Some of My Best Friends Are Black

by Tanner Colby

  They’re all legitimate questions. Even the last one. Most of these kids would be teachable if America were ready to teach them, which it’s not. I asked Sue Lovoy, “How much of the post–civil rights history on race has worked its way into the accepted high school curriculum?”

  “None,” she replied.

  “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.

  [PART 2]

  PLANNING FOR PERMANENCE

  [1]

  There Goes the Neighborhood

  In the spring of 1968, Father Norman Roetert was appointed to serve as pastor at St. Therese of the Little Flower, a Catholic parish and parochial school in the Blue Hills neighborhood of Kansas City, Missouri. Once upon a time, before Roetert arrived, Blue Hills had been Kansas City’s Woodlawn. One of several Woodlawns, actually.

  On Kansas City’s wide-open grid, well-to-do whites lived on the west side. Working- and middle-class families lived mostly in little bungalow neighborhoods to the east, like Blue Hills and Troostwood and Linwood, the kinds of places where families used to pass their evenings on the front porch and the neighbors would stop by to say hello. This was Walt Disney’s America. Literally. Walt Disney grew up in a gabled-roof cottage at 3028 Bellefontaine Avenue. Just a streetcar ride away, at Forty-sixth and Paseo, was Electric Park, a playland of games and activities with fireworks that went off every night and an electric train that the young Walt would ride. Disney opened his first animation studio here, too, where he kept a pet mouse whose name was not Mickey but Mortimer.

  Though far from wealthy, whites on the east side had done well. The local Democratic political machine, run by “Boss Tom” Pendergast, had been instrumental in winning Missouri for Franklin Roosevelt in the 1932 presidential election, and government patronage from FDR’s New Deal insulated Kansas City from the worst effects of the Depression. When the industrial mobilization of World War II got under way, the city snagged its fair share of those contracts, too. Good jobs with good wages were plentiful, creating a solid tax base for public schools.

  Kansas City was home to a vibrant black community, too, also on the east side but well to the north. Like New York’s Harlem and Chicago’s South Side, Kansas City’s Eighteenth and Vine District was a hub of black American culture. Music legends like Count Basie and Charlie Parker got their starts here in the 1930s, playing all-night jam sessions and cutting contests at bars like the Hey Hey Club, transforming jazz from New Orleans’ Dixieland sound into Kansas City’s own signature style. Eighteenth and Vine had generated its own bustling black economy as well, served by black-owned livery cabs, black-owned clothing stores, and the Kansas City Call, one of the most widely read black newspapers in the country. Sitting at the heart of the neighborhood was Lincoln High, considered one of the finest black schools in the Midwest.

  Ordained in 1957, Norman Roetert had ministered in Kansas City’s black community for most of his career, starting at Annunciation parish close to Eighteenth and Vine. He belonged to a new generation of white clergy, committed to reversing Christianity’s ignoble past of sanctioning slavery and Jim Crow; he’d marched with Martin Luther King in Selma in 1965. But when Roetert arrived at St. Therese in 1968, he found himself wrestling with a racial problem that was immune to protest marches and prayer. “FOR SALE signs were everywhere,” he says. “Like tulips at Easter time.”

  Blue Hills was going black.

  For years, white home owners on Kansas City’s east side had been in a panic—not simply because blacks were moving south into their neighborhoods at an alarming rate, but because no one understood how or why it was happening. “The priest who preceded me had no grasp on what he was dealing with,” Roetert explains. “There was no legitimate real estate company operative anywhere in the area. There were no mortgage loans available, no insurance available, and these people were working the neighborhood for everything it was worth.”

  “These people” were men like Bob Wood. Wood was a hustler. Through the fifties, sixties, and seventies, all over the country, men like him pioneered an art known as blockbusting. Blockbusters were predatory real estate speculators. They’d buy a house in a white neighborhood, rent it to a black family, wait a few weeks, and then start calling the neighbors. “The coloreds are moving in. Don’t you think you should sell? I can get you a good deal—before it’s too late.” The scare tactics these men used could get quite creative. Some would go into the ghetto and pay a few bucks to the biggest, scariest, right-off-the-chain-gang-looking fellow they could find. Then they’d bring him along, knocking door-to-door, politely informing white residents that “this gentleman is looking in the area.” The FOR SALE signs would start to go up.

  Once the signs were up, that neighborhood was “in transition.” All the licensed real estate brokers would close up shop; their code of ethics prevented them from selling “white” houses to blacks. Once the licensed agents left, the neighborhood’s housing market turned into an unregulated free-for-all. The blockbusters would descend. As soon as one black family moved in, all the surrounding white residents found themselves perpetually harassed. Widows and the elderly—on fixed incomes, their entire net worth tied up in their house—were targeted first. Six, seven phone calls a night. More and more yard signs would crop up. Within months, sometimes days, the whole block would go black.

  In any selling frenzy, prices plummet. Fear makes a motivated seller. A neighborhood might have an average home price of $10,000, but once the old widow is strong-armed into selling for $5,000, that sets the market value for the rest of the block—the myth of black neighbors lowering property values becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. But blacks didn’t drive property values down; real estate agents did. In truth, the first blacks to pioneer a neighborhood were so desperate to leave the ghetto they’d sign a $15,000 mortgage for that $10,000 house; the arrival of blacks drove prices up. Supply and demand. The first whites to sell could make a bundle and get out. The last whites to sell might be lucky to get $2,500.

  Blockbusters also knew that blacks had little access to mortgage capital. So those brokers would offer to finance the purchase themselves for an outsized down payment and an unreasonable monthly note. Trapped in tenements most of their lives, having never dealt with complex mortgage instruments, black families would take the deal. Falling behind on the note almost immediately, they’d find themselves foreclosed on in a matter of months. The deed would then revert back to the broker, who’d turn around and sell it again. An enterprising blockbuster might turn the same house over two, three, maybe four times in the space of a year.

  Blockbusting hit the northern frontie
r of Blue Hills, Forty-seventh Street, early in 1968, just as Father Roetert arrived at St. Therese. He watched as the neighborhood crumbled from within. “These brokers would list a house for a white family,” he says, “and then wouldn’t even try to sell it. Then the home owners would get scared, go out to Johnson County, and buy something. Now they had two mortgages to carry, so the broker would offer them a pittance for their old house—he’d just steal it from them. Then he’d jack up the price and sell it to blacks. That was going on all over the place.”

  Like others to the north had done, Roetert tried to hold the line. He thought he could help make an orderly transition to a stable, integrated neighborhood. He failed. His priestly authority held no sway over men like Bob Wood, with whom he had frequent run-ins. “Wood made no pretense that he wasn’t doing what he was doing,” Roetert recalls, “and he was doing it well. His attitude was ‘Try and stop me.’”

  The pastor often begged Wood to do just that. Stop. For the sake of the community. “But he’d just laugh at me. He thought I was a fool.”

  The fate of any residential neighborhood is bound to the fate of its schools. Before Brown v. Board, Kansas City ran a strictly segregated school system, based on racial attendance zones. Starting in 1955, in order to “comply” with Brown, the city announced that school enrollment would now be based on neighborhood attendance zones—neighborhoods that just happened to be all white or all black. For decades, the residential color line on the east side had held unchallenged at Twenty-seventh Street, kept in place by fear. But the all-black tenements and schools of Eighteenth and Vine were packed beyond capacity. Emboldened by the rising consciousness of civil rights, black families began to move out.