What I Learned in the Aftermath

 There’s a new Athens book out, The Crimson and Gold, by Mark Clegg.  A too-easy encapsulation of it would be to say that it is Remember the Titans for my hometown.  It is the story of the merger, in 1969-70, of white Athens High School and black Burney Harris High School into Clarke Central High School, told largely through the emotionally charged process of combining two successful high school football programs that their respective communities treasured.  The AHS Trojans and the BHHS Yellow Jackets became the Clarke Central Gladiators, who went on to  regularly kick the asses of my Cedar Shoals Jaguars.  I've only read a few passages, but I can sense already that the author’s agenda is not necessarily to tell an inspirational story of racial reconciliation.  It's real life, so things are more complicated. We’ll see.  I like what I've read so far.

As was the case when Grace Hale’s Cool Town came out, my first instinct when I get my hands on a book about Athens history is to skim through the index looking for familiar names.

 

Of course there are some big names there you might expect to see in any book about Athens.   MichaelStipe.  Dean William Tate.  There are also some era-specific minor celebrities:  Michael Thurmond.  Pete McCommons.  Horace King.  Andy Johnson.  But I was really looking for names that only a true aficionado might recognize.  The first such name I came across was that of E.T. Roberson.   I remember him as an assistant principal at my high school, Cedar Shoals, Clarke County’s second desegregated high school, opened in 1972 to ease the overcrowding that ensued when AHS and BHHS merged. 

 

Flipping to the pages the index directed me to, I immediately learned something about Mr. Roberson I had not known before: he was the last principal of Burney Harris High School.  His career embodied one of the not-uncommon side effects of desegregation: unmerited demotions for longtime educators who had spent their careers in black schools.

 

My one clear memory of Mr. Roberson is of him coming to chew out a classroom I was in.  We had been disrespecting a substitute teacher – a common enough occurrence in a 1979 public school, and rebuking the likes of us was the sort of necessary but demeaning task that assistant principals found themselves beset with.  In my memory, Mr. Roberson was always dressed impeccably.  He had a stately manner and way of speaking.  I had a class with his daughter.  She was smart and beautiful.  I never knew that her father had been principal of our “separate but equal” black high school.  Had I known, I might have perceived in Mr. Roberson’s manner as he reprimanded us a wearied tone that it wasn’t supposed to have been like this for him.  Desegregation had to happen, but it came with losses.  That's part of what this book is about.

 

In the index I also saw Lyons Middle School. In 7^th and 8^th grade, from 1975-77, I went to Lyons.  Until desegregation a few years before, it had been Clarke County’s black middle school.  I don't recall knowing that.  Someone might have told me and I missed it, but I can’t recall being aware of it when I was a student there.  The repurposed Lyons I attended was a culture shock for me – my classmates were not wall-to-wall faculty brats as they had been at my previous school – and I did not handle the change gracefully.  I was a snob.  There were kids at Lyons, black and white, who could have been great friends to me had I been more open to them and their ways.   I did have some great teachers.  My brother and I fairly worshipped Coach Harris - his anti-smoking lecture, derived from his experiences guarding Japanese POWs during the war, was more effective than any government label on cigarette packages.  As for the physical plant of the school, to me it was just fine.  The classrooms were spacious.  The cafeteria tables were great for playing paper football.  The real tell about what Lyons had once been was its location: a scraggly plot of land between the Athens airport and a quarry.  Clegg writes that the distant, out-of-sight, unappealing placement of Lyons fit a pattern that Athens’ black community noticed and resented.  Black schools were never in attractive places, and Lyons was particularly inaccessible.  Lyons alum Horace King (one of the Jackie Robinsons of UGA football, later a Detroit Lion) recalls bus rides of over an hour. Years after I moved on from Lyons it merged with Burney-Harris into a single middle school.  Today that school is in a big, modern building, and what’s left of the old Lyons building by the airport is a National Guard armory. 

 

I recognized another school name in the index:  West Broad School.  I see that school every day – over my desk there’s a newspaper clipping, a human interest photo of my father and my brother walking down the front steps of West Broad.  The photo was taken on my first day of kindergarten, in 1968 – Rob had come along for the ride.  In that school year the full racial integration of the Clarke County Schools was close to fruition - only the upper grades remained (that's the story Clegg tells).  West Broad was an elementary school, and it had been adopted by the UGA College of Education as a lab school.  I don’t remember much about school that year, but I love the photo and I like having it over my desk at school.  Pop holds Rob’s hand as they navigate the steps.  As a son it is a beautiful reminder to me of the kind of parent my father was, and as an educator it evokes for me my family’s devotion to school and schooling.  These days the photo has an additional meaning for me: it's an artifact of regional history.  Those steps I walked up on my very first day of thirteen years of public school – a short time before they led up to what was known as the West Broad Public School for Negroes.  

Until I was an adult I did not know that two of the schools I attended had once been black schools.  Or, if I ever knew it, I had forgotten, suggesting to me that their origins must have been rarely spoken of, if ever.  The South's collective racial history was not concealed from us, we were taught the big picture story (with the good guys and bad guys correctly identified), but its local manifestations, people and places and stories that would have made it more real, less abstract, went largely unmentioned.  

 

Clegg's book is about the desegregation time itself, and that's the real story, not the aftermath that I passed through.  The black Athenians who pursued justice in that era have the more important recollections to share.  What I want to stress with these tangential, postcripty memories of mine is the peculiar reticence of the community I grew up in about the recent reality of segregation.  As a Southern white man of my generation I know I'm not alone in this perception.   Author Michael Griffith published a wonderful essay in the Oxford American about growing up in Orangeburg, S.C. in about the same era, about playing peewee football on an integrated team coached with verve by students from the local HBCU, South Carolina State College, in 1975.  The team practiced in the shadow of a gymnasium named for the three SCSC students killed in the Orangeburg Massacre in 1968, just a few years before. Griffith's essay is mainly about the shroud of public silence over that tragedy: he learned about it only as an adult, long after he had left Orangeburg, and the lack of acknowledgement mystified him:  "Why had no one mentioned the only historically signifiant event in Orangeburg since Sherman passed through on his way to torch Columbia?"   There was something strange in the willingness of both sides to avoid, to the extent that they could, reckoning together with "the legacy and the burden" of what had transpired, whites for their own comfort, blacks for starkly practical reasons.  A collective, forward-looking "politesse" partially explained the hush.  Griffith's recollection of that vibe in the Orangeburg of his childhood echoes how I experienced the mid-seventies in Athens, and, like him, I'm somewhat perplexed that the people in my orbit could dummy up so thoroughly about something so significant and so recent.  Because, chronologically speaking, that's what the segregation era was: recent.  Only yesterday.  It was in history books, but we lived directly in its wake, up to our necks in the residue of our own apartheid.     

 

I think that willful obliviousness to that recency had some harmful effects, one of them a disinclination to reckon fully with the implications of the Civil Rights era.  The United States is on the verge of celebrating 250 years as a nation.  Our Sesquicentennial.  I remember celebrating the Bicentennial at Lyons.  They brought us into the cafetorium to watch 1776.  I was a history nerd and I really liked that movie.  But as we watched Adams and Jefferson and Franklin sing their way through the founding, I doubt that any of us kids knew that the history of the building we were in testified loudly to the fact that the songs were about unfinished business.  In adulthood I see that in some rather important ways the birthday we were celebrating in 1976 was questionably dated.  Commentators I admire have trenchantly argued that as an authentically multiracial democracy, the United States only dates back to the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965.  From that view (one at least worth incorporating into your conception of U.S. history, if not adopting fully), our nation is not a venerable 250 years old, but a mere 60 years old.  Practically juvenile.  

 

For me, recalling my childhood exposure to the only-yesterday legacy of segregated schooling in my hometown reinforces the perspective that as a polity we're really quite young.  This incarnation of the United States, the closest it has ever come to the egalitarian ideals of its founding, is still a fledgling, still very fragile, and still capable of withering if the forces of retrogression have their way.  This is a critical time.  Make sure you vote.   Make sure you vote like a patriot of this young nation.