The sit-in movement had jumped into the national spotlight a year earlier, when college students in Greensboro, North Carolina, began a wave of protests targeting downtown lunch counters.23 The tactic had spread like wildfire across the South, mostly among college students, but in Louisville, it was high school students who were leading the protests.24 Most attended Central. Encouraging them was the young and fashionable publisher of the local black newspaper, Frank Stanley, the NAACP, and, of course, their teacher, Lyman Johnson.25
As early as 1956, Lyman had taken a group of Central students, many of them members of the NAACP’s Youth Council, to conduct sit-ins in drugstores.26 Four years later, he had been incensed at the irony of a segregated theater that banned blacks from coming to see the Gershwin opera Porgy and Bess about a black community in South Carolina. He and his students helped form a picket line outside of the show, and eventually attendance dwindled enough that the show’s run was cut short.27 The pickets moved on, and so did Lyman and his students, to the Blue Boar Cafeteria, an inexpensive plate lunch place catering to downtown office workers.
The boycott and pickets carried on for months, a victory in itself for the black leadership. The sit-ins brought together the black community “as nothing else in the past had,” one Courier-Journal reporter wrote.28 But, as in other places across the South where blacks were becoming bolder about challenging the old power structure, whites were slow to give up their privileges. It took two years from the climatic 1961 sit-ins for Louisville’s board of alderman to finally criminalize racial discrimination in public accommodations.29 The same year, Johnson won another victory: the public school system agreed to desegregate teachers.30
Black leaders, most of them drawn from top echelons of the community, or, at least, from the squarely middle class, had forced immense progress in just a little over a decade. In theory and usually in practice, blacks could walk into any restaurant and expect service; they could send their child to any school inside the city limits; they could ride on buses, read at the library, and swim in the pools, just like anybody else.31 Most blacks didn’t spend weekends golfing at the Shawnee Golf Course, but just knowing that they had fought and won the right to do so was a point of pride. Yet the day-to-day realities for many blacks had hardly changed at all. Everything was different, and yet nothing was.
For Fran Thomas, who had graduated from Central, the upheaval seemed distant. After years of struggling to support her children on a nurse’s salary and keep them out of the public schools, in 1966, she married an army officer, Virgil Thomas, and the family moved to Fort Knox, an army post south of Louisville. Fran left the black cocoon she had been raised in and entered an entirely white world.
The United States was increasing its involvement in the Vietnam War, and only a year after their marriage her husband was deployed. The G.I. Bill meant the couple could afford a home, though. Fran was nervous about the idea of settling permanently outside of the black community, but she went looking for houses before Virgil left. At the far tip of the county, the G.I. Bill had stimulated a suburban growth spurt. Many young military families found their ideal spot in Valley Station, a neighborhood situated along Dixie Highway near the halfway point between Louisville and Fort Knox. As the influx reached its peak in the early 1960s, the schools strained to accommodate all of the new children.32
Fran found her dream house there, on a quiet street off the main drag. It was a freshly built one-story ranch with a façade of white stones. There were hardwood floors, a full bathroom and a half bath, three bedrooms, and a big backyard. She stopped to see it one evening and talked to the realtor. Perhaps he was fooled by Fran’s light skin or by the dim light, but he agreed to show Fran and Virgil the house the next afternoon. When they arrived at 2 p.m., the realtor took another look at her and refused to let them in. “There are no blacks in this subdivision and there will never be,” he told them, shooing them away.
Fran was furious. The realtor had sparked the rebellious side that had led Fran to dabble in civil rights activism during college. Before she had been reluctant to move to Valley Station; now she was determined. She made an appointment to see Virgil’s colonel at Fort Knox. The colonel was surprised to see her, but cordial. The military had long been in the vanguard of racial progress, ever since Truman had integrated the military on executive order in 1948. Fran got down to business quickly: “If I’m not going to get the house I want to live in, then my husband is not going to Vietnam. He doesn’t have anything to go over there and fight for.”
The colonel looked at her, and then told her he would make some calls. He informed the real estate company that if Fran and Virgil Thomas couldn’t have their house, then it would have trouble selling any more houses in a neighborhood that was financed with government money. The threat worked and the realtors relented. A few days later, Fran went to sign for her new home.
Virgil left soon after; he would eventually be deployed three times to Vietnam. When her son was old enough to fight, he was sent to war, too. Fran was left alone with her younger children, once again working as a nurse at the Veterans Affairs Hospital. Fran’s neighbors were tolerant, if not too friendly. Many were also in the military and were more used to the idea of sharing their space with blacks. It was a new decade. As the 1960s dawned, the trauma of the house bombing had been largely forgotten; Shively was still all white, but Carl Braden had been released from jail after Kentucky’s sedition law was overturned, and charges were dropped against Anne. Louisville had reached “a most enviable position” when it came to race relations, according to the city’s mayor, Bruce Hoblitzell, a gentlemanly former sheriff who addressed both men and women with an affectionate “Honey.”33 Enormous, unimaginable progress had been made over the course of just a few years. Still, there was a long way to go.
III
With Our Own
Chapter 9
Riccardo X liked to say that he stopped believing in Santa Claus at a very young age. The apartment where he was born in 1953 had no chimney. It was in the College Court housing project, the oldest public housing in Louisville.1 To get to Riccardo’s stocking, the jolly old white man with his bag of toys would have had to make it through the projects without being mugged—an unlikely prospect.2
In the mid-1960s, his mother moved Riccardo and his sister across town to another public housing project, Southwick, built a couple of years earlier on the land where Little Africa, the former enclave of freed blacks in the far West End, once stood. Southwick had been envisioned as a village of two-story, brick apartment buildings with modern plumbing and tidy green spaces where mothers could garden and children could play, all centered around a shopping complex that would carry the neighborhood into the modern era.
The shine rubbed off quickly. The shopping complex never materialized.3 With no investors interested in developing the area, the new residents were left marooned at the edge of the city, with their businesses and churches destroyed and nothing to replace them. Louisville’s school desegregation plan was in its tenth year, but Riccardo’s elementary school was all black. It was about as rough as the surrounding projects. He recalled his fourth grade teacher drinking beer at her desk as her students copied multiplication tables. He, as class clown, was a frequent recipient of the paddle.
The nearest store was two blocks away, and when Riccardo ran errands for his mother, he had to pass through another housing project, Cotter Homes, where gangs waited to beat up the Southwick kids who walked alone. In summer, the rivalry between the two projects turned into an all-out war, with rock throwing and knife fights, until the arrival of autumn cooled things off. The violence among the adults was more intense. At age thirteen, Riccardo watched a man shoot another in the head after a game of craps went bad.
This was not the way it was supposed to be, of course. In 1957, before Southwick had been built, the chamber of commerce invited Louisvillians to go “slumming” in the city’s black neighborhoods to see the poverty and decay infesting the city.4 In Little Af
rica, visitors would have seen seven hundred black homes, some of them dating from the 1800s, when the first black settlers had claimed the area for their own. There was poverty, but in the intervening years, residents had built sturdier houses, paved the streets, added sidewalks and mailboxes, and built up a significant business district. They established six grocery stores and a similar number of churches.5
Many old shacks still remained, however, and the chamber of commerce saw only “cancerous blight” that the city couldn’t afford. Its members vowed that soon Louisville would get a “new look.”6 Over the next decade, more than two thousand acres of the city were razed in pursuit of a modern new cityscape. Politicians and chamber of commerce members called it “urban renewal,” but its supposed beneficiaries, nearly all of them black, called it “urban removal.”7
Urban renewal had been intended to correct a problem of the federal government’s own creation. The Roosevelt administration, during the Great Depression, had set up a system to make home buying easier and less risky for average Americans. During the next several decades, the Federal Housing Administration insured billions of dollars in home loans, mostly for new houses being built in rings around core cities.8 “Average American” didn’t mean black. Up until 1950, the federal government essentially had a policy against making and insuring housing loans in black neighborhoods, arguing their presence hurt property values.9 Even when the agency dropped the policy, blacks still faced huge obstacles in getting a loan or finding a real estate agent who would sell to them.10 As cheap loans, new expressways, and expanding industry pulled whites out to the suburbs, most African Americans were left behind, isolated in neighborhoods that no one was willing to invest in.
As inner cities became poorer, the federal government set out to mitigate the blight it had given birth to through the Federal Housing Administration’s mortgage program. Cities like Louisville eagerly applied for federal grants set aside in 1949 and 1954 for what was at first called slum clearance. The main condition attached to the funds was that cities would find new housing for the people living in the homes that were destroyed.11
In Louisville, thousands of people and small businesses in “old tumble-down buildings” were displaced to make way for new roads, shops, hospitals, and office buildings and funneled into more “sanitary” homes overseen by the government.12 About half of the ten thousand homes that were eventually torn down in Louisville were unoccupied. But tight-knit neighborhoods organized around church and school were also dispersed.13 Slum clearance dissolved the warmth and caring that Fran Thomas remembered from her youth in Louisville’s black community. In the area west of downtown surrounding Central where she had lived, three hundred acres of existing structures were demolished, 1,000 families plus 900 individuals were moved, and 560 businesses were closed.14 In many cases, black homeowners were forced to sell their homes, but the payouts were rarely enough to allow them to buy elsewhere. Instead they became renters, often in the subsidized public housing that eventually replaced their neighborhoods.15
Usually, it took a while for the government to get around to building the new homes. Near Central’s new building, the city demolished thirty-four acres of housing and left the area sitting empty for five years.16 At one point in 1965, an aerial photograph showed the school standing nearly alone in a vast desert of empty lots spanning dozens of square blocks.17 Some lots were never filled in. As one woman who was forced to sell her house put it at the time: “They’re supposed to be helping poor people, but urban renewal is helping to make people poor.”18
As blacks were displaced, many moved further west, to the dismay of the whites still rooted in the West End. The flow of whites to the suburbs became a flood in the 1960s. Realtors took advantage of the panic, scaring white residents into selling cheap with the news that blacks had moved to the block, then reselling their homes to blacks at a profit. Some white liberals, including the Bradens, fought back by holding protests and posting signs in their yards declaring that they would refuse to leave. A few of them still lived there half a century later.19 But these holdouts couldn’t stop white flight. Louisville’s urban developers, in their efforts to root out the ghetto, had simply spread it across a larger swath of the city.
Starting in the 1970s, the conventional wisdom about urban renewal shifted. The federal government, finally noticing the disastrous consequences of slum clearance, began to emphasize rehabilitation over demolition.20 But by then it was too late for the black communities in Louisville and in cities from Newark to Chicago that were already gone.
The civil rights movement gathered steam in the context of this huge shift in the landscapes of cities. The era of sit-ins and the dawn of busing corresponded with the new era of suburbs and white flight. Activists claimed victory after victory in the bloody battles to end Jim Crow, but as the suburbs filled up and cities emptied, these victories would eventually seem anachronistic. They won the integration of public transportation systems, but before long, there weren’t that many whites taking the bus anyway; they drove their cars into the city from their homes in the suburbs. They forced the integration of downtown department stores and lunch counters, but whites no longer shopped there; they could be found in the new strip malls and shopping centers beyond the city limits. In cities that had yet to integrate their schools, which was most of them, there were fewer and fewer white students to integrate the black students with.
In Southwick, ten-year-old Riccardo X watched children not much older than he attacked by dogs and hosed down by police in Birmingham on the evening news. But more thrilling to a black child growing up in a Louisville housing project in the 1960s were the battles fought by Muhammad Ali.
Ali was born in 1942 on Grand Avenue in the West End, about ten blocks north of where the Southwick projects would be built. Relative to many blacks in Louisville, his parents were comfortably middle class. His father had regular work as a sign painter and occasionally did murals for local Baptist churches. His mother raised her two sons and worked as a housekeeper for white families when the family was stretched for cash.21 Their block was a pleasant stretch of one- and two-story frame houses with porches, mowed lawns, and large trees near the unofficial border between the black and white West End. Ali wasn’t sheltered from the racial struggles shaking the city and country as he was growing up in the 1940s and ’50s, however. The newspaper pictures of Emmett Till, a boy about his own age who had been murdered after allegedly flirting with a white woman, put into focus the threat that always hung over the head of a black man in the Jim Crow South.22
Ali attended Central High School in 1957. Although he ostensibly could have chosen another high school under the city’s new desegregation plan, like most black students that year, he didn’t. He was indifferent to school (as he would tell reporters later, a high school diploma was still likely to lead to a dead-end for a black man), but the principal, Atwood Wilson, was patient with him. Already at that age, Ali was winning a name for himself as a boxer. Wilson ignored his abysmal grades and embraced Ali’s bragging, even repeating at school assemblies the teenager’s boasts that soon he would be heavyweight champion of the world. Ali would eventually be Central’s “claim to fame,” Wilson told faculty members who were reluctant to grant him a diploma.23
He was right soon enough. In 1960, a year after graduating, Ali won a gold medal at the Olympics and made his triumphant return to Louisville.24 The mayor and three hundred other fans, including the ebullient Atwood Wilson and a group of Central cheerleaders, drawn away from their duties rooting for the school’s championship football and basketball teams, greeted him at the airport before he paraded to his alma mater.25 Before he was famous, Ali had vowed that he would always be nice to his fans once he became a celebrity, and nowhere was he more beloved than among the youngsters of the black West End. In the weeks after his victory, he rode the streets of Louisville in an open pink Cadillac, shouting, “I am the greatest!” to his ardent fans.26 His brashness was daring and inspiring to his young fans
, but in an era of sit-ins, marches, water hoses, and police dogs, Ali wasn’t pushing very hard against the boundaries of the Southern racial structure—yet.
Ali’s celebrity did not, unfortunately, improve Central’s stature in Louisville. In fact, Ali’s success corresponded with a major shift at the school. In the past, when Fran Thomas had attended and Lyman Johnson taught there, Central had been more like a prep school for the city’s black middle and upper class. In the 1960s, thanks to the new building, Wilson met his goal to open the school to more students through a wider array of vocational offerings. Students made bookcases and cedar chests in advanced woodshop, learned welding and jewelry making in the machine shop, and served lunch to school officials in the commercial foods class. Upholstery and dry cleaning classes came in 1967, around the time the school introduced a vocational orientation course, which a school official said was intended “to help the under-achiever into the mainstream of education.” Students like Gwendolyn Hopson studied art and took home economics. A co-op program, which allowed students to leave school to work in the afternoon, typically at clerical jobs, also opened in the same year.27 The programs were welcomed and needed, but they did not necessarily burnish the school’s reputation for academic excellence.
By this time, more and more blacks from lower income levels were pursuing a high school education. Many black parents who had moved from the Deep South or the countryside seeking better opportunities for themselves were even more determined to find better opportunities for their children. The newcomers were mostly funneled to Central. At the same time, the opening of the white schools to blacks led some in the higher strata of black society to send their children to schools like Male, Shawnee, and even Atherton, a school on the eastern edge of the city limits that served the city’s old-money neighborhoods.
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