So Near, and So Far
School Bells Ring In Memories of a World Beyond the Trees of A Segregated City

By Wil Haygood
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, August 23, 2007

COLUMBUS, Ohio

For a child, there are few things like the tingly-tense sensation that comes with the ringing of morning school bells. There always seems to be a promise in that speeded-up rhythm, an old sound that elicits the shiver of the new.

But in America the promise of those bells has often been an uneven one, as evidenced by the recent 5 to 4 Supreme Court ruling voiding efforts to keep school integration efforts alive in Seattle and Louisville. Reminders of that history -- albeit in a different tone -- also came with the recent passing of Virginia lawyer Oliver Hill, who fought alongside his friend Thurgood Marshall in cases leading up to the epic 1954 Brown desegregation decision.

These two events got me thinking during a recent trip back home to this Midwestern city, where one can still find so many touchstones from the bygone era of segregation, Northern style.

The East Side has long been the black part of town, kept that way through restrictive real estate practices. When I was a child in the early '60s, Mount Vernon Avenue was a sepia magnet of clothing stores, nightclubs and booster rallies featuring the athletic teams at all-black East High School. Black families like mine would picnic at nearby Franklin Park -- across the street from the high school -- on Sunday afternoons or summer holidays. Convertibles were parked on the angle in the grass. Sweet soul music wafted by. My mother liked Gene Chandler, Smokey Robinson and Jerry Butler. I fished in the nearby lake with a cane pole. I don't remember any white families at Franklin Park.

My aunts and uncles would talk animatedly about going to Mount Vernon Avenue to see national figures such as Robert Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Martin Luther King Jr., who came to talk about escaping poverty and finding the American dream. And it's where riots erupted in 1967, and where the tanks from the nearby National Guard base showed up, looking just like the military machinery in Vietnam that I saw on TV.

Monroe Junior High is four blocks from Mount Vernon Avenue and a half-hour walk to Franklin Park. There was never a car in our family and I walked everywhere. I turned 14 in ninth grade, my first year at Monroe, the all-black junior high, which served as one of the feeder schools to East High.

Sometimes nostalgia about those days rolls off the tongues of folks who were there. Nostalgia is often too honey-colored, but I do remember this: standing outside East High after basketball games, after the great Eddie Ratleff (we called him Eddie Rat) had led his team to yet another victory. They would be state champions. Even in a time of segregation, there was something golden about Eddie Rat, shaking hands with the players on the opposing teams, patting them on the back, telling them to keep their chins up. It was as if he were some kind of ambassador, already knowing he'd will himself from the confines of segregation. After high school, Eddie Rat got clean out of Columbus, went to college in California and had a fine NBA career. But of course not everyone possesses what it takes to will themselves up and away like that.

I don't think any of us at Monroe or East realized how unbalanced the learning situation was then. I do know our backgrounds were similar: poor, single-parent families, many on welfare, clothes grabbed from Goodwill, hominy grits in the morning, vinyl LPs stacked next to cheap stereo systems in the homes and apartments where many of us lived. A lot of lives roped around poverty.

"There was too much to worry about -- fathers in prison, food -- to think about the school situation," says Cynthia Bell, who then lived near my family in public housing and is now a health consultant in Boston.

I remember the thick stand of trees on the edge of Franklin Park, obscuring the view of Nelson Road. I always wondered: What lay beyond those trees? On the other side of that road? What was over there?

One fall day during our first year in high school, Mark, Chin, a couple of other friends and I decided to play hooky and see what lay beyond those trees. The night before, I sweated and worried. Playing hooky could get you a three-day suspension. We decided we'd bolt at 10:30 recess and took off, in a quick jaunt, toward the trees. We couldn't go as fast as we wanted to because of Mark, who had been born with polio, and limped because one leg was shorter than the other. But Mark, who had his Spalding ball cupped under one arm, waved us onward, assuring us he was lagging behind only so he could keep watch, making sure no posse of truant officers was gaining on us.

Finally -- it seemed like it had taken forever -- we were at Nelson Road. Might that car coming toward us be Mr. Simpson, one of the truant officers? Duck. Duck! Now. Duck! Maybe. Maybe not. But: whew.

At last we crossed, and dipped into and beyond a grove of trees.

We were on the other side, inside a lovely expanse called Wolfe Park, where blacks rarely ventured.

I don't think I had ever seen anything so lovely, so green, so cool in the shade. There was a basketball court. And nets on the rims! We proceeded to play and laugh, feeling like adventurers, explorers. Like spies even: We were not supposed to be here. And when we stopped, from exhaustion, we explored some more, walking and gazing around the area. There stood St. Charles High, a prep school on beautifully manicured grounds; there sat houses with tall windows and circular driveways; there sat tennis courts. It was a Columbus we didn't know. We had slipped through an Ozlike curtain, into the neighborhood of Bexley -- fancy, well tended and, to us, somewhat intimidating.

You'd wonder: How do you get to this side of town?

Then came the legal decision that stunned the town fathers: In 1977, U.S. District Judge Robert Duncan, who was appointed to the bench by Richard Nixon, ruled that the Columbus schools had "intentionally aggravated, rather than alleviated" racial segregation. (His decision cited both schools I had attended: Monroe and East.) Ordering the school system to adopt a busing plan, he wrote, "Firm action is needed when the horse won't drink the water." There were appeals, which were lost, and Duncan's ruling went into effect in 1979.

By then I had graduated from college.

It was a momentous decision, and acquaintances of mine were constantly talking about it. In the years to come, the decision would scoop up a boatload of my nieces and nephews.

"It was a great decision," says Carol Tyler, now retired from nonprofit work in the city and whose family operated a popular drugstore on Mount Vernon Avenue.

But Tyler, like others, lamented one visceral reaction to the decision: "There was white flight like you wouldn't believe," she remembers.

As for Judge Duncan, he is now off the bench. He lectures, does some writing. The U.S. Supreme Court's recent 5 to 4 ruling disheartened him. "I was disappointed in the decision but not surprised by it," he says, citing other rulings that have seemed to thwart efforts to redress past inequalities. "Education, at least to me, is best done in a diverse setting."

One of the most pernicious practices in Columbus, he says, was that education officials continued to assign black teachers to black schools, but precious few black teachers to white schools. "In the '60s and '70s, when Columbus experienced meteoric growth, the schools became even more segregated," he says.

The summer between my last year at Monroe and first year at East High, I spent countless hours -- at least after morning chores in our little apartment -- at the nearby Sawyer Recreation Center. It was a 10-minute walk from our apartment. I'd listen to boxers in training thump one another. I'd play basketball, play checkers, hope for a free skateboard. Sometimes I'd just sit in the shade.

I dropped by Sawyer on my recent visit here. Children were all about, some coloring in coloring books. The doors to the center were wide open. Javetta Gray, one of the rec leaders, asked me about the history of the neighborhood.

She might as well have asked me to put on an old vinyl record. I started playing back memories. I told her about our Bolivar Arms housing project, about those awful mornings when we had found out someone had dropped an infant down the garbage chute and we'd watch the ambulance with horror-filled eyes. I told her about my summer jobs: one sweeping out behind the alley of the Macon Bar, which I pointed out in the distance. I told her about digging for red worms on crisp mornings in the nearby stockyards. "Oh. My. God," she said, her hand on her chest. "It's a miracle you got out of here!"

I think she thought I sprang from the pages of Charles Dickens, which I did not. So I flipped the record and told her of other things: how sometimes my Uncle Ira would show up at the front door with a bag of unexpected groceries. How there was nothing like Christmastime in the projects, because there were gallant efforts at decoration, and the teeny light bulbs seemed to glow as big as any in those famous Christmas movies. I told her about the lemon cakes at Brassfield's bakery on Mount Vernon Avenue. And about Eddie Rat. And about how on the eve of going away to college, the principal of East High -- Jack Gibbs was our Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois and Thurgood Marshall all rolled into one -- pointed me to a downtown foundation, which gave me $300, which saved my life at the time.

I stood staring at the children around her. A lot of poverty still; a lot of dreams would be lost, she feared. The children at Javetta Gray's side certainly didn't need any more "intentionally aggravated" turmoil in their lives.

Which doesn't mean the city of Columbus hasn't changed a lot in the intervening years.

The mayor, Michael Coleman, is black, and his popularity cuts widely across racial lines. White flight doubtless harmed the school system, but something else has followed in recent years: black flight. Black families with their bright children are relocating to nearby locales like Reynoldsburg and Westerville.

Before leaving the city, I walked alone through Franklin Park. It's a much prettier place now with a huge greenhouse and exotic flowers to ogle. I found myself a bench inside the park and sat down. The sun was shining. After a while, I glanced over my shoulder, toward Nelson Road. Toward my Ozlike journey of years ago. I thought of my friends, Mark and Chin, of trooping across this very grass, heading for something we had never seen. There was no busing then. Just our legs. And they took us to where our eyes saw something new. Something I never forgot.

Is it too much to want those children around Javetta Gray to see new things? To wish them travels beyond their immediate surroundings -- even if only on a rickety school bus that might deliver them across Nelson Road?

I let time pass while sitting on that park bench. Looking through the trees at the outlines of East High, I thought of the sweet tingling sound of school bells.