Some of My Best Friends Are Black

by Tanner Colby

  “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.”

  The affinity for these black institutions didn’t die just because the doors to Vestavia were opened. On the contrary, because Vestavia was seen as so hostile and so unwelcoming, middle-class blacks turned their backs on it—pointedly refused to have anything to do with it. For education, they turned to the best options the city had to offer, schools with solid academics but a strong enough black presence to be culturally comfortable. There was the Catholic school downtown, John Carroll, which was about 20 percent black. And then there was Ramsay, Birmingham’s public magnet school. At about 75 percent black, Ramsay still drew the best white students that hadn’t left and also skimmed the top black students from across the city.

  “Ramsay was the cream of the crop as far as middle-class black people were concerned,” Tycely says. “They preferred it because it was not a school that was open to all black people. It was a magnet. It was the ‘safe’ school, and there was still some level of exclusiveness. You had to go through testing or know someone who knew someone on the school board to get in there. Their academics were said to be comparable to the suburbs. That’s debatable, but that was the perception.”

  Debatable or not, academics were hardly the point. If Tycely’s parents had been concerned only with her grades, Ramsay would have been more than fine. But Jerona and Tyrone Williams believed that book smarts alone wouldn’t take their children very far. They needed to be acculturated in the social mores of the country that they lived in—and Tycely didn’t just live in black America. She lived in America. Not only did the Williamses send her to Vestavia, they also didn’t let her join all-black social groups like Jack and Jill. With the exception of church, which would be the hub of Tycely’s social life outside of school, her parents threw her into the deep end of the pool with the white kids and told her she had to learn how to swim.

  “When you’re forced to live in both worlds as a black person,” Tycely says, “it makes you very much aware of things. You’ve been through the revolving door. You see where the power really lies and how the world really works. And the real world requires a cultural education that black middle-class society alone can’t give you. To her credit, my mother always told us, ‘You have to have a broader exposure. You have to be comfortable in different settings.’

  “But a lot of my black friends were like, ‘Why do you go to Vestavia? Why can’t you do Jack and Jill?’ It was this perception thing where black people felt, ‘You think you’re better than us.’ It was never really spoken, but you could just tell from tone, from looks, from questions. But my mother’s hesitation with all of these blacks-only affinity groups wasn’t that she felt they were subpar or that they weren’t teaching good values, but it was the indirect lesson that was taught: that blacks stay with blacks and whites stay with whites. She was just not an advocate of that.”

  But many of Birmingham’s black parents did advocate that, as was their prerogative. They’d fought for the freedom to choose, after all. Unfortunately, staying on the black side of town has its drawbacks—most of the money and the jobs are over on the white side, for starters. With the city’s commercial and residential tax base flown to the suburbs, and with the city governed more by racial politics than by sound policy, Birmingham sank like a rock.

  The school system went down with it. Ramsay and a couple of the other magnet programs still post not-horrible results, but because those schools are skimming off the best of what’s left, most of the city schools have followed the same downward spiral as Woodlawn. Once as cozy and stable as Vestavia Hills, Woodlawn today betrays (almost) no trace of its white past. The Sigma Tau Beach Beauties are long gone. The academics are appalling, and the dropout rate is staggering. A bank of security monitors dominates the front office, keeping a closed-captioned eye on the violent assaults that seem to break out at random. Legend has it that by the 1990s the bathrooms at Woodlawn were so terrible that teachers would go across the street to McDonald’s to use the ones over there. The school has since been renovated. Not that you can tell.

  And so, like many troubled metropolitan areas, Birmingham now has black flight. Black families are deserting the district faster than whites did in the 1960s, transferring to county schools, moving to black suburbs on the north side, and, finally, migrating Over the Mountain. And that is where the story of federally mandated integration in the suburbs of the most segregated city in America takes a very interesting turn. About ten years ago, a sizable contingent of Birmingham’s black flight exodus chose a peculiar destination as their new home. They moved to Oxmoor.

  “It’s such a prominent community now,” U. W. Clemon says of the former industrial scrapyard. “Some developers went in and built houses in that area for blacks and sold them on the very winning point that, thanks to the special zone created by the government desegregation plan, if you buy a house there your kids can go to school in Vestavia Hills.”

  The 1970 desegregation order for Vestavia Hills said only that the school was responsible for “those who live outside the city limits between Wenonah and Oxmoor Road.” The court never stipulated who or what could be inside that footprint.

  For decades, suburban sprawl rolled out around the Oxmoor Valley, encircling it, built to maximum capacity on all sides. The valley itself remained empty, a vacant parcel of Appalachian bottomland seven times the size of New York’s Central Park, smack in the middle of the largest metropolitan area in the state of Alabama. If the people of Oxmoor remained marooned in the past, it’s probably because virtually every one of the seven thousand acres around them was owned by U.S. Steel, which for years was just sitting on it.

  In 1988, U.S. Steel and the city of Birmingham embarked on a bold “public-private partnership.” Birmingham annexed the land into the city. Taxpayers provided the capital for infrastructure improvements like roads and sewerage, thus upping the value of the land many times. Then U.S. Steel started selling. Parcel by parcel. Golf resorts, shopping centers, office parks. And, of course, high-end residential. One particularly canny developer looked at the area “between Wenonah and Oxmoor Road” and saw that it offered black home buyers something they couldn’t get anywhere else: access to Vestavia schools without paying Vestavia property taxes—and without the hassle of actually living with white people in Vestavia.

  So that developer bought up land in the busing zone and started building. He went in right across the street from the old Depression-era shanties and built big $300,000 and $400,000 homes. Then he went out to the street and put up a big sign that read: VESTAVIA HILLS SCHOOL DISTRICT. People couldn’t buy them fast enough. This new and improved Oxmoor was exactly what many in the black middle class had dreamed of: nice homes with good schools, yet situated in a space that was still culturally theirs. It offered what nonintegrationists had always said was black America’s due: equal access to public services without the loss of their own community. It seemed too good to be true, and it was.

  “They built way too many houses,” Clemon explains.

  By the early 2000s, rows of spec homes were popping up inside the Oxmoor busing zone. Word began circulating of plans for a large-scale apartment complex. All of this meant dozens of new students entering the school system with no increase in tax revenue to pay for the increased demand on services. It h
ad been one thing for Vestavia to shoulder those costs for the low-income families of Oxmoor. It was quite another to do so for people buying houses at or above the price of homes inside the district. Vestavia called foul.* “And they were right,” Clemon says. “I completely agreed with the people in Vestavia.”

  The courts agreed, too. On December 13, 2007, the federal desegregation order against the city was rescinded. In the terms of the settlement, every child currently enrolled—and the siblings of every child currently enrolled—can attend Vestavia schools until he or she graduates. And any child currently living in Oxmoor but not yet old enough to enroll is eligible for a tuition slot to Vestavia, which comes in at about what the equivalent property taxes would be.

  “It was an excellent settlement,” Clemon says, “and more than fair to all the parties involved.”

  Not surprisingly, many in Oxmoor don’t see it the same way. The current residents may be grandfathered in, but no new home buyers will be; without access to Vestavia schools, the resale value of these high-end houses just went in the toilet. The original Oxmoor families lost out, too. Their houses had been an underground railroad for relatives to go Over the Mountain. Grandmothers took in grandkids, aunts took in nieces and nephews; they could all claim legal residence and catch a ride on the bus. That’s over now, and those families had nothing to do with the overzealous development that botched everything up.

  After my bus ride with Alicia Thomas, I drive out and spend a Friday afternoon in Oxmoor and manage to talk to a couple of parents. One father who lives in one of the newer developments tells me that they should have fought harder against the settlement. “We’re finally starting to make a little money,” he says, “and they want to knock us back down.”

  In old Oxmoor—by which I mean just across the street—a family is out on the lawn, burning their trash in a pit, the smoke wafting over to the McMansions across the way. One mother of a Vestavia boy gives me an earful. “I didn’t like it,” she says. “I think it’s wrong. Why block a kid from an education? Regardless if they live in a mansion or whatever? All my life, all my nephews and nieces went to Vestavia. My son’s been in the school system ever since he was in preschool. They can’t touch him. But if I decide to take my granddaughter, and wanted her to go to Vestavia, she can’t go because of the bullshit. They just don’t want these blacks over there.”

  Given Vestavia’s reputation as “that racist suburb,” it’s easy to see why she’d say that. Given my own memories of Vestavia, before I did any research I would have thought she was right. But the reality is that the Oxmoor busing plan should have ended the year that I moved there, in 1988, when Birmingham annexed Oxmoor out of Jefferson County. As desegregation law stood at that time, once Oxmoor was a part of the Birmingham system, Vestavia could have vacated the busing order the very next day and walked away clean. And yet, for the next eighteen years, Vestavia continued to bus black students from Oxmoor despite having no compelling legal obligation to do so. During the settlement negotiations in 2007, one of Vestavia’s opening bids was a very simple idea: annex the original 1970 busing footprint out of Birmingham city and into the school district, leaving Oxmoor exactly as it is: a majority-black enclave with access to top-shelf public schools. The logistics of it were such that it never went anywhere, but it was noted by the judge as a good-faith offer. And when the school board presented its case to the court, Norman Chachkin, the director of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, submitted a brief to the court in favor of Vestavia’s position, not Oxmoor’s.

  “Vestavia Hills has paid its dues,” says U. W. Clemon. He more than anyone would know.

  In the grand scheme, the arc of the moral universe would seem to bend the other way. Vestavia’s home owners have profited insanely from investing in land whose price was artificially inflated by keeping black people out. So it should be no great crime that a few black families enjoy a little tax savings every April. But this isn’t a binary equation anymore. More than a few black families live and pay property taxes in Vestavia now. Letting people exploit the Oxmoor loophole puts an unfair burden on those home owners, too, not just whites. Alicia Thomas gets up at five o’clock every morning and drives the bus in order to get her kids in the system; she’s not getting a tax break on a $400,000 house, either. And besides, the whole point of school busing was to end segregation. The way the Oxmoor footprint was being abused, it had mutated into an economic incentive to make residential segregation even worse.

  When I first learned that my old school had terminated its busing plan, I came down and started digging into my Southern roots fully convinced I’d find that the Confederate-flag-waving Rebels were the bad guys. They weren’t. Not this time. What I found, instead, was a story that sits uncomfortably outside the bounds of the things we’re supposed to say when we talk about race. I found that federally mandated integration in the racist suburb of the most segregated city in America did not come to an end because white people were trying to keep black people out. It ended because black people weren’t willing to move in.

  * At the time the lawsuit was settled, the median sale price of a home in Vestavia Hills was around $270,000, plus the higher annual property taxes.

  [5]

  Go Rebels?

  James Robinson met his wife Debra at Shades Valley High School, one of the Jefferson County schools desegregated under U. W. Clemon’s Singleton v. Jackson case. In the arbitrary shuffling of black students around the district, they found each other after being transferred in from different neighborhoods on opposite sides of town—a school-busing love story.

  James went on to graduate from Alabama’s Tuskegee Institute, the famous industrial education school founded by Booker T. Washington. Today he’s national accounts manager at Alagasco, Alabama’s largest natural gas utility. After they were married, the Robinsons bought a home in Jefferson County and sent their eldest son, Mauri, to Shades Valley as well. He graduated in 2004 and was accepted at Morehouse, the all-male, historically black college in Atlanta. That same year, the couple’s younger twins, Myles and Malcolm, were getting ready to enter sixth grade. The county middle school for which they were zoned was mired in construction delays and administrative problems, so the family decided to move. “My wife and I chose Vestavia,” Robinson says, “for the school system.”

  The Vestavia Parent is a singular species, easily identified by an all-consuming obsession with his or her child’s academic advancement. James Robinson was recommended to me as someone I should speak with about being a black Vestavia Parent, a role requiring a unique level of dedication and vigilance. Robinson is fluent in all the latest school board actions and city council zoning issues, the kind of stuff you only read about in the really boring sections of the newspaper. He quotes extensively from books on parenting and education, mainly specific to the challenges faced by black men—books he’s read to correct the problems he sees in his own generation. “In the community where I grew up,” he says, “males had very little responsibility in the household. The expectation for us was lowered.” But in raising his own sons, he says, “the bar is extremely high, and there are no excuses.”

  At Shades Valley, Mauri Robinson was starting quarterback, captain of the basketball team, and an honor student. No less is expected of Myles and Malcolm, which was part of the decision to bring them to Vestavia. Robinson says he had little concern about the twins’ academic transition, but crossing the social and racial divide was not a decision his family made easily. “We were apprehensive,” he says. “I grew up playing athletics against Vestavia Hills, and in my day it was seen as a prejudiced school. Whether it was true or not, that was our perception.”

  Playing for Shades Valley a generation later, Mauri Robinson’s perception was exactly the same. “As a matter of fact,” his father says, “when we decided to move, Mauri literally said to us, ‘How in the world could you send my brothers to that oppressive school?’” Before leaving for Morehouse, Mauri took his younger brothers aside and gave them a stern,
brotherly warning about the world they would encounter in Vestavia Hills. “Without my wife and I knowing,” James says, “he sat them down and told them that they would have to stick together because they were going into an environment that was unfair and oppressive. He told them, ‘I don’t know why our parents are doing this, but this is what you’re dealing with, and here’s what you’ve got to do to survive.’”

  “And?” I ask.

  “And to his surprise—quite honestly, to my surprise—what we encountered was totally different. Far from this community that would be prejudiced and not treat us fairly, we were received with open arms.”

  Vestavia, it would seem, has changed. On the surface it’s pretty much the same, just more suburbany and sprawly. The Chuck E. Cheese is still there, but now there’s a Starbucks with a drive-through. The high school itself has a whole new wing of classrooms, six new tennis courts, a new parking lot, a new soccer field, and a huge new lobby bolted on the front.

  There’s a brand-new gym, too, which is where I’m headed. It’s the area finals in Boys 6A Basketball, and Vestavia’s in the hunt for the state trophy this year. Tonight, we have to get past our old nemesis: Mountain Brook. I get my ticket, my Coke and popcorn, and head in. Rebel pride is on full display. There’s crotchety ol’ Colonel Reb, painted two stories tall down by the scoreboard. I’d actually forgotten that the Colonel doesn’t wear Confederate gray. He’s in a three-piece suit colored red, white, and blue—the Rebel as Patriot.

  Up in the bleachers on the Vestavia side, the first thing I notice is all the black people still huddled off in their own cluster in the corner. Then I realize: it’s the parents. Down in the student section, all the kids, black and white, are sitting with one another, laughing, fist-bumping, and generally having a blast.