Divided we Fail (9 page)

Lyman was one of the men they recruited to stand guard.
¹⁷
On a Saturday night in June, he was stationed at the couch by the house's front window. Others were spread around the house, but the evening was quiet. At 9:00, everyone left except for a couple of men who had agreed to stay on through the night. They chatted with the Wades, who had been out for the evening and come back late, on the porch. The Wades' daughter was staying with her grandmother, as she did most weekends. A police officer, there ostensibly to guard the Wades' home, stood in the next-door neighbor's yard. Suddenly there was a flash and an explosion. A pile of dynamite tucked under the foundation had ripped open their daughter's room, collapsing half of the house into rubble.

The city's reaction was as stunning as the blast. The
Shively Newsweek
printed a letter by Milliard Grubbs, who had alleged links to the KKK, accusing the Bradens and the Wades of being part of a Communist conspiracy. Perhaps the bombing was “self-inflicted,” the paper suggested. That fall, a state prosecutor announced that he, too, believed the Bradens were Communist schemers, and that the bombing had been a plot to sow racial conflict in the suburbs.
¹⁸
Six months after the bombing, the couple was charged with sedition under state law. In December, an all-white jury
convicted Carl Braden of sedition, and shipped him off to jail for a fifteen-year sentence. Anne was left behind, waiting to hear if she would be next.

To many blacks living in the South, this reaction to an attempt at residential integration didn't seem so farfetched. After
Brown
, blacks were both joyous and apprehensive. The idea that whites would passively accept desegregation without a fight was naïve, and many were terrified at the idea of sending black children as frontline soldiers in the upcoming battle.
¹⁹

For the decade after May 1954, when the
Brown
decision was handed down, Gallup polls found some ambivalence about desegregation among black Southerners; the percentage of those who agreed with the decision fluctuated between 30 and 70 percent between 1954 and 1961. The poll findings were based on a small sample size, which partly explained wide variations between years, and black respondents living in the South may have been reluctant to express their true views. The numbers contrasted starkly with the 95 percent approval rating among black Northerners, a number that remained steady in the decade after
Brown
.
²⁰
By 1962, about 70 percent of American blacks, North and South, favored school integration, slightly more than the proportion among whites.
²¹

W. E. B. Du Bois, the founder of the NAACP, was among the skeptical. In what seemed a shocking about-face from his earlier days as Booker T. Washington's nemesis, Du Bois had published an article in 1935 titled, “Does the Negro Need Separate Schools?” A year earlier, Du Bois had left the NAACP in part because of his dispute with its new leaders over the best way to uplift the race.
²²
Du Bois no longer thought integration was the most practical solution.

In his article, he argued that in the face of white hostility, the black student needed the “sympathetic touch” of a teacher who understood “his surroundings and background, and the history of his class and group.” His conclusion was not necessarily that segregation should be maintained, but that it was beside the point: “Theoretically, the Negro needs neither segregated schools nor mixed schools. What he needs is Education. What he must remember is that there is no magic, either in mixed schools or in segregated schools.”
²³

Fear for the well-being of black children was not the only reason blacks in the South were uneasy about integration in the lead-up to and the immediate aftermath of
Brown
. Black teachers and principals feared for their jobs. In a 1953 poll of 150 black teachers from the South, only about half said they would prefer desegregation to the segregated system.
²⁴

The ambivalence about
Brown
in some communities was deepened by the fact that quite a few black schools were doing much better during the years leading up to the ruling. In many places, white school districts poured money into black schools both preemptively and in reaction to lawsuits forcing them to live up to
Plessy's
separate-but-equal clause. The black schools in Hyde County, North Carolina, were a prime example. Before
Brown
was handed down, and just after, the white school board of Hyde County constructed new buildings, science classrooms, libraries, and gymnasiums for the black schools in a flurry of belated good-will.
²⁵
Blacks were wary about sending their children to white schools in a place where the Ku Klux Klan was not only alive but very active. They were also proud of the schools they had built and maintained despite meager school board investments during the many years of white neglect.

Hyde County reacted to the desegregation order by proposing to close the traditionally black schools and transfer their students into the traditionally white schools. The black community was livid. They didn't want desegregation if it meant losing everything they had worked for. Rather than give up, they chose to boycott: for two years, black children in Hyde County were kept home from school.

In Louisville, Central High School also appeared to benefit from growing white apprehension over the tide of NAACP court victories in the early 1950s. Years earlier, when Fran Thomas was still a student, the Louisville school board had promised Central a new building. The only step that was taken, however, was to choose a site already occupied by dilapidated houses of the black poor in the California neighborhood. The board stalled for years on the new construction, however, because members said they were reluctant to start evictions, although, at the time, thousands of blacks were being uprooted from “slum housing” under urban renewal plans.
²⁶

Atwood Wilson, who had become principal at Central in 1934, fought for the new building and more money for programs at the school for much of his tenure. Wilson was a quiet but awe-inspiring figure at the school.
²⁷
He had a degree from Fisk University, and master's degrees in education and chemistry from the University of Chicago and the University of Colorado. He considered a doctorate, but he didn't want to be away from his school for the amount of time it would take him to complete it. He pushed his faculty to extend their education, however, and some took off for Columbia
University and other northern schools during their summer vacations.

Wilson was single-minded about improving Central for black students. In the 1940s, he asked the teachers to draw up lists for the classrooms, labs, and equipment they would need in a new facility, and put the architecture teachers to work drawing up plans. The result was a ninety-five-page report that included plans for an ROTC unit, a swimming pool, a gymnasium, an auditorium, and a stadium. Wilson's dream was to create spaces and programs for students across the spectrum of class and ability. Central would focus intensely on college prep, but the school would also expand its vocational offerings, which already included carpentry, tailoring, dressmaking, and mechanics. In 1947, he gave the plan to the school board for consideration.

A year passed with no response, and Wilson took Lyman with him to confront the board. The costs had risen with inflation, and the board members said they would need to consider the plans in light of the new expenses. Meanwhile, the school's 115-year-old building was oversubscribed by five hundred students, and the roof had begun to leak. Construction finally started three years later. In 1953, a few months after the school desegregation cases were argued in the Supreme Court, the new Central building opened. Board members dubbed it the “South's finest high school for Negros,” and it probably was.
²⁸

The school had its own radio studio and shops for tailoring, dressmaking, pressing and cleaning, sheet metal, carpentry, and auto mechanics. It also had a “beauty school . . . to offer training in beauty culture.”
²⁹
A space was left for a swimming pool, although it would take another two decades for the board to get around to having it built. The two-story building took up a whole city block and was constructed with yellow brick. In contrast to the heavy stone structure the school had previously occupied, there were lots of windows. There were no rats in the basement, and the roof didn't leak.

A year after the
Brown
decision came down, even as students basked in Central's new, state-of-the-art facilities, the school was preparing for a new era of integrated schools. It seemed like the country had suddenly, unexpectedly made a huge leap forward in its race relations, and things were changing fast.

Chapter 8

Early in the morning of September 10, 1956, the superintendent of the Louisville public schools took his position in front of the stone arches and columns surrounding the doors of Male High School, a sprawling brick building just south of the city's downtown business district.
¹
Male, the all-boys' school opened in 1856 that had handed down its old building to Central, was Louisville's best, and proud of it. In 1950, protests had broken out when the city announced that Male would have to admit girls. It took two years to force the school to open its doors to female students, and the district was never able to make the school give up its name.

In 1956, just a few months after its hundred-year anniversary, another of the school's cherished customs was about to be challenged. That September, for the first time, black students would cross under the arches and take their seats in the school's venerable classrooms. The protests against admitting girls had taken place mostly in the confines of school board meetings. This time the superintendent, Omer Carmichael, was prepared for violence in the streets. The mayor, the police chief, and the school board president joined him at his post. Newspaper and television reporters dispatched by national media outlets waited nearby to witness the violence firsthand.

Louisville was one of the only Southern cities that had set a timeline to desegregate in the wake of
Brown
.
²
Carmichael was an unlikely maverick, however. He was a farmer's son who had graduated from a one-room
schoolhouse in Clay County, Alabama, just southeast of Birmingham in cotton country.
³
Carmichael started out as a teacher in another one-room schoolhouse, but quickly moved up the ladder. He became superintendent in Selma, where he made a few small efforts to combat the inequities of segregation, including banning the practice of addressing black teachers by their first names. He moved to Tampa, where the KKK was “in its heyday,” and then to Lynchburg, where he adjusted the teacher-rating system that determined salaries and was heavily skewed against black teachers. Blacks were still paid less than whites, but he was proud that he had raised their salaries somewhat, and pleased that by the time he left, black principals ran all of the black schools.

On the day in 1954 that the Supreme Court handed down the
Brown
decision, Carmichael took a bolder stance, perhaps encouraged by the Kentucky governor's public approval of the ruling.
⁴
Without checking with the school board first, Carmichael announced that Louisville would comply with
Brown
by 1956: “There will be problems but they are not insurmountable . . . the group to suffer most will be the Negro children in the early stages of integration. The real problem will be with the adults, however, not the children.”
⁵

Louisville held tight to its racially tolerant image, keen to sell this image to the outside world. Just as the United States was struggling to hide its racial troubles as it competed with the Soviet Union for the world's allegiance in the Cold War, Louisville was fighting to attract industries and workers to revive its fortunes in the post–World War II boom. The chamber of commerce had launched a big push to lure trade shows and concerts to the newly built fairgrounds, and the city was in the midst of demolishing slum housing to clear the way for the redevelopment of the downtown.
⁶
The bombing of the Wades' house—two days before Carmichael made his announcement—threatened the city's carefully laid plans.

After the
Brown
decision and his promise that Louisville would comply, Carmichael spent the next two years frantically working on a viable desegregation system and fielding angry questions from white parents. The education department held question-and-answer sessions with PTAs, recruited ministers to preach the value of integration from their pulpits, and posted notices in the newspapers. Teacher training didn't go as smoothly as hoped. Carmichael discovered a deep-rooted racism and anger among many in his teaching force. Some called the prospect of teaching black children a
“bitter dose” or “simply repulsive.”
⁷
The NAACP also complained—that the school district was moving too slowly. The biggest worry, however, was caused by the White Citizen Councils.

The councils had formed across the South to hold the line against integration in the wake of
Brown
, and Milliard Grubbs, the man who had germinated the idea that the bombing of the Wades' house in Shively was the work of Communist infiltrators, founded the Louisville branch.
⁸
Members included some of the Wades' white neighbors. In the lead-up to the first day of school, meetings were held calling for the assassination of the Supreme Court justices and crosses were burned on school property, including in Parkland, where white parents were agitating to have their middle school district lines redrawn to keep out blacks.
⁹

So as students trickled into Male that morning in September 1956, Carmichael was nervous. Some of the students lingered to watch and pose for photos. More arrived, some of them black. They walked up the stairs and disappeared through the doors. The officials waited for something to happen. Nothing did. The five hundred police officers patrolling other schools around the city called in their reports. Nothing. A handful of picketers from the White Citizens Council showed up briefly at education department headquarters, then disbanded. Carmichael was elated. Louisville could reclaim the mantle of racial tolerance and progressivism, and bury the uncomfortable tensions provoked by the bombing in Shively. The city's track record on race could now be a role model, not an embarrassment.