Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, October 22, 1995                   TAG: 9510210002
SECTION: HORIZON                    PAGE: G-4   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

HELEN STUART SMITH

Before that first day at a new school, Helen Stuart Smith remembers, "We were all told by our parents that we would run into ignorance but as long as no one touched us it wasn't a problem."

Smith remembers that it was the boys who were more difficult to deal with during integration. "You know, nigger this and that type of thing, which we knew to ignore," Smith says. "I guess it all goes back to the way your parents raised you."

Smith tells of the day her mother pulled out an old raggedy Webster's Dictionary and looked up the word, "nigger." "She pointed to the definition and it said 'a low class person'," Smith remembers. "She told us to remember that anyone who uses that word is just that."

What has Smith taught her own four children? "I've never discussed what I went through in Floyd with my kids," she says, "because I don't think they would have really understood."

"I'm really glad they weren't subjected to that, bigotry may have crossed their lives but they have a right to go to any school they choose."

Smith dropped out of Check High at 16 but later caught up at an Adult Education school in Washington, D.C. and earned an associate's degree in management at a business institute.

Smith serves as president of the board of directors for the co-op where she lives, "the first major black-owned co-op in the United States," says Smith proudly.

"My children can't fight for something that happened to me just like I can't fight for something that happened to my parents or grandparents," Smith says. "I tell them you cannot look back, you must continue to look ahead and work for your own children. Whatever happened yesterday is gone, you cannot reach back and get yesterday but you can always look forward to tomorrow."

"I do think about the blacks who didn't fight to go to school in the county they were paying taxes to" Smith says. "We were the guinea pigs then the rest of them came over later."

"You know what really bothers me, though?" Smith asks. "That even today blacks and whites can't always go to the same church."

"I really don't understand it," Smith says. "I wonder what they'd do if a black person walked into Floyd County Baptist church in the middle of town, they'd probably stop the service," Smith says and laughs.

"I wonder," Smith says. "How many Gods do they think are up there?"