Jackson Free Press

Octavia Carson has called Jackson home for almost all her life. Her family moved to the capital city when, very early in her childhood, her parents realized that she would require the special services offered by the Mississippi School for the Blind to achieve the education they wanted for her.

Because visual impairment is prominent in their family, MSB has played a vital role in the lives of several of Carson’s extended family members, including her mother, aunts and uncles, and one of her siblings. It continues to play that role today in the life of her 15-year-old daughter, who is a current student there.

“We are a third-generation family (at MSB), and as far as I am aware, we are the only third-generation family,” Carson says. “It does make for very sentimental kinds of aspects of why we take things so seriously in terms of education, in terms of what’s there and what needs to happen for students of our blind and visually impaired population.”

While MSB has been important in the lives of Carson and her family, her family has also been important in the life of the school. She points out that her grandmother was instrumental in the effort to integrate the school.

“Not until 1979 … did the school start fully integrating,” Carson says. “So, I never went to the all-Black school. My mom did. My aunts and uncles did. But thanks to my grandma pushing for things to change … I always was afforded the opportunity to go to school with students who were not my same ethnicity.”

Following in the footsteps of her own mother, Carson’s mother pushed to get better educational opportunities for her daughter, as well.

“I got all of my formal education mainly from the School for the Blind. And I say ‘mainly’ because, around the sixth or seventh grade my mom insisted that I start taking classes with peers who were not vision impaired, … and that meant integrating me into the public school system,” Carson explains.

During her middle and high school years, she split her time between MSB and JPS schools—first Chastain Middle School, then Murrah High School—spending half of the day at each school. Those years attending school with peers who did not share her physical challenges would prove to be instrumental in helping Carson achieve her goals.

“(Those were) very eye-opening years for me. Had I not been exposed to that, there is no way I would have been socially ready to attend a four-year university, which is ultimately what I did after I graduated from the School for the Blind,” she says.

Carson attended Tougaloo College, graduating with a degree in psychology. She then continued her education, earning a master’s degree in special education with a concentration in visual impairment from Jackson State University.

Long a proud supporter of Mississippi’s Historically Black Colleges and Universities­, Carson is especially pleased that her oldest daughter, who is a college freshman this year, has also chosen to attend a Mississippi HBCU.

“Although she did not choose my HBCU,” Carson says with a laugh, “she did choose an HBCU. She’s attending Jackson State University, and I still couldn’t be prouder. For an African American, there’s nothing like getting the background, getting the history, that you wouldn’t get at the other larger, predominantly white universities.”

Laughing again, she adds, “Maybe one of my three (daughters) will end up at Tougaloo. My 8-year-old already says that an HBCU is in her future, she just doesn’t know which one yet. So, there’s still hope.”