Divided we Fail (6 page)

In the summer of 1995, less than a year after news broke that Central had kicked out ten of its students, denial letters went out to more than two hundred black students, including Ja'Mekia Stoner.
³⁵
The students met all of Central's entrance requirements, except for their race. The following June, another round of letters went out denying more black freshmen, among them Dionne Hopson. Fed up, the members of CEASE formalized their organization. That summer, they lined up a series of meetings with school board members, state senators, and civil rights organizations to seek support for their cause. For the most part, the response was icy. The next step was direct action, and if that didn't work, then they would sue.
³⁶

First, they needed willing plaintiffs. From his position within the school, Riccardo X was able to help identify some of the students who had been denied. Others were found by word of mouth, flyers, and the publicity from the newspaper stories. The students and their parents were invited to a meeting at Robert Douglas's home, where the CEASE members gave speeches and urged the parents to join their cause for the sake of their children. They passed around a petition demanding that “the ratio of African American students to White and other students be changed to allow African American students their right of choice.”
³⁷
They also asked parents to sign a “request for enrollment,” agreeing that if their children weren't allowed into their school of choice, they would “join with other outraged and unfairly treated parents to pursue legal action against the Jefferson County Public Schools for denying my request because of my child's race.”
³⁸

The arguments appealed to Gwen. Why shouldn't there be quality schools in the West End? Why did everyone assume her child had to sit next to a white child to learn? Why did their lives still have to be defined
by their race? When the group asked who would be willing to join a second protest outside of Central High School on the first day of school, Gwen promised that she and Dionne would be there. CEASE marked her as a potential plaintiff.

Jacquelyn sat through the meeting accompanied by her two restless middle schoolers. She was not particularly impressed by their arguments—she thought they were putting too much emphasis on the barriers faced by blacks. She wanted Ja'Mekia and La'Quinn to focus on what they could accomplish, not what stood in their way. But she also badly wanted her daughter to get into Central. The first year at Shawnee had been worse than Ja'Mekia had feared. The teachers seemed to regard her classmates more as problems to be managed than students to be taught. Bored and humiliated, Ja'Mekia often didn't arrive at school until around 10 a.m., but she made Bs in her first two classes of the day. Sometimes she didn't go to school at all. Jacquelyn knew her daughter wouldn't make it if she didn't get out soon, so she gave CEASE her name.

The protest was mortifying. Ja'Mekia couldn't meet the eyes of the students filing into school. She was sure everyone was laughing at her, assuming that her grades weren't good enough to get in, and that here she was skipping school to whine about it. It was nearly as bad as the shame she felt sitting through class at Shawnee.

Dionne felt numb. She was spending her first day of high school at Central, but instead of embarking on a legal career, she was on the outside, holding a picket sign. In their matching deep altos, Dionne and her mother bellowed chants along with Fran Thomas, Carman Weathers, and the others for the television cameras. But Dionne was already thinking about the following day, when she would be starting school at Pleasure Ridge Park, a few miles up the road from Frost Middle School. When a white student stomped out of Central and yelled to the picketers that someone could have her seat, Dionne winced. It wasn't a seat she could have. The next day, Dionne woke up early to catch the bus to the South End. Ja'Mekia headed east to Fern Creek. CEASE began looking for a lawyer.

II

Our Beloved Central High

Chapter 4

Lyman Johnson was born in 1906, a grandson of slaves who talked often about the hardships of plantation life. He was the youngest of eight, skinny, with a long, serious face, and wavy, thick hair. He learned to be self-sufficient after his mother died and he was left to tend to the housework for his father. The family lived in the cabin his grandfather had built in Columbia, Tennessee, not too far away from the plantation where he was born. By the time Lyman lived there, white families had moved in nearby. His father was principal of College Hill School, the one-room schoolhouse for black students in Columbia, and he instilled in his children pride and ambition.
¹

In comparison to many Southern blacks, Lyman's family was well off, but as a teenager, Lyman had his first inklings of how difficult it was to protect one's dignity in a segregated world. On a school day in 1921, Lyman's father sent him on a quick errand to the local white high school to retrieve some papers from the superintendent.
²
Lyman trotted over to the school and reported his message to a clerk, who told him he would have to wait for a few minutes. Lyman perched in an office chair next door to the superintendent's door. As he sat, the black janitor passed by the doorway to the office.

Lyman knew him as Mr. Graham, a friend of the family. Mr. Graham peeked in, his eyes on the school clerk. When she looked away, the janitor gestured to Lyman. “While you're waiting, don't you want to walk around with me?” he said.

Lyman was confused, but he decided that a tour of the white school
could be interesting. He followed along as the man stooped to pick up trash in the halls until they reached the school gymnasium. The wood floor glared with polish. There was a roof overhead. Lyman had never seen anything like it. At his school, recess was held outside and the students learned to shoot baskets while dodging stones jutting from the field. College Hill didn't have a cafeteria with hot lunches as the white school did—the black children who could afford a midday meal ate from brown bags outside. Lyman's school lacked plumbing and children used fetid outdoor toilets that were eventually closed down by the state health department.
³

Lyman remembered that tour as he prepared to graduate from College Hill in 1924. Of the one hundred students in his class when he began in first grade, only nine graduated. Lyman was the only one to go to college. Even then, he had to spend two years at a remedial boarding school because College Hill's courses ended in eleventh grade, not twelfth, like the white school. He buckled down, learning Greek and calculus. But history was his favorite subject.
⁴

He was particularly obsessed with the history of the black struggle for education: After blacks were freed following the Civil War, most stayed on the plantations where they had worked as slaves.
⁵
Progress for blacks overseen by Northern troops during Reconstruction—including the election of black politicians to local and national offices—eroded after only a decade, when Rutherford Hayes pulled out the Northern army in return for Southern electoral votes in the election of 1876.
⁶

Despite these circumstances, Southern blacks forged ahead to build an education system for their children from scratch. There was no movement for integration with white schools because in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, there were no public schools at all.
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Independently from whites, black communities opened schools in churches, family homes, and buildings donated by Northern philanthropists and churches. And although help from white Northerners allowed for the construction of new black schools, they were sustained by the efforts of black parents, teachers, and administrators.
⁸

They were proud of what they built. The community and the school were symbiotic, sustaining a sense of pride, culture, and history in the children and the adults, generation after generation. Although black schools often lacked plumbing, heat, textbooks, gymnasiums, cafeterias, school buses, and sufficient classroom space, the principals and teachers worked hard to make up for these deficits. Even if the schoolbooks were old, curriculum
in some schools was state of the art, with offerings ranging from Latin to black studies.
⁹
In a seminal case study of one segregated black school in North Carolina, historian Vanessa Siddle Walker wrote that in many of these schools, there was not a choice between “learning and not learning.”
¹⁰
Failure was not an option. Expectations were high. Black teachers and administrators cared deeply about their students—they were the children of neighbors, friends, and family. They often saw their work as a religious calling.
¹¹
Their job was to uplift the race.
¹²

The black southerners' efforts awakened whites to start demanding a public school system, too. The white schools soon had the upper hand, with better facilities, better supplies, and better-paid teachers. The tax systems that eventually funded both school systems, white and black, were usually heavily weighted toward white schools. But though the white teachers were better paid, they were not always more qualified. Many black teachers, especially in the early years, were assigned to schools only a few years after graduating from elementary school themselves. Before the 1930s, only about 9 percent of black teachers had a degree.
¹³
After 1930, however, 42 percent of black teachers had some college. Black normal schools and colleges, also funded by sympathetic northern whites, churned out a formidable force of highly trained professionals who had no other options but to teach.

In 1896, the Supreme Court handed down the
Plessy v. Ferguson
decision.
¹⁴
In the case, Homer Plessy, who was “seven-eighths” white, boarded a whites-only train car in Louisiana in protest of the state's segregation law and refused to leave. The Court decided in favor of Louisiana. Southern states soon applied the Court's decision to all facets of public life. Racial separation in schools became law, but for many blacks, integration was not a desirable goal. The most prominent black voices during this period instead called for black independence from whites. Booker T. Washington, who said he believed in integration, but only once “the Negro learned to produce what other people wanted and must have,” became the face of black America for the white world in 1895, when he gave a speech in Atlanta calling for blacks to accept their segregation from whites and to “cast down your buckets where you are.”
¹⁵

Although many cringed at what they saw as Washington's capitulation to white supremacy, his support for separate black schools reflected the sentiments of many ordinary blacks in the South. Reacting to the overt racism
of southern whites and the condescension and paternalism of northern whites, a large swath of blacks in the South favored “black teachers for black children.” They were encouraged by the two most powerful church denominations in the black community, the African Methodist Episcopal Church and the National Baptists, which had both followed a separatist agenda after the Civil War and carved out their independence from the white church.
¹⁶

Lyman admired Washington. As the president of the Tuskegee Institute, Washington had convinced wealthy white patrons in the South to fund the education of thousands of black students. But in the early years of the twentieth century, as Lyman was immersed in his studies, new black voices out of the North were calling for change. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People appeared in 1909 to oppose Washington's ideas and to fight for equal rights through integration. That message spoke to Lyman.
¹⁷

For Lyman, the academic star in his small-town school in Tennessee and the second generation in a family of teachers, a career seemed set. He would be a schoolteacher. But Lyman wasn't willing to settle. He wanted to move beyond the expectations of both his community and the white world. He had kept track of the daily humiliations that the grown men around him suffered: When white vegetable peddlers refused to call his father by his last name, insisting instead on calling him “Uncle.” When his uncle, a dignified college professor, had to ignore the white farm boys who called him “nigger.” When a classmate of his was lynched after being falsely accused of raping a white woman.
¹⁸

After graduating from high school in the mid-1920s, Lyman headed to Virginia Union for college. The school was cut in the mold of northern liberal arts schools—a place where philosophy and Greek took precedence over the vocational training offered at many other southern black colleges. After he graduated, he applied to graduate school: Yale, Michigan, and Iowa. All accepted him, but he couldn't afford Yale, where he had planned to study theology. He settled on Michigan, and a history degree instead.
¹⁹

Lyman's journey north coincided with the path followed by tens of thousands of other black southerners in the 1920s.
²⁰
Few came from an advantaged background like Lyman's. Many were former sharecroppers. But they moved for the same reason he did: to find better jobs, dignity, and freedom.

The early waves began in the first decade of the twentieth century. Northern industrialists, in need of workers to replace soldiers off at war, enticed the migrants with jobs that paid more than double what they could make down south. The black newspaper founded in 1917, the
Chicago Defender
, lured them with biblical allegories of Exodus and the Promised Land. Many found their way to Chicago and other northern urban centers. Others made shorter journeys: Southern cities, including places with more progressive reputations and growing industries, such as Louisville and Nashville, saw their black populations swell. From 1890 until the Great Depression, Kentucky lost blacks to out-migration, but many more entered the state.
²¹
And thousands moved internally, away from the state's rural tobacco fields and isolated mountain hollows into the cities.