As he and the other black students left Northwest Junior High at the end of the school day, Ernie Carson saw them waiting.

"We'd always notice a big group of white kids standing outside the school after we'd leave," he said. "Some of my older friends, black friends, knew something was going down, but they didn't know where or when."

Carson, a member of the information systems team at Palomar College, was among the first black students to attend the Kansas junior high school. In May, he will offer a workshop about being one of the first students in an integrated school after a court decision that ended segregation.

After the third or fourth week of school at Northwest Junior High, Carson recalled, the white youths started chasing him and his friends as they walked home. Outnumbered, the black students were on the losing end of the fights that followed the chases.

"That was the first time I heard the 'N word,'" Carson said. "Talk about growing up a sheltered child. I might have heard it in a joking manner, but never in such a hateful manner."

Brown vs. the Board of Education ended segregation in public schools in 1954, but the road to actual school integration often was bumpy and slow. The district borders of Northwest Junior High School in Kansas City, Kansas, were not changed until five years after the landmark court decision.

"If I recall correctly, there were probably 20 of us," Carson said about the number of black students at Northwest Junior High. "I think the school population was 200 or 300."

After the first few weeks of classes, black students were afraid to leave school at the end of the day, knowing racist thugs were waiting for them. Neighbors and even police turned a blind eye as the students were chased down the streets, said Carson.

He was 8 years old when the Brown case was decided and said he had little understanding of what it was about at the time.

"My father and mother never talked about race relations," he said. "I can remember seeing different things on television, but Daddy and Momma would never comment on it, other than, 'That's too bad.'"

Carson's father worked at a meat-packing plant and then became a firefighter, rising in rank to become one of the first black fire captains in Kansas City. His mother did domestic work before returning to school to become a nurse.

The oldest of three children, Carson attended the segregated Stowe Elementary School in the inner city, where he said there were few white families. Two years later, the family moved to the suburbs, where Carson found himself enrolled in the heretofore segregated Northwest Junior High.

When the after-school harassment began, Carson made the connection between what was happening to him and the images of racial unrest he had seen on television.

"I was raised where everybody was getting along," he said. "It was a shock, a rude awakening."

The black Northwest students tried a few strategies to defend themselves.

"We thought of splitting up when we left the school," he said. "We thought maybe it'd reduce the tension of what was going on. We found out pretty quickly that wasn't going to happen."

Some black students tried leaving school early, and the number of white students waiting for them after school dropped to about 30.

Then, Carson said, his friends learned something surprising: The white students chasing them did not even attend their school, but were older students from a nearby high school.

"The sad thing about it was, some of us were too scared to even tell our parents about it," he said. "Our folks would say, 'What happened?' and we'd say we got into a fight."

The chases happened at least two or three times a week, and while they didn't end in bloody beatings, there was pushing and shoving that caused black eyes and busted lips, he said.

"Eventually, in the neighborhoods we were being chased through, some of the white homeowners started calling police," he said. "They could see whites running and girls screaming."

But those same people would shut their doors when they saw a black child running toward their houses to seek shelter, Carson said.

Sometime during the school year, a couple of black students from Kansas City, Mo., just over the state border from Kansas, transferred to Northwest Junior High.

"These guys went home and called their brothers from Kansas City (Missouri)," Carson said. "Their brothers got in contact with us and several other blacks in Missouri, and they said, 'You guys run like you normally do down this certain street, and we're going to be waiting and put a stop to all this."

The students coming to their aid were high schoolers, closer in age to the boys who had been picking on the Northwest Junior High students.

An after-school skirmish erupted like clockwork, and Carson and his friends took off toward the street where they had been told to lead their pursuers.

"We turned the corner, and we didn't see anybody," Carson said. "We thought, 'Oh, sh-, this is going to be bad.' The white boys caught up and circled us."

Carson remembered about a dozen white students circling the five black students, and he was bracing for a beating when he caught a glimpse of something colorful behind the hood of a parked car.

The black high schoolers were wearing bandanas on their heads, and Carson could see them bobbing behind the cars as they maneuvered into place before popping up and taking the white students by surprise.

"These were muscular guys," Carson said. "They confronted the leader: 'Why are you guys chasing these little kids? What have they done to you? We don't understand why you're chasing them.'"

Carson said both sides argued back and forth, and he remembers one of the white youths saying that the younger black kids had started it.

"One of them said, 'They don't belong here, and what are you going to do about it?'" Carson remembered. "That was the wrong thing to say."

One of the Missouri students wound up, threw a punch and dropped a white student to his knees.

"It was the first time I saw somebody get knocked out, and his legs were just shaking," Carson said. "I was afraid he'd killed him."

The ensuing fight lasted about five minutes, but Carson said it felt like 36 hours. Police were called and arrived just as it was ending.

The next day, the junior high principal finally learned about what was happening after school, and from then on, police cars patrolled the neighborhood each day after school.

"Guys would pull up and say, 'Are you guys OK? Is anybody bothering you?'" Carson said. "These were the same guys who were ignoring us before."

Carson suspects that the white high schoolers had some explaining to do when they went home, and their parents probably disapproved of them picking on younger students.

Fights still happened sporadically at the school, but the after-school chases were over.

"Eventually it dawned on me, when I started paying more attention to the newscasts, that it wasn't just Northwest kids getting beat up," he said. "It was happening in the whole damn country, and we were just a part of it."

Carson followed the civil rights movement closely while growing up and remembers watching sit-ins and marches.

"I felt, if they can accomplish that with nonviolent means, great, because I always said that nobody should have to go through what we went through as kids," he said.

People have asked him whether the confrontations in junior high affected his life.

"It made me work that much harder, or let me know I would have to work that much harder in an integrated society," said Carson, who is also state president of the California Federation of Teachers' classified employee division. "After that, it wasn't strange for me to be the only black in the computer department."

After high school, Carson attended Kansas City Junior College and Kansas State Teachers College before working for Avon in Kansas City, Mo., where he was the company's first black supervisor in data processing. An Escondido resident, he has worked at Palomar College 13 years and is a father of three.

"There's a lot of firsts in my life," he continued. "The first black to do this or the first black to do that. I was letting people know we can do the same thing, we can excel. The highlight of all this is, I didn't come out with any resentment to the white race."

Carson is scheduled to discuss his experience from 10 a.m. to noon May 5 in Room O-11 at Palomar College as part of the Life-Long Learning Institute at the school. The talk, "Growing Up with Segregation," is $25. Call (760) 744-1150, Ext. 2702.

Contact staff writer Gary Warth at gwarth@nctimes.com or (760) 740-5410.