Gregory Robinson: ‘We were members of the last generation to attend segregated schools’

I was born and raised in Northeast Alabama, an hour or so east of Birmingham, US. We had a big family, with my mom and dad and six kids. There were three girls and three boys.

We were members of the last generation to attend segregated schools. The Supreme Court’s Brown v Board of Education decision, which ruled that racially segregated schools were unconstitutional, came in 1954, but it took more than a decade-and-a-half for the ruling to have an impact in my part of Alabama. Consequently, my classmates and I continued to attend overcrowded, underfunded, inferior segregated schools.