Some of My Best Friends Are Black (6 page)

One year later, America saw the release of the 1966 Coleman Report, the result of an exhaustive government survey to determine a) just what disparities remained between black and white educational opportunities, and b) what to do about it. The Coleman Report showed that minority students who attended majority-white schools fared much better academically—not simply because of access to better textbooks and resources, but also because of the exposure to middle-class peer groups, which raised educational expectations. The report gave a major boost to the proponents of integration.

In May of 1968, the Supreme Court finally called foul on “freedom of choice” remedies in the case of
Green v. New Kent County
. Echoing HEW, the justices held that for a desegregation plan to be considered constitutional, it had to produce actual black students, in real desks. Writing the court’s unanimous opinion, Justice William Brennan called on the country to eliminate the last vestiges of state-sponsored segregation “root and branch.” Despite this sweeping directive, most districts still didn’t budge. November of 1968 had brought the election of America’s thirty-seventh president, Richard Milhous Nixon, who took the White House by playing to whites’ fears of integration, campaigning on a promise to roll back Washington’s enforcement of HEW’s desegregation policies. Once in office, he did. After another year of stonewalling by Southern schools, the Supreme Court was compelled to take up the matter once more in the case of
Alexander v. Holmes
. On October 30, 1969, the court issued another unanimous decision, saying the exact same thing it had just said eighteen months before, only this time telling white people to get on with it already.

When U. W. Clemon arrived at the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans, his only task was to ask that the court apply the precedent of
Alexander
to the
Singleton
case. “Basically,” Clemon says, “all we had to do was stand up and give them the facts about how many blacks were enrolled in formerly all-white schools in each of the districts. And of course the number was zero.

“One of the defense lawyers was telling the judges that they ‘needed a little more time,’ that this had come up on them ‘all of a sudden’—fifteen years after
Brown
was decided. But there was a judge from Tuscaloosa, Walter P. Gewen. He looked at the lawyer and said, ‘Sir, the Supreme Court told us that we have to desegregate these schools now, and if you don’t know what
now
means, just look at your watch.’”

In Vestavia, people were looking at their watches very intently. As soon as Jefferson County came under the government’s desegregation order, they started pulling their kids out of Berry. In less than five months, the city raised, campaigned for, and passed a tax issue to break its schools off from the county’s, attempting an end run around the law. It didn’t work. So transparent was Vestavia’s motive that, in less than ninety days, Clemon had appealed and a judge had slapped the new school system with the very same desegregation order it had tried to escape.

“The county was quick to point out,” Clemon adds, “that Vestavia was saddled with blacks
because
it acted precipitously.”

On July 23, 1970, the U.S. District Court of Northern Alabama ordered Vestavia “to have 25 percent faculty integration by September 1971” and to take responsibility for “those who live outside the city limits between Wenonah and Oxmoor Road.” Soon, a five-year-old Alicia Thomas would be out by her campfire in the predawn chill, waiting for Shaky’s rickety death trap to come rumbling out of the darkness.

The school bus became a lightning rod almost immediately, a thing on which white America could unleash its inchoate frustration and anger. In Boston, court-ordered busing sent mobs of Irish and Italian protesters into the streets. In Detroit, armed with dynamite, members of the Michigan Ku Klux Klan broke into a city bus barn and blew several school buses into the night sky. School busing was easy to hate. It was big-government social engineering of the worst kind. It was a “socialist plot” foisted on “real Americans” by “East Coast liberals.” But the history of Vestavia Hills is useful for highlighting an important truth: big-government liberals didn’t create school busing. Southern conservatives did. They willed it into existence with fifteen years of massive resistance.

In 1965, when HEW first issued federal guidelines for school desegregation, busing wasn’t even mentioned. Preserving neighborhood schools to the greatest extent possible was the overriding consideration, HEW said. To that end, the two initial tactics the government used were pairing and zoning. Pairing was done by taking the black and white schools in closest proximity and merging them. With zoning, school districts were simply redrawn to encompass mixed populations. As a desegregation tool, busing was first used on a large scale in Charlotte, North Carolina, which adopted the tactic as an experiment in reshuffling the student population of its district.

Prior to that, busing had been used primarily as a means to
stop
integration. In small Southern towns, blacks and whites lived in relative proximity, often in checkerboard patterns. School boards hauled black and white kids all over the map on circuitous routes across gerrymandered districts in an attempt to keep them separate; many of the earliest desegregation plans often simplified the route kids took to school and redrew “neighborhood” boundaries in ways that made sense. Southern conservatives had used busing and redistricting for years. It was only when those tools were deployed against them that shipping kids across town suddenly became unfair and un-American. “It’s not the distance. It’s the niggers,” Clemon and his colleagues liked to point out.

The constitutionality of busing was eventually upheld by the Supreme Court in 1971’s
Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg
, but the court’s unanimous opinion was also very candid about the program’s flaws, calling it “administratively awkward, inconvenient, and even bizarre.” Even the supporters of busing thought it was a pretty cockeyed way to go. But whites had resisted and resisted and pushed the law to its breaking point, leaving little choice but to man up a fleet of big yellow diversity wagons to go and track everyone down. Thanks to its twenty-year temper tantrum, white America wound up saddling itself with
far
more black students and
far
more government intrusion than if it had just given blacks the only thing they’d asked for in the first place: freedom of choice.

Massive resistance made it so that integration had to be legally coerced, and that in turn has left us with an eternally vexing question: legally, what is integration? Once you start suing people, how do you
know when you’re done? The only available metric was the one put forth by HEW: statistical proof of significant progress. Or: “How many blacks ya got?” Once the precedent of
Brown
actually went into effect, the lofty but vague notion of “integration” by necessity evolved into the more quantifiable goal of “racial balance.” Whites had been so disingenuous for so long, the only way to make sure they weren’t cheating was to add up all the black students in the classrooms and use them as a measuring stick.

What had begun as a crusade for equal rights and educational opportunity had given birth to a big racial accounting system, one with mandates and timetables and “quotas.” And despite its noble intentions, that system very quickly began to reveal its shortcomings. All the Supreme Court said was that Vestavia had to put the Oxmoor kids in the building. Earl Warren wasn’t checking to see if Alicia Thomas made the volleyball team.

Up in Washington, on HEW’s spreadsheet, the racial accountants could see that Alicia Thomas was right where she was supposed to be. But when the bus dropped her and the other Oxmoor kids off every morning, they were alone in a place apart that was straining with every muscle to pretend that they weren’t actually there at all.

These days, every February during Black History Month cable news viewers get treated to a steady diet of grainy black-and-white newsreel footage from the 1960s: Klansmen setting crosses alight, urban youth being nightsticked and teargassed. Acts of terrorism against blacks, both vigilante and state sponsored, were all too common, but a more well-rounded version of history would also show what the vast majority of white Americans were doing at the time. They were at home, raising good Boy Scouts, watching
Bonanza
, and thinking this Negro thing wasn’t much to get worked up about. And that’s if they were thinking about it at all. Denial was so pervasive, and local media so censored, that the historic events of Birmingham probably had a greater immediate impact on newspaper readers in Japan than on many of the whites living in the middle of it.

Sue Lovoy grew up smack-dab in the middle of it, in Selma, Alabama.
She was in high school when the epic Selma to Montgomery March took place in 1965. That march would be the apex of the civil rights crusade, culminating in the passage of the Voting Rights Act. Eight thousand demonstrators mustered at the Edmund Pettus Bridge and marched some fifty miles to Montgomery, but for Sue and her friends it was just another day to hang out at the malt shop. She didn’t march across the bridge or even go down to see the spectacle. “I was totally detached from it,” she says. “It had nothing to do with me.”

But she couldn’t remain detached for much longer. Six years later, the forces unleashed at Selma would bring her and the children of Oxmoor face-to-face in a classroom at Vestavia Hills High. After graduating from Birmingham-Southern University, Sue Lovoy was hired to teach American history at Vestavia in the fall of 1971. Twenty years later, she’d be my American history teacher, too.

During my first visit back to her classroom, she showed me a fairly disturbing artifact of the “history” she was given to teach when she arrived. It’s a copy of
Alabama
, third edition, by Charles Grayson Summersell, the state history textbook adopted by Vestavia when the school was formed. Even though it was published in 1965, it makes no mention of Rosa Parks, no mention of Martin Luther King, Jr., not one word on the firebombing of the Freedom Riders in Anniston. Nothing. What it does say, in its sole gloss on the entire civil rights movement, is this:

Alabama
remained a staple of the school’s curriculum well into the late 1970s.

Vestavia had fallen all over itself trying to get out from under the desegregation order imposed on the county; however, shortly after the Oxmoor plan was announced, the court ruled that the city’s white kids would not be bused out into black neighborhoods, which was really
white parents’ greater fear. Once that decision was made, the opposition to busing in Vestavia vanished, almost overnight. There was no more avoiding it, but it was also no longer something they had to bother themselves with. It was now an accounting matter between the school and the government. The everyday folks could go back to reading fairy tales about George Wallace. So they did.

William Clark was the district superintendent at the time. He says he received only one formal grievance over the integration issue. A white father barged into his office saying it was unfair that whites had to drive their children to school while the government gave black kids a free ride. White families should get as much as the blacks got, he said. Clark sent the man home. Beyond that, he insists, “I saw no racial animosity, didn’t get any complaints, and we had no trouble.” Even as Vestavia’s own children were being hurled into one of the biggest social experiments in American history, the prevailing attitude of the community, still, was that this wasn’t really about them. Typical of Alabama: once the busing situation was settled, Clark said, “my biggest problem was football.”

While Vestavia’s parents fretted over whether Colonel Reb and his angry mustache would make the conference finals, the families in Oxmoor were grappling with an actual problem: fear. Legally, the Oxmoor children now had no choice but to attend Vestavia, and Vestavia would be hauled back to court if they didn’t. But many families didn’t want their children hauled off to “that racist suburb.” Given a choice between Vestavia Hills and dropping out, some kids were dropping out. So as year two of the busing plan was about to begin, Sue Lovoy’s first task as a teacher was to load up with several other faculty members and drive into deepest, blackest Oxmoor for a very unusual parent-teacher conference. “There was a tremendous fear factor,” she recalls. “They were afraid for their lives. We all rode over there, and I had to explain to them that I didn’t care what color their children were; I was there to educate, and I was going to educate whoever walked in my door. But we really did have to go and convince them that we were not trying to corral their kids so we could bring ’em over here and kill ’em.”