This is Black History Month, when Americans remember events and people from our past and important to our future, including African American women with February birthdays: Marian Anderson, Barbara Jordan, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker and especially Rosa Parks, “the mother of the Civil Rights Movement.”

But witnesses to history are around us, too.

In fact, on the day Parks refused to surrender her seat on a segregated bus in Montgomery, Ala., a first-year teacher in Peoria celebrated her 22nd birthday. A few weeks after Laveine Birditt celebrated her 90th birthday at Smokin’ Notes BBQ in East Peoria, she reminisced about bus boycotts, college, teaching and Peoria — and the Way Things Were and how the country seems to be drifting back to the Bad Ol’ Days.

Her white hair accented by black frame glasses and earrings, Birditt glows in a living room as warm as the winter weather outside is arctic.

‘Respectable’ treatment

Raised in Monmouth, Birditt attended Western Illinois State College in Macomb, where she worked in the cafeteria and was required to live off campus “with a respectable Black family” while Black athletes were permitted to live in the dorm. That meant she had to walk more than a mile to campus every day.

Graduating in 1955, Birditt became one of the first Black teachers in Peoria public schools.

She taught for 55 years at Lincoln, Trewyn and Rolling Acres, 40 years full-time in different grades and 15 years part-time supervising in-school suspensions.

“I preferred the 8th grade. They understood better. I remember telling them, ‘You can do things, go on to college or some apprenticeship to be an electrician or bricklayer.’

“There was one girl who always was looking down. I finally said, ‘Lift your head up, look up and be proud’.”

More than once, she advised classes of mostly minority children that sometimes they were going to have to be better just to stay afloat.

Meticulous notes in legible longhand she shares show her demanding nature. A former Trewyn student, Terrion Williamson, author of “Scandalize My Name,” in 2017 told writer Pam Adams, “We all thought she was crazy, but she understood something about us I’m not sure we understood about ourselves. She stayed on us.”

Birditt almost begrudgingly concedes she was kindhearted. For a while, she read to Head Start youngsters and showed them affection despite others’ objections. “One teacher cussed me out for hugging the kids,” she says.

The suspended students she monitored made her realize a double standard. They were mostly minorities who had problems with drugs, she says, and they were disciplined. “But when White kids started doing drugs, all of a sudden there were programs and agencies to help.”

Peoria had outright segregation, too. In the 1950s, Thompson’s restaurant downtown was the only place that served Blacks, who were seated in the back. There were housing restrictions in Peoria.

“It was the talk of the town when a Black man bought a house on Groveland Avenue.” In public housing, Harrison was Whites only as was Warner Homes’ corner building on MacArthur Highway, she says. And, like her years in Macomb, she was “a single Black teacher in Peoria who had to live with a respectable Black family.”

Good trouble

As a teacher, she was affected by a successful boycott of Peoria’s public transit system in 1963, when the bus company had no Black workers. It was inconvenient but necessary, she recalls: “The bus boycott affected those of us with jobs, but was for a just cause,” he says.

She and friends occasionally traveled, and she faced discrimination in lodging.

“I’d get so mad, but I maintained my cool. But it still angers me,” she says.

She got around one reluctant clerk who was prohibiting her from registering until she faked an accent as a foreign tourist and was then given a room.

Birditt is still determined. Despite contracting COVID twice, in 2020 and in 2022, she’s remained independent and walks — with her metal walker — at Riverplex a few times a week, weather permitting.

But her memories remind her of how uncomfortably similar Peoria’s past was to what some seem set on re-creating now.

“White supremacists are crawling out from under rocks, and you just can’t put toothpaste back in the tube, as it’s said. The more things change, the more they’re the same,” she says. “White supremacy isn’t new, but some parents haven’t explained it and made their kids aware of its dangers. I’d tell them in a heartbeat.”

‘Ways to go’

She sees a troubling return to times when discrimination was tolerated, if not exactly acceptable, citing increasing restrictions on voting and backtracking on issues as different as migrants and health care to LGBTQ rights and censorship. Asked what she would have done if officials had forbidden her to teach about certain topics, she smiled slightly and said, “I would’ve sneaked it in some way or another.”

Despite her apprehension, she’s not pessimistic. “I know I have three strikes against me — I’m a woman, I’m Black and I’m Catholic,” she quips, chuckling.

“We still have a ways to go — to grow,” says Birdittt, who embraces hope by contributing to causes as varied as scholarships to Black students and Habitat for Humanity to the Center for Prevention of Abuse and the Crittenton Centers.

This month will pass, of course, like the cold, yielding to March’s Women’s History Month and more. But as calendar pages fade, lives like Laveine’s — and the impact she had on generations, the history she experienced and yearns to see recognized — go on.

“Periodically I read a little note I kept, which says something like, ‘Don’t allow the past to cause you to be hateful… That’s the Devil at work’.”