A new documentary reveals what it was like for a group of Black students in Prince George’s County who integrated an elementary school 50 years ago.
The 20 kids who took the Tower Road bus bypassed their neighborhood school in Brandywine to integrate Crestview Elementary miles away in Clinton.
“They definitely didn’t want us there, and we didn’t really want to be there,” said one of the students, Karmalita Contee.
As a third grader in 1973, she didn’t understand why it was happening.
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“And I remember the student calling me the N-word and me thinking I had never had anyone say that to me before,” she said.
Contee is among those in “The Tower Road Bus” documentary, written and directed by former classmate Michael Streissguth, who was in the third grade at Crestview when the school was integrated
“I wasn’t understanding the larger political context of this, that a court had said this integration needs to happen and it needs to happen now,” he said.
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Widespread anti-busing protests happened in the county, he said.
“These stories needed to be told, these stories of people who were on the front lines of school integration,” Streissguth said.
Susie Proctor taught at Crestview and worked to make integration a success.
“All of the children, they saw it in different ways, and some of it was not positive, of course,” she said. “The environment was not necessarily inviting at the time for so many.”
School principal Dotson Burns Jr. is the main character in the film – a trailblazer who maintained calm in unsettling times.
Contee said the message in the documentary is timely given the continued push for justice.
“The concept of race theory and critical race and racial injustice, you would think 50 years later we’d have an answer to it,” she said. “We don’t.”
