Conn for spending time with our students earlier this month. Conn (pictured, left, with BCHS teacher Preya Krishna-Kennedy) was a special guest at a joint meeting of the student clubs Students for Peace and Survival (SPAS) and ALANA (African, Latinx, Asian, Native American & Allies).
Conn, who attended BCMS and BCHS from 1957-1962, read from the book she helped publish, entitled “Integrating Delmar 1957: The Story of Friendship.” The book chronicles her family’s search for housing amid discrimination and their experiences as the first Black family in Delmar in the 1950s. The book is told through journal entries kept by Conn’s mother, Margaret Cunningham, and Arlen Westbrook, a white woman who rented her house to the Cunningham family despite pushback from neighbors and community members. The two women, who would go on to become lifelong friends, were unaware that they had each kept private journals about their time together until learning about the separate journals decades later. <
Integrating Delmar is a memoir and a piece of American history,” Conn told the students. “Change in assumptions and attitudes is the basis of real change. People getting to know one another as human beings, getting to know what we have in common, even what we don’t have in common but to know we are all human beings. That is one of the lessons of this book and it is one of the things I want you to hear and understand.”