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Transcript on deposit at The Southern Historical Collection, The Louis Round Wilson Library
Citation of this interview should be as follows:
“Interview U-0023, in
the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007,
Southern Historical
Collection, The Wilson Library,
University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill”
Glennon Threatt describes his experiences with racial segregation in his hometown of Birmingham, Alabama. Threatt, a lawyer in Birmingham, was one of three gifted African American students who integrated an all-white elementary school gifted class. His presence at the school both helped propel him to academic success and made him a double target for violence and intimidation. Threatt left Alabama to attend Princeton, leaving behind a city where residential and school desegregation seemed to nurture, rather than erode, racism. When he returned to Birmingham twenty years later, he found African Americans in leadership positions, but also golf courses that continued to refuse them membership. Researchers interested in the Birmingham experience with segregation, one African American's experience with racial discrimination and violence, and reflections on the life of racism in America will find this interview very useful.
A Birmingham lawyer shares his reflections on segregation in Birmingham, Alabama, and racism in the United States.
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
This is Thursday June 16th and I am at the law offices of Mr. Glennon Threatt in Birmingham, Alabama. Thank you for having me.
You're welcome.
We are going to be discussing his experience in school desegregation in the Birmingham schools. We are going to start with his elementary school, go through high school and then your general impressions of how desegregation changed Birmingham. Whether you think it was a good change or if there are other goals that needed to be filled.
Well, I went to several elementary schools. My mother was a [unclear]
So you started out as a gifted student very young.
I did, but I was just fortunate. Both my parents were teachers, and both
of them read a lot. My father was a voracious reader; he used to read
two or three newspapers. It was actually interesting, because at the
time with what was going on with
Or they were under pressure not to record it.
Sure, sure. [Phone rings.]
My fourth-grade teacher in the all black school had a Ph D., in
elementary education. One of the things that was strange about the
desegregation in the public schools in Birmingham was because what they
did in many instances was they took the best, most qualified, most well
trained teachers from the all black schools and put them in white
schools and then they replaced them with white teachers that were right
out of college. And so, it diluted the talent and experience pool in the
black schools. Also, the first children that began to integrate the
formerly all white schools were the children of lawyers, the children of
doctors and teachers. They tended to be as a group, better students,
certainly more economically advantaged than some of the students that
were left
That's a good point to make.
Well, because what you have is a city school system where, although only seventy percent of the population of Birmingham is black, about ninety five percent of the school population is black.
You are talking about currently?
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
And this was a small class wasn't it?
Yeah, there were twenty-four or twenty-five students in the class. I had never been treated that way before, and so it was very, very difficult for me to adjust to. Even though I was aware of things that were going on, but it was very different dealing with it on a personal basis.
Had you been around white people much before you went to Elyton?
I had, but the relationship that you had with white people then was
very, very different than it is now. You could go to stores for instance
and shop down town. You couldn't try on clothes. You couldn't eat at the
lunch counters. They had black and white bathrooms, colored and white
bathrooms. They would usually have a bathroom for white men, a bathroom
for white women and then one bathroom for colored. When we would go to
movie theatres here you would have to pay in the front and then walk
around to the back of the theatre and go up some stairs to sit in the
balcony. Sometimes they would have segregated shows where they would
have just shows that were only for colored, at the time and then whites
would go to the theatre at different times. So, I had been exposed to
whites. I had ridden on public transportation and stuff, my parents
lived in the city—oh and the other major exposure that I had to white
people was because my dad had a concession stand at Legion Field, which
is where the University of Alabama used to play their home football
games in the 1960s. So, I had a lot of exposure to white folks then
because I used to sell peanuts and popcorn and sodas to them. I started
So, can you tell me a little more about how the decision was made to move you to Elyton?
Well, what happened was there was a lawsuit. One of the attorneys who
was handling the lawsuit was a guy by the name of Demetrius Newton, who
is now the Speaker of the House of Representatives for the state of
Alabama. They had filed a lawsuit to force the integration of special
education. After we had been placed in the all black enrichment class,
because that was the way they had tried to fix the problem. What had
happened before was that there was gifted education, but it was for
white only, but then under separate but equal when blacks complained
about it, they decided that what they would do is set up gifted
education for all black classes in the all black schools. So, they came
around and IQ tested the kids to qualify them to go into that class, I
got placed into that class. Then of course the case was resolved because
separate but equal is inherently unequal. So, they then allowed some of
us to integrate that white class. I learned later from Dr. Baldwin at
one of our reunions that they took the three kids in the all black
gifted class that had the highest IQ's. It was myself, a woman by the
name of
So the class was twenty-five then.
There were three blacks.
Just three in the whole gifted class of twenty-five students. Then the rest of the school was also all white.
The rest of the school was all white the first year that I went there. That school also had some children that were physically challenged. Polio, other physical disabilities and you started to see some blacks come in in that area also. By the time I was in eighth grade the school was probably fifteen to twenty percent black because it was sitting in the middle of a black community. I used to have to drive past two all white schools to get to my all black school, because I lived in an all black community. The elementary school Graymont, which is now the JCC headquarters, is a beautiful school. It has been restored, it is a beautiful school, but it was all white. After black people started moving—let me back up and tell you. I lived in an area in Birmingham called Dynamite Hill.
Yeah, I've interviewed a few people from that area.
Well, I lived on Dynamite Hill. We were one of the first black families
to move on our block. In fact when I moved into that neighborhood there
were still white folks there. I remember living there and white people
coming in the neighborhood and vandalizing cars, throwing bricks through
people's windows, burning a cross in my
Do you have memories of walking to school and walking past groups of white kids?
Oh yeah, we used to have walk battles with them. There was a line of demarcation which was Graymont Avenue, because there also is a very large housing project that's right across the street from Legion Field called Elyton Village. When I was in fifth grade Elyton Village was all white, so we used to have fights and organize rock battles with the white kids from the projects. It was like a little demilitarized zone, which was like Graymont Avenue almost like in Korea.
Or Israel.
Yeah. The whites would stay on their side of Graymont Avenue and we
would stay on our side of Graymont Avenue. Then as we started to box
them in the
Would you like to tell me in more detail about some of the incidents?
Sure. The first day that I was in Elyton School, one of the white kids in the class called Deidre a nigger and pulled her hair. I got in a fight with him; they suspended me from school. I had to stay home three days. Came back to school, my parents talked to me and said, "Listen, you have got to understand you cannot react that way. You can't respond that way, because it's really important. What they are trying to do is get you put out of school so that they can prove that blacks can't behave properly. You have got to understand that there is some social responsibility and you just have to bite your tongue and not say anything, because it's really important that you stay in that school." That was a very, very difficult thing to do because at the time I was like ten years old. I just didn't do very well with people getting up in my face and spitting at me and stuff like that, I didn't take very well to that at all.
Did your parents talk about it in terms of non-violence or the movement?
My father did, my father never told me to let anyone hit me. He never
told me to absorb punishment. He said don't hit anyone first. If
somebody hits you, you should definitely defend yourself. That's not
non-violent. I wouldn't have made it in
So, you had the threat of them not liking you anyway and then especially because you are black, it would be double —
Sure, sure. Then, because a lot of the white kids in the school were poor. I mean, I remember white kids coming to that school with cardboard in their shoes. It was the first time I had ever seen anybody eat a mayonnaise sandwich. My parents weren't wealthy, but they were both teachers. We owned our own home, we had two cars, we took vacations . . . I didn't think about it at the time, but we had a lot more resources then some of the white students in that school. So, there is always a natural animosity because of that demographic difference. It was very, very strange now that I think back on it. I thought my teacher at the time was a racist and that she didn't like blacks. She was very stern and strict. Later on I found out from talking with her that she had gotten death threats because people told her she should refuse to teach blacks. It just goes to show that perhaps one of the greatest untold stories of the Civil Rights Movement is white people that participated in and did things- because now a lot of the black people who participated in the Civil Rights Movement have been recognized, but many of the whites who gave money and support and stuff like that never got recognized until stuff like the book that Diane McWhorter wrote. Her book really talked a lot about the role of white people in the Civil Rights Movement—Carry Me Home. It's a good book, it's an excellent book, it is the best book. Diane McWhorter is her name; it is absolutely the best book I have read on the Birmingham part of the Civil Rights Movement. Because she was from here and her father was an industrialist who participated in the Citizen's Council that was responsible for maintaining segregation.
Was she working underground?
No she wasn't. She was a teenager at the time and later on she found out about her father's role.
A lot of people misunderstand why we got desegregation in
It just was the pressing thing to do.
Well, and then also again there was a lot of pressure placed on white businesses not to integrate. If you let black people try on clothes then it would get out and you would be ostracized by members of the white community or white people would stop shopping at your store. So there was a lot of social pressure from the white community to force other whites to be racist.
I'm definitely going to take a look at that book.
It's an excellent book. The only other book that I read about the Civil Rights Movement that is as good is John Lewis's book. John Lewis's book is much more personal than Diane's book because John was a member of Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (S.N.C.C.) when he was at Fisk University, and he was a Freedom Rider and so he was able to give a first person account of being on the bus when it was set on fire and being beaten at the Edmund Pettis bridge, and Diane never had those experiences. Her book is much more of a historical third person account, whereas John's book is up close and personal. It's a tremendously moving book; it's so powerful that I couldn't even finish reading it.
Too many memories?
Oh man, when you read about the Freedom Riders it's just horrible, what happened to them. I mean it's bad enough to be spit on, but it's another thing altogether to be padlocked in a bus and have it be set on fire.
Yeah, when I saw the bus at the Civil Rights Institute.
That's the bus he's been in! You ought to read his book, it's powerful.
He talks about people who were Freedom Riders with him, several of them
who are mentally ill now. One of the guys that was with him in S.N.C.C.
and was a Freedom Rider with
Did she get sent to jail?
I don't know if she went to jail, she doesn't talk about it very much. A lot of people that were part of that don't talk about it.
Since we just start with the school's desegregating, we really haven't talked with anybody about the children's march. I'd like to in my own time.
You should, the children's march was a powerful, powerful thing. It got so bad that they used Rickwood Field as a holding cell, they used a baseball stadium to hold kids because they ran out of jail space. Connor said that he wasn't going to stop arresting them, so they just started holding them in—but Diane McWhorter's book talks about all of that in detail.
Sometimes it just still feels overwhelming to think about all of that.
What's overwhelming is that it wasn't that long ago. I'm middle aged,
I'm forty-eight years old and I remember this stuff clearly. So, it
wasn't that long ago. The city has changed a lot in many ways, and in
many ways it hasn't changed. There is no more du jour segregation. The
thing that was odd about the south is Jim Crow. There was segregation in
other places, but it was more custom than by law. Here for instance, if
We talked some about the really negative experiences you had in the schools, but I was wondering about how you recovered from that? What comfort did you have when you went back home?
It wasn't anything that—I don't feel permanently stigmatized by it, not
did I feel permanently stigmatized by it at the time. We had a lot of
very strong black institutions. I was fortunate to have both of my
parents until my father died in 1974, I had an older sister who had done
very well in school. She graduated from high school and got a
scholarship to Talladega when she was sixteen years old. I have younger
sisters
I could tell that by observation, just driving around.
Had it not been for some of the historical efforts that have taken place in the Fourth Avenue area, it would be much more run-down than it is now. It had fallen into just a prostitution and drug strip many years ago, until some people that had a sense of the historical impact of that area went in and tried to save it.
I didn't know it had gotten that bad.
It was bad, it was bad.
It wasn't even safe to walk in that area of downtown?
There were prostitutes walking the street, openly.
Can you think of any good experiences at Elyton that you would like to share?
Oh, lots of them. I made some people that I'm friends with. A guy I met
in that class named Barry Norris, who I still talk to now. In fact Barry
is a nationally recognized organist and teacher, who still lives here in
Birmingham. I still consider him to be a personal friend. Some of the
other students in that class, in fact three or four of us went to Indian
Springs together. Again, the racism that was going on here was
governmental and it was being perpetuated by a small part of the white
community. A lot of white people didn't agree with it and a lot blacks
didn't, but everybody was caught up in it because it was enforced by
law. It wasn't just a social compact, it was enforced by law. Also,
whites would have been ostracized if they tried to interact with blacks.
One of the white girls named Kay Cretcher who went to that school, her
father was a liberal. He was one of the first grown men I knew that wore
a pony tail. They had a bookstore on the south side here in Birmingham.
She was the first girl in the class to befriend Deidre, because at least
Richard and I had each other, Deidre was the only black girl. Kay was
the first girl in the class to befriend Deidre. I remember the last day
of school after the sixth grade, some students grabbed Kay and threw her
down on the ground and cut her hair. She had almost waist length hair,
and they cut her hair for being Deidre's friend. That was terrible. I
still communicate with another guy named Keith Sides who is a Vice
President of a local bank who is right across the street from me now,
working for AmSouth Bank. I have been in touch with Mrs. Ayers. As a
matter of fact I ran into Mrs. Ayers at a shopping mall in 1981, the
summer after I graduated law school. I had not seen her, and I
recognized her and hugged her and thanked her because she gave us all a
tremendous education. She was a marvelous teacher. I told her I was
giving the youth sermon at my church, and she told me she would come and
she did. She came there and I
I can tell she was a good teacher, everybody went on to a really good career.
Oh sure, she had some good students too, but she was also a very, very good teacher. It was something being part of integration, because what integration ultimately did, the black people who really benefited from it were the students whose parents did not have the means to send them to private school or the ability or the will to get them into better black public schools. All the black public schools were not the same. You had some black schools that had very, very good teachers and a very active PTA and the level of instruction and the level of learning was much higher than at some of the other black schools. There's going to be a pecking order in anything. My parents were both graduates of Parker High School, which was probably the best black high school in the state of Alabama. In fact at one time it had more students than any other public high school in the United States. When my mother went to Parker the students went in shifts.
I've heard about that.
Two shifts a day. It was called Industrial High School at the time. Both
of my parents graduated from Parker. My mother moved to Birmingham
because there were no schools beyond the sixth grade for blacks in
Sumter County which is where she grew up. My father came in from
Sylacauga County for the same reason. So I had some very, very good
experiences and I'm not bitter about the relationships that I had with
people. I have bitterness because of the institutionalization of the
racism, and the fact that from a governmental standpoint we didn't do
anything about it sooner. You can't
Do you think that the discrepancy was worse in terms of residential or in terms of keeping up the schools?
The residential discrepancies changed immediately, because once black
people started moving into white neighborhoods the white folks left. A
black person would move onto a block and all the white people would have
for sale signs in their yard. Before then there were unspoken agreements
from real estate agents not to even show houses in certain areas to
blacks. So, that was the way that they really controlled it. Or, if you
went to a bank for financing they wouldn't finance you if you were
trying to buy in a certain area. That was the way that it was
controlled. The city of Birmingham was residentially integrated long
before it was institutionally integrated. When you look at things like
the police department and the fire department and the opportunity for
blacks to work as county employees for instance, that lagged way behind
the residential integration. In fact now, in many of our institutions
like county government for instance, the majority of the employees are
white. In city government there is a disproportionate
So what effect does this have on people besides just the practical things of not having reliable services in their homes, does it have some kind of psychological effect?
What it did is it caused a lot of people to move. It was why I left, because I thought that I didn't have a future here. When I left to go to college, I told my mother I am never coming back here. I'm never coming back, this is a racist place, I don't think I have any opportunities here, I'm not going to be able to succeed in the good old boy network because I will never be a good old boy because I'm black. . .and I'm never coming back here. Many of my mother's friends, many of my parent's friends left. They left and they went to Chicago, they went to Cleveland and they went to Detroit. My mother's best friend and my God parents, moved to Detroit because they had Master's degrees and they were making less than white teachers that did not have Master's. When my mother went to teach at West End High School, she had a Master's degree and she was working as a subordinate to a white coach that did not even have a college degree, and making less money. We have judges in the state of Alabama that are not even lawyers. In some rural communities, you can be a probate judge without even being a lawyer in the state of Alabama. I still practice now in a lot of rural communities and when you go out to these rural communities you find that a lot of things haven't changed. They're still basically segregated, it's not Jim Crow du jour segregation but it's still segregated in fact.
So on the books the color of your skin matters more than education, or they just don't even factor education in to the job requirements?
What happens is that black people here used education as a means of escaping. They just didn't see equivalent opportunities here. I'll give you a perfect example, many of the black lawyers that I know that went to law school prior to 1970—they didn't want to integrate the University of Alabama Law School, so they would pay for you to go to law school out of state. They'd pay your tuition, they'd pay your room and board, they'd pay for your housing and they'd pay for your books. The only other option was to have a black law school. If you wanted to go to medical school and you applied to the University of Alabama, they would pay for you to go to Meharry or some other black medical school rather than to have to set up a black state medical school. Up until the time that the University of Alabama Law School was integrated, if you graduated from the University of Alabama you didn't have to take the bar, you were automatically admitted. When it integrated that changed. That's a tremendous thing, because a lot of folks never pass the bar.
Hmmm. These are things I have never heard about before, changing standards as soon as integration happened.
Oh, sure. Well, they moved the fence. It was exactly the same thing with
the voting rights act cases, where you would come in and you would have
to take a citizenship test in order to vote. They didn't make white
folks do that. They had black folks coming in there, many of whom were
relatively uneducated and many instances some of them were illiterate
and they would ask detailed questions about the constitution that even a
law professor can't answer. Then they would use that as a means of
exclusion
The national turnout is like just shy of fifty percent.
Yeah but in Alabama the black people should be one hundred percent. Many of the people who are old enough to vote are old enough to remember what happened.
That's true.
And if you remember what it was like here before 1965 there is no excuse for you not voting.
Maybe they still have that sense that their votes won't change the government that has been so unresponsive before.
Well, apathy has settled in and I go back to Dr. Wilson's theories. Even
though I don't agree with a lot of things that he says, I thought this
was just so much on point. He talked about what happened during
segregation, he said you had a much more cohesive black community where
you had black professionals and black people of wealth living in the
same communities as black people who didn't have wealth or education. So
they had role models in their community. Now what has happened to a
large degree is that— my wife and I for instance live in Vestavia. We're
the only black couple on our
They assume the opportunities are somewhere else.
Well they are, they want the American dream and they don't want to be trapped in an inner city where the crime is going up and the social services are deteriorating. We got black mayors in a lot of black cities because the white folks left, not because we out voted them, they left. So there is a lot of political animosity between the city of Birmingham and the surrounding communities and it's destroying our communities. One of the reasons that we can't progress is that we don't have any regional cooperation for things like transportation. Whenever we try to get regional transportation it is perceived as being an opportunity for blacks to get to the suburbs and they vote against it. We had a voter sponsored initiative here in the spring of 1998 right after my wife and I moved here, called MAPS-metropolitan area progress or something like that, I forget what the acronym was. . .the money was to be used for regional transportation and having entertainment being in downtown. People voted it down. The people in the city, which was seventy percent black overwhelmingly supported it. The people in the suburbs were opposed to it.
Do the suburbs always tend to swing the votes here?
Absolutely. Up until a few years ago, we had never had a black elected to county wide office. Chris McNair, who's the father of one of the four little girls that got killed in the Sixteenth Street Church was the first black elected to county wide office in Alabama. In the 1980's before we had a black elected to state wide office, post-Reconstruction.
I guess that's because more people were voting then.
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
If you were an educated black person in the early 1960s here, it was just a tremendous push to leave. What were you going to do? The only thing you could do was teach, cut hair, or try to open a little business. A lot of things that are available to us now, professions like fire, police, public safety, and law enforcement were not open to blacks. There wasn't going to be a black policeman under Bull Connor. The fire department was the same way. County government, which is one of the largest employers in the state, that wasn't here. The steel plants, you could work there but you were basically restricted to being laborers. So, if you were some parents and your kids got a college degree, why would you want them to stay here? There was nothing for them to do unless they wanted to teach.
How early did you decide you were going to leave?
Probably when I was about nine. Well, I wasn't going to go to the University of Alabama. I had bad experiences with them working at those football games. When the University of Mississippi, Ole Miss used to come here to play there band used to play Dixie at half time and they would wave confederate flags. That was accepted, and I was like I'm getting the hell out of here as soon as I can. So, I got a chance to go to Princeton. When I went to Princeton I got an opportunity to meet black people from more progressive areas of the country and it made me realize that I wasn't ready to come back here. I changed a lot and the city changed a lot, and it was the combination of those two transformations that allowed me to be able to live here. I stayed away from Birmingham for—I left in 1974, and I moved back in 1997.
And now you feel like you're ready to be back?
Oh yeah. The city has changed a lot. I mean, we still have a lot of work to do but it has changed a lot. We have a black mayor, we've had black mayors for the past twenty years. We have a black fire chief, a black police chief, and several black owned businesses. I would have never thought that I would have the opportunity to be an adjunct professor at the University of Alabama, I mean when I grew up they didn't even have black students. I'm an adjunct professor on their faculty now, and so things have changed a lot in a relatively short period of time. From a historical standpoint, about half of my life, but from a historical standpoint twenty-five years is not very long.
That's part of why we do these projects, because people will think it's long and then they'll think that they don't need to know about how things were— [person speaking interrupts conversation] back when schools were desegregated because that can't possibly apply anymore.
You absolutely need to know it. Not just from the standpoint of being informed, but it allows you to understand the institutions that still survive. I was reading a story recently in the Wall Street Journal about how Morgan Stanley and several other investment banks found out that they got started because of investments in slaves. So you have institutions that have institutional wealth still in this day that is the result of slavery. Not just the exploitation of labor, but slavery.
Clear profits from slavery?
Sure. Buying and selling of slaves. You had people that owned land and
businesses here—if you ever want to read some interesting stuff about
Alabama, you ought to read about convict labor. That will blow your
mind, because what happened was that the mines more so than anything
else, to some degree the steel mills, but the
I've heard some stories about it.
Horrible. Horrible, people were dying. Not only were they not getting paid, but they were dying in these mines. If the mines needed additional work they would just go round up some brothers and put them in jail on some trumped up charges, then let them go work in the mines until their need for work went down. Then they would let them out. That was worse than slavery because at least slaves were given a place to live.
Yeah, these guys were just worked like animals.
Uh huh, they were worked like animals and they were in jail for completely trumped up charges. It's horrible, it is one of the worst black eyes in the history of this state. In my view it is even worse than the fire hoses, it is worse than the police dogs, nothing is worse than bombing of churches, but it is second to that. That a state agency would incarcerate people who were innocent just so they could work for free in coal mines.
There was a little exhibit about that up in Vulcan that I saw on Monday, but yeah, just the tip of the iceberg.
And then you have the same companies who benefited from that, like the McWanes for instance, that are still polluting in the black community. They just got convicted of it last week. For spewing polluted water into Village Creek, this is a waterway that runs right down the middle of the black community in Birmingham. They would have never done that in Vestavia.
Yeah, because they would have gotten caught.
Sure.
Let's talk a bit about Indian Springs.
Indian Springs [High School] was an unusual place, it was started in
1957 by a guy named Harvey Woodward, who owned Woodward Coal and Iron.
He gave I think it was seventeen million dollars which was back when a
million dollars was really still a million dollars. They bought seven
hundred acres of land down in Shelby County and it was set up as a
trust. All the students in the school had to be white Anglo-Saxon
Protestants from below the Mason-Dixon line and all the teachers in the
school had to be white Anglo-Saxon Protestants from above the
Mason-Dixon line. All the teachers had to live on campus. At the time it
was an all boarding school and the students were required to work, they
had a farm and horses and all that stuff back in the 1950's. They had a
circulating board of directors of I think seven or eight, wherever the
number was, the members would go off in staggered terms so that they'd
allow them to re-elect each other so that it was a constantly cycled
group of people. It required a unanimous vote of the board to
desegregate the school. So I think it was 1968 when they got their first
Catholic and Jewish students, and then in 1969 they got their first
black students. It's a beautiful campus, at the time it was in the
country, but now it's on 119 which is a pretty well developed area. On
the back side of it is Oak Mountain State Park. I went there on
scholarship. I met the coach, and one of the teachers there went to
Pilgrim Congregational Church. I met them through the Black and White
Together Group that I was with in my church. They met me and they talked
to my parents and in fact Coach Fred Cameron developed a friendship with
my father because my dad was also a high school coach. Coach Cameron was
a basketball coach down there, and so they became
I don't think I have met him.
Julius Sherrod Scott. I think he's an English Professor, if he isn't there he left in the last three or four years.
I'll look him up when I get back.
Yep, we called him Scotty Scott. He graduated from Indian Springs in 1973. The other black graduate that year was a guy by the name of James Montgomery, who is now a tax lawyer in Washington. The third black graduate was a guy named Arthur Gaines, who is now in prison for murder down in Texas. He went in the military, went to Rice, and went in the military in ROTC. He killed his wife in a domestic related dispute, got on an airplane, confessed it to the stewardess and they turned the plane around and flew him back—he was trying to leave the country —they turned the plane around and he surrendered himself at the airport. He's been in prison since then.
That's awful.
It is awful. It is awful, because he is a very, very bright guy. He only went there for two years. He came there from Woodberry Forest, which is a very exclusive prep school in Virginia. I liked Indian Springs, it changed my life. It really did.
You heard about it from the teenagers in the church program, but when you took the P.S.A.T. did you feel any interest in going to any of those other prep schools?
I did, but my parents were not inclined to let me go out of state. When I went down to Indian Springs I fell in love with it, because it's just a beautiful campus. They have lakes and beavers and deer and we used to fish and hunt doves on the school grounds and stuff like —it was like moving to summer camp. Also, I was away from home and I enjoyed boarding but I was close enough to come home on weekends if I wanted to. It was only twenty five or thirty miles away. My parents were very comfortable with it and my parents were also very comfortable with the school because they knew the Camerons. They had known them, not just individually, but collectively through church and for a number of years. They knew them the entire three years that I was at Elyton. The other thing that was a strong factor for me going there was that three other guys that were in my eighth grade class went there.
Yeah, you mentioned that before. So, you had all talked about going there?
Sure, and we had been down there to visit and they brought us down there for interviews. I used to love to sing, and they had a nationally renowned glee club. Our glee club went to Europe when I was in my junior year. They had gone to Russia the year before I came there. We participated in a national choral competition and won first place in Kansas City when I was a sophomore. We went to New York my freshman year to sing. We sang with the Vienna Boys Choir when we were in Vienna.
Wow. Was that your first time out of the country?
Oh yeah. That was my first time on an airplane. The first airplane flight I took was from Atlanta to Frankfurt, that was my first time on an airplane.
You got the really, really long one for your first time.
Yeah, that was a long flight.
It must've been kind of scary.
Yeah, I remember my mother giving me money and putting it in a handkerchief and pinning it to the inside of my pants.
Yeah, my parents gave me those kinds of tips too.
[Laughter]
And you are still on the board?
Yeah, I'm on the alumni council there. I actively help them to try and recruit and raise money. I helped in the selection of the new headmaster, which was a tremendous find for the school. It's a great, great school.
When you got there, did you hang out with the other guys from your school?
To some degree I did, but those guys. . .I was really into athletics
when I was at Indian Springs, I played basketball, soccer and ran track.
Also, I had a black roommate who was from Houston, Texas, who is now a
Chemist also, living in Houston. He and I developed a real close
friendship because he was a long way from home. So when I would come
home on weekends he would come with me so that he could go to church
It seems like you keep in touch a lot.
Oh yeah, I talk to people that I went to Princeton with almost every day. Well, now particularly because I have my friends who went to Princeton and my wife has her friends that went to Princeton. My daughter's godmother is a Princeton graduate; my best man was a Princeton graduate. I talk to a lot of people that I went to school with.
Are you going to be sending your daughters to Princeton?
If that's where she wants to go. If she is fortunate to get in, it's a lot harder to get in now than when I went there and it's certainly more expensive—it's about forty-three thousand dollars a year to go to Princeton. So, even if they gave you a thirty thousand dollar a year scholarship, it would still be expensive.
Yeah, I've only been there once. I didn't apply there for college, it was a lovely place.
It's beautiful, in the middle of a black community.
I didn't walk around enough.
There was a community of flags at the stoops. Yeah, Princeton is the second oldest school in the United States. The College of William and Mary may be the only one that is older. It was a colonial college.
Yeah, I did know that, I didn't know it was a community of slaves.
Oh yeah, even if you go in some of the dorms there now people used to have servants at Princeton. Some of the dorm rooms are set up for a student and their servant.
I think I could tell that when I was staying there.
Paul Robeson is from Princeton and applied to Princeton and they wouldn't let him in.
Just because he was black?
Yeah. I mean the guy was an operatic singer, he was an actor, he was extraordinarily bright, he was an all American athlete and he was from Princeton—his dad worked on the campus and they wouldn't let him in.
Yeah, I'm glad those times have changed.
Yeah, they have. I was actively involved in the anti-apartheid movement when I was at Princeton. They had lots of money invested in South Africa. I almost got expelled from school for protesting, we took over the administration building at the school my senior year.
What year was that?
1977, it was the fall of 1977. I graduated in June of 1978, I almost got put out of school.
Did you talk them out of it somehow or did they just change their minds?
No, the school just decided to put the people on academic probation instead of expelling them.
We could talk some about your experiences while you were attending Indian Springs, but I have really wanted to ask you about your role on the alumni board at Indian Springs. Have you been involved in planning reunions?
I've been involved in that, I've been involved in recruitment, we talk
about curriculum, we do fundraising of course and for the last year I
have been the only black member of the board for the alumni council.
It's difficult for a school that costs seventeen thousand dollars for
day school, to recruit black students. The black students who can afford
to go there can get in usually and are academically qualified to go
there. That's the other thing, not only do you have to have the money to
go there, but you got to be smart. So if you're a black kid who's smart
enough and your parents have enough money to send you there, then they
can also send you to fine arts, they can send you to Altamont which is
in the city, they can send you to the Alabama High School of Math and
Science—which is free, they can send you to the honors program at John
Carroll which is about half that price. Or you have options to go out of
state to school, so what has happened now is that in the 1960s and 1970s
the white institutions were getting poor blacks from inner cities to
integrate their schools, but now they are getting black kids that have
the same educational background as the white students that go there. The
black students that go to Indian Springs now, usually went to private
school all the way through elementary school. They were not like me.
They're much more like the white students who go to Indian Springs, the
only difference is race. Their background is very, very similar. Their
parents have the same types of jobs, they earn the same income strata
and
Are they gifted students?
Yeah, Yeah, Indian Springs is real, real high academics. It's a tough school to get in and it's even harder to stay. When you look at their graduates, they typically have graduating classes with forty students and three or four Ivy Leaguers and several people go on to the honors program at Vanderbilt, Emory, Swanee, William and Mary—you know good Southern liberal arts schools. They have a very, very illustrious set of schools that the graduates of that school go to. I'm proud to be a member of their alumni council, because I think, and I believe this to be true, that I'm part of the council not just because I'm black, but because they believe that I have something to contribute. Nobody wants to be part of a group just because of your race.
Do you find that the reunions are attended well?
Yeah, we had my thirtieth reunion in 2004. One of my classmates is the
publisher of The Birmingham News and he lives in like a three million
dollar estate out in
That is, everybody's still left with a very positive impression?
We had a guy come here from France, who was living in France to come back for our reunion. Several people came from the west coast, a couple people from Massachusetts, Vermont and New England area. We had a classmate of mine that came back here from France.
Why was your class the largest graduating class?
We were the last class before the school was coeducational. The year after I left they admitted women. A lot of people didn't want to go there anymore. I opposed coeducation at the time. It ended up being better for the school in the long run, but in the short term it cut the enrollment.
Why did you oppose it?
Because I thought that it would fundamentally change the school.
What would be the changes?
Well, when you have same sex education you don't have a lot of the
pressures that are negative in coeducation. The guys are not competing
for female attention. I've read several studies that show that girls
that go to same sex education tend to do better in technical fields in
math and engineering. Up until about the fifth grade level girls and
boys achieve similarly in math and science, and then at that point which
is right around puberty, it starts to change. Guys become more
aggressive, they speak out more in class and girls become less inclined
to be involved in the competitive fields, so they go into softer social
sciences. That's why you hear some of the goofy comments
And when the girls came?
Oh, no, no you couldn't do that. Guys started dressing for them it was just completely different, the environment. Even when it was all boys, there were girls out there every weekend because all the girls used to come out there because the kids of the wealthiest families in Birmingham went to school out there. So, we used to have dances. We had a sister school called Brookhill, which is actually where Deidre went to high school, Deidre Newton. We used to have a lot of combined social activities with them. I liked it, I liked living on campus. Brookhill is no longer in existence, it merged with a school called Birmingham University School to become Altamont. Unless I'm mistaken Deidre was the first black girl to go to Brookhill.
So I guess they recruited her to desegregate their school?
Well, again it was a natural extension from where we were. I think there was another white girl in our class at Elyton that went to Brookhill. Once we got put in the white enrichment, gifted class then we were exposed to the opportunities that the white kids had been exposed to all along. It wasn't so much that Indian Springs didn't want black students, they had the problem with the trust, but they didn't know any black students and didn't have any way of identifying them. It was an unusual thing for students at an all black high school to take the P.S.A.T.
So your group was really the first, you were the first ones to get exposed to that whole area of Birmingham's education.
Sure, sure.
So, after that did a lot more gifted black students start going to these schools?
Well, they did. The other thing that happened was that they started other gifted programs and then they eventually started magnet schools. So, you had the School of Fine Arts and Ramsey was called an alternative school, but they had an admission exam. So that was one way of letting the higher achieving academic black students to get to go to a public school where they had programs that were specifically designed for them. The problem, and it was the reason that I got skipped, if you were a black kid that was high achieving they didn't have any programs for you. When I was in the third grade I made straight As and an F in conduct.
An F in conduct?
Yeah because I was talking all the time, I was bored. They didn't have any thing there to challenge me because the teacher had twenty seven other students to teach. If you have one or two gifted kids, you can't teach them and you really don't need to teach them because they are going to get it on their own.
They could have almost put you in special education just because they didn't know what you needed, so they would think you were just troublesome.
Yeah.
I wonder how many more gifted programs the board of education started.
I know there was one at Lincoln Elementary, because a friend of mine was in that class and they were a year behind us. I also knew the woman who taught that class, because she was in my school, she is dead now. Her name was Charlotte Haywood. It seems like there were a handful more.
Do you think Indian Springs was the best school that you went to out of all of them?
I can't say that, because Princeton might be the best educational institution in the world, if it's not it is in the top five or ten. It would be very, very difficult for me to say that any school is better than Princeton, but from the standpoint of high schools in the south I absolutely believe that Indian Springs was the best high school in the southeast of the United States at the time. . .and may still be today. But it is the best high school for a certain type of kid, it is not for all children. If need a highly structured environment then Indian Springs is not the school for you.
It sounds like it was run sort of like a college.
It was, it was based on the Summer Hill philosophy of learning.
So you had a lot of free range to come and go to your classes?
Absolutely we did. We had humanities classes in the ninth grade.
Did you have humanities classes before you went to Indian Springs?
No, I didn't even know what humanities were. I took Latin in the ninth
grade, in the eleventh grade, I took French in the ninth and tenth and
then Latin in the eleventh. They had a Latin program for forty years, in
fact my Latin teacher still teaches Latin there now. Again, you didn't
have other options. You didn't have the Jefferson County International
Baccalaureate School, you didn't have The Alabama High School of
How did it feel to be that kind of trail blazer?
It was a relief to have left Elyton, because Indian Springs was a whole lot more collegial type of an environment, the people were a whole lot friendlier to me there than they were at Elyton. At Elyton, after the first year or two, I made friends with the other people in my class, but I still didn't make friends with the other people in the school. When I was at Indian Springs, everybody in the school was all together. I was also in Glee Club and we had ninety students in Glee Club out of a school that had a population of two hundred. The people in the Glee Club were very close because we practiced five days a week.
So when you graduated there you automatically had a lot of friends.
Oh sure. You also traveled with them on tours, because we did a fall and spring tour. We went to Europe together, we went to New York and Kansas City, and we went all over the place. It was a very, very cohesive and closely knit organization because we spent so much time together.
Were you still spending time with friends that you made while living in College Hills?
No. No. No, one guy from my neighborhood went to Indian Springs with me,
but he only stayed a year. He was my best friend, he's dead now. The
other people I
Did you end up dating some of them?
I did.
We like to ask about interracial dating, did you see any going on at Indian Springs?
Oh hell no [Laughter]
Really?
No, no that wasn't accepted. Also, you got to remember at the end of the 1960's it wouldn't have been so much the white folks, but other black people would have ostracized you for dating outside your race. When I went to Princeton it was at the end of the revolutionary movement, the black students were still wearing army fatigues and carrying Chairman Mao's quotations around. It was very, very different. We were at sort of the tail end of the revolutionary movement because of the takeovers at Columbia and other schools like that, so interracial dating was not acceptable. You started to see it more my senior year at Princeton and now it's very common, not just at Princeton or Indian Springs, but in public schools as well. It did not go on, it just wasn't accepted.
On either side?
No, no, no. If a black guy had gone out with a white girl and another black girl found out about it, they would have never dated you.
Did you have any sense that the administration at either school was putting some kind of racial—
None at all, we weren't dating when we were at Elyton because I was only thirteen when I got out of there, but at Indian Springs there was no pressure from the administration there. It was a very, very liberal environment, but it just wasn't something that was socially acceptable.
Even on things besides dating like maybe befriending other white students?
Oh sure, I went home to visit some of the kids that went to school with me. I was friends with them and still am to this day. As to whether or not I would have dated their sister? No. I had one bad experience involving interracial dating in Indian Springs. We had gone to Martinsville, Virginia to sing in a high school there, it was an all white school. I met some girls there that were in their choir. They put us up, when we would travel to these different places the communities where we would sing, either the churches or the schools would try and get parents to house us so that we wouldn't have to get hotels. We stayed with some family there in Martinsville, Virginia and I met a girl from that high school who was in their choir who was white, and we talked and stuff. Then their choir came down here the next year to sing in Birmingham and we hosted them at Indian Springs. We started talking, I mean we couldn't really date because we were living in different states. I remember one of the guys in the choir telling me that—and I had considered him to be my friend until this incident, he thought that it was a bad idea for me to be talking to her. I was really, really surprised by that because I thought he was cool and I did not expect him to have that reaction.
Just because you talked to her too often?
Well, he saw me with her when they came to our campus. She was a very attractive girl, and he remembered her.
So after that you didn't talk much with him anymore?
No, no, sure didn't. Haven't really spoken to him since that happened and that's been thirty five years ago now. Yeah, some things don't change. The acceptability of . . . I'll give you an interesting statistic. The last statistic that I saw on interracial marriages in the United States, ninety percent of them the man was black. So when it becomes really accepted, then it will be relatively even. It won't be black men dating white women, it'll be black people dating white people and marrying white people.
You know, we're not there yet.
No we're not there yet. There are certain cities in the United States that are more favorable for interracial relationships and people know that and they move there. I have a couple of friends that are an interracial couple, they moved to Seattle from Texas because they are more accepted there. Denver is a city where interracial couples are accepted, so a lot of people that date or married interracially move there for that reason. The thing about interracial dating is that when you have kids, your kids really catch it. I have a real good friend here in Birmingham, who is a woman who is the product of an interracial marriage. She caught hell growing up, because she grew up in South Central Los Angeles and her mother was the only white person that she said lived in Compton. She went to three or four high schools because of the problems that she had being accepted. She was neither white nor black, and I can imagine what it must have been like growing up in South Central Los Angeles in the late 1960's and early 1970's, with a black daddy and blue eyes.
Yeah, could be kind of tough growing up in South Central any way. Did anybody do things that surprised you favorably? Like you thought they might be racist?
Not really at Indian Springs. I talked to you about the experience at Elyton with my teacher, but I didn't even find that out until years later. Indian Springs was a very, very different environment because it was so controlled. There were eighty students that lived on campus, we lived in the dorms, and we had teachers that lived in the dorm circle. We used to go over to there house to study after school. Like I said, we wore pajamas to class, so it was a very, very unrealistic environment.
How much connection and relationship do you think it takes for people to not have to worry about prejudice?
I think it needs to be more than just school. I think it needs to be
through religious institutions and through other social related
organizations, because socially to a much greater degree than we are in
schools . . . because schools can be controlled; you can pass a law that
says that schools have to be integrated. You can't pass a law that says
a church has to be integrated. The saying is that the most segregated
time in Alabama is Sunday morning. So, the overwhelming majority of
churches in this state are still all white and all black. You go to some
mixed race churches where it will be predominantly white with a few
blacks and Asians or Hispanics, or predominantly black with a few whites
or Asians or Hispanics. The majority of churches in this state are all
white or all black. You can't enforce that, there is no way you can pass
a law that says a church has to have white members or has to have black
members. Other social organizations; country clubs—Shoal Creek is a
perfect example. When the PGA tour was playing here, people protested it
because Shoal Creek was a country club that didn't have any black
So in your case, schooling helped you to achieve that.
Sure because I know those folks, because I went to school with them.
What do you think could have been done differently to help people who weren't in gifted programs to have that sort of experience?
Interracial athletics. Up until 1969 I think it was against the law for
black and white students to participate in interscholastic high school
athletics in this state. They had a black high school football
championship, they had black high school championship and they had a
white high school football championship and a white high school
basketball championship. It was just in either 1968 or 1969 that there
was ever a game between two of these segregated schools. It was when
Banks High School played Parker, they beat them like fifty five to
three, down at Legion Field. Beat the tar out of them. They had better
coaches, better facilities and better equipment. The black schools got
used books, they got the football helmets the whites had used already,
they got the [Phone rings.]
With my twenty year old, as she grew older I let her watch "Roots." What
I didn't want to do is to convey bitterness because it's difficult to
talk about things that have happened to you without sounding bitter. In
an hour and a half interview you can get a better sense of me as a
person because of all of the things we have talked about, the good and
the bad. When your child sees something on television about the 1960s or
they see the images of the police dogs and stuff like that and she says,
"Daddy didn't you grow up in Birmingham, did anything like that ever
happen to you?" It's very difficult to talk to them about that in a
balanced manner. It's difficult for a child that grew up in Washington
D.C.—because my older daughter grew up in Washington D.C., it's
difficult for her to come here and see the lack of opportunity and the
obvious racism and class related segregation that occurs here. My
daughter went to Florida A&M, and when she got down
there—Tallahassee is still very segregated; it's like Birmingham, but
it's the state capital of Florida. She's twenty now and she's a graduate
of college and she understands the balance and she's gone to school
there and gone to white private schools and black public schools in her
educational history. So she has a balanced understanding of it and it's
a lot easier to talk to her now. My five and a half year old is tough
sometimes. She's in a summer camp now where she is the only black girl.
Last week, she was in another summer camp where there were two blacks
there and one of the white girls there wouldn't let her play a little
game they were playing. They said, "We don't want to play with you
because you're brown." That's difficult to explain to her, and I have to
kind of do it because her mother is West Indian. She didn't encounter
those
Does she have any sense of racial prejudice at all?
I don't know that she sees it as race, she associates it with color. We have people in my family that look like they are East Indian and we have people that are darker than I am, particularly on her mother's side. So, when a child says "you're brown," she doesn't think of that as ethnicity, she thinks of it as discrimination because of skin color. I don't know if I'm being clear about that, but there is a difference. If an African American with a light complexion was there with her she wouldn't expect them to be treated the way she was treated. The thing that was weird about the South was that if you have one drop of black blood you're black. People who have blue eyes and straight hair are black, like in New Orleans. In New Orleans they had quadroons and octoroons. When I talked to my twenty year old about that she said, "They have what?" Yeah, you were mulatto which is half white and half black, you were quadroon which was one black relative, one white relative of your grandparents, you were octoroon—it's just weird the things we came up with to deal with that stuff.
One black grandparent is quadroon —
Is that quadroon? Because you have four grandparents.
If I have one great grandparent who's black —
Okay, then you are octoroon. That's weird that we came up with these things. In Alabama, if you have one drop of black blood you are black.
Still?
Still. Up until the last census people didn't have the opportunity to put biracial, even the respondents of the census, even on their tax returns. I've had people come in and talk to me complaining that their kids went to school and they had to be either white or black. She's like, my child has one white parent and one Hispanic parent or one black parent and one Hispanic parent, why do they have to put down black? That's like saying they don't have a white parent. I never thought of it as a big deal because to me everybody here that wasn't white was black, because we didn't have any Asians or Hispanics when I was growing up. The first Asian person I met was when I was a junior in high school, it was a Korean kid who came here and went to Indian Springs. His name was Jun Kim, and he was the first Asian that I ever knew personally. I never knew a Hispanic person until I went to Princeton. It was odd to me because the first Hispanic I met was Puerto Rican, and he was as dark as I am with nappy hair. He considered himself to be Hispanic, his name was Sergio Sotamundo, and he looked just like me!
Yes, the census is still trying to figure out how to make that cultural distinction and also make a race distinction.
Hispanic is not an ethnicity, all it means is that you come from a country that speaks Spanish.
It has a cultural—
That's like calling me English, because we speak English here, it doesn't make any sense. A guy that works here is a good friend of mine and he's Puerto Rican, so I asked him what do you call people who are from Guatemala, other than "Guatemalan." It seems to me that a Guatemalan doesn't have anything more in common with a person from Madrid than I do with a white person from Fairfield. That just doesn't make any sense. Why are they grouped together? Guatemalans and Hondurans tend to be mestizo, they're more Mayan than they are related to white folks from Madrid. Many of them don't even speak Spanish! That's the thing about it, a lot of the people that are grouped into the Hispanic category don't even speak Spanish.
They have nothing in common.
They don't have anything in common! They speak Indian dialects, or Mexicali is one for instance. I run into that all the time in court because I have a lot of clients now that are not English speaking. Some of them are Spanish speaking and some of them are not, but they are called Hispanic even if they don't speak Spanish.
END OF INTERVIEW