Free Some of My Best Friends Are Black by Tanner Colby Page A

public transit boycott was near unanimous, yet at the same time local teachers repudiated his call for a legal challenge against the segregated public schools. Montgomery’s blacks had no love for the back of the bus; control over their own classrooms was a different matter.
    By the early 1960s, however, the momentum of the civil rights movement had shifted decisively in favor of integration, thanks in no small part to King. He put the matter on a moral and spiritual plane. Segregation,he preached, wasn’t merely wrong because whites victimized blacks. At the deeper level, it was psychologically debilitating to everyone in society, black and white. It abrogated “the solidarity of the human family,” twisted man’s perceptions of himself and his brothers. Whether blacks were seen as degenerate beasts or whites were reviled as blue-eyed devils, both sentiments were rooted in segregation’s fundamental evil: reducing people to objects rather than recognizing them as fellow human beings.
    The cure, King said, was integration. Only sustained, cooperative interpersonal living could undo the damage wrought by four hundred years of slavery and Jim Crow. “Integration seems almost inevitably desirable and practical,” he said, “because basically we are all one.… The universe is so structured that things do not quite work out rightly if men are not diligent in their concern for others. The self cannot be self without other selves. I cannot reach fulfillment without thou. Social psychologists tell us that we cannot truly be persons unless we interact with other persons. All life is interrelated. All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.” Stirred by King’s lofty sentiments, many blacks, and plenty of whites, rallied behind him. They allowed themselves to believe, to hope, that this better world was possible. There was only one problem: it wasn’t. Not in the 1960s, anyway.
    With HEW’s authority finally backed up by the Supreme Court’s “Do it now” ultimatum, blacks had won enough leverage in the courts to mandate that white schools open their doors, but the execution of that would be handled by the same racist whites who’d opposed it all along. In the final analysis, busing wasn’t really implemented to give black students access to better schools. It was implemented so that white schools could avoid lawsuits. The fate of black children was an ancillary concern, if it was a concern at all.
    In 1964, only 2.3 percent of black students in the South attended majority-white schools. By 1972, that figure was 36.4 percent. A stunning turnabout, it seemed to vindicate those who believed integration possible. But it came at a steep cost. Nearly every Parker High was liquidated in the bargain. Wherever white and black high schools were compelledto merge or consolidate, the white school was presumed to be better, almost without exception. The neighboring black school was either closed or converted into an elementary or middle school. In North Carolina, the number of historically black high schools fell from 226 to 13.
    Some black high schools managed to stay open. They were integrated by busing white students in, but that only brought indignities of a different sort. Before whites would attend a black school, they would, in the parlance of the times, “de-niggerize” it. The schools were fumigated, all the toilet seats changed out. They were given new mascots, new school colors. The Frederick Douglass poster came down, George Washington and his cherry tree went up. Trophy cases filled with the souvenirs of blacks’ academic and athletic achievements were emptied and tossed. “One hundred years of history went into the trash,” lamented one black principal in Oklahoma.
    Any stain of blackness was scrubbed clean—even the names. Black kids had no say in being trundled off to Jefferson Davis Elementary, but no white kid in Alabama was going to be enrolled at