Some of My Best Friends Are Black by Tanner Colby Page A

Catholic school downtown, John Carroll, which was about 20 percent black. And then there was Ramsay, Birmingham’s public magnet school. At about 75 percent black, Ramsay still drew the best white students that hadn’t left and also skimmed the top black students from across the city.
    “Ramsay was the cream of the crop as far as middle-class black people were concerned,” Tycely says. “They preferred it because it was not aschool that was open to
all
black people. It was a magnet. It was the ‘safe’ school, and there was still some level of exclusiveness. You had to go through testing or know someone who knew someone on the school board to get in there. Their academics were said to be comparable to the suburbs. That’s debatable, but that was the perception.”
    Debatable or not, academics were hardly the point. If Tycely’s parents had been concerned only with her grades, Ramsay would have been more than fine. But Jerona and Tyrone Williams believed that book smarts alone wouldn’t take their children very far. They needed to be acculturated in the social mores of the country that they lived in—and Tycely didn’t just live in black America. She lived in America. Not only did the Williamses send her to Vestavia, they also didn’t let her join all-black social groups like Jack and Jill. With the exception of church, which would be the hub of Tycely’s social life outside of school, her parents threw her into the deep end of the pool with the white kids and told her she had to learn how to swim.
    “When you’re forced to live in both worlds as a black person,” Tycely says, “it makes you very much aware of things. You’ve been through the revolving door. You see where the power really lies and how the world really works. And the real world requires a cultural education that black middle-class society alone can’t give you. To her credit, my mother always told us, ‘You
have
to have a broader exposure. You
have
to be comfortable in different settings.’
    “But a lot of my black friends were like, ‘Why do you go to
Vestavia
? Why can’t you do Jack and Jill?’ It was this perception thing where black people felt, ‘You think you’re better than us.’ It was never really spoken, but you could just tell from tone, from looks, from questions. But my mother’s hesitation with all of these blacks-only affinity groups wasn’t that she felt they were subpar or that they weren’t teaching good values, but it was the indirect lesson that was taught: that blacks stay with blacks and whites stay with whites. She was just not an advocate of that.”
    But many of Birmingham’s black parents did advocate that, as was their prerogative. They’d fought for the freedom to choose, after all. Unfortunately, staying on the black side of town has its drawbacks—most of the money and the jobs are over on the white side, for starters. With thecity’s commercial and residential tax base flown to the suburbs, and with the city governed more by racial politics than by sound policy, Birmingham sank like a rock.
    The school system went down with it. Ramsay and a couple of the other magnet programs still post not-horrible results, but because those schools are skimming off the best of what’s left, most of the city schools have followed the same downward spiral as Woodlawn. Once as cozy and stable as Vestavia Hills, Woodlawn today betrays (almost) no trace of its white past. The Sigma Tau Beach Beauties are long gone. The academics are appalling, and the dropout rate is staggering. A bank of security monitors dominates the front office, keeping a closed-captioned eye on the violent assaults that seem to break out at random. Legend has it that by the 1990s the bathrooms at Woodlawn were so terrible that teachers would go across the street to McDonald’s to use the ones over there. The school has since been renovated. Not that you can tell.
    And so, like many troubled metropolitan areas, Birmingham now has black