Forty years later, I have a very different perspective. I know now that were it not for my school's closing, I wouldn't have learned some important lessons as early as I did about race relations and public education.
Ullman was closed in 1970 as part of the integration of the black and white schools in Birmingham, Ala. Seven years after the marches led by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the city's schools were still segregated. Or rather they were mostly segregated. There were a handful of black students at some white schools, including Erskine Ramsay High, which is where I was assigned after Ullman closed.
Ramsay went from being almost exclusively white to about 50-50 black and white. Talk about culture shock. The biggest surprise I had was seeing that not all white kids were like Wally and Beaver Cleaver or other TV characters. Just like black teens, some white kids at Ramsay were in gangs, smoked cigarettes, drank liquor, took drugs, and got pregnant.
Despite the daily discrimination our parents and teachers endured, they tried to teach us that everyone is equal under God. But those lessons didn't resonate until I saw for myself that there was no difference between whites and blacks. Some are good, some are bad - and no one is always either.
The next biggest surprise I got at Ramsay was learning that the education I had been receiving at my separate-but-unequal black school was inferior. I gained an even greater appreciation for students I knew who had graduated from Ullman and were doing well at top colleges across the country.
