About racial inequalities in education. This is live coverage of the southern festival of books. Good afternoon and welcome to the session. The two different stories of the integration process. Its triumphs and failures and to all of you at home watching we say welcome as well. As wel the audience will enjoyoy the talks and will have questions that we are going to save until the end this afternoon. Both of these deal with education. We take a lot of pride in our history. We see ourselves as a progressive Southern City and we also like to present the story as almost a triumphant story. We didnt have the violence of other southern cities and weve chosen to craft that narrative and forget some of the painful parts of the story and we will hear some of the painful parts as well as the successes. Our presenters today hes written a book about the integration of athletics at vanderbilt and it has aof natio tremendous amount i know that you will enjoy his presentationo from another who crossed over into vanderbilt to be the first on the Basketball Team. He will be followed by Hans Lee Erickson has a fine book called making the unequal metropolis and this is the integration of metro Public Schools but much more than that. In her book you see nashville pursuing urban renewal money after world war ii the model cities programs and how all of this ultimately ties togetherge into our educational system sofi andrew is going to go first and then he will tell you about the story and vanderbilt. It is an honor to be on thebh panel. You talked about how nashville likes to celebrate without talking about the pain it took to get there. The subject of mine is phrased is reconciliation without the truth is just acting and people often want to get to the reconciliation part without thee hard work that it takes to get there so this year youve seen a lot of this celebration. My book is being read with thee entire class and an engineering scholarship and a courage award in the Athletic Department so if you look at what is happening today its a feelgood story that would work out the way everybody planned but that isnh how it happened so learning the truth of how it came together is what i try to do in this book and im happy to be on a panel thats about civil rights. It was important for me to tell the story of the context and the place that. Wallace operated and thats the deep south in a tumultuous period in history and its not about the scores of games or statistics, its about what it takes to be a pioneer and it is a legitimate civil rights story considering he started in 1964 in brown v. Board and was around nfl. Age to see what the College Students were doing heel entered the week after Martin Luther king i have a dream speech and defend 64 and 65. He will say he could feel the country changing that there was a sense of momentum for him and members of his graduating class been that happened then mary and he needed to be prepared to take advantage of these opportunities and he was. He was the starting center on a team that won the championships ichampionships intennessee incle and 66 but more importantly than that he was the valedictorian of his class and he was into math and science and played the trumpet, hes learned karate, sings opera, all of his older sisters went to college and this is on the incomes. Education was important in their home. He saw basketball as a means to an end and a ticket out of jim u crow south so his goal was to get a scholarship in the midwest and he went on recruiting trips to places like wisconsin, michigan and he was even recruited at ucla and this was his whole dream is to get a scholarship to the north but unfortunately he saw the ugly underside of College Sports that still exist and on a lot of the trips he was told heres yourr car come here some cash when you come to school here and you dont need to worry about going to class. He was an engineer but i considered him a poet at heart. He wasnt going to leave the deep south for his athletic ability and one of these better campuses. So at that point he began to take vanderbilt seriously even though he grew up just a couple miles from the campus they were segregated until 64. He would have been excluded most of his life it goes back to the same settings. They were leading the nonviolent protests at the lunch counters and when the administration learned it was one of their own students doing this they expelled him from the university so this is at the time they wert going to become one of the stronger universities and the Media Attention that came was as you could imagine very negative so it was an embarrassing moment on the National Stage so a newge chancellor was brought in was a much more progressive figure at the time and he spoke often about race being the central issue and his daughter was a music professor told me her dad was also a big sports fan. Pr so he understood the role of sports plays and he knew if he made a move people would Pay Attention so he called the coach into his office and said you can recruit a black player and i would like you to so you had the valedictorian star player, the obvious choice and the only question was would he accept the assignment and face these road trips just a couple years after all the famous encounters that you see. So i spent eight years working on this book the first four on research and durin during that l fouryear stretch, the now professor in washington, d. C. Flew down to nashville and we spent the day just driving around town looking at the parks he played in and are one point we were over by the fact i thate this uppity and i appreciate all of you being here instead of at the titans game. He said to pull the car over here i want you to see these and we looked at the rocks and treea and thats all it was. He said thats the rocks that i prayed on. So that was cool to see thesat actual rock that he sat on so he makes the decision to come too vanderbilt and today he has a phrase you can be treated well, treated poorly or not treated at all. Id never heard that before but its a profound way to look at life. So from the beginning he experienced all three treatmen treatments, one including the chancellor and the chaplain at the university that has univerl group of black students but for the most part he experienced tha other type right from the beginning so h since he arrivedn campus about a month early just to move into his dorm and get acclimated and meet people. He wanted to get a little of a head start in on one of the trips, the name star showed him around campus and said heres the church of christ where you should go to church. He said growing up in nashville he never would have thought of walking through the doors of a white church but this is what being a pioneer was all about soap or three sundays in august he walked in, sat in the backin and was eager left alone or ignored depending how you want to look at it and the fourth sunday he is pulled aside by some Church Members and theyey said you cant keep coming to the church, some say they will write us out of there though. You have to leave right now. This is before hes taken his first class hes expelled andnd his best friend followed. To vanderbilt and his first day of class the teacher says i see they let the nword in. On the Basketball Team he wasnt treated very well either. They canceled rather than played against the team so its not until his sophomore year heye becomes the first to play and the first half of the game hes hit in the nose, cant see out of one eye. They dont even whistle to stop the gam game so it isnt until y come out on the court and as they walked into the vanderbilt locker room the crowd cheers that he has been injured and he spit on when he walks back. They assist him with ice packs and a half timeclock the rest of the players and Coaching Staff walk out to the court before the warm warmup. They leave him alone in the locker room knowing that he will have to walk back out where all of these people harassing and are waiting on him. What would have been an ordinary walk back was a long and hellish trauma for him and when asked about the approach to road trips in general he said when he looked at the schedule each year and knew he was traveling to mississippi and Mississippi State he looked at the schedule with a sense of dread and would imagine whats the worst that can happen to me on one of these trips and in his mind it was that he would be shot and killed another one of these towns were on the court and yet he still had the courage to persevere and try to play like anybody else. But he said theres three types of treatment being treated well, poorly or not at all it was the third way not being treated at all that was the most difficult. It wasnt a verbal abuse but defends of isolation that was the most difficult for him and this is the time when do greekgd system dominated the sociald scene. To those. There was no student center. You would walk in and she would tell me as she looked around there were no other students. You could walk into the biology lab and who ever sat next to you became your lab partner but what if no one sat next to you. There is a feeling of isolation it deprived him of humanity. But he didnt quit. Growing up he had been a student of sports history and read a lot about Jackie Robinson said he would ask himself what would Jackie Robinson do in this situation and that was to not quit. His mom told him to put on the full armor of god and that is what will protect you in these circumstances that he doesnt quite and his mother passes away of cancer before his senior year and he dedicates the last game of his career to his mom and he plays the game of his life. He has about as many as they team might get and he saves the best for last. It was a slam dunk in the middle of the game and that doesnt sound very noteworthy except it was outlawed in College Basketball at the time and i have a whole chapter about the undertone of this but she saved it for the last minute and said growing up in segregatedand he v nashville over segregation laws that are unjust and there has been no dunking rule so this was his form of protest on the way out. So he gets a standing ovation and theres a lot ofsi significance and at that moment he is more popular in this townd than hes ever been and if there is every movie made about this book which i hope there will be, that would probably be the triumphant scene. But he didn didnt let it stop. He had this feeling in the pit of his stomach when he walked off the court that they were too eager to want to wrap up the story. Even though there were no other players coming along behind him and he only played against one in their entire careers with this rules were not really jumping on board he said he had an obligation to the people that would come behind him to tell the truth about his experience had been like so even though hed been this valedictorian and engineering graduate he ended up setting himself up as a Hometown Hero for a bright career in his hometown he said he understood he was writing his ticket out of town and it was all over in nashville and unfortunately he was right. I interviewed the reporter thatd wrote this article about him and he told me the phones rang off the hook when it ran on the front page where he talked about being kicked out of the churchth and the way the day addressed his best friend. And they were calling to cancel their subscriptions to the newspaper saying he was ungrateful and wishing him good riddance out of town so. Graduates and is adopted by the 70 sixers come he goes to philadelphia and he has never lived here again but he goes on to a successful career. S in the he served six years in the National Guard and he is an attorney for the Justice Department for about seven years and has now been a professor of law at American University in washington, d. C. And when the book came out, the first event we did together was at politics and prose. It was a very warm and welcoming crowd the next day we were flying down to nashville and he said we are going into a hot environment in nashville and he didnt mean it by any good sense of the word. So we had our fingers crossed and he did an event at the Downtown Library had 400 people showed up. Afterwards there was a long line of people. I had a chance to watch this interaction. It was surprising and touching and emotional. People came up crying with bloodshot eyes as if they had been crying. They were saying things like i wish that i had been paying attention to what you were going through at the time. Een ther i wish i had been there for you. You are a hero please forgive me. For me to see that was very rewarding and over the last year or so since the buck came out, that sentiment has been relayed more often and often and it sparked a conversation aboutar,s race at vanderbilt which is pretty cool to see. The difference between the way that he was perceived when he gave that interview and how he is perceived now he said het wa suspected people wouldnt want to hear what he had to say. He had this hope people would understand so now its like all the people hes been waiting for the last 50 years. Thank you very much. [applause] good afternoon. Its a pleasure to be here andl im thankful for the southern a festival of books for inviting me and i am also grateful for you choosing to spend your saturday with us. Someday. N [laughter] the story is powerful in the way that americans often are. They help us think about the different kind of interactions w with students in the past andulh adult in nashville today that capture a lot of feelings of justice or injustice so what i want to do is pick up on some of those individual stories but also try to look more broadly and think about not only the individual actions of the policy choices in politics that condition a lot of those interactions. Vi the national desegregation story offers many powerful stories for example, in 1957 she held her fathers hand as she walked to school for the first time. She walked to school as a young black girl going to a school and through a crowd of white protesters she described as not being afraid because she had her fathers hand and at a different school, grace mckinley led her daughter and a friend through the same crowd. After the night before pressing and buying out his close very carefully. We should recognize and appreciate and applaud challenging the regime of segregation. They took a really important step in moving beyond that regime but if we start with only those children, we are going to miss a lot about what created the conditions they confronted. In nashville as most of the a country segregation resulted from a very powerful andation. Robustly, that created extensive discriminatory housing policy. Who got mortgages to live in what place with what kind of federal subsidy. It was in a lot of ways as ws another hiscribed it, a centrifuge easing their movement in that respect. The centrifuge operated not only because they were denied access to those that because the Public Housing focus on concentrating them in the segregateded neighborhoods. These are policy choices that reinforced the discrimination and other aspects that we have to recognize them as policy choices that were consequential. And schools were not separate from the making of this. They were in fact and we can see this really well in nashville part of the way people thought about making a segregated metropolis. The commission to find a neighborhood around the existence of a school and thought about segregation both in relation to each other so its not just that segregated schools like the ones they were trying to challenge resulted from housing policies that schools followed. Owed. Instead they had been part of making that segregated space, and additionally there were ample ways that this was in the 1950s were deciding toactively s actively segregate children. Boxing is one of the first examples of that act. You are likely to ride a bus for the purpose of segregation beyond closer segregated schools that the city or the county was assigning you. Other decisions like the shape of the school zones were like reinforced segregation as well. So these are the names of children that we need to keep in mind in the recognize their courage in doing this work. But what they were up against was this interconnected web ofie policies. That is a lot to ask sixyearolds and their parents to challenge. So although we are talking about the 1950s, we are talking about a lot of the structures that still shape american is, for ty today. For example its an important part of the story of how it comes to be that the average american white family has a wealth of more than 150,000 whereas the average africanamerican family is less than 10,000. So choices that we made 60 years ago have really a present impact to this day and when you think of the National City where the highway runs into Public Housing sits you can see other decisions that shape the landscape that matter very much today. Hi so there is nothing distant about this and i would assertac there is Nothing National either in its historical form or present form. We can identify the causes both historically and in the present day. Shifting to the later phase of the story was 1954 when thee it supreme court. It was a part of a consequential move towards the desegregation but it turned out to be very gradual and more than a dozen years after they began to desegregate the vast majority of students that the vast majority that attend, so that initial form proved to have limited impact for most children. Nashville moved into its next stage that began requiring busing across neighborhood lines and sends under the pressure of the court order the schools became the statistically the segregated schools in theools ih country from 1971 to roughly 98. We can see this through the eyes of another student. In 1971 he was a second grader that road to nashville and also had a first day of school story. He remembered being a seven or 8yearold on the bus and seeing people at the school when he arrived and he remembered thinking its a parade. They are welcoming me to school. When he realized what was on the sign she realized it was a protest rather than a parade but over the course of the next ten years when he moved through various schools he felt he had a