Some of My Best Friends Are Black

by Tanner Colby

  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.”

  In personality, Myles and Malcolm Robinson could not be more dissimilar. “Had I not been in the delivery room,” their father jokes, “I would not believe that they are twins.” Myles plays basketball, Malcolm plays concert piano. Myles hangs with the jocks, Malcolm is president of the German Honor Society. Not being into sports—a one-way ticket to popularity—Malcolm found it a little tougher to adapt. “Myles had an easier time getting along,” Malcolm explains. “I had to make my own friends, which was harder for me. At our old school my brother and I had all the same friends. When we moved here, we got different ones.”

  Far from having to stick together to survive, Myles and Malcolm both say they barely see each other during the school day. They have completely independent activities, interests, and peer groups. Twenty years ago, Tycely Williams had to make an either/or choice—in or out, black or white, Oxmoor or Oreo. Today, Myles’s and Malcolm’s choices aren’t solely dictated by their race. There’s still a color line, to be sure. There’s still a black cafeteria table and a cluster of black kids in the hallway before school. But navigating that terrain has become far less treacherous.

  If the twins have one thing in common, it’s that they’re both honor students. Not the only black ones, either. The academic glass ceiling at Vestavia has not only been cracked, but shattered. In the class of 2008, William Desmond qualified as a National Merit semifinalist, took home the departmental honors in social studies,
and was voted Most Intellectual by his classmates. Not only is William Desmond black, he’s from Oxmoor. One of the newer, middle-income families, but still. If you’d told me six weeks earlier that a bus kid from Oxmoor had been voted Most Intellectual by the students at Vestavia Hills High School, I would have swallowed my tongue.

  James Robinson credits his own boys’ academic achievements and high self-esteem to their involvement in an early childhood education program in Birmingham known as Wee Care Academy, which focuses on the historic academic achievements of the black community throughout history. “The background that our kids got there was one that said, ‘You are as good as anyone else. You can achieve what anyone else can achieve, black, white, yellow, brown.’ So coming into this environment, it wasn’t intimidating. I had a little apprehension about whether they could compete academically, but they never did. Because of the foundation at Wee Care, they’ve never bought into that stereotype that being on the honor roll is ‘acting white.’ If being intelligent is acting white, does that mean being ignorant is acting black? I don’t buy that. That’s foolishness.”

  Foolish or not, the problem of “acting white” still persists. It’s an accusation Myles Robinson says he still gets from some black students routinely. “There’s a long history of not achieving for black men,” Myles says, “and so when they see somebody doing something that’s not like them, they turn their back to it. They say, ‘You dress white. You act white. You talk white.’”

  But both Myles and his brother seem to easily shrug it off. “They make straight As,” their father says proudly. “As of first semester of sophomore year, they each have a cumulative GPA of 4.3.”

  As my days in Vestavia move forward, it’s easy enough to get a read on how black students and parents feel about the racial landscape here—I just ask them. Being in the minority, they’re acutely aware of what’s going on. I quickly learn, however, that putting direct questions about race to white suburban teenagers is a useless endeavor. Painful, too. A sample quote:

  I have a couple black friends, but, like, I know a lot of people in the school? I kind of feel like… like, not politically—I don’t know how you’d say it—but having, like, right now, especially in this school, if you have a black person on a team, it’s like… bonus points? It’s like, look here, government or whatever, yeah, we have racial integration, because—you know what I’m sayin’?

  And that was an honor student. Seeing as the direct approach isn’t going to get me very far, I decide to poll a wide sample, let them give their answers blind, and then look at the results in the aggregate. Three teachers in Sue Lovoy’s history department offer up time in their classes to hand out my two-page highly unscientific survey on the subject of race. All told, the sample pool covers 274 kids: 227 white, 33 black, and 14 other.

  First question is a two-parter, asking the white kids how many black friends they have, meaning acquaintances, and how many real black friends they have, like the kind of friend you’d call late at night (or text or whatever) to talk about boys. The results:

  In my class, there weren’t but six possible black friends to choose from total. Today, more than 60 percent of the white kids are at least chummy with five or more, and half of them have at least one close black friend. A turn through the 2008 yearbook backs up what the kids are saying. In the candids section, you can actually see black kids and white kids together in the same photograph. That’s new. Same with clubs and activities. Certain groups tend to be more integrated than others, I’m told. So if you’re in band or choir, you’ll have a diverse set of friends. If you’re on the swim team, not so much. Like Myles and Malcolm, black students at Vestavia are increasingly defining themselves by what they do, rather than by their skin color.

  “The strongest, most respected choir students are three black students,” Cas McWaters tells me. “Twenty years ago, I don’t remember a single black student in choir. Now you’ve got a lot of camaraderie. I don’t believe busing alone was ever going to do that. Back then? In the South? I don’t know what alternative we had, but I’m not so sure that the school can implement anything, any program, that says, ‘We can fix this.’ I believe you have to change the culture of your school.”

  The culture in Vestavia has changed, considerably. And most of that has come in just the last five or six years. The early 2000s, I’m told, weren’t substantially different from the late 1980s. Since then, things have improved radically, almost overnight. Vestavia’s culture changed because white administrators and black parents finally decided to change it. Banning the Confederate flag was a signal to black families that here, at least, was a principal willing to meet them halfway. Those families, like the Robinsons, set aside their reservations and moved into the community; their presence has made it such that their needs can no longer be ignored in the way they were during the years they spent grousing about Vestavia’s racism from the outside. And while this sea change in the school’s culture has taken place, the only change in the federal desegregation mandate was that it was eliminated. No longer beholden to the letter of the law, Vestavia is nonetheless making good on its spirit.

  The faculty, McWaters believes, has played a major role in this as well. “As our teacher population aged out with retirement,” he says, “we’ve gotten teachers from other schools that weren’t all white and all rich. So they’ve brought different experiences. We had a young man from a single-parent family down in Oxmoor; he was in football and choir. When his mother died, the choir director became his legal guardian. People of Vestavia went and put together enough money to get him through college. He’s at West Alabama now, graduating on time. The choir director is the legal guardian responsible for that situation. And that’s how you change the culture: through experiences.”

  Among the faculty, the most immediately visible change is Tyra Williams, the youngest daughter of Vestavia’s Williams dynasty; she’s just started this fall, teaching in Sue Lovoy’s history department. By the late 1990s, her mother, Jerona, was the last black classroom teacher working in the core academic curriculum. Together with her daughter, that makes two. And Mom has it easy: she teaches fractions. Once you get past the Three-Fifths Compromise, there’s not a whole lot of racial tension over fractions. Tyra’s juggling American History: 1865 to the Present. She gets to take these kids through Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and all the rest of it. A daunting task.

  The institutional racism at Vestavia may be gone, but there’s still plenty of the garden-variety kind. As happened everywhere, Barack Obama’s presidential campaign brought a lot of it to the surface. Racist jokes and emails circulated. The day after the election, chants of “Obama-nation, Assassination” could be heard up and down the halls. And shortly before the inauguration, Tyra had to stop class and explain to a white girl that our new black president is not, in fact, the Antichrist. “Nuh-uh, Ms. Williams,” the girl insisted. “It’s in the Bible.”

  It can get personal, too. When Tyra had just started teaching, someone snuck into her classroom between periods and wrote the N-word on her chalkboard. (They didn’t write “nigger”; they wrote “the N-word.”) She didn’t see it until she was up in front of her next class, mid-lecture. “It was a test,” she says, “because how do you respond when thirty kids are watching you? I just erased it and kept going like I didn’t see anything. After class I went into the bathroom and I cried and cried. I could not believe that happened to me. My mom told me, ‘You can’t wear your feelings on your sleeve. You can’t be all emotional.’ She’s tough as steel. I’m working my way to that point.”

  So, just how racist is life in Vestavia Hills? One black student described it as “so ignorant it’s unexplainable.” Another simply sighed: “I could go on for days.” Out of all the surveys, I counted nine that one could objectively categorize as “racist” in the true meaning of the word. Some students took the short-answer section and went off into the margins, filling them with angry diatribes. One white kid wrote, “Why do they smell? Why don’t they take
showers? Why are they so lazy? Why are you even writing this book? Honestly, you’re white. Be proud of that. Very.” This same student also checked the box for “Racism is no longer a major problem in America.”

  But that was only nine kids, out of over two hundred. In forty years, Jerona Williams has seen more of this than anyone. She pegs that kind of element as “not even 10 percent” of the students. “The rest of them are genuine,” she says. “Vestavia has changed almost 180 degrees.”

  Whatever the quantifiable level of racism may or may not be, the more important question is how black students choose to deal with it. Out of those polled, only one black student checked the box that said, “Racism at Vestavia stands in the way of my advancement here.” The rest said it was something they chose to ignore; they have better things to do. Of that same group, 76 percent wish Vestavia had more racial diversity, but only 24 percent say they would rather be at a majority-black school, even if the quality of education remained the same. And only 33 percent say they prefer to sit at the black cafeteria table; the rest enjoy sitting wherever with whomever.

  “It’s come a long way,” Sue Lovoy says. “I’m proud of the distance we’ve traveled in these years. In the early days you would see all the black kids sitting together in one group in a class, and the white kids would sit as far away from them as possible. But now black students in my class don’t feel the need to sit together. And you’re not going to grow if you only surround yourself with people just like you. You’ll never understand anybody else.”

  What Vestavia’s children are, for the most part, is confused. Talk to half the kids here and they will tell you, with absolute sincerity, that the rebel flag stands for “school spirit.” On the survey, I asked all the white kids to write down one thing they didn’t understand about black people. “I don’t understand why there is so much violence associated with black culture,” one wrote. “Why do they talk one way in front of the teachers and another way around each other?” asked another. And then there’s my personal favorite: “Why do black people drink Hawaiian Punch?”