Some of My Best Friends Are Black

by Tanner Colby

  [4]

  What Can Brown Do for You?

  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.

  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, bla
ck 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 r
acist. 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.