Photo courtesy of Nollie Jenkins Family Center
On a Tuesday morning three years ago, Julia Ringo discovered her daughter was in terrible pain. Examining her, Ringo looked in shock at a mass of bruises and swelling on her daughter Kiorey’s buttocks, a day after the 8-year-old Black girl had been paddled with a wooden board at an elementary school in Grenada, Mississippi.
Ringo rushed her daughter to the emergency room and told the attending doctor what had transpired. “As soon as he looked at her behind, it was like he couldn’t even look at it,” she says, breaking down in tears. “He just took a deep breath, felt on her butt to see was it swollen. She was screaming.” Kiorey’s injuries were so severe, Ringo said, that she had to stay home the rest of the week.
Ringo also reached out to someone else: Dianna Freelon-Foster, a lifelong resident of Grenada. In 1966, as a 15-year-old high school student, Freelon-Foster helped integrate the Grenada public schools. “The principal sent me and other students into a sea of angry white men who had bricks and pipes and stones” to vent their wrath over the school’s integration, Freelon-Foster told MindSite News.
Comments (0)