by Tanner Colby
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Vestavia Hills didn’t start as a refuge of wholesome, middle-class family values. It was a refuge from wholesome, middle-class family values—a place apart from the religious and racial intolerance dividing the city below. That would not last. The Great Depression left Ward penniless. He suffered a debilitating stroke, lingered for years, and died of throat cancer in 1940, his gardens choked with weeds and his temple nearly in ruins.
In 1947, a real estate developer named Charles Byrd bought the abandoned estate and much of the surrounding land. Starter homes began sprouting up—homes proudly advertised as “fully restricted.” From now on, the only people of color allowed in Vestavia’s gardens would be the ones who were planting them. Officially incorporated on November 8, 1950, the city of Vestavia Hills took the landmark mansion as its namesake, but by that time the rugged wilderness where Native Americans and sexually ambiguous politicians once roamed free had ceased to exist.
And the Vestavia temple itself? In 1958, George Ward’s stately pleasure dome was turned into a Baptist church.
Other than George Ward, the man probably most responsible for the future success of Vestavia was Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren, who in 1954 handed down the decision of Brown v. Board, which sent white people running for the hills.
Less than two months after Brown was announced, Indianola, Mississippi, formed what would be the first of many White Citizens’ Councils, groups of civic and business leaders who used their power and influence to thwart any attempts to implement the court’s decision. In Louisiana, when the archbishop of New Orleans announced that the Catholic Church would follow the spirit of the court order and integrate its parochial schools, the legislature convened in Baton Rouge to debate whether or not police power could be used to bring the church under state control. In Virginia, Senator Harry Byrd called for a campaign of “massive resistance” against Brown. The state enacted a sweeping program of obstructionist legislation, defunding schools that attempted to integrate and providing vouchers and tax credits for white families to enroll in private, all-white “segregation academies.” Similar legal challenges across the South would clog up the courts for years.
And that’s just the stonewalling that went on during the daytime. Under the cover of darkness, the Ku Klux Klan and other groups waged campaigns of murder and intimidation to keep blacks on their side of the color line. The combined effort of legal obstructionism and extralegal terrorism made for an effective deterrent. By the early 1960s, less than 12 percent of schools in the South had integrated; in the Deep South, the figure was as low as 2 percent. In Virginia, Prince Edward County shuttered its entire public school system for five years rather than integrate. At the rate things were going, one activist estimated, the South was on track to be in compliance with Brown in about seven thousand years.
At the time, the white residents of Birmingham enjoyed one of the finest school systems anywhere in the South. Its flagship high schools—Woodlawn, Ramsay, Phillips, West End—were grand and imposing, built by a city with great pride in its public works. No black student had ever set foot in any of them. The black children of Birmingham attended schools that were considerably less well endowed, but not all of them fit the newsreel stereotype of the dilapidated, one-room Jim Crow schoolhouse. Parker High, originally founded in 1900 as The Negro School, had an enrollment of more than 3,700, making it the largest black high school in the world. Parker was a cornerstone of the black community. It supported the professional class with hundreds of teaching positions. It educated the future lawyers and activists who would lead the local civil rights efforts, and its vocational programs were an important pipeline to get work in the steel industry. And as the threat of desegregation loomed, Birmingham, like other Southern cities, began making sizable investments in its black schools; if separate were made to appear equal, maybe this whole Brown thing would go away. The all-new, all-black Hayes High would open in 1960 on a seventeen-acre campus complete with gymnasium, auditorium, library, labs for home economics and industrial arts, and so on.
Birmingham was determined to keep Jim Crow alive no matter the cost. Martin Luther King, Jr., called it the most segregated city in America. Others referred to it as “America’s Johannesburg,” after the capital of Apartheid-riven South Africa. Its most colorful nickname was simply “Bombingham,” a tag that stuck once dynamiting black neighborhoods had eclipsed the steel industry as the city’s principal claim to notoriety. In April of 1963, King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) descended on Birmingham to lead marches and protests against the city’s draconian Jim Crow laws. It would be the most high-profile effort yet from the young preacher who had risen out of 1955’s Montgomery Bus Boycott to become the leading figure of the civil rights movement. The centerpiece of the Birmingham campaign was a march on the city’s downtown department stores. Though launched with high hopes, it quickly stalled. King found himself in jail, and movement organizers were running short on money. Most local black citizens, employed by the steel industry in one way or another, couldn’t march for fear of losing their livelihoods.
The mantle of protest fell to their children. On May 2, the black youth of Birmingham took to the streets in what would become known as the Children’s Crusade. Thousands of boys and girls poured out of downtown’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church and into the streets, singing triumphantly. Then, on television, the world watched in horror as the Birmingham police turned fire hoses and dogs on the defenseless children and hauled them away to jail. The Children’s Crusade exposed the violent, dehumanizing reality of segregation. Jim Crow’s days were now numbered. But that victory came with a heavy cost. The blowback was violent and swift. The Ku Klux Klan escalated its campaign of terror, detonating bombs all over black neighborhoods. One went off at Martin Luther King’s vacant motel room. Another, most infamously, was planted at the Sixteenth Street Church some months later, killing four little girls.
That fall, federal intervention finally made desegregation inevitable for the Birmingham city schools. In a society built entirely around the social value of whiteness, that reality was simply unimaginable. And so, having built a thriving city of industry with comfortable neighborhoods and good schools, instead of sharing it, the white people of Birmingham chose to abandon it wholesale. On September 5, the day two black children were first admitted to West End High, white students left their classrooms and gathered on the football field. A rally to call for more massive resistance turned into a two-hour funeral instead. At the climax, the crowd sat silent while one boy played a somber, down-tempo “Dixie” on his trumpet. Like a requiem, it was said. And with that, they hit the road. Somewhere over the mountain, they would build a new world, one even brighter and whiter than before, in Vestavia Hills.
In the long run, the backlash to the civil rights movment would do its greatest damage not in assault, but in retreat. Few places offer a clearer picture of this than the place that used to be Vestavia before Vestavia was Vestavia. Prior to white flight, Woodlawn was the Vestavia Hills of its day. It was the nice, quiet family community—inside the city but just outside of downtown, right on the streetcar line that would take you wherever you needed to go.
Woodlawn High was one of the jewels of the Birmingham school system. Today, the posts on its alumni website are chock-full of “Where Are They Now?” updates and Kodachrome memories. Here’s Martha and Bobby from the class of ’55! There’s Peggy and Jenny Lou from the ’64 Sigma Tau Beach Beauties! Check out the whole ’65 reunion doing the electric slide at the Marriott! Everyone’s happy and spiffy and all-American. And everyone’s white. Then you come to the early seventies and… there’s nothing. No more reunions, no more Beach Beauties. It’s like the whole place just vanished.
In the meantime, Vestavia blossomed. Its property values soared. Its Baptist churches were fruitful and multiplied. After 1963, families were flooding out of Woodlawn and heading Over the Mountain in a hurry. They were
seeking refuge from—as Marvin Yeomans Whiting neatly threads it—“the troubles that were breaking upon the metropolitan area.” When the 1970 census was tallied, Birmingham’s population had fallen nearly 12 percent in just a decade. The population of Vestavia Hills, meanwhile, had ballooned to 8,311, up more than thirteenfold from its 1950 incorporation. That same year, the total number of black residents in Vestavia was three. Not three percent, three.
Next door, in old-money Mountain Brook, things were booming as well, but the city leaders there had been very prescient in organizing their secession. They’d founded their own schools in 1959, and the only “policy” instituted to keep blacks out was old-fashioned, unspoken social custom: blacks did not go to Mountain Brook. Having broken no laws, its schools were subject to no lawsuits. Vestavia, on the other hand, was born on the run. Every year, more and more children were deserting the Birmingham school system and crowding into the surrounding Jefferson County system. Which was packed. White kids stacked to the rafters. Berry, the county school serving the families of Vestavia, hadn’t been built for this kind of traffic. By the late sixties, its parking lot was jammed with trailers serving as makeshift classrooms. Student-teacher ratios ran in excess of forty to one, and no matter how many teachers were hired in the spring there were never enough come fall. For this whites had abandoned their nice, comfortable campus in Woodlawn. The county system, for all its drawbacks, had managed to remain segregated. It wouldn’t for very much longer.
U. W. Clemon grew up all too familiar with Jefferson County’s segregated schools; his was the archetypal wood-framed building with no indoor plumbing. The son of former sharecroppers who’d come to Birmingham seeking work in the steel trade, Clemon was born in 1943 in nearby Fairfield, a company town built by U.S. Steel to house its laborers. Thirty-seven years after that, in 1980, he would be nominated by President Jimmy Carter to serve as the first black federal judge in Alabama history. In between, in 1969, he was the lawyer who brought the school bus to Vestavia Hills.
At the height of the civil rights movement, Clemon was a student at Birmingham’s historically black Miles College, where he took part in the 1963 demonstrations, joining the group that desegregated the downtown public library. He graduated from Miles as valedictorian of the class of 1965, and then, under the peculiar logic of Jim Crow, the state helped pay for him to go to Columbia Law School in New York; that way, none of the all-white in-state programs would have to accept him. Three years later, armed with an Ivy League diploma and a fellowship from the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Clemon returned to Birmingham and started kicking its ass in court.
One of Clemon’s first tasks was to file suit against Jefferson County for maintaining its segregated school system in flagrant violation of Brown. That case, Stout v. Jefferson County, was eventually consolidated with several similar motions from school districts across several other Southern states under the umbrella of Singleton v. Jackson. In December of 1969, the fifteen judges of the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals sat en banc at the New Orleans Federal Courthouse in the heart of the French Quarter to hear the arguments in Singleton. Clemon was barely a year out of law school and only twenty-six years old. Opposing him, the various school districts had assembled a dream team of attorneys drawn from the preeminent white-shoe law firms of the South. “I don’t recall being particularly nervous,” Clemon tells me. “I had what, in hindsight, appears to be overconfidence. We had the wind at our backs.”
The legal momentum that U. W. Clemon rode to the New Orleans Federal Courthouse had been painfully slow in gathering, and it would evaporate almost immediately. But for a very brief window the champions of racial integration had all the leverage they could wish for. During the time of massive resistance, white school districts had been hiding behind bad-faith solutions known as “freedom of choice” plans. Under these, black families were allowed to apply on an individual basis for enrollment in majority-white schools, and those schools were, in theory, obliged to accept them. In practice, however, black families who exercised that freedom usually woke up with a burning cross on their lawn. Few bothered. In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson finally brought the weight of the federal government to bear through Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which denied federal funds to any government agency engaged in discrimination. The White House enacted blanket reforms requiring school districts to file desegregation plans with the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) or else face severe budget cuts. Under the stringent HEW guidelines, schools were now required to provide “statistical proof” of “significant progress.”
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.