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Partly Cloudy Keeping black history close to home
Goodine gives teens a taste of the past
“We always hear about Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, all the important people,” Glen Cove High School junior Dajour Gibson said of Black History Month, “but we never really hit home.”
That’s why, as part of a school project, Gibson decided to explore his own city’s black history. At an assembly in the high school’s auditorium where Gibson’s work was presented, Allen Hudson, the school’s assistant principal, spoke about the origins of the project. He explained that students were asked to think about how the civil rights movement impacted the South. Gibson took it upon himself, doing some extra research, to explore how the movement impacted the North.
He didn’t get far before learning about 67-year-old Sheryl Goodine, the now retired assistant principal of the high school, whose father, James Davis, named her in a lawsuit in the late 1960s that resulted in the desegregation of Glen Cove’s schools. Davis, then the leader of the city’s chapter of the NAACP, had also sued to desegregate the Fire Department.
“Miss Goodine, she hits home,” Gibson said. “Before this project, I didn’t even know about Glen Cove’s desegregation history. I didn’t know about [Sheryl] Goodine.”
But when Gibson went home and told his mother, he discovered that she knew Goodine. “My mom was excited for me to interview her,” he said, adding that his mother had been a student at the high school when Goodine was a member of the faculty.
Gibson’s video began with a focus on racism and segregation across the nation, and then transitioned to the Little Rock Nine, who helped push desegregation in an Arkansas school district. The effort gained national attention when President Dwight Eisenhower called in the Army to escort black students through violent crowds to their school building. Finally Gibson focused on Long Island, and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s visits to Nassau County.
But that was just the video’s introduction. The bulk of it featured Gibson interviewing Goodine. He was surprised to learn that even though her name was on that long-ago lawsuit, she was too young at the time to remember much about the efforts to desegregate the school district. She did, however, remember what it was like in her classrooms.
“I didn’t really start to notice something until I got to the middle school,” Goodine said in the video. Before then, she had attended a mostly black school. But once she started sixth grade, she was often the only black person among white students. “That was difficult,” She said. “I was separated from all of my friends. It was culture shock.”
Goodine said that she didn’t learn about the history of black people in America until she went to college. “When I started at Glen Cove High School, there was no black history,” she said in the video. “The closest we got was discussing slavery, and even then, very briefly. And when we got to that, if you were black, you put your head down, because they talked about it in such a disparaging way.”
Then, she took a course called “Black History” while she was a student at the University of Rochester. She recalled, “I was very, very angry that no one had taught me my own history, a history that is so tightly woven into the fabric of American history.” But, she added, she used that anger to help bring about change. “I was determined to come back into Glen Cove to start teaching others what I did not know,” she said.
And she did, becoming an educator and returning home. As a testament to her success in the school district, the Glen Cove High School Select Chorale, under Edward Norris’s direction, wrapped up the assembly with a performance of “Indodana,” a traditional religious song of mourning and blessing in the Bantu language of South Africa.
After the song ended, Goodine joined in the applause, sighed and said, “Those are my babies.” Afterward, teachers, former students, former colleagues and other school staff members all wanted to catch up with her, and for about an hour, she warmly complied.
