Sweet home Alabama: US segregation, 60 years on
I’m a sucker for a graduation. Proud parents. Dressed-up cousins. Kids in gargantuan crimson gowns that threaten to swallow their rangy frames. And when the mortarboards are thrown into the air, I have to wipe a tear from my eye.
But there’s more than one reason that this particular high school graduation is bittersweet. We’re in Tuscaloosa to trace the rising tide of re-segregation – a return to the “separate but equal days” that America was meant to have left behind.We’ve met a family whose history reflects the different phases of education in the town.
The only educational option in the 1950s for the grandfather, James, was an all black school, a few blocks from the all white school, where he tells us, still slightly amazed, that some of the kids had cars.
His daughter was a child of integration. She attended the new mixed high school, called Central, in the 1980s. When she graduated, she went to college, and bought a house.
And her daughter, D’Leisha, is newly graduated from that same school, but unlike her mother has never shared a class with a white student. D’Leisha has that in common with her grandfather.
This month marked sixty years since the landmark US Supreme Court case which ruled segregation unlawful. Sixty whole years for school systems like those in Tuscaloosa to transform themselves and offer a racially mixed education. But the fact is that, according to research by ProPublica, more than a third of black children here graduate from schools that look as though that decision never happened.
The squat brick building which houses Central High School in Tuscaloosa City sits proudly on a landmark corner in the West End. The atmosphere is friendly, and open. The students engaged and engaging. The corridors decorated by posters carrying inspirational quotes from Martin Luther King, and Barack Obama, and warning against bullying, and the dangers of malevolent texting.
There are only two white students in the school.
It was a different story when Central opened in 1979. That followed a court decision forcing the city fathers to close the town’s black and white high schools, and open a mixed one instead. Central quickly became a poster child for desegregation.
In the corner office, a place as busy as a stockmarket floor, Principal Clarence Sutton remembers the good times. He was a student at Central in the eighties, and recalls the many subjects (including Latin and Greek), the clubs, the sporting prowess, the pride associated with Central then.
“We had so many opportunities, and we met so many people,” he says. “You knew you were special.”
Diversity helped. Dr Sutton recalls sitting next to students for whom attending college was the norm – it became his norm too. He developed a taste for classical music. Now he plays the trumpet, and likes Mozart.
Clarence Sutton bemoans the changes at Central, but says: “My job is not diversity – I think that’s bigger than me. My job is to make sure that these students that I’m responsible for do not feel less than, so they can say I’m equal to, anyone else in this world.”
The shocking thing to an outsider like me is to hear that lesson is still on the syllabus.
Certainly, the reasons for the rowing back of integration are complex. In Tuscaloosa, it’s to do with housing, with poverty, with the local economy, court challenges by the city authorities, the desire of people to live in neighbourhoods filled with people like themselves.
But those challenges existed in 1954, even more strongly, when the Supreme Court ruled against the Board of Education and threw out “separate but equal”. If the ideals that forced that change applied then, where are they now?
Follow @C4KylieM on Twitter