Both Sides Now: The Story of School Desegregation’s Graduates

7. More Diverse Than My Current Life

236 SEVEN More Diverse Than My Current Life Henry Delane was born and raised in Topeka, Kansas, where his family had been part of the black community for generations. Like his father and uncle and cousin before him, Henry went to Topeka High School. But unlike prior generations of Delanes, Henry experienced a Topeka public school system that was considerably more desegregated , both across and within school buildings, even though it still had a long way to go to achieve meaningful integration. In the fall of 1977 Henry entered Topeka High School, which was grades 10–12 at the time, with a sense of pride. He said, “I was excited about just being there.” He had grown up attending Topeka High football and basketball games and band concerts with his father and felt familiar with the school. He had been to both all-black and predominantly white elementary and junior high schools, so the racial makeup of Topeka High at that time— 69 percent white, 20 percent black, 8 percent Latino, and the rest a mixture of American Indian and Asian—did not faze him. Still, Henry, like many of his classmates, noted that he had been in “awe” of the school building itself. As we noted in chapter 2, Topeka High is a beautiful Gothic structure built in 1931 and thought to be the first million-dollar high school in the United States. It resembles a New England college or prep school campus and thus seems a bit out of place at the center of Topeka, the Kansas state capital, where drab government buildings predominate. Chapter 07 10/1/08 12:02 PM Page 236 The class of 1980 arrived on the doorstep of this high school during a relatively quiet era in its history. The civil rights movement and the ensuing protests for equal rights had led to unrest in the school district from the late 1960s through the mid-1970s, but as we noted in chapter 3, by the time Henry and his classmates got to Topeka High the turbulence had subsided . Educators were worn down. Some, though not most, of the changes that students of color had fought for had occurred, and Henry noted that in the late seventies students were already becoming more apathetic. Still, Henry resented that the teachers and administrators did not discuss race or incorporate different racial perspectives into the curriculum. Henry recalled sitting through upper-level history classes, where he was one of only two or three blacks, and hearing little about African American history—not even the landmark Brown decision that some would argue should have been central to the study of the history of Topeka and Kansas. He recalled, “We never talked about, you know, accomplishments of . . . blacks in history. . . . But you sure as hell would talk about George Washington.” His parents inspired him to explore his own history more. He remembered that whenever he had a research paper for which he could choose his topic, he would write about an African American such as Frederick Douglass. Ironically, he said, since he was one of the few blacks in his upper-track classes, his perspective was not seen as threatening: “I don’t think that . . . it really bothered [the teachers], just because I was a minority amongst a majority.” He and other black students were sometimes intimidated in the predominantly white high-level classes. “You get some of the top white students , and they [would] just yak, yak, yak,” he said, while the black students would not say very much. He added that he thinks the black students were afraid that it would seem like “we didn’t know and that we were stupid” if they tried to speak up more. He also recalled that the African American students were less involved in activities and in student government leadership, in part because the white students had a greater voice and were more connected to the process. But Henry was popular. He had friends of all races, he said, and was a “very upfront person” who did not fake anything. He m o r e d i v e r s e t h a n m y c u r r e n t l i f e 237 Chapter 07 10/1/08 12:02 PM Page 237 was elected a member of the Homecoming Court and participated in two bands, the Spanish Club, football, basketball...