Black History Month causes reflection
Busing students remains as lasting effect of desegregation in Alabama

Thursday began this year’s celebration of Black History Month. Throughout my school days and collegiate years, several of my teachers and professors have asked me to try to remember the first time I realized I was black. That task was virtually impossible.

That’s like trying to recall the first time I remembered breathing. There was never a time when I wasn’t aware I was black.

But I do recall growing up in Alabama for the past 21 years. I didn’t witness the lynchings and hazings and beatings. No white person ever called me a ‘Nigger.’ I went to a predominately white elementary school in an extremely wealthy white neighborhood. My parents raised my sister and me to be nice to all the other boys and girls.

“Jesus loves the little children — all the children of the world. Red and yellow, black and white. They’re all precious in His sight. Jesus loves the little children of the world,” my Sunday school teacher sang to us.

My mother was my Sunday school teacher until I was 12 years old, so I never paid too much attention to the fact that the other little girls were white and I was black. We all got along and played together.

But over time, I began to notice that the white children got picked up by their parents in nice cars or they walked home, which was less than a mile from the school. But the black kids were bused to Mary B. Austin Elementary School, which was miles away from home. That would have been a long walk home for us, but I don’t think any of us cared too much. We liked riding the bus. We learned all kinds of jokes and sang songs and shared homework and stories from school. Riding the bus was the best experience ever. But it still seemed odd to me that only black kids rode the bus. Oh well, maybe only black kids rode the bus, I thought.

esides, sometimes my mother would pick my sister and me up from school, so that myth wasn’t totally true.

Hillsdale Middle School was different. It was there that I realized white kids rode the bus too. I didn’t know why. But they did, so I figured my method of thinking was just the naiveté of a child. A lot of things didn’t make sense to me as a child growing up in Alabama — I wasn’t about to spend my nights wondering why only black kids rode the bus to Austin and white kids rode the bus to Hillsdale. Also, it didn’t make much sense why a middle school had a plaque that said “Hillsdale High School.”

It must have been Easter 1995. I went to my neighbor’s house, the late-Senator Michael A. Figures. Somehow we started talking about Mobile’s school system and he finally answered my childhood naiveté questions. First of all, the plaque made a lot of sense when he said he almost graduated from Hillsdale.

He explained to me in March 1970 when Mobile finally ended segregation in the school system, the Hillsdale High students were transferred to Shaw High School, which was predominately white, and Hillsdale was turned into a middle school. And in order to desegregate the middle school, they bused white kids from other neighborhoods to Hillsdale. It was then I realized why every day for four years I remember Mr. Kelly faithfully busing about 60 blacks kids from Toluminville, a black neighborhood, to Providence Lane so that we could attend Austin.

I would have loved to see the expression on some of the teachers’ faces the first time they saw about 60 little rowdy black kids coming to Austin. Oh, the alumni who rolled over in their graves that day!

When I was 8 years old, I never thought my attendance at Austin was the result of desegregation efforts. I enjoyed going to Austin. We were the “Think-Write School.” It was there where I first developed my love for writing.

And my desegregation role didn’t stop at Austin. Over the years I learned my magnet high school, LeFlore, was the result of a desegregation court case in Mobile. To make both parties happy, the city added more features and better classes at a black school in order to attract white students from other areas. It didn’t necessarily work too well at my school because my graduating class had less than 10 percent white students.

As I’m sitting here reflecting, I feel a great sense of pride and accomplishment, much the way Mr. Kelly probably felt in taking all of us to Austin. My daddy said when he was in school it was just an unwritten rule in Alabama that white and black students didn’t go to school together. And less than 15 years later, there I was going to a school that my father had never even heard of because it was so exclusive.

There are still neighborhoods I won’t go to at night when I’m in Mobile. I will never forget the Ku Klux Klan rally that took place the summer before I left for TCU.

But Mobile has come a long way since March 1970. We still have our share of hate crimes. During the early 1980s, Senator Figures prosecuted members of the KKK for the hanging death of a black man in Mobile who was walking home from his job at the newspaper in downtown Mobile. And there were customers this summer at the bank who talked down to me because I’m a black woman.

So, I guess there’ll never be a time when I don’t realize I’m black. But thanks to people like Senator Figures, Mr. Kelly and my daddy, I’ve never been more proud to be black.

Yonina Robinson is a senior broadcast journalism major from Mobile, Ala.
She can be reached at (y.l.robinson@student.tcu.edu)

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