Some of My Best Friends Are Black (14 page)

“Will it ever be included?”

“Probably not. Those of us who lived through it can bring our own experiences to the discussion, but as far as the standard curriculum, all you’ve got is Rosa Parks on the bus and how Martin Luther King was such a good father to his kids—and that’s all they want told.”

As head of the history department, Ms. Lovoy has had to seek out other means of diversifying the classroom experience. Hiring Tyra Williams was one. “I went after her,” Lovoy says, “and I had to convince her. She wanted to work in an underprivileged school where she felt she could make a difference, but I told her, ‘You can make a difference
here
. These kids need you, too.’ And she’s tearin’ it up, really challenging these students to think about what they’re going to encounter once they leave the bubble.”

The biggest improvement Vestavia could make in educating its kids about race would be to have more black teachers do the educating, sharing their knowledge and experience. But that’s easier said than done. As part of the Oxmoor settlement, Vestavia traded its hiring quota for a pledge to increase its minority recruitment effort. A major part of that effort is Pauline Parker. Parker is an exceptional-education specialist at the high school, one of the few black faculty whose last name isn’t Williams. She also works overtime as the school’s faculty recruiter. Several times a year, Vestavia sends her to job fairs and seminars across the South. “They’re trying to show people that African Americans do teach in this school,” Parker says. “But because of what is said about Vestavia Hills out in the black community, people don’t want to deal with it. Black people do not want to come and work here. The responses I get from
other African-American professionals are mostly along the lines of, ‘I’m surprised they let you do this.’ Or, ‘I’m shocked. How many of you
are
there?’”

Under Principal McWaters, Vestavia has been actively recruiting minorities for several years. “And they don’t come,” Parker says.

If James Robinson had paid attention to his deepest apprehensions, he might not have come, either. But after a tentative arrival, he appears to be all in. He’s not only a proud Vestavia parent, but has also joined the board of Leadership Vestavia Hills, a citizen coalition dedicated to improving the schools and the community. When we spoke, he told me of a day a couple years ago at one of Myles’s middle school basketball games. During the game, a white student donned a rebel flag like a cape and ran up and down the sidelines, like some Confederate superhero. Offended, Robinson went up to the school the next day to meet with the principal about the incident. But when his boys found out what he’d done, they questioned him. “Both of my kids said to me, ‘If you’re making an issue out if it because of us, don’t. This isn’t an issue for us.’ Myles told me, ‘Dad, when we’re tailgating out in the parking lot before the football games, those are the
nicest
people.’

“And I was like, Whoa, I need to rethink this. Who is this about? Is this about me, or is this about my children?”

“Do you think their attitude is just self-confidence,” I ask, “or is it from losing some part of their identity?”

“I don’t believe they have lost their African-American identity,” he says. “That’s well cemented. I think what they’ve lost is they’ve shed the baggage of their father, and in my opinion that’s a good thing.

“I have made it clear that wherever they choose to go to college, they will go. I’ll work night and day, two or three jobs, whatever it takes. If Harvard is your dream, there is no reason why you can’t go. Period. End of discussion. Here’s what I know: the average ACT score of a graduating senior at Vestavia Hills in 2008 was 24.3. This past February, Malcolm made a 25, Myles made a 22, and they’re sophomores. Chances are they will qualify to go anywhere they want. Why should my racial baggage hold them back? That’s the lesson I’ve learned living in Vestavia Hills.”

On my last day in town, school lets out early. It’s the state semifinals in Boys 6A Basketball, and the kids are all flooding out to their cars and heading downtown to the Birmingham-Jefferson civic center. Dressed head to toe in school spirit, they pack the stands, yelling and stomping the floor. The other schools and the other teams are all black; Vestavia, again, has the only integrated bench, the only integrated student section. When we win the semis, the kids go nuts. Two days from now, Vestavia will go all the way, capturing the state trophy for the first time since 1992. New South wins. Go Rebels.

In the wake of the 1963 civil rights campaign, Martin Luther King sat down and wrote
Why We Can’t Wait
, a personal remembrance of the monumental events that transpired here. “I like to believe that Birmingham will one day become a model in Southern race relations,” he wrote. “I like to believe that the negative extremes of Birmingham’s past will resolve into the positive and utopian extreme of her future; that the sins of a dark yesterday will be redeemed in the achievements of a bright tomorrow. I have this hope because, once on a summer day, a dream came true.”

Came true for some. As wonderful as life in the New South may seem, there is still the matter of those left behind. There is still the matter of Woodlawn. Vestavia may not be the bad guy anymore, but the
fact
of Vestavia—the gross racial and socioeconomic divide its existence created between city and suburb—remains very much the problem. In Birmingham, the dropout rate is over 20 percent. In Vestavia, 99 percent are walking out with diplomas. While 80 percent of the city’s schoolchildren hover at or below the poverty line, not one student in the entire Mountain Brook system is poor enough to qualify for an assisted lunch. As city schools go without working bathrooms, Homewood has just built a brand-new, green-certified middle school. I walked through it. It’s like going to eighth grade in the future.

Whites have deserted the city schools for good. In the 2008–2009 school year, out of 27,440 students enrolled in Birmingham city schools, only 263 were white, less than 1 percent. Out of 1,157 students, Woodlawn has ten white kids. Ramsay, the once vaunted magnet program, has
only five. The schools in identifiably black suburbs, meanwhile, aren’t doing much better: they’re less than 3.5 percent white. The greatest diversity, as it happens, is found Over the Mountain. Taken together, Hoover, Homewood, Vestavia, and Mountain Brook have an average enrollment that’s 14.9 percent black. If you take out Mountain Brook, it goes up to 17.8 percent. That’s light-years ahead of where things were just twenty years ago, but the marvelous new diversity in the suburbs is also an indication of just how low the city schools have fallen, and how desperate black families are to escape. Between 1993 and 2008 the black student population of the Birmingham city schools fell from 37,950 to 26,465, a 30 percent drop. “They’ll sell their souls to get out,” Sue Lovoy says.

Birmingham’s schools are crumbling from within, and the consequences of that are falling squarely on the suburban school districts who spent the past four decades thinking they could run away from it. Kids in the city get passed through the system learning next to nothing; they’re oftentimes four or five grade levels behind. If their parents manage to relocate Over the Mountain, the time, energy, and resources it takes to remediate those students turn into a considerable drain on Vestavia’s blue-ribbon resources.

Then there are the discipline problems. Violent offenders. Kids wearing ankle bracelets. They get expelled from the city and, after a turn in reform school, head to the ’burbs. “We’ve had an influx of kids who cannot go back to Birmingham city because they’ve been in trouble with the law and expelled permanently,” Lovoy says. “So we’re dealing with them, some successfully and some not.”

Call it the White Flight Boomerang Effect:
because
Vestavia legally segregated itself from the city and county, it has no choice but to give a fresh start to the worst troublemakers they decide to cast off. “It behooves all school systems that all school systems do well,” Cas McWaters says. “The surrounding systems need Birmingham to succeed. They realize that now. Because this is a topsy-turvy mess we’re in.”

Secession doesn’t work. You’d think the fine people of Alabama would have figured that out the first time. But no.

Forty years ago, the Sigma Tau Beach Beauties of Woodlawn lit out of Birmingham like the place was on fire, seeking refuge in Vestavia Hills.
White folks took the tax base, the property values, their collective social and intellectual capital. They all but ripped out the plumbing. But there’s at least one thing they left behind. During desegregation, historically black schools may have been stripped of their names and their mascots, but white schools weren’t. At Woodlawn, even as the student body got blacker and blacker, out on the athletic field they were and still are known as the Woodlawn Colonels. By which I mean Colonel Reb. By which I mean Woodlawn has the
exact
same Colonel Reb mascot we have at Vestavia. Only he’s black. He’s got the same cocked hat, the same angry mustache. Someone’s just painted him in blackface to match the building’s new occupants. His red, white, and blue three-piece suit has changed colors, too. It’s now a bright yellow—well, one hesitates to say pimp suit, but what other kind of three-piece suit is bright yellow?

Vestavia can’t run away from Woodlawn, because Vestavia is Woodlawn and Woodlawn is Vestavia. Different schools, different districts, yet bound by a DNA they’ll always share. They’re brothers, these rebels. Twins. One white and one black, one favored and one forgotten. The District Court of Northern Alabama may have granted unitary status to one of them, but the rift between the two, between city and suburb, doesn’t look to be reconciled anytime soon.