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

flight. Black families are deserting the district faster than whites did in the 1960s, transferring to county schools, moving to black suburbs on the north side, and, finally, migrating Over the Mountain. And
that
is where the story of federally mandated integration in the suburbs of the most segregated city in America takes a very interesting turn. About ten years ago, a sizable contingent of Birmingham’s black flight exodus chose a peculiar destination as their new home. They moved to Oxmoor.
    “It’s such a prominent community now,” U. W. Clemon says of the former industrial scrapyard. “Some developers went in and built houses in that area for blacks and sold them on the very winning point that, thanks to the special zone created by the government desegregation plan, if you buy a house there your kids can go to school in Vestavia Hills.”

    The 1970 desegregation order for Vestavia Hills said only that the school was responsible for “those who live outside the city limits between Wenonah and Oxmoor Road.” The court never stipulated
who
or
what
could be inside that footprint.
    For decades, suburban sprawl rolled out
around
the Oxmoor Valley,encircling it, built to maximum capacity on all sides. The valley itself remained empty, a vacant parcel of Appalachian bottomland seven times the size of New York’s Central Park, smack in the middle of the largest metropolitan area in the state of Alabama. If the people of Oxmoor remained marooned in the past, it’s probably because virtually every one of the seven thousand acres around them was owned by U.S. Steel, which for years was just sitting on it.
    In 1988, U.S. Steel and the city of Birmingham embarked on a bold “public-private partnership.” Birmingham annexed the land into the city. Taxpayers provided the capital for infrastructure improvements like roads and sewerage, thus upping the value of the land many times. Then U.S. Steel started selling. Parcel by parcel. Golf resorts, shopping centers, office parks. And, of course, high-end residential. One particularly canny developer looked at the area “between Wenonah and Oxmoor Road” and saw that it offered black home buyers something they couldn’t get anywhere else: access to Vestavia schools without paying Vestavia property taxes—and without the hassle of actually living with white people in Vestavia.
    So that developer bought up land in the busing zone and started building. He went in right across the street from the old Depression-era shanties and built big $300,000 and $400,000 homes. Then he went out to the street and put up a big sign that read: VESTAVIA HILLS SCHOOL DISTRICT . People couldn’t buy them fast enough. This new and improved Oxmoor was exactly what many in the black middle class had dreamed of: nice homes with good schools, yet situated in a space that was still culturally theirs. It offered what nonintegrationists had always said was black America’s due: equal access to public services without the loss of their own community. It seemed too good to be true, and it was.
    “They built way too many houses,” Clemon explains.
    By the early 2000s, rows of spec homes were popping up inside the Oxmoor busing zone. Word began circulating of plans for a large-scale apartment complex. All of this meant dozens of new students entering the school system with no increase in tax revenue to pay for the increased demand on services. It had been one thing for Vestavia to shoulder those costs for the low-income families of Oxmoor. It was quite another to doso for people buying houses at or above the price of homes inside the district. Vestavia called foul. * “And they were right,” Clemon says. “I completely agreed with the people in Vestavia.”
    The courts agreed, too. On December 13, 2007, the federal desegregation order against the city was rescinded. In the terms of the settlement, every child currently enrolled—and the siblings of every child currently enrolled—can attend Vestavia