Extraordinary, Ordinary People: A Memoir of Family

chapter sixteen

To be honest, some things remained the same after the 1964 legislation. The schools, for instance, remained segregated in all but name. Yet interaction between white and black students began to occur. In the fall of 1964, our school was selected to participate in the first integrated book fair, where students displayed books that they’d read along with a little synopsis of the story.

Mrs. Hattie Witt Bryant Green, who was the library teacher and very demanding, carefully prepared us for the big day at the Tutwiler Hotel. We weren’t going to embarrass ourselves, she told us, in this first academic encounter with white people. Mrs. Green paid attention to every detail, insisting that the girls wear bows in their hair and that the boys wear ties. When we arrived at the hotel we found that we had been assigned to a separate room, but whites came through and looked at our projects, and we looked at theirs. After the event, Mrs. Green proudly pointed out that she never would have allowed her students to display projects as shabby as the ones the white students had created.

There were new opportunities for my parents too. The black and white presbyteries (the regional governing bodies of the church) merged, and my mother’s choir had an opportunity to sing at a white Presbyterian church. Daddy had tried to break down racial barriers much earlier and had befriended a number of white ministers. A few Sundays after the Civil Rights Act passed, he got an alarmed call from one of these pastors. “Reverend Rice,” he said, “there are some Negro people out in front of the church and it seems they want to worship. What should I do?” My father replied that they probably weren’t there to make trouble, just to worship, and that the best thing to do would be to greet them and seat them. His friend called after the service to say that all had gone well.

A few days later my father came home from school really excited to say that Dr. Sheffield wanted him and another guidance counselor, Mrs. Helen Heath, to be the first blacks to work for the state of Alabama at the employment office downtown. They would be trained at the University of South Carolina and spend the summer counseling in vocational education. He added that the clients and their fellow workers would be black and white. Mrs. Heath remembers that Dr. Sheffield also said that he wanted them to teach white people how to say “knee-grow.” The time for saying “Negra” had long passed.

I was really disappointed that we would not be going to Denver for the summer, but the trip to Columbia, South Carolina, was fun, especially since we got to fly on an airplane for the first time. I bought a new pink and white checked dress to wear aboard the Southern Airways flight.

That summer featured another highlight as well. I was almost ten and had begun to tire of the piano. Grandmother had stopped teaching, and Mother took up the role of my music instructor. This was not a good development. I can remember Mother yelling out from the kitchen as I practiced. “That’s not right!” she’d call out.

“You’re not supposed to be listening. I’m practicing,” I would respond.

Somehow we just didn’t have the right chemistry for this endeavor. I told my mother I wanted to quit. I can remember her response as if it were yesterday. “You are not old enough or good enough to make that decision,” she said. “When you are, you can quit.” I was shocked, but I could tell that there wasn’t any room for debate.

Mother and Daddy decided that I needed a change to reinvigorate my interest. As it happened, Birmingham-Southern College had a very fine conservatory of music, but to date its student body had been exclusively white. My father called and said that he had a child who was an accomplished pianist and wanted to study at the conservatory. Several weeks passed, but I was granted an audition.

On the day of the audition I admitted to my parents that I was nervous. They were surprised because I had always displayed rock-solid nerves while performing in piano recitals or concerts. After all, I had been doing so most of my life. They asked if I needed more time to prepare. I finally admitted that I didn’t want to embarrass anyone. I’d be the first black student in the Birmingham-Southern program. I felt that I was carrying the weight of needing to be twice as good. They reassured me that I was indeed twice as good. Looking back, it is striking that they didn’t say, “You don’t have to be twice as good.”

The audition went very well, and I was admitted. I got back into the car completely elated. We went to Forbes Piano store to buy the prescribed curriculum, and I was soon reenergized in my pursuit of a career as a concert pianist. Years later, my father said that he was really glad that he and my mother took the chance of letting me try to break this color barrier. He then laughed. “They were probably just relieved that you didn’t dance on the piano.”

As desegregation continued to take hold, social life changed too. We went to restaurants frequently and were generally treated with respect. And we took in a movie once in a while and went twice to the traveling ice show Holiday on Ice.

Then, in 1965, the NFL played its first professional football game in Birmingham’s newly desegregated Legion Field, pitting the Dallas Cowboys against the Minnesota Vikings. Even though my mother’s father was gravely ill—he died the next day—Mother went to the game to keep from disappointing me. She knew I regarded it as a watershed event.

Mother and I bought new matching outfits: navy blue suits with gold blouses and gold hats. We sat in our seats and began to watch the game. Former Olympic gold medal sprinter Bob Hayes was a rookie wide receiver for the Cowboys, and he took the opening kickoff and ran it back ninety-plus yards. We cheered wildly. I don’t think my parents knew that I heard the man behind us say, “Oooh-wee. Look at that nigger run!”

We stayed in Birmingham only one more year before moving to Tuscaloosa, where my father accepted a job as dean of students at Stillman College. Over the years, Birmingham has remained fixed in my mind as a place and an experience inextricably bound up with those troubled times. A great deal has changed, including the election of successive black mayors and city council members (not least my friend Carole Smitherman). Ironically, Bull Connor’s successor many times removed was, until recently, a black woman.

The schools are completely integrated, and though neighborhoods are still largely segregated in the de facto sense, even that is breaking down. In the suburbs where we once shopped to purchase the higher-quality goods of white merchants, affluent blacks and whites, including my aunt Gee, live side by side.

When I visited Birmingham in 2003 my aunt Connie threw a party for me, inviting my friends from school and several teachers. Everyone was, of course, black. But the caterers were white. No one else seemed to notice. I asked Connie how she’d selected them. “The mother of one of my students started a catering service,” she replied. “I thought I’d give her a chance.” This was perfectly logical but out of bounds for the Birmingham that I had known and left as a child.

Back in 1961, CBS did a devastating documentary called Who Speaks for Birmingham? The film is filled with whites and blacks talking about life in “The Magic City,” as Birmingham is called. Several white citizens explain why race mixing is against natural law and why the “Negras” are happy with the way things are. My parents and I watched it at the time and were appalled, angry, and hurt.

I once again saw clips of the documentary in 2005 when I took British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw and his wife, Alice, as well as British Ambassador David Manning and his wife, Catherine, to the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute. My father’s longtime friend and colleague, Dr. Odessa Woolfolk, walked us through the exhibits that chronicled segregation. I was proud of what we had overcome, but as I noticed the horrified looks on the faces of my guests, I became deeply embarrassed. How could it be that so much hatred and prejudice had been lodged in one place? And how could it be that this was the place from which I had come?

In recent years I have been spending more time in the city with my family and friends, getting to know the “new Birmingham.” Birmingham’s efforts to emerge from the dark shadows of that time are now decades old. Yet I want to be a part of that emergence because somehow it is important for me to come to terms with and feel good about the city of my birth.