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

DATE: SUNDAY, October 22, 1995                   TAG: 9510210007
SECTION: HORIZON                    PAGE: G-4   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

RAYMOND TAYLOR

"Three or four of us blacks were good at sports" Taylor says. "We would have made any team, but by going to Floyd High we didn't get a chance to play." Taylor sits in the living room of his daughter's house, one of his rental properties in Roanoke.

"We weren't allowed to play," Taylor says. "That hurts." He stops and smiles "look at me, going on bragging like that."

A day earlier a younger former student, Dennis Akers, who followed Taylor at high school, expressed the same memory. "Those boys," he said of his older brother, Charles, and the others, "They would have made a monster football team. It was a shame, all those big farm boys not allowed to play sports."

Size was important and could have its advantages. "I never worried about anybody whipping me" Taylor says and laughs. "I doubt anybody at Floyd could have."

It was words, not fists, that were hurled during the integration. "People saying 'nigger' when you passed them on the streets or writing 'skunk in the white house on the blackboard'."

"It really didn't bother me," Taylor says. "Believe it or not I kinda felt good about it." Taylor says his father taught him that if anybody called him a name or wanted to fight him, it meant "I must have something on the ball. I must be somebody. Being ignored is a put-down," Taylor says.

"But I thought everything was pretty fair," Taylor says as he thinks back to integration in Floyd County. "Except the teachers were real strict on us."

Before Floyd High, Taylor had attended a school in Columbus, Ohio, where 60 percent to 70 percent of the student body was white.

Taylor remembers attorneys asked him to return to Floyd because he had already attended an integrated school. The hope was that his experience in Ohio would help ease the transition.

Taylor complied and left a school where he remembers "if teachers saw you weren't doing well they would say 'Can I help you?' or 'Do you want to stay after?'"

At Floyd, Taylor felt "the teachers were done with you at 3:00."

Taylor felt "at home with" the students, however, having grown up with them. "All of us, [black and white ] we'd go out together, we had our hopped-up cars we'd race," says Taylor, who had a '55 Chevrolet. "We'd even sneak a beer every now and then, you know how teen-agers are."

When it came time for Taylor's senior prom he remembers "I was told by the sheriff that I shouldn't go."

Taylor says "if I had gone, I had a couple of close white girlfriends - I would have gone with one of them and that wouldn't have gone over too well."

"As far as students-against-students we didn't have too many problems" Taylor says. Taylor and the others interviewed believed that students years ago were torn between wanting to be friendly and open and what their parents wanted them to do. "Prejudice comes from the roots way back" Taylor says. "Until the older generation dies out, until that way of thinking is gone, Floyd will be that way."

Has Floyd changed? "Yeah, a whole lot," Taylor says. "But the progress Floyd's made has only been material. For instance, years ago we would have never dreamt that a Hardees would even consider coming to Floyd."

Floyd is a small town with one traffic light and now one fast-food restaurant. "In a small town, when you're black, they're only going to let you do so much" Taylor says.

Taylor, who divides his time between working at the psychiatric ward in the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Salem and the houses he buys, fixes up and rents, has felt unfairly dealt with in Floyd. "I have a pretty good job, savings, assets," Taylor says. "But if I go to the bank in Floyd to borrow money it doesn't seem to matter to them."

Looking at his four children's lives, Taylor feels positive about the future. "You can see changes" Taylor says.

He is quick to point out that there are problems at any school and if he had to do it all over again says "he'd study harder instead of running around."

"It was worth it just to have a shot at what everybody else did" Taylor says. "We put things on an equal basis, that was the most important thing."

Class reunions? "I'd love to go back" says Taylor. "I haven't been to any of the reunions. I don't hold a grudge or have bad feelings. It's just that I don't feel part of the class. We weren't allowed to be part of the class."