Why Johnny Can't Integrate

From Birmingham, Alabama, to Malibu, California, rich communities are bringing back school segregation. Did you forget that one of the three R’s is ‘racism’?

- Alexander Nazaryan

To the west, railroad tracks snaked between warehouses, vestiges of boom times, when Birmingham was known as “the Pittsburgh of the South.” On the horizon rose Red Mountain, a slight green ridge. Clustered on the other side of its hump, outside the city limits, are some of the wealthiest suburbs in Alabama: Mountain Brook, Vestavia Hills, Hoover and Homewood. They have the best schools in the state, and although Alabama has some of the worst schools in the nation, those suburbs frequently make it onto national best-schools lists. Many medical center faculty members live in these “over the mountain” suburbs, as do older Southern families.

Clemon did not go to school over the mountain. His grandparents were sharecroppers in Noxubee County, Mississippi. His parents moved to Alabama, where his mother worked as a domestic for a white Birmingham family, while his father was a bricklayer’s helper. He went to the Dolomite Colored Elementary School. “We had outside privies,” he remembered over lunch at City Club Birmingham. Other than the servers, he was the only black person in the room. At one point, two white men came over, and one of them greeted “the judge.” The other asked if the judge was famous, and the first one said yes, he was.

Clemon later went to Miles College, right outside Birmingham, and became involved in the civil rights movement, working with Martin Luther King Jr. He jokingly recalled unfavorable coverage on the movement from Newsweek back then. When I mentioned that I hoped to do research at the Birmingham Public Library, Clemon chuckled. “I desegregated that,” he said.