Some of My Best Friends Are Black by Tanner Colby Read Free Book Online

them that we were not trying to corral their kids so we could bring ’em over here and kill ’em.”
    Eventually, most of the children came, and back at school Ms. Lovoy found herself responsible for two of them. Both girls, and both seniors.One did poorly. She retreated from the unfriendly, unfamiliar environment around her. She fumbled through, barely got out, and went right back to Oxmoor, having gained little from the experience, academically or personally. The other girl did the opposite. If the school’s intimidating atmosphere bothered her, she never let on. She arrived in class every day with confidence and a keen sense of humor, and she was a good student. “She and I had an interesting relationship,” Lovoy says of the second girl. “We always used to pick at each other, tell jokes, have fun. The one thing I’ll always remember is the morning I was standing there with my cup of coffee before class. She scooted up right behind me and she leaned in and said, ‘Don’t you know drinkin’ that stuff’ll make you black?’
    “I
hooted
—I laughed so hard. And I determined then that if she could say that to me, and if she felt comfortable saying that to me, that meant she was going to be okay.”
    Thanks to U. W. Clemon, the doors to Vestavia Hills had been forced open. Soon the next generation of black children would be free to come in, and some of them would do better than okay.

[ 3 ]

Oreo
    In a racial accounting system that leans heavy on the letter of the law, the law is only as good as it’s written. The affirmative action clause mandating that Vestavia hire black teachers, for example, said the school had to meet a 25 percent minority faculty quota. It never said Vestavia had to
maintain
a 25 percent minority faculty quota. At the start of the 1971 school year, the system had hired thirty-six black teachers. With retirement and attrition, by the late 1980s only a handful remained. By the late 1990s, at the high school, there was only one left.
    Jerona Williams was born in 1950 in the hamlet of Elloree, South Carolina. Her father, Raymond J. Anderson, was a bricklayer and a committed civil rights activist. Even in the early 1950s, he was openly registering voters and circulating petitions to integrate the schools, drawing a lot of the wrong kind of attention. One night when Jerona was seven years old, the Ku Klux Klan came over to send them a warning.
    “They put it up right in front of our house,” Jerona says. “They’d come in their white robes and put up the cross, saturate it with gasoline, and burn it. They were talking through a megaphone—they’d call out your names. I remember my daddy coming in and waking me up and lifting me out of bed. He carried me and he took me to the front door and he opened it. I looked out and the cross was burning and the men werestanding there in their hoods. And my daddy held me in his arms and he said, ‘I wanted you to see this so that you know you never have to be afraid, because your daddy will always be here to protect you.’”
    Then he closed the door, put her back to bed, and returned to his business, undeterred. When Jerona was fourteen, Anderson applied for her to attend the town’s all-white high school under the district’s freedom of choice plan. She would soon be the first black student in the history of that school, but her father found himself blacklisted for his efforts. Unable to get work anywhere in South Carolina, he drove back and forth to North Carolina every week to lay brick at Fort Bragg for the federal government, the only employer who would have him. When Jerona finished high school, she enrolled at the historically black South Carolina State College to become a teacher. Still driving to Fort Bragg year after year, her father worked to keep her there—literally worked himself to death, dying of a heart attack when his daughter was only twenty; he wouldn’t see her graduate from college.
    At South Carolina State, Jerona met and