Some of My Best Friends Are Black

by Tanner Colby

  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:

  In June, 1963, Governor [George] Wallace made good on his promise to stand “in the schoolhouse door,” by taking his now-celebrated position at the entrance to Foster Auditorium on the University of Alabama campus when two Negroes, Vivian Malone and James A. Hood, sought to enroll. (Italics mine.)

  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.”

  Eventually, most of the children came, and back at school Ms. Lovoy found herself responsible for two of them. Both girls, and both seniors. One did poorly. She retreated from the unfriendly, unfamiliar environment around her. She fumbled through, barely got out, and went right back to Oxmoor, having gained little from the experience, academically or personally. The other girl did the opposite. If the school’s intimidating atmosphere bothered her, she never let on. She arrived in class every day with confidence and a keen sense of humor, and she was a good student. “She and I had an interesting relationship,” Lovoy says of the second girl. “We always used to pick at each other, tell jokes, have fun. The one thing I’ll always remember is the morning I was standing there with my cup of coffee before class. She scooted up right behind me and she leaned in and said, ‘Don’t you know drinkin’ that stuff’ll make you black?’

  “I hooted—I laughed so hard. And I determined
then that if she could say that to me, and if she felt comfortable saying that to me, that meant she was going to be okay.”

  Thanks to U. W. Clemon, the doors to Vestavia Hills had been forced open. Soon the next generation of black children would be free to come in, and some of them would do better than okay.

  [3]

  Oreo

  In a racial accounting system that leans heavy on the letter of the law, the law is only as good as it’s written. The affirmative action clause mandating that Vestavia hire black teachers, for example, said the school had to meet a 25 percent minority faculty quota. It never said Vestavia had to maintain a 25 percent minority faculty quota. At the start of the 1971 school year, the system had hired thirty-six black teachers. With retirement and attrition, by the late 1980s only a handful remained. By the late 1990s, at the high school, there was only one left.

  Jerona Williams was born in 1950 in the hamlet of Elloree, South Carolina. Her father, Raymond J. Anderson, was a bricklayer and a committed civil rights activist. Even in the early 1950s, he was openly registering voters and circulating petitions to integrate the schools, drawing a lot of the wrong kind of attention. One night when Jerona was seven years old, the Ku Klux Klan came over to send them a warning.

  “They put it up right in front of our house,” Jerona says. “They’d come in their white robes and put up the cross, saturate it with gasoline, and burn it. They were talking through a megaphone—they’d call out your names. I remember my daddy coming in and waking me up and lifting me out of bed. He carried me and he took me to the front door and he opened it. I looked out and the cross was burning and the men were standing there in their hoods. And my daddy held me in his arms and he said, ‘I wanted you to see this so that you know you never have to be afraid, because your daddy will always be here to protect you.’”

  Then he closed the door, put her back to bed, and returned to his business, undeterred. When Jerona was fourteen, Anderson applied for her to attend the town’s all-white high school under the district’s freedom of choice plan. She would soon be the first black student in the history of that school, but her father found himself blacklisted for his efforts. Unable to get work anywhere in South Carolina, he drove back and forth to North Carolina every week to lay brick at Fort Bragg for the federal government, the only employer who would have him. When Jerona finished high school, she enrolled at the historically black South Carolina State College to become a teacher. Still driving to Fort Bragg year after year, her father worked to keep her there—literally worked himself to death, dying of a heart attack when his daughter was only twenty; he wouldn’t see her graduate from college.

  At South Carolina State, Jerona met and dated Tyrone Williams, a young man from Birmingham, also the first in his family to go to college. As graduation neared, she says, “Tyrone went home for spring break and brought me back three applications for teaching jobs. He said, ‘I got you Homewood, Jefferson County, and this new system, Vestavia Hills.’ Vestavia called while I was still a student, because they were under court order to find black teachers. If it weren’t for that, I wouldn’t be here.”

  Jerona started teaching algebra at Vestavia in the fall of 1972. Tyrone, who would eventually be a school principal, went to work in the Birmingham city system. Together they bought a home on the north side in Forestdale and had four children: Tycely, Tyrenda, Tyra, and finally a son, Tyrone, Jr. For several years, despite being able to do so, the Williamses chose not to enroll their own kids at Vestavia. “The principal called me in,” Jerona says, “and asked me why I wasn’t bringing my kids to the school. Vestavia wanted them because they had to make the count. I told him I wanted my kids to be grounded, to be rooted. I wanted them to know black culture and know what’s what before they came over.”

  When her oldest daughter was ready to start middle school, Jerona decided it was time.

  When I say I don’t know any black people, that’s not exactly true. I used to know one. I just haven’t spoken to her in seventeen years. Tycely Williams and I met in eighth grade at Vestavia’s Pizitz Middle School in the fall of 1988. I was the skinny new kid with braces, recently arrived after my parents moved my brother and me from Lafayette, Louisiana. Freshman year, Tycely and I joined the debate team together. Your typical debate nerd was prone to spend his Friday nights playing Axis and Allies or smoking clove cigarettes while moping around to The Cure. But Tycely was one of the most popular kids in school. Member of the homecoming court, student government chaplain, Class Favorite, Best All Around, Ms. Vestavia finalist—you name it. After we graduated in 1993, we lost track of each other the way people used to do before Facebook. The only thing I’d heard of her since then came from a mutual classmate who’d picked up some random news through the alumni grapevine. “I think she’s friends with Oprah or something,” he said.

  Tycely is not friends with Oprah, but she does run her own nonprofit management consulting business in Washington, D.C., which is where I tracked her down in the summer of 2008. If I was going to write a book about why I don’t know any black people, it only made sense that she would be the first person I’d call. I drove down from New York, we had lunch, caught up, and began what has become, for both of us, a very illuminating high school reunion.

  During our time, the Vestavia school system as a whole was 4.4 percent black, but the high school itself was closer to 3 percent—only 38 out of 1,238 students. Almost all of them were from Oxmoor. In our graduating class, Tycely and one other student were admitted because they were teachers’ kids, and only one black student, Chad Jones, actually lived inside the Vestavia city limits. Chad was the superstar athlete, our double state champ in basketball and soccer. His mother, a single parent, had moved to Birmingham from Tupelo, Mississippi, when he was twelve. She worked nights at the local phone utility as they struggled to keep both feet inside the school district, moving from unit to unit in the handful of apartment complexes located on Highway 31. (“I think we lived in all of them,” he says today.) Being the superstar athlete, Chad enjoyed his own set of rules when it came to crossing the color line. Tycely didn’t have that advantage. She had only one chance to fit in, and that was by being the Black Girl with a Really Great Attitude.

  “Even on my first day of school,” Tycely says, “I promised myself that I would be nice to everyone, because there was a fear that people would not be nice to me because of my race. But all of my experiences proved otherwise. I never had to be anything other than who I was. I think I was able to make as many friends as I did because I had a level of sensitivity that most teenagers don’t have, and I had that because I was black. There were skaters and jocks, and this group wouldn’t talk to that group—I never fell victim to those classifications, because I was so cognizant of being classified myself. I tried to learn everybody’s names, be friendly to everyone. I think if I hadn’t been black, I wouldn’t have been as popular as I was. I would have just done whatever the majority was doing.”

  Much like the self-assured girl in Sue Lovoy’s first class, Tycely crossed the color line so fast it never had a chance to hold her back. In a world without black people, it was her advantage to define what black was; we didn’t know. And if black meant Tycely, then black was pretty great. By the time we got to high school, Tycely says, she’d crossed so many lines and had so many friends that she’d neutralized whatever racial animus might have come her way. When pressed to dredge up all the racist things that had happened to her in Vestavia, she didn’t have much to offer. Racking her brain, she could really only come up with one, and then not even something directed specifically at her. “After a football game,” she recalls, “a bunch of Vestavia kids were hanging out, and of course I’m the only black kid. But we were playing Homewood, and Homewood had a lot of black guys on their team. And as they were walking back to their bus, this Vestavia kid said, ‘You know, I hate those niggers.’

  “Then one of the cheerleaders was like, ‘Oh my God, how could you say that in front of Tycely?’ Not ‘How c
ould you say that?’ but ‘How could you say it in front of Tycely?’”

  To which the young man shrugged and offered the standard Southern defense, “What? She’s not like them.”

  “I dismissed it,” she says of the incident. “I just felt sorry for people. It wasn’t their fault they were ignorant. I had a lot of kids say to me that I was the only black person they’d ever spoken to besides their maid. I’d invite friends over to visit, and they’d be shocked that I lived in a normal, regular house. They’d say, ‘My parents were really nervous for me to come over here.’ It wasn’t their fault their parents were so fearful and afraid—of what, I don’t know. Going to Vestavia is supposed to be all about getting this great education, but it’s not really about getting an education, because if your parents were concerned about giving you an education, they would educate you about the fact that there are black people who can read and write.”

  When Brown v. Board ruled that segregated educational facilities were harmful, the court’s decision focused almost exclusively on the psychological damage segregation caused to black children, the feelings of inferiority they developed by being stigmatized as second-class citizens and lesser human beings. Whites were assumed to be the healthy, well-educated norm. And because we were the norm, rarely did anyone stop to ask, “How is segregation screwing up the white kids?”

  The answer, it turns out, is quite a lot.

  Vestavia was seriously serious about education. Less than twenty years after bolting from the overcrowded classrooms of the county, our high school had risen to become, arguably, the best public school in the state. In 1991, the U.S. Department of Education officially designated us a Blue Ribbon School; some people came from Washington and gave us a flag.