Talking about currently, in the Birmingham schools. Because the white
students have fled to suburban schools, and because of the
constitutional structure of the state of Alabama we don't have home rule
in Birmingham so it is very restricted on the city's ability to put
additional funds into education. So, you have run down schools, low paid
teachers and then you have extraordinary schools in the suburbs.
Therefore, many of the blacks that can afford to move to suburban
communities are moving there so they can send their kids to better
schools. Just like Dr. Julius Wilson talks about, you have a situation
now where many of the role models that used to be in the black community
no longer live there. I grew up in a church where there was one black
lawyer, a guy named Arthur Shores, who was licensed to practice law in
the state of Alabama for I think sixteen or seventeen years. He was the
only black lawyer licensed in the state and he went to my church. There
were three other black lawyers that went to my church, and that was
probably half of the black members of the Birmingham bar. I had several
Ph.D.s
Page 5that went to my church. I went to The First
Congregational Church here in Birmingham. It was really through my
church that I ended up going to Indian Springs because what happened was
that during the desegregation struggles here, my church was affiliated
with a white congregation called the Plymouth Congregational Church in
Mountain Brook, which is probably the most affluent community in the
state. They started a discussion group called Black and White Together,
where white teenagers would come and have church services with us and
then we would go and have church services with them and then we would
have meetings a couple of evenings a month to talk about things that
were going on in our lives. I believe that the solution to bigotry is
just for people to get to know each other, because a lot of bigotry is
based on ignorance. Many of these kids, the only black people they had
known were people that worked in their homes or folks that performed
services for them. I had known some white people, but not very many.
Until I got an opportunity to meet people there and many of them were
talking about the secondary education that they were looking forward to
and the colleges they were looking forward to. I started thinking about
these kids and I thought these kids aren't any smarter than I am, if
they can go to these private schools and if they can go to Princeton and
schools like that then I can apply and maybe I can get in too. That was
really how I ended up at Princeton, to be honest with you. There was a
kid from my school who applied there and didn't get in, and he said that
he thought they just weren't taking students from Alabama. I said I
don't believe that's true, so I applied and they let me in and gave me a
scholarship. It was an interesting time. My first exposure to
integration in schools was very, very bad. It was bitter. I was spit on,
I got in lots of fights and I got suspended from school twice in the
first two weeks for fighting because of racial slurs.
Page 6The first month I was in that class none of the white students in the
class would speak to me. The first time we had lunch I came and sat down
my lunch tray at the table with the other students in my class and every
one of them got up and left.