WBEZ has found that in the last 20 years, the number of extremely segregated black and Latino schools has gone up in our region. For our ongoing series Race: Out Loud, we talked with seniors who just graduated from some of these schools.

DERRELL: Most of the schools I’ve been through, throughout my life, are segregated.

COLLAGE of VOICES: An all-black school, all-black elementary and high school, all black. None of it was mixed. All black. It was all black. Totally black, just totally black. Grammar school all the way up to high school. A thousand, two thousand students: All of them were Latin.

GENESIS: I haven’t really been really close to someone or had like a full conversation with someone who’s not Hispanic.

The seniors in this story went to five different high schools. Some have gone their entire education—kindergarten through 12th grade— without ever having a classmate from another race.

Did you ever wonder when kids start to notice they’re in a situation like that?

JAKEEDA: Oh, that was probably when I was like very young—like grammar school, probably about third grade—when I noticed that I’m in an all-black school. There’s no other races.

DONAVAN: Fourth or fifth grade. They was talking about Martin Luther King. And some—I think his name was…it was Marquis something—he asked the teacher, ‘Is we black?’ And the teacher, she was like, ‘Yeah.  All of y’all some black young kids.’ And from there I was like, OK. We’re black.

GENESIS: Well, I don’t think I realized that ‘till maybe last year. ‘Cause I was just so used to it. And then last year, when I was finally looking at the future and what college I was going to attend and I was attending open houses, I was like wow. I’ve been in high school with all Mexicans, and I’m gonna go to college and it’s not all Mexicans. And that’s when I realized how comfortable I was here and how different it’s going to be in college.

JAKEEDA:  In school, I got to the age where they began to talk about race and black history and slavery, so I still thought it was, like, segregated.

Yeah, she thought Chicago schools were still legally segregated. That was around 2003.

When researchers measure school segregation across the country, Chicago tops the charts.

Forty percent of Latino kids in Chicago go to school in what sociologists consider “extreme segregation.” Seventy percent of African American kids do.

JANELLE: I just feel like we was just closed in, we were just all kept together.

PATRICE: You’re not going to hear anything positive about us, just because we’re all black.

Many of the students we talked to—though not all—go to struggling schools.  But even students in the same school have different views about their segregated education and what it’s meant for them as students, and as people.

LORENA: The experience isn’t bad, necessarily. It’s more like home.

GENESIS: You could just catch somebody in the hallway and say some phrase in Spanish and they’ll understand what you’re talking about. I guess we feel kind of like a family.

JESSENIA: It was really bad, like horrible, like beyond believable. The rooms were all run down and my parents were a little bit concerned because they didn’t  have the same materials as other schools. But as the years moved along our school started to move up, little by little—with just all Hispanics.

DERRELL: Black history, that’s a very big deal in black schools. I’ve won first place in a black history bee contest in my school, and my teachers—they take that very seriously, and so do the students.

GENESIS: I don’t think it depends on the school or the people you’re around. I think it just depends on yourself and how hard you’re trying.

KARL: I think it’s horrible, in one word. Kids never really get to know what life is. We’ve got to worry about getting shot. That’s life for us.

DERRELL: It was this one time, I was at a track meet. And we had to drop Walter Payton students off because their bus hadn’t come. And when we pulled in front of their school, it was flat screens, the school was clean, and everything just looked so perfect there, and I thought to myself, ‘This is somewhere I should be. This is where I want to go.’ What I saw in their school, we had nothing even close to what they had. And it was just something that I just had to accept.

KARL: To be honest, you kind of build a dislike for whites.

Students’ experiences with kids of other races have been accidental, and fleeting: a brief move to another state or a year in parochial school, a field trip to a white school. One girl told me that when Hurricane Katrina hit, a handful of white students arrived at her school. They were gone within a week.

TEONDRA: I wanted to go to a school that was mixed.

PATRICE: They’re more advanced than us. Like the stuff that all mixed schools read, I ain’t read yet. And then, they’re not just writing five paragrphs.  They’ve got to write three pages. In two days!

PATRICE: I have to go to certain schools in my area if I don’t pass this test. We’re not good enough for your mixed school. That hurts.

RAFA: It would certainly change and expand the minds of the students coming in. Definitely more culture enriched, more language enriched. Just, more well rounded. And it’s not a bad thing that it’s not—the education is great here. But, if we could have had more ethnic diversity, it would have been a better experience.

LORENA: I would be completely different because I would see different types of views, how everybody thinks. So it kind of changes my view and the way I am, and how everybody gets along.

BOY: It might turn the school completely around.

PATRICE: We’re in the middle of, you can say, the ghetto.

RAFA: The streets here are filled with Hispanics, so who’s gonna come to the school? Hispanics, Latins.

LORENA: It really can’t change. Well, it can—if we wanted it to—but it’s really difficult because we’re so used to living segregated.

All these students are about to step out into a much larger world. They know that. Tomorrow I’ll bring you their thoughts about how prepared they feel for what’s next. That’s in part two of this story.