Some of My Best Friends Are Black (12 page)

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.

The last time Vestavia took home the state basketball title was 1992, my junior year, when Chad Jones was the only black player on the team. George Hatchett was the coach then and still is now. Our win in ’92, Hatchett tells me, brought in a flood of dubious fan mail. “Way to win one for white people!” folks said. Today, the team has five black players out of fifteen; the JV team, where Myles Robinson plays, is even more integrated. “We’re more racially diverse on our athletic teams than we’ve ever been,” Hatchett says, “and they’re all really good kids.” It’s a night-and-day difference from when he first started coaching and had to take the golf team up to practice at the Vestavia Hills Country Club. “No blue jeans, no blacks. That’s what they told me,” he says.

“No blue jeans, no blacks” isn’t an official policy for Mountain Brook, but it might as well be. In 1992, the entire Mountain Brook school system had three black students. As of 2009, it had ten. That’s out of 4,367 total. I don’t see any of them here. I’m told that Mountain Brook has actually tried to recruit black students for its athletic teams, but it can’t get them; it’s too white. James Robinson, in comparing school systems, rejected Mountain Brook out of hand. “It was not an option, culturally,” he says.

It’s a bit of a brain-twisting reversal, but the cheerleaders shouting “Go Rebels!” in the gym tonight are not rooting for the Old South; they’re rooting for the New. One set of bleachers is integrated; the other is not. One team is integrated; the other is not. And in the 2009 area finals for Alabama Boys 6A Basketball, New South kicked a little ass. State tourney, here we come.

The next morning I find myself sitting in the principal’s office for the first time since fourth grade. Cas McWaters is a dyed-in-the-wool Vestavian. He was here when the first Oxmoor bus rolled in thirty-nine years ago. Twenty years ago, he was my chemistry teacher. He later made the move into school administration, then left Vestavia to become principal at Tarrant, a low-income, majority-black high school on the north side. After a two-year stint there, he came back to Vestavia as principal in 2005.

Upon his return, the issue of race was right there waiting for him. Since the day the school opened, every four or five years a black family has filed a grievance with the school to have the Confederate flag banned. Every four or five years they’re told no. One such grievance landed on McWaters’s desk during his first week on the job. Quite possibly, he feels, as a test from the black community to see where he stood. He weighed all the arguments, and then, reversing thirty-five years of school policy, he banned the flag. “Here’s my question,” McWaters says of the decision. “Is it healthy for the school environment? My opinion is that it’s not. It gives us a black eye in a large portion of the population. It could provoke an incident.” The Stars and Bars is no longer allowed on campus during school hours, it’s expressly forbidden in the dress code, and it’s been purged from the school crest, replaced with the state flag of Alabama.

The one place the flag is most popular, however, is the one place he can’t do anything about it: the football stadium. “I can’t control what’s at a football game,” he says. “It’s a public event, paid tickets, open to anybody. I can’t mandate what is or isn’t in there.” Since McWaters couldn’t ban the flag in the stadium, he did the next best thing. He banned poles, for safety. “It’s certainly not safe for anybody to be carrying around a big
stick,” he says with a wry smile. So even if people bring their rebel flags to the game—and they do—they have nothing with which to wave them.

Cas McWaters is no latte-sipping liberal, either. He’s a conservative Southern Baptist Republican with a gravy-thick Alabama accent. So to what, I ask, does he attribute the progressiveness of his attitudes? “Just having black friends here in Vestavia, I suppose.” He shrugs. “Gettin’ to know them as people. If you’d asked me ten years ago how many black friends I had—meaning friends, not acquaintances—I would have probably said one. Now… six? Close friends, people that eat over at my house, go to Sunday school together. And I probably ain’t got but fourteen, fifteen close friends to begin with.”

What I get from McWaters is the last thing I ever thought I’d find in Vestavia Hills: total candor about race. The Oxmoor lawsuit, campus incidents—McWaters puts it all out on the table. He wants it out on the table, I find. He’s even called the editor of the school newspaper to sit in on our interview and write an article about it. “
VESTAVIA GRAD TACKLES THE SUBJECT OF RACE RELATIONS
.” It ran on the front page above the fold. They took my picture and everything.

Honestly, I’m a bit thrown. I thought I’d come down here, tiptoe around the administration, get some off-the-record stuff from my old teachers, and generally sit and listen to a lot of “I’m not a racist, but…” Instead I’ve got a permanent hall pass, carte blanche to poke around.

“Can I take over some classes for group discussions?” I ask the principal.

“Why not?”

“Can I ride the bus out to Oxmoor?”

“Okay.”

“Can I hand out a survey to dozens of teenagers asking them questions about the most volatile and incendiary subject in our nation’s history?”

“Sure, let us Xerox it for you.”

For fun, I also ask McWaters about
A Place Apart
and its euphemistic tap dance around the origins of Vestavia Hills High. He just laughs. “Anybody tells you that this school didn’t break off to try and stay all white is lyin’ through their teeth.”

This “new” Vestavia caught James Robinson by surprise, too. After moving into their new house, he and his wife went on vacation, leaving the twins with their older brother. By the time the parents got back, the boys were already involved in the community. School hadn’t even begun, and Myles had been drafted to a Little League football team. When the coaches realized that Mauri, the star quarterback of Shades Valley, was now living in Vestavia, they invited him to help coach the kids on their passing game. So before heading off to college, Mauri spent the summer coaching Little League, somewhat bewildered by everyone’s neighborliness.

“When Debra and I returned from an Alaskan cruise right before the school year started,” Robinson says, “we were amazed at what had transpired. Mauri was helping coach the quarterbacks on Myles’s youth football team, and Myles had developed this huge network of friends. When classes start, Malcolm gets elected to student government. All of their teachers are attentive and receptive. I can’t speak for anyone else’s kids, but our twins adapted very well. The reception exceeded our expectations. It was totally different from what we could have ever imagined.”