Some of My Best Friends Are Black (9 page)

So Tycely was up on the auction block for Slave Day (I know, I know), and the Oxmoor kids had pooled all their money to buy her. Lord knows what kind of hazing they had in mind, but they bid her up
high
. They were determined, and angry. This seemed like their chance to get even. For what, I didn’t get at the time. I just remember how terrified Tycely looked standing alone there in the middle of the gym. Finally, the white kids stepped up on Slave Day and bought the Oreo to save her from the black kids.

During our senior year, Tycely took her experiences from Vestavia and wove them into a speech for oratory events at our debate tournaments. Her “Oreo” speech took home first prize at every competition she entered. Then she used it as her college admissions essay. She got in everywhere she applied, taking a scholarship to Wake Forest in North Carolina. In 1997, the next Williams sister, Tyrenda, graduated from Vestavia and was named America’s Junior Miss, the first black woman to win that title in the forty-year history of the pageant. After graduate studies at NYU, she started her own fashion consulting company in New York. Tyra Williams graduated in 2004 and four years later would return to teach under Sue Lovoy in the history department, making her the first black graduate of Vestavia ever to go back and teach there. The youngest Williams, Tyrone, Jr., graduated just last year and is a freshman at the University of Alabama.

Affirmative action put Tycely’s mother on Vestavia’s teaching staff, and the fight against housing discrimination allowed Chad’s mother to live there. But Tycely and Chad succeeded in an all-white school because they were raised to succeed in an all-white school. They were given the emotional armor required. The children and grandchildren of Raymond J. Anderson learned early on that a football game that looks like a Klan rally is just a lot of posturing. It’s not so intimidating once you’ve stared down the real thing on your own front lawn. Chad Jones, too, credits his mother and grandmother for giving him the confidence and self-esteem to get through like he did. Chad left Vestavia with an athletic scholarship to Ole Miss, and now lives in neighboring Hoover with his wife and their four boys. For the past three years he’s been running a restaurant owned by his mother, who started her own business after leaving the late shift at the phone company. In the classes that came behind ours, more children of working- and middle-class strivers would find similar success. The children from Oxmoor, with rare exception, did not.

When the 1966 Coleman Report emphasized the need for integration, it had done so with lots of big, flashing neon caveats, warnings that were
brushed aside in the mad dash to create racial balance in every classroom available. One such caveat was that when going into a hostile environment like an all-white school, the single greatest indicator of a black student’s success was the socioeconomic and cultural background of his or her home. For black children without strong parental support, the social whiplash of integration might cause them to “fall farther behind the white majority” both in academic learning and in the development of social skills necessary to navigate modern society. If not done properly, integration might only make things worse. And in Vestavia, nothing was done to see that integration was done properly. It was just done to be done with.

Vestavia’s class of 1993 graduated, almost to the day, on the thirtieth anniversary of the Children’s Crusade. In that triumphant moment, the black youth of Birmingham had seized the cause of freedom with enthusiasm and joy. Now, black or white, the children of Birmingham weren’t doing much of anything about anything. If the Children of White Flight were being raised in captivity, then school busing was like being forced to mate in captivity; they just put us in a room and expected us to do something we’d never been socialized to do. It doesn’t work with pandas, either. And this was at a time when desegregation programs were functioning
at their best
, according to advocates. In 1988, the year I started eighth grade in Vestavia, 43.5 percent of all black students in the South were attending majority-white schools, the highest level of racial balance our public schools have ever achieved. These were the good times, the numbers tell us. The salad days.

Perhaps I could give you an Oxmoor student’s opinion on that, but the truth is I couldn’t find any of them, not from my class at least. They weren’t at the ten-year reunion, nor in any of the online alumni groups. In interviewing my classmates, a lot of people would stumble and trip up just trying to remember some of the bus kids’ names. A woman in Oxmoor gave me a possible work number for one of the boys in my class, and Chad Jones passed along an email address for a guy he’s occasionally in touch with. I left a couple of messages, sent a few emails. Nothing back. For a while I was panicked that the story would be incomplete without them, but then I realized that that in itself says it all. I don’t need
to talk to the bus kids. If I just leave them out, if I give no voice to their thoughts or their memories, that is the most accurate illustration I can give you of the impact they had on our lives. As for the impact that we had on theirs, let’s just say that we didn’t exactly go out of our way to spark a renaissance of racial healing in Vestavia Hills. Had the circumstances been reversed, I probably would have stayed at my own cafeteria table, too.

When U. W. Clemon was fighting to desegregate Vestavia Hills High School, he was also fighting a very different battle with his senior law partner, Oscar Adams. Adams, who had brought the suit that desegregated Birmingham’s schools in 1963, was a graduate of Parker High, the largest black high school in the world. “Oscar had the feeling that Parker should be preserved as a black high school,” Clemon says, “but I felt that Parker should be dismantled and the students sent to what was then Phillips High School. I felt very strongly that the black institutions could never be made equal with the white institutions, particularly while the whites were still in control of the system. There was a rather intense debate, and Oscar prevailed.”

Parker stayed open, stayed black, and remains so today. The debate it provoked between Clemon and Adams is very much alive, too. It’s an argument that’s been around, in one form or another, since the days of slavery. Should blacks fight for inclusive equality with whites, or take white racism as a given and bolster their strength through ethnic solidarity? To sit at the black cafeteria table or not to sit at the black cafeteria table? Or perhaps to do both. In the early years of Jim Crow, this ideological clash manifested itself between the era’s two most prominent black intellectuals, W. E. B. Du Bois, who argued for civil equality and
helped found the NAACP, and Booker T. Washington, who advocated racial uplift through self-reliance.

On the issue of public education, the majority of freed slaves in the South tended toward Washington’s point of view. They were especially wary of placing their children in schools run by former Confederates. Colored teachers, they felt, were best equipped to take care of their own; white politicians and philanthropists need only give them equal access to the resources they’d been so long denied. Alongside the black church, the black school became the center of the community. In smaller towns, the church and the school, the preacher and the teacher were often one and the same. New Orleans, Louisiana, was the only major city in the South where blacks fought to establish and maintain an integrated public school system under Reconstruction. Elsewhere, black communities often sought to control their own destiny in the classroom. Many black schools, like Parker, excelled. Most famously, Dunbar High School in Washington, D.C., often outperformed neighboring white schools in standardized testing.

Black America’s emotional attachment to its own institutions was and remains tenacious. Those organizations were the glue that held the community together in times of great distress. Life grew around them. Black fraternities and sororities, originally founded as a social refuge for the few blacks at white colleges in the North, took root at Washington’s Howard University, “the black Harvard.” From there, chapters spread across the historically black colleges of the South, forming extensive social networks and forging traditions that have been handed down generation to generation. Out of the new black professional class came blacks-only trade organizations. Denied entry to the American Bar Association, black lawyers formed the National Bar Association. Ditto the National Medical Association and a host of other unions and professional guilds. The elite black bourgeoisie formed its own exclusive social clubs, the Boule for men and the Links for women. There was also Jack and Jill, an after-school activity group for black children from the “right” families. There were black summer camps, black chapters of secret societies like the Elks and the Masons, and, of course, granddaddy to them all: the black church.

The fight to eradicate the legal sanctions of Jim Crow had been, for all its difficulty, relatively straightforward. It had a moral clarity, a defined goal. But what to do with the world that Jim Crow had wrought? We’d built two separate Americas, and now we had them. They existed. One might not have been equal, but it was not without its own intrinsic value. Where desegregation was a matter of right and wrong, integration was a question of cost and benefit, measuring gains against losses. Forty years ago, the debate over Parker High yielded no easy answers, and it’s only grown more complicated since.

Given black America’s attachment to its own institutions, the campaign for civil rights did not begin as a demand for “integration” per se. It began as an effort to secure equal protection under the law. It was about the right to sit at the lunch counter and be served, not about the right to sit at the lunch counter and have a root beer with Susie and Biff.

The word “integration” itself wasn’t even used in conjunction with the movement before 1940, when the NAACP called for “the integration of the armed forces,” a demand that President Truman satisfied eight years later by executive order. Bolstered by that success and by the legal victory of
Brown v. Board
in 1954, the NAACP moved to the public fore of the movement. Under the intellectual leadership of Thurgood Marshall, the legal architect of
Brown
’s assault on segregated schools, the organization adopted a stridently prointegrationist posture. Given the disparities of wealth and power in the United States, separate could never be equal, or even remotely sufficient to meet black individuals’ needs. The black community’s attachment to its own institutions was foolish sentimentalism, integrationists felt; it was clinging to the past for fear of an unknown future. For the good of the race, NAACP leaders said, it was time to let go of the “little kingdoms” that had sustained them in exile. If Parker was a casualty of progress, so be it.