“What, Me Worry?‘”

Huffman High School’s early years may have been no different from those of 10,000 other high schools across the country. We’d like to think ours was unique, though.

Why? For one thing, it was brand-new while we were there. Our school, uniquely, was the last bastion of White flight inside the Birmingham City School system. (More on that later.) Last, everything was so new, and we were helping build traditions that still reverberate there.

As we established our new lives as high school students, Birmingham was still reverberating from so much racial tension–primarily from that watershed year, 1963. Over half a century later, we still don’t understand why we were so sheltered from those infamous events. Our only collective memory is that our parents and teachers just didn’t talk about that stuff.

We don’t recall any overt racial incidents during those years. Black students were few and far between, but by the time we graduated, the faculty was integrated to a court-ordered 50%. Our MO was to exploit the weak teachers regardless of race. We were good at it. And we were scared of the disciplinarians, whether black or white!