Some of My Best Friends Are Black (10 page)

But the NAACP did not speak for all of black America. Not remotely. The organization’s critics accused it of elitist, myopic thinking. Only the very smallest percentage of the black professional class was even in a position to integrate with white cultural and social institutions. (The National Association for the Advancement of
Certain
People, some called it.)
What about the laboring black masses and the poor, those who depended on the social cohesion and support provided by black institutions? How would dismantling Parker help them, particularly in the near term?

A second critique of the integrationist platform emerged as the
Brown v. Board
decision moved from idea to execution. Brown held that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” This sounded noble, but what did it mean? Did blacks have to integrate if they didn’t want to? What about the very best of the black schools that were as good or better than some white schools? What did
Brown
mean for schools that were by-products of residential segregation? Nobody actually knew.
Brown
established a rather simplistic moral and legal standard that said, “Segregation bad, integration good”—a standard that would prove inadequate to address the true complexity of the problem.

Jim Crow had sunk deep in the physical and psychological bedrock of the country. An intricate, interlocking web of social networks and cultural norms had been built on top of it. Closing Parker High would destroy a century’s worth of community ties and traditions. Meanwhile, the society that integrationists expected to enter, the one in Vestavia Hills, was built to function quite well without them. Black nationalists insisted that white America was eternally racist, would never offer blacks the benefits of a healthy, mutually cooperative society—the very one they risked destroying at Parker. Integration was a fool’s bargain. It was lose-lose.

Black teachers, in particular, feared what integrated schools would do to their jobs. In 1953, on the eve of
Brown v. Board
, a survey of black teachers in South Carolina found that three-quarters wanted to continue working under a segregated system. Two years later in Montgomery, Alabama, black support for Martin Luther King’s public transit boycott was near unanimous, yet at the same time local teachers repudiated his call for a legal challenge against the segregated public schools. Montgomery’s blacks had no love for the back of the bus; control over their own classrooms was a different matter.

By the early 1960s, however, the momentum of the civil rights movement had shifted decisively in favor of integration, thanks in no small part to King. He put the matter on a moral and spiritual plane. Segregation,
he preached, wasn’t merely wrong because whites victimized blacks. At the deeper level, it was psychologically debilitating to everyone in society, black and white. It abrogated “the solidarity of the human family,” twisted man’s perceptions of himself and his brothers. Whether blacks were seen as degenerate beasts or whites were reviled as blue-eyed devils, both sentiments were rooted in segregation’s fundamental evil: reducing people to objects rather than recognizing them as fellow human beings.

The cure, King said, was integration. Only sustained, cooperative interpersonal living could undo the damage wrought by four hundred years of slavery and Jim Crow. “Integration seems almost inevitably desirable and practical,” he said, “because basically we are all one.… The universe is so structured that things do not quite work out rightly if men are not diligent in their concern for others. The self cannot be self without other selves. I cannot reach fulfillment without thou. Social psychologists tell us that we cannot truly be persons unless we interact with other persons. All life is interrelated. All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.” Stirred by King’s lofty sentiments, many blacks, and plenty of whites, rallied behind him. They allowed themselves to believe, to hope, that this better world was possible. There was only one problem: it wasn’t. Not in the 1960s, anyway.

With HEW’s authority finally backed up by the Supreme Court’s “Do it now” ultimatum, blacks had won enough leverage in the courts to mandate that white schools open their doors, but the execution of that would be handled by the same racist whites who’d opposed it all along. In the final analysis, busing wasn’t really implemented to give black students access to better schools. It was implemented so that white schools could avoid lawsuits. The fate of black children was an ancillary concern, if it was a concern at all.

In 1964, only 2.3 percent of black students in the South attended majority-white schools. By 1972, that figure was 36.4 percent. A stunning turnabout, it seemed to vindicate those who believed integration possible. But it came at a steep cost. Nearly every Parker High was liquidated in the bargain. Wherever white and black high schools were compelled
to merge or consolidate, the white school was presumed to be better, almost without exception. The neighboring black school was either closed or converted into an elementary or middle school. In North Carolina, the number of historically black high schools fell from 226 to 13.

Some black high schools managed to stay open. They were integrated by busing white students in, but that only brought indignities of a different sort. Before whites would attend a black school, they would, in the parlance of the times, “de-niggerize” it. The schools were fumigated, all the toilet seats changed out. They were given new mascots, new school colors. The Frederick Douglass poster came down, George Washington and his cherry tree went up. Trophy cases filled with the souvenirs of blacks’ academic and athletic achievements were emptied and tossed. “One hundred years of history went into the trash,” lamented one black principal in Oklahoma.

Any stain of blackness was scrubbed clean—even the names. Black kids had no say in being trundled off to Jefferson Davis Elementary, but no white kid in Alabama was going to be enrolled at anything named after Booker T. Washington. A 1970 report found that out of 321 former black schools “integrated” in the South, 188 had their names changed, usually from something symbolic of community pride to something plain and generic, like Central or East Side. The black school, as a historical cultural institution, was practically made extinct.

With their own schools shuttered, black students were uprooted from familiar environments and distributed as necessary; they would provide the statistical proof of significant progress. Having lived their whole lives with the same kids in the same neighborhood, black children found themselves divvied up and bused off in opposite directions. They lost their clubs, their teams, their student groups. “At the age of fourteen, it was like someone took a knife and cut off everyone you ever knew,” said one young black student from Texas. And because of white flight and defections to private schools, the number of white students in these systems was plummeting with each passing year. So to meet the needs of racial balance, black students had to be shuffled around every fall, seemingly at random. At the most extreme, a black student might attend four different schools in four years.

The fears of black teachers proved justified as well. In an integrated system, their credentials mattered little to white administrators; those who weren’t fired outright were generally demoted or marginalized. In nine states across the South, the number of black principals fell from 1,424 to 225. The National Education Association estimates that by 1970 more than 5,000 black teachers and administrators had lost their jobs. In Louisiana, one black principal was transferred to a white elementary school and restricted to teaching one fourth-grade class per day, after which he was made to perform all of the school’s janitorial duties.

Whatever black America thought the civil rights revolution was going to bring, this wasn’t it. And when King’s path to the Promised Land left black America seemingly stranded in the wilderness, lofty sentiments lost out. Survival instincts took over. After decades of protesting to get in, now many were clamoring to get out. In 1968, black families in Hyde County, North Carolina, protested the closing of two historically black schools by pulling their children out of the system for an entire year, echoing the same method of massive resistance used by whites in years before. In April of 1969, students and parents from Atlanta’s Hamilton High marched on the Dekalb County Courthouse to protest the loss of their school. But the all-white school board would not reverse its decision. Hamilton was shut down, its students split up and bused off as a means of desegregating four different white schools. Resentful alumni would later lament that Hamilton wasn’t just closed, “it was drawn and quartered.”

Any integration that treated black principals as janitors was an integration blacks wanted no part of. They’d taken care of themselves before, and they’d do it again. In 1972, a Gallup poll found that nearly 90 percent of whites were against school busing—but nearly 50 percent of blacks were against it, too. That same year, an NAACP field secretary working in Natchitoches, Louisiana, reported with some despair that, in surveying the parish’s black community, “you won’t find twelve people in favor of integrated schools.” And three years after that, in 1975, James Coleman, author of the influential 1966 report that fast-tracked school desegregation to begin with, conducted a second study of what the intervening decade had produced. He didn’t come back with good news. “Programs
of desegregation have acted to further separate blacks and whites rather than bring them together,” he concluded. “Busing does not work.”

For decades now, everyone from the media to the federal government has been relying on this metric of racial balance to tell us if racism in America is getting better or worse. It doesn’t work, because racial balance can never illustrate how much of the problem is white people being racist and how much of the problem is black people having lots of good reasons for not wanting to hang out and play Scrabble with us. White resistance and black reticence are hopelessly entwined with each other, endlessly variable from situation to situation. No spreadsheet has yet been invented that can tell us where one leaves off and the other picks up.

This much became obvious when I started looking at the racial balance in Vestavia Hills. The math didn’t add up. In the late 1980s, housing discrimination in suburban neighborhoods remained a serious problem. Home prices inflated by property taxes also made for a steep barrier to entry. But at that point Birmingham had had its first black mayor, Richard Arrington, running a powerful black political machine, the Jefferson County Coalition, for at least a decade. The city’s black middle class was substantial and growing. And yet in my graduating class at what was arguably the best public school in the state, only two black families had children who were fully, socially integrated into the student body: Tycely Williams and Chad Jones. And only one student—one, out of thousands—actually lived inside the district. That was Chad, the son of a single mom who worked the late shift. I know Vestavia’s racist, but it’s not
that
racist. Which begs the question: in a city with a large black population and a substantial black middle class, if a single black mother working the late shift could move into Vestavia, stay in Vestavia, and see her son graduate as one of the most popular students at Vestavia… where was everybody else?

“Most black people in Birmingham wanted to be around other black people,” Tycely Williams says. “They wanted to live around black people, worship with black people, go to stores that were owned by black people.”

After all the struggle to eliminate Jim Crow in the most segregated
city in America, the black middle class, those with the means and opportunity to cross the color line, elected not to. They wanted the
right
to cross it. They wanted legal equality, access to public resources, and socioeconomic progress, but by and large very few crossed over in the meaningful sense of choosing to live, work, and play on the other side. And with good reason. White people didn’t exactly roll out the welcome mat. And other than the good schools, life in Vestavia didn’t seem to offer much besides angry neighbors and a Chuck E. Cheese. Staying in Birmingham’s black community, on the other hand, offered family, community, pride of ownership.

“Sixth Avenue Baptist Church was the crown jewel in the black religious community,” Tycely explains. “All of the Who’s Who in the black community went to Sixth Avenue. You had large social networks that people had built around the sororities, fraternities, and alumni groups of the historically black universities: Tuskegee, Alabama A&M, Alabama State. Those kinds of clubs and affinity groups connected people socially. Aside from that, maybe the biggest factor on the political front was the Jefferson County Coalition. There were a lot of professional folks who were members of that. And that association did a lot of things; it wasn’t just politics. They had their hands in everything. If you owned a black business and you were trying to get money out of city hall, you were trying to get in with that group.”