My freshman year at Baker High School was uneventful. The year was 1969 and most of us were in love with The Beatles, pet rocks and bell-bottom jeans.

Our parents weren’t rich, and few of us lived in fancy houses. Most of my classmates had grown up together and we seemed like one big family.

High school life was pretty good, I thought, but all that changed my sophomore year when our high school underwent forced integration.

Black students from a neighboring town had to come to our high school and some of our friends had to go to a different school.

Both black and white parents were outraged. There were protesters outside of the school those first few weeks with screaming angry parents marching back and forth.

Inside the school, things weren’t much better. I distinctly remember seeing our assistant principal walking down the hall carrying chains and brass knuckles he’d taken away from students.

It wasn’t unusual for girls to walk down the hall three and four abreast and knock down anybody in their way.

Tempers flared, fist fights happened every hour, and there was chaos. Our first pep rally, the students from Scotlandville sat together and the kids from Baker sat together.

They sang their school fight song and we screamed ours. Fights broke out, and that was the last of the pep rallies for the year.

I was scared a good bit of the time as well as angry about why politicians and prejudiced parents had to ruin life for us.

Then I got to know some of the kids from Scotlandville, and I found out a few things. They were proud of their school, proud of their school’s achievements and as angry as we were.

As the weeks rolled by, we realized a few uncomfortable truths. The teens from Scotlandville didn’t have the same level of textbooks that we had. Not that ours were great, but at least ours had all the pages and were printed in the last 20 years.

They didn’t have the same school supplies we had in the classrooms nor did they have the same level of musical instruments or football equipment. The classrooms at their old school were in sad shape, and that was unbelievable as ours weren’t that great.

By the time we were seniors, many of us had become friends. Some parents came around, but generations of hate are difficult to erase in one generation and almost impossible to forget.

Which brings us to the uproar over Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam’s black-face picture in a 1984 medical school yearbook page.

What he did is unconscionable. Not because he did it – there’s not a one of us who doesn’t regret something we said or did back when we were young. Who poses next to someone in a Ku Klux robe and thinks that’s funny?

What’s almost impossible to forgive is that Northam didn’t come forward and own his past transgressions. It’s not like he was a teenager whose hormones and immaturity ran ahead of common sense. This man was in medical school in the mid-1980s.

Surely his memory isn’t that shallow.

Still the question looms:  how far back do we go to punish someone? A picture from elementary school? High school? College? Do we examine that person’s life to see if they’ve outgrown those prejudices or do we immediately call for blood?

I admit freely that there were things I said and did in my youth I truly regret. There will probably be words I’ll utter today or next year I’ll wish I hadn’t said. I pray that anyone I’ve hurt will accept my apologies and forgive me, but I’m not sure that’s possible these days.

We are quick to judge and condemn but we should be slower to judge and faster to understand and learn.

We must never stop working to right wrongs, even if they happened five, 10, 20, 30 or 40 years ago. We must be willing to look inside and admit to prejudices and find ways to educate ourselves.

The words of Abraham Lincoln still ring true: “In times like the present, men should utter nothing for which they would not willingly be responsible through time and eternity.”

This article was originally published in The Fort Bend Herald.