Divided we Fail (7 page)

Among the tide of young men, women, and families traveling north was Fran Thomas, who at age seven made the journey alone. Fran made it as far as Louisville, officially still the South, but with a friendlier reputation. She wasn't looking for a job; she wanted to go to school.

Fran was born Frances Newton in 1928 on a farm in the northeast corner of Alabama, outside the town of Florence. She and Lyman grew up in similar circumstances: in a small cabin inherited from family members who had worked as chattel. Fran's great-grandparents had been slaves, and her family also acquired its own land after the Civil War. In contrast to Lyman's experience, however, her family, along with an extensive network of uncles, aunts, and cousins, lived in an all-black community called Bailey Springs. Town life centered around the one-room schoolhouse, built and maintained by the community, and the church.

Lyman's father, as a teacher, was an elite in the black community. Fran's parents worked as sharecroppers. Her family lived in a log cabin of two rooms divided by a breezeway. One served as a bedroom, the other as a kitchen. Fran was an only child, but her parents still struggled to support her. They had attended school until sixth grade, but hoped for more for their daughter. The local school was five miles away, and in those days, a ride on a school bus was a privilege reserved for white children. Her mother walked with her because she was so young, but the farm's success depended on both parents working from sunup to sundown. After a couple of years, the family decided that if Fran was going to continue her schooling, she would have to leave home.

In the 1930s, Fran, a pale, freckled girl still in elementary school, made
the journey north on the Louisville & Nashville Railroad, alone. She followed family, and many in her town, who had already headed north. The train was dirty—blacks were forced into the car nearest the engine's grimy smoke stack—and it was crowded. On the other end, in Louisville, Kentucky, she was met by a teenage aunt who had found work in the city as a housekeeper.

The two girls lived in an apartment a few blocks west of downtown, but Fran never ventured far from her new elementary school on 16th Street, in a black neighborhood known as California. Louisville, to her, was the small area of the inner city that blacks were confined in, although as the country came out of the Depression and headed into World War II, that area in Louisville was growing.

Chapter 5

Louisville was built along a two-mile stretch of waterfalls and rapids at an N-shaped bend in the river, the one interruption on the Ohio's smooth, southwesterly meander toward the Mississippi. Locks were constructed in the 1820s to tame the rapids, and the city boomed.
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The river was the state border with Indiana, and it served to constrict the population's northern expansion. To the south was a marsh, and to the east were hills. But to the west, curled into the river bend, was a flat expanse of lush, forested floodplain.

At the end of the nineteenth century, this floodplain was gradually being built up as one of Louisville's first white suburbs. In 1937, after days of rain, the river broke over its banks, turning the West End into a lake.
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When the waters receded, the houses were rebuilt. But this disaster, along with the end of World War II, accelerated a transformation. Whites headed for new suburban frontiers to the south and east, many with the help of housing loans from the federal government. The wealthy concentrated in the hilly sections to the east of downtown. Poorer whites headed south, where the floodplain extended until it hit a ring of steep hills and the village of Fairdale. By the 1950s, black families had moved into the bungalows and old Victorians that whites had left behind.

During this first half of the twentieth century, Louisville was slightly more welcoming to blacks than Alabama. Blacks owned their own businesses and a significant black middle class was up and coming. But they
were not allowed in public parks, hotels, restaurants, or stores. In 1914, the city passed a law barring blacks from moving to white residential streets, which the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional three years later.
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The reversal of the law made little difference in practice, however. During the Depression, blacks were still largely confined to the shantytowns formed by ex-slaves: Little Africa, deep in the West End; California, the neighborhood just west of downtown where Fran lived; and Smoketown, just east of downtown. Their numbers were growing, however, as blacks fled the Deep South and the tobacco fields of Kentucky and Tennessee.

Forced to settle in segregated inner-city ghettos, these migrants were discovering that racism was endemic outside of the stifling plantation culture, too. During the height of the Great Migration, integration was not the dream embraced by most blacks, however. The NAACP's platform, at least at first, had to compete with the much more popular Black Nationalist movement of Marcus Garvey.
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Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) reached its peak in the 1920s, with a membership estimated at between 1 million and 6 million members—more than half the population of black Americans at the time.
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The UNIA rejected integration as an undesirable and foolish ideal. The organization's goal was to promote “pride in race.”
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Fran's world in Louisville was all black, but she didn't notice. No one had a car, but everything she needed was in walking distance. Her neighborhood had its own skating rink and swimming pool. The streets were lined with black-owned barbershops, funeral parlors, clothing stores, and even a movie theater. The Great Depression had hit its peak just a few years earlier, sending African American unemployment soaring to 37 percent in Louisville, but the city was relatively resilient compared to other places.
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The cigarette and alcohol industries—two of the city and the state's biggest—were booming.
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The factories near Fran's apartment hummed with activity.

Her new elementary school was an improvement on the crowded schoolhouse back in Alabama. There, the education for girls included cooking lunch for the rest of the students. Still, at Fran's new school, books were hand-me-downs, and the building was old. Eleanor Roosevelt visited the schoolyard during her travels in 1938 to investigate the nation's poverty.
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And Fran missed home terribly. She took the grimy train, or sometimes the bus, back to Alabama each summer to visit her family. But her parents
insisted that she return: the black high school in Alabama didn't have the same reputation as Central.

Louisville's Central Colored High School, as it was called at first, originally opened in 1882 in a three-story brick building south of downtown.
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It quickly outgrew its facilities. The original 27 students ballooned to 185, and the number kept expanding. By the time Fran enrolled in the 1940s, the school was on its third building, which was still too small.

Like its books and desks and chalkboards, the structure, an edifice of heavy stone and Greek revival columns, was secondhand. The building had originally been built for Male High School, Louisville's pride and joy, the first public high school west of the Allegheny. Male, for white boys only, had moved on when the city built it an expansive new facility farther away from the encroaching black neighborhoods downtown. After a half century of use, the hand-me-down building was decrepit. The hallways were so dark students bumped into each other while changing classes. In an annex built to hold the overflow of students, the gas heaters spewed more fumes than warmth. Rats infested the basement and the maid had to double as the school nurse. On one occasion, a student who began hemorrhaging blood during class died as the cleaning woman helplessly held him in her arms in the school bathroom. The death didn't prompt the city to assign a nurse to Central.

Fran's homesickness faded when she began attending Central. Among her classmates, she was something of an anomaly: Many of the students who made it to Central were from Louisville's black middle classes. Poorer students often had to drop out and work full-time. Left to fend for herself for most of her childhood and teenage years, she reveled in the fierce embrace of Central's teachers. Just as Central drew its students from as far away as Alabama, it also attracted some of the South's brightest teachers. They mixed maternal love with a strict discipline code that students dared not break.

Maude Brown Porter, the assistant principal, stalked the hallways in cat-eye glasses and ugly black shoes, sending students skittering into class at the sound of her low but powerful voice.
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She was tiny, but it was rumored she had the strength to lift up a basketball player twice her size. The students loved and feared her. They felt the same about their teachers, who on Saturdays and Sundays visited the homes of students who were absent during the week or doing poorly in class. The classes ranged from Latin to
physics and from typing to woodshop. Many of the teachers held multiple master's degrees. A few had doctorates. The goal at Central was to bolster Louisville's growing black middle class—with or without the help of whites.

Academics were rigorous, but sports were key to Central students' sense of identity, engendering fierce loyalty and love among the school's alumni.
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Until 1919, the school didn't have fields or basketball courts, but as soon as the school gained a gymnasium, the Central Yellowjackets began winning games. Central won the National Negro High School Basketball Tournament twice. The second time Central came home with the trophy, in 1952, the Louisville mayor threw the high school a parade, complete with a brigade of fire trucks and a key to the city. In Kentucky, basketball was king, but football at Central was big, too. Under one beloved coach, the Yellowjackets football team racked up a record of 280–30 during the 1930s and '40s. Thousands of black Louisvillians lined the streets for the Thanksgiving football game each year to belt out the refrain of the Central High School song: “Long live Central, our beloved Central High. Ours till we die.”
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Fran graduated from Central in 1946, fulfilling her parents' dream. She missed home, but no longer saw going back as an option. Florence, Alabama's plantations were giving way to factories, including a Reynolds aluminum plant. The foundry was nicknamed the Pot, and the men who worked there—most of them black—were worn down by the brutal conditions. They often came home with severe burns, and they died young. Beyond manual labor and farming, Florence offered few opportunities; a black woman could help tend the farm, work for a white family, or maybe teach. Central had pushed Fran to think bigger: she was going to college.

She enrolled in the Louisville Municipal College for Negroes, a black school linked to the University of Louisville.
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Municipal had a few excellent teachers, but struggled with meager resources compared to its white sister school. Fran's education there went beyond academics, however. During her college years, she met Alberta Jones, who had graduated from Central just behind her. Jones—who eventually became the first woman to pass the bar in Kentucky and Muhammad Ali's personal lawyer—was bold and defiant.
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She became a role model for Fran and introduced her to activism through a group called the Independent Voters Association, which trained and registered black voters. Fran also began attending forums on
open housing, a growing movement to fight housing segregation organized by black activists, ministers, and a handful of white liberals.

Marriage whisked Fran away from her first steps as a budding activist, however. Before she graduated, she married a maintenance man in 1947 and they moved to Beecher Terrace, a decade-old housing project built to look like a village, with peaked-roof multifamily houses and small lawns surrounding a park. Fran had five children in quick succession, but the marriage was troubled. By the mid-1950s, she got a divorce, staying on in Beecher Terrace to raise her children alone. She worked long hours as a nurse, saving enough to enroll her children in Catholic school. The public schools available to black students in Louisville were better than the ones in Alabama, but despite the
Brown v. Board of Education
decision in 1954, the options were still bad. Like her own parents, Fran wanted better for her children.

Chapter 6

As he began his history studies at the University of Michigan, Lyman's pride was challenged as much as it had been in the South.
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In Tennessee and Virginia, he had never doubted that he was as good as or better than white people. At the university, however, he encountered white students for the first time, and he was the only black person in many of his classes. On his first day, he had trouble holding his head up and worried that everyone assumed he was inferior. His abiding fear was to be mocked for asking a “Negro question” or giving a “Negro answer.” One professor, giving him a C, told him it was a “good grade for a Negro.”

Eventually, as he got more comfortable, Lyman's dignity returned, and he began to push back. At least one of his professors encouraged it, and soon Lyman was thriving, challenging his professors in class and writing papers that questioned conventional wisdom. He graduated at the height of the Great Depression, however, and there were no jobs. He moved to Louisville to stay with his sister, initially scratching out a living doing handyman jobs.
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In 1933, Central's civics teacher left. Hired for the job, Lyman threw himself into the work. He turned his classroom into a forum where he could preach about civil rights. Kentucky had the oldest black teachers' union in the South, and within five years, Lyman had joined the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and been elected president of the Louisville Association of Teachers in Colored Schools, which
had as its main goal the attainment of equal pay for black teachers.
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The campaign was a part of a huge effort by the NAACP rolled out in nearly every Southern state to bring black teacher salaries up to the level of whites.
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