Education has been an important theme in Rita Watson's life.

When she was a child living in a black neighborhood with one paved street in Durham, N.C., Rita's mother told her education was vital to her success. At her segregated schools in the 1940s and 1950s, her teachers said the same thing.

"We had teachers who loved us, who cared about us and insisted we do the best that we possibly could because when we got out in the world there were things we'd have to contend with," Watson said.

The "things" Watson had to contend with were her own skin color and entrenched societal racism.

"I don't let things like that hold me back," she said with a faint Southern twang.

Today, after about three decades at the Wyoming Department of Education, the last decade working as the assistant to the Superintendent of Public Instruction, she has showed she could not be held back.

Watson, 61, was born to a mechanic father and a mother who worked at the American Tobacco Company in Durham. At her all-black schools, the kids got the books the white schools had discarded.

When she graduated from high school, she said, her options were to become a teacher, nurse or filing clerk. She did a few years of community college and worked various jobs before becoming the first black person hired by the Durham Woolworth's, and she became the first black to work the cash.

It was the 1960s and the South was struggling with integration. Watson herself protested segregation on the city bus lines for three months until city officials gave in.

"We had a mission and we knew we wouldn't get anyplace if we did what we'd always done," she said of the boycott.

Later, she got a car and her husband-to-be, Floyd, hit her up for a ride one day. In 1965, the two were married and made a blended family with her daughter and his son, both from previous relationships.

Floyd was in the Air Force when the couple married and got transferred to F.E. Warren Air Force Base in Cheyenne in the late 1960s. Watson refused to join him but he delivered an ultimatum: "Come out here or meet him in court," she said with a laugh.

When she arrived she moved onto the base, and took a drive through town with Floyd.

"I asked my husband where was downtown and he said, 'You just drove through it,'" she said.

Her daughter had trouble moving from an all-black school to an integrated one in Wyoming.

"She didn't like it at all because the teachers weren't as attentive to them, the black kids didn't matter to them," she said.

She found a job working for the state in vital records services, then moved to the state Department of Education, first as an assistant for planning and in 1989 as the executive assistant to the superintendent.

Now a grandmother and a participant in more charities than she has time for, including the Order of the Eastern Star, she is thinking about easing into retirement and travelling to Denmark.

Denmark?

"I've read some things," she said.

Watson said she is happy working in the Department of Education, breaking in a new superintendent Trent Blankenship and helping in the community.

"I never dreamed that I would be in the position that I'm in now," she said.