Some of My Best Friends Are Black Read Online Free

to describe the very simple state of being made whole—no longer dual, no longer separate.
    As a slaveholding nation dedicated to the principle that all men are created equal, America built its house on two fundamentally irreconcilable ideas. We’ve been struggling to reach unitary status ever since. The particular chapter of this struggle that pertains to Vestavia Hills began in 1954 with the Supreme Court’s landmark decision of
Brown v. Board of Education
, which nullified the use of segregated facilities for blacks andwhites in public education. Separate but equal was inherently
un
equal, and therefore unjust, said the court in its unanimous reversal of
Plessy v. Ferguson
.
Brown
’s sweeping indictment of segregated schools, however, did nothing to eliminate them. For fifteen years, white school districts kept blacks out by evading and stonewalling, forcing the government to devise a solution. And the solution we came up with was this: the school bus. In the same decade that America put a human being on the moon, our nation’s finest minds could offer no better fix for four hundred years of slavery and segregation. Just some nervous white guy named Shaky in a busted jalopy lurching down and around the mountain with everyone screaming for him to slow the hell down.
    There was a lot of extra weight riding on that bus, too—possibly more than it could bear. With
Brown v. Board
, America had set its eyes on the ultimate prize: social integration, racial equality—unitary status. Many had even dared to dream that this big yellow school bus would take their children to a place where they would be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. Shaky wasn’t just taking these kids to school. He was taking them to the Promised Land. Some of them made it, and some of them didn’t.

[ 2 ]

A Place Apart
    In 2000, the History Book Committee of the Vestavia Hills Historical Society published the city’s authorized biography,
Vestavia Hills, Alabama: A Place Apart
, by Marvin Yeomans Whiting. A handsome, gold-embossed collector’s piece, it was issued to commemorate Vestavia’s fiftieth anniversary. “Commemorate” is the operative word, as you won’t find a whole lot of history going on inside its covers. Not unless you count the history of the men’s garden club or the mayor’s annual prayer breakfast. The book is a whitewash. During the cataclysmic civil rights campaign of 1963, we learn, Vestavia was opening a brand-new swimming pool and Little League field. School busing is given slightly greater coverage, but only in the context of how difficult it was to endure: the city had “survived” court-ordered integration.
    All of this is in keeping with Vestavia’s carefully cultivated image. It’s a town with “good schools,” people say. “A great place to raise a family.” There’s a Chuck E. Cheese anchoring the strip mall and a Protestant church on every corner and the Little League facilities, it must be said, are really quite nice. When I was growing up here in the eighties, it was like living inside a real estate brochure. The actual real estate brochures, the ones that the Realtors here use, present a heartwarming story about how Vestavia’s name comes from a local building modeled after the temple of Vesta, the Roman goddess of hearth and home. Here in Vestavia,they say, “you’ll find that spirit of hearth and home” in your own three-bedroom, split-level slice of the American Dream. Like a lot of what you read in brochures, it’s complete bullshit.
    The real story of Vestavia Hills begins with George Ward, a financier who served as mayor of Birmingham from 1905 to 1909 and as president of the city commission from 1913 to 1917. Birmingham was a steel town. Unique in the agrarian South, it sits up in the Appalachian foothills on some of the richest deposits of iron ore found anywhere in North America. As the city’s industry grew after the Civil War, black