One day last week, an article in the paper on local graduation exercises reminded me that the 52nd anniversary of my own graduation from Robert E. Lee High School in Montgomery had recently passed without notice or fanfare. I was moved to take my yearbook from the shelf, and leaf through it, barely recognizing the people in the photographs, especially the skinny kid with a crew-cut and heavy eyebrows that had my name typed underneath his picture. When a 21st century reader opens the 1960 Lee yearbook, one thing that stands out immediately is that we, students and faculty, were exclusively, totally, without exception, white. It was four years later that the school had its first African-American teachers, and another year before the first tiny cadre of black students showed up under the "Freedom of Choice" segregation plan. It was not until 1970 that the patience of the Federal courts finally ran out and the school enrollment became about 35% black.
In 1960, Montgomery maintained four high schools: Robert E. Lee and Sidney Lanier were 100% white, while Booker T. Washington and George Washington Carver were totally black schools. The city was inordinately proud of its two white schools, especially their athletic programs. Every Saturday morning during the fall, the Montgomery Advertiser sports section was filled with pictures, stories, and interviews from the Lee and Lanier football games the night before. The players and coaches of the two schools were local celebrities. Booker T. Washington and Carver high schools, on the other hand, were virtually invisible. I'm not even sure that the scores of their games were published, but there were certainly no pictures or feature articles.
My classmates and I were largely unaware of the currents of change that were swirling around us. The Brown v. Board of Education decision was handed down while we were in elementary school, and the historic Montgomery Bus Boycott happened right in front of our eyes while we attended junior high school; but none of that actually had any impact on our daily lives. Like teenagers in all eras and all societies, we were primarily focused on our own hormones and our evolving independence from our parents. We were passionate about extra-curricular activities, sports for many of my friends, social organizations for others, band and chorus for still others; and we were at least peripherally concerned about academics. I believe that our teachers as a group were quite capable, although they tended to be apologists for "The Southern Way of Life" (segregation by race) and fundamentalist Christianity. When I graduated from Lee in 1960, I had a firm foundation in reading and writing skills that has served me well ever since.
We in the Lee High School class of 1960 were racist in a casual, unthinking way, reflecting the attitudes of our parents and the society we lived in. The only black people we came in contact with were domestic servants or other adults in menial jobs such as the waiters at the Morrison's Cafeteria downtown, or the janitors at our school. Every aspect of our lives was segregated - churches, movie theatres, sports teams, parks, truly everything. I can't remember any contact with an African-American person my own age until I was in graduate school. When I received my diploma from Lee in May, 1960, I would have told you that black people were inherently inferior to whites intellectually, and that racial segregation was an appropriate arrangement for Southern society then and for the foreseeable future. With even less real thought, I accepted the teachings of Forest Avenue Methodist Church, where I attended two services every Sunday. I think I knew even then that the main reason I went to church was to be around all the cute girls in our youth group, but go I did, and I sang the hymns and prayed the prayers and listened to the sermons.
My attitudes changed in a slow, often painful process during my undergraduate days at the University of Alabama and during my first few years of teaching. It was impossible for me to live through those turbulent times and retain my arrogant comfort with the prejudices of my youth. During my freshman year at Alabama, in May of 1961, the Freedom Riders came to Montgomery. This incredibly brave group of young people were riding Greyhound buses through the south to test a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision outlawing segregation in lunch counters and waiting rooms serving interstate buses. Their bus was met at the Court Street terminal by an angry mob which reportedly included some off-duty city policemen and Alabama highway patrol officers. This fine group of Alabama patriots savagely beat the riders, sending several to the hospital. Just over two years later,when George Wallace "stood in the schoolhouse door" in June of 1963, I was across the street from Foster Auditorium during the confrontation. I realized that day that Vivian Malone and James Hood had every right to enroll in the University of Alabama, and that Wallace also knew it; but was engaging in cynical political theatre at their expense, aided and abetted by the Kennedy Justice Department. On that awful Friday morning in November when John Kennedy was gunned down in Dallas, I was appalled to see many of my fellow southerners, including members of my extended family, openly rejoicing at his death. My relationship with Forest Avenue Methodist and its doctrines changed forever the Sunday morning I saw three men, long-time members of the church, standing on the front steps with loaded pistols strapped on their belts, self-appointed guardians to "keep the niggers away".
As I turn the pages of my yearbook, I wonder how the attitudes of the other members of the Lee High School Class of 1960 have evolved over the decades since our graduation. I suspect that many of us have at least partially rejected our comfortable sense of white supremacy, and our automatic acceptance of anything printed in a bible or spoken from a pulpit. The South we grew up in has changed with us, moving away from the third-world status of our childhood, shedding some of the ignorance, hatred, and superstition that plagued our early years. The changes have not gone far enough, not nearly far enough; but I do believe that Alabama in 2012 is less racist, and marginally more secular, than it was in 1960. My fervent hope is that my children and grandchildren will see that progress continue and accelerate. I want to believe they will.
Thomas R. Borden Waugh, Alabama June 5, 2012