Esther Quarles

Girl Scout Leader, Fourth Baptist Church
B. 1940

I came here at age eight, and I’ve lived here ever since. Even now, I can go back into my neighborhood and for those neighbors who are there, it’s like old times. We’ll sit down and we’ll talk and reminisce about things that we did. It was just awesome then. And you look at today what the kids are going through. It’s quite different.

It was 26 children where I grew up in one block, and if we were going to a football game, Virginia Union [University] is where all the games were played at that time. Maggie Walker [High School] and Armstrong [High School] games were played there. If one of us didn’t have money, everybody walked. We would walk to the games and we would walk back home. What little money we had, we’d might of put it together and buy chips or something like that to give us strength to get back.

I worked at Fisher Elementary School, which was an annexed area of Chesterfield. Kids had to come from Gilpin Court all the way to Fisher. Those kids in that area came over to Church Hill to integrate, but really it was not integration, because when you bused the kids like that, you got that whole area going over to one school and the other area is coming back. Even now you don’t have real integration. You go into some schools, you have ninety-nine percent African-American, one percent other nationalities.