Arrested for being inventive while brown-skinned.

When I was ten years old, I was one of the four African American students who were transferred to the predominantly white school. This move was my county’s half-hearted and passive-aggressive effort to comply with the U. S. Supreme Court’s orders to desegregate the nation’s public schools. I was the only African American child in my class of about thirty students. My teacher was white. Because our school was overcrowded, my class met in a separate building called the “Tater House” and I did not see or interact with the other three African American Students.

We were on a six-week grading period and during that first grading period, I would raise my hand to respond to questions that were asked in class or volunteer to solve a mathematical problem on the board or diagram a sentence. However, it was as if I was the…