My Mother Helped Integrate Decatur’s Schools. I Was Among the First Students.

Wanda Sims Watters, 72, is a legacy resident of the Beacon Hill community in Decatur, Georgia. Beacon Hill, also referred to as “The Bottom,” was a Black community that was established after the Civil War by formerly enslaved African Americans. Watters grew up in the community in the 1960s and 1970s as the country was integrating. She and her siblings were some of the first Black students to integrate Decatur public schools. 

This account has been condensed and edited for clarity.

I am a legacy descendant from the original Beacon Hill community, formerly known as “The Bottom,” and I’m deeply rooted in the community. It’s where I grew up, and my early adult life was experienced in this particular community. We were really kind of confined in that area during the time, but it was a really strong, tight-knit neighborhood.

You knew who lived next door, who lived on the other street. There were lots of relatives in the neighborhood, lines of families. So you felt safe, you felt protected. It was a neighborhood where any adult could correct you if you were out of line. It’s a place where you walked. You walked to church, you walked to school, you walked to do your shopping. 

In our neighborhoods, there were barbershops, hair salons, grocery stores, funeral homes — everything we needed was located within our community, mainly because we were on the brink of segregation and integration and so there were so many things that we were not allowed to do outside our neighborhood. So because of that, we were united in our neighborhood. You never felt ostracized, or you never felt like you didn’t have anyone to talk to. Even if you had a brawl with your sister or brother, you just go hang out with your cousin. So there was lots of love. And even if they were not related by blood, they were related by love. 

My mother, Sadie Sims, was very civic-oriented, which is kind of where we get all this from, along with Emerita Elizabeth Wilson, who wasn’t the mayor yet — she was just a regular citizen back then. In that time, in the late ’60s, my mother and Miss Elizabeth Wilson went to the superintendent of Decatur schools to tell him that they needed a summer program for the colored children’s school because we didn’t have summer school then. And he replied to them, “You should buy your children some encyclopedias.” Well, they did not settle for that answer. And so that started the push to integrate the schools of Decatur. We had to be the first ones on the list to attend the schools. So my sisters, Doris, Carolyn, and myself, were of age. They had a junior high school and a high school back then. So I was in junior high school. They were in the high school along with African Americans from various families.

It was very uncomfortable for the first day, going into an environment where you’ve never been. Even though you know the Supreme Court had ruled that there shouldn’t be segregated schools in 1954, here we are and we’re just starting to integrate here in the City of Decatur.

I said how comfortable it was in the Beacon Hill area where the Blacks resided, but if you took one step further by the county courthouse, you were not comfortable because we were not accepted. We couldn’t try on clothes because we were Black; we couldn’t try on hats because we were Black. We had to drink different water because we were Black. We were not allowed to eat at various places. This is what we knew to expect — that we were not accepted when we went to Decatur High — so it was very uncomfortable. I cried a lot of days there. I tried to do my very best. I am not angry. I am happy that I was able to survive because it really strengthened me. I learned from my parents how not to be defined by anyone and not to be told what I couldn’t do.