Divided we Fail

by Sarah Garland

  Although Central was also adding new foreign-language classes and electives in journalism, Shakespeare, and the short story, its reputation was shifting along with its student population. Central was increasingly seen not only as the city’s black school, but as a school for a lower class of blacks. The stereotype was cemented by urban renewal: The acres of vacant lots surrounded the school were being filled in with public housing projects that, in look and feel, closely resembled their dismal counterparts in Southwick.28 The businesses the city promised would flock to the area never came. By the end of the 1960s, Central High School found itself situated in the heart of a new black ghetto, which, as a result of government good intentions gone awry, was more isolated and fragile than ever before.

  Riccardo X would have liked to follow his hero, Ali, to Central, and most of Riccardo’s friends from the Southwick housing projects were going there, but his mother was reluctant to let him go with them. In her eyes, Central had become a school for hoodlums. She wanted her children to get out of the projects eventually, and Central seemed like it would lead them straight back. Ali was influential among Louisville’s young people, but the most important African American figure for many middle-aged blacks was Martin Luther King Jr.

  Martin’s brother, A. D. King, was the preacher at Zion Baptist Church, one of Louisville’s most prominent churches. He had marched through the West End to promote open housing, and had spoken in the city many times.29 Riccardo’s grandfather was a Baptist minister, so weekends and many weeknights were spent in church. The adults around him revered Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and muttered about the heresy of his rival, Malcolm X. Like many of her generation, Riccardo’s mother, who had grown up as Jim Crow was in full swing, believed in King’s integrationist goals and his nonviolent strategy. She wanted her son to take advantage of what Dr. King had been fighting for, and to her that meant going to a desegregated school. Riccardo didn’t put up much of a fight. He was consoled by the fact that he could join the ROTC at Male, which would help him pursue a plan to join the military when he graduated; Central didn’t have the ROTC.

  Male High School, a long public bus ride away from Southwick, was not the picture of successful integration that Ricardo’s mother imagined. As suburbanization drained the city of whites, schools in once-mixed neighborhoods like Parkland, Shawnee, and Old Louisville, a once-wealthy enclave south of downtown, became all black. Male sat on the outskirts of downtown, in a neighborhood that was also swiftly changing over. When Riccardo entered as a freshman in tenth grade, the school was roughly half white. Three years later, when he graduated, only a handful of white students were left.

  Riccardo didn’t much notice, nor did he mind. He realized the white people were probably leaving because of him, but he didn’t have any desire to be around them, either. He was commander of the drill team and focused on becoming a soldier. After a childhood of battling in the streets, it seemed like a reasonable career choice. He often got into fights, but at the same time, he didn’t want to end up like the guys who shot craps on the street corners in Southwick and Cotter. His mother was strict about school; she grounded him if he received a bad grade. Every afternoon, he marched in drills and saluted the flag with the Male ROTC. He channeled his energy and anger into academics and pickup basketball games.

  In the evenings, he watched the news over dinner with his mother and sister. Opposition to the Vietnam War was gaining in fervor. Starting in 1965, every summer was punctuated by a new series of riots in black ghettos from Los Angeles to Newark. In Oakland, a fledgling new group, the Black Panthers, had created an alternative police force.30 In the fall of 1967, two police officers were shot and one was killed in a confrontation with the Panthers’ leader, Huey Newton.31 For Christmas that year, every kid in Southwick wanted a black leather jacket and a beret. So did Riccardo, who was intrigued by the Panthers and their ideas.

  Also gripping his attention were the changes happening in his hero, Muhammad Ali. In 1964, Ali had changed his name from Cassius Clay and made his membership in the Nation of Islam official.32 For Ali, the association with Muhammad and Malcolm X’s Nation of Islam, which the white media had characterized as a hate group, was a grave career risk. But to him, the Nation of Islam’s take on America’s race problem, and what blacks should do about it, made sense. It also gave him the purpose he had been looking for since the Emmett Till murder. “Black people were in trouble; we needed to help ourselves first,” he later wrote.33

  The ideas were old; the Nation of Islam simply repackaged them and sold them to a new generation. The message borrowed both from Booker T. Washington’s arguments that the black race could be uplifted only in conditions of self-isolation and internal struggle and from Marcus Garvey’s movement to reclaim Africa—and all its achievements and heritage—in order to ignite pride among African Americans.

  Young men like Riccardo X, who grew up in the desolate landscape manufactured by urban renewal, where dignity was hard to come by and respect was earned with your fists, saw Ali’s beliefs as revolutionary. Here was their hero, a black man unabashedly promoting himself, demanding respect and shamelessly declaring that he was the best and that he was beautiful. He didn’t back down when white people, his parents, the newspapers, or even Martin Luther King Jr. disapproved. His bravery inspired awe.34

  Most jarring and transformational for Riccardo was Muhammad Ali’s refusal to fight in Vietnam. Riccardo had always admired Ali’s rebelliousness, but had never thought too deeply about his political ideas as an adolescent. He started paying closer attention in 1966. “I ain’t got no quarrel with them Vietcong,” Ali declared to reporters when he had learned he would be drafted.35 Riccardo, who often donned his military uniform to wear to school, was caught off guard, and also mesmerized. Ali stood to lose everything, including his heavyweight title, but he had not backed down. The news was a major jolt to Americans, both white and black. “My hero is not going to this white man’s army,” Riccardo thought to himself. “The black man’s fight is here, not over there.”

  In the summer of 1967, blacks rose up in riots in cities across the country again. Even some of the city’s pro-integration activists were fed up. The civil rights movement was splintering. Some were angered at the slow progress and the compromises that black leaders like King and others were forced to make with whites. In 1967, one group in Louisville, the West End Community Council—founded as a progressive homeowners’ association—made “black power” its mission.36

  The organization was racially integrated, counting among its members Anne and Carl Braden, and many of its members still espoused integration. But as their original goal became increasingly elusive, they turned to fighting against the degradation of the black ghetto. To further the mission, the group created a youth organizing arm staffed by young people employed with federal funding from the domestic Peace Corps, VISTA, one of President Johnson’s War on Poverty innovations. The staff included a young art student and Central graduate from Smoketown, Robert Douglas, who would later be a founding member of CEASE. They called themselves the Black Unity League of Kentucky—BULK. Although two of the leaders, Sam Hawkins and Robert Sims, were drawn from Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, they said their mission was to teach “black people to think black” in order to instill “self-pride into Negroes.”37

  As if to confirm to Riccardo that nonviolence and integration were doomed ideas, in the spring of 1968, Martin Luther King Jr., who had called for calm the summer before, was shot in Memphis. King’s assassination unleashed another wave of violence in urban ghettos. That afternoon, Riccardo was outside hanging out with his friends when parents began appearing in apartment doorways calling for their children to come inside. The Southwick courtyards emptied quickly as families gathered around the television. Riccardo joined his mother to watch the news unfold. That night, riots erupted across the nation. In Louisville, the streets stayed quiet, but the calm was temporary.

  A month after King’s death
in April, a black teacher and a real estate agent accused Louisville police of beating them during a traffic stop. The police officer admitted to slapping and hitting the real estate agent, Manfred Reid, who had stopped by the side of the road to see if his friend needed help. But Reid was arrested and charged with assault anyway; the police officer wasn’t charged.38

  Louisville’s black community was outraged. The mayor, Kenneth Schmied, reacted by eventually suspending the officer, but a few days later, the civil service board overturned the officer’s suspension.39 BULK swung into action. The young men, now even more disillusioned with nonviolence in the aftermath of King’s death, called for a rally to protest the release of the officer the following Monday, May 27.40

  On Monday, about two hundred blacks gathered at an intersection in Parkland for the protest. The two BULK leaders, Hawkins and Sims, took their place on top of a car parked in the middle of the street so they could be seen and heard. Joining them was an out-of-town guest, James Cortez, a member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee—SNCC. Cortez said he had also invited Stokely Carmichael, SNCC’s leader, who had recently linked forces with the Black Panthers.41

  In his speech, Cortez told the group to be proud of their blackness, and then broke the news that Carmichael wasn’t coming: he said Carmichael’s plane had been blocked from landing.42 The crowd was furious. Sims stood up to speak, directing his wrath at the mayor. Schmied, a short, round man nicknamed “Cannonball,” owned a business that sold furniture in the West End.43 He was a Republican and a Nixon supporter who had opposed an ordinance banning racial discrimination in housing.44 In his speech, Sims told the crowd that Mayor Schmied, whom he had met with that morning, had insisted to him that he understood what it was like in the West End. His furniture trucks drove through “everyday.”45

  “I’m not preaching violence, but if it was me, I’d turn those trucks over,” Sims said. “The reason we’re up here is that the honky policemen have been brutalizing our black brothers. We’re going to tell the mayor that the next time this happens, he’s going to see smoke signals coming from the west.”46

  Sims and Cortez climbed down from the car. People began to walk away.47 Then, a bottle hit the pavement and smashed. A few seconds later, another hit. The people who had been strolling away began to run. A police car appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, with its sirens blaring. The officer jumped out of his car with his revolver ready.48

  Bottles began raining down, showering the crowd with glass shards. People were now screaming, and more police cars were arriving. Someone fired a shot, halting the action for a few brief seconds. But then more shots cracked nearby, and the crowd began to panic. Within the hour, dozens of people had taken to the street and were moving in a mob. Police cars and two taxicabs were turned over. The looting began not too long after.49 White stores were targeted; black stores were mostly left alone, as were white merchants who charged low prices.50

  A brief moment of calm in the morning didn’t last. People had heard a false rumor that Mayor Schmied was spending the day golfing, and a true account of his refusal to come to the West End to talk with black leaders, including A. D. King.51 Nearly one thousand National Guardsmen were called up, and a curfew was put in place. But by 2 p.m., a new mob was running through the streets, smashing windows and throwing rocks.52 The “disorder,” as the newspapers called it, lasted another day. Police killed two teenage boys, one fourteen and the other nineteen.53 Most of the rioters were young black men, and a fifth of those arrested were unemployed, although about fifty whites participated.54

  Afterwards, Sims, Hawkins, and Cortez were arrested along with the black real estate agent who had been hit by the police officer and the middle class wife of a black doctor who had made contributions to BULK, all of them charged as co-conspirators in the riots.55 The local newspapers, however, blamed black “frustration and anger.” A New York Times reporter toured the Cotter Homes, the housing project next door to Riccardo’s home in Southwick, in the aftermath of the riots. She found unemployed youth bored with the tedium of their days and outraged at the conditions they lived in. “They’ve got their little government reservation here,” one boy told her.56

  Riccardo had begun to see things the same way. He had watched his neighborhood burning around him, watched the racial integration at his high school dissolve before his eyes. He still wore his ROTC uniform and led the drill team—ROTC had promised him a college scholarship—but outside school he wore his leather jacket. In 1971, he headed off to college on an ROTC scholarship, but he told his mother that if his name was drawn for the draft, he would follow Ali’s lead and refuse to go.

  As he entered his freshmen year of college—later, he would decline to say which college he attended, refusing to acknowledge any association with a place he said taught him nothing—Riccardo started an extracurricular reading program. The first book on his list was the Autobiography of Malcolm X. Next he read Huey Newton’s To Die for the People. He started out taking business classes, but he was inspired: “Here was a new way to struggle. No longer were black people begging whites for sympathy. They were going to take their justice,” he told himself. He signed up for some political science classes, and decided he would get a teaching certificate so he could teach while going to law school. His plan was to be a criminal defense lawyer. In 1975, after finishing college, he moved to Newburg, one of only a handful of suburban neighborhoods outside of the Louisville city limits that was majority black, and took a job teaching history in the suburban Jefferson County schools.

  Chapter 10

  In 1954, Joyce Spond, a wide-eyed farm girl freshly graduated from Old Home High School in Bardstown, Kentucky, moved into her sister’s newly constructed bungalow in Shively.1 The house, already filled with young children, was a few doors down from the house that the white civil rights activists Anne and Carl Braden had bought on behalf of the Wades, an African American family, a year earlier. It now lay partly in rubble. As Joyce adjusted to her new neighborhood, she caught some of the rumors about the bombing passing over the backyard fences: People said the Wades and the Bradens had ulterior motives. The police, who had eventually settled into watching over the Wades’ house from the yards of their white neighbors, leaked out what seemed to be incriminating details. Someone heard that the bomb had been planted indoors, meaning that it must have been an inside job. The theories of a Communist conspiracy printed in the Shively Newsweek met with nods of approval. The idea that a black family might see in Shively the same things that they did—a place where they could finally have a nice house, a good school, a safe place for their children to play—didn’t occur to them.

  The bombing had not halted Shively’s development boom. The suburb’s growth was the product of a major demographic shift occurring at the same time as the other major migrations of the first half of the twentieth century. After World War II, just about everyone was on the move: The North became the cultural center of black life as the Great Migration emptied the South of millions of blacks; similar numbers of white urbanites responded to the influx of blacks to cities and the availability of cheap government loans by moving to new suburbs; and, less noted but just as dramatic, huge numbers of white people from the countryside abandoned their family farms and headed to urban centers to claim their share of the country’s new prosperity.

  In Kentucky, the population went from being 70 percent to only 50 percent rural between 1940 and 1960.2 More than two hundred thousand people moved to Louisville in those two decades, and three-quarters of them moved to the suburbs. In Louisville, the suburbs grew as the city population dropped for the first time in the city’s history.3 In moving directly from farm to suburb, these people skipped the experience of “urbanization,” holding onto the more conservative value systems they had brought with them from the countryside. The historian C. Vann Woodward called the process “rurbanization.”4

  Joyce Spond was part of this less-noticed migration of rural whites to the city. She had been born
one of nine children raised on a farm in Nelson County, a Catholic stronghold in the center of Kentucky. Her father was a carpenter and her mother a homemaker. Life in rural Kentucky revolved around church and school. Joyce went to a one-room schoolhouse for elementary school, and then commuted to Old Kentucky Home High School, named for its proximity to the plantation commemorated in the state’s official song. “My Old Kentucky Home” was about the idyllic countryside and the hard life for slaves on the plantation, and it was also about emigration. “A few more days till we totter on the road, then my old Kentucky home, good night,” the lyrics went. The rolling hills around Bardstown, forty miles south of Louisville, were beautiful, but there was little work. High school graduates looking for a job outside of farming had only one choice: to move to the city.

  Already, several of her siblings had left for Louisville, and Joyce saw no option but to follow. Many of her Shively neighbors had followed the same trajectory. Most were just a generation away from coal mining or subsistence farming. In the blocks around her lived other graduates from Old Home and schools like it across the state. They were strivers who saw the tracts of ranch houses and one-acre yards as the next step up the ladder. Once the Wades had moved away, it only took a few months for peace to return to the neighborhood. But underneath the surface calm, a deep anxiety was lurking.

  The residents of Shively thought of themselves as ordinary Americans, patriotic and hardworking, and as the 1960s progressed, they wondered where the country was headed as they watched the news of the riots happening a few miles away in Parkland and in cities around the country. They worried that everything they had worked for could be taken away; the bombing in 1954 was enough proof that the violence of the radicals might intrude here. But for those who were paying attention, scarier even than the riots and the antiwar protesters tearing up black neighborhoods and college campuses were the nine black-robed men and the aggressive members of the Johnson administration who seemed determined to use their power to promote civil rights for blacks at the expense of whites. Moving to the suburbs was part of what was supposed to be a seamless journey from rural poverty to urban blue-collar endeavor to eventual white-collar success. The presence of blacks there threatened this path. If Shively became known as a black neighborhood, property values would decline, and, as important, so would the self-worth and social standing the whites who lived there were fighting so hard to attain.5