This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Feb. 9, 2010 - I entered Frank P. Tillman elementary school in Kirkwood in 1954, the first year that the Kirkwood public schools desegregated. That didn't mean there were any black students. There weren't.
Kirkwood was desegregating not because it chose to, but because it was the law of the land. Before Brown vs. Board of Education was announced that spring, Kirkwood had been fighting a group of black parents who had gone to federal court to force desegregation. After Brown, a federal court ordered Kirkwood desegregated.
Kirkwood's segregated past
Kirkwood didn't have an especially enlightened history educating black children. After all, Missouri entered the union as a slave state as part of the Missouri Compromise. Kirkwood residents owned slaves before the Civil War. Later, in 1908, Kirkwood agreed to set up a school for white residents of Meacham Park but said it couldn't afford one for blacks.
For years, black students had to cross railroad tracks and travel across much of Kirkwood to get to their segregated school, Booker T. Washington School. Black high school students rode public buses to Sumner in St. Louis, but Kirkwood children often got sent home because the district hadn't paid their tuition.
That era of segregated schools ended the day my mother dropped me at Tillman. David Holley, the current principal of Kirkwood High School, was in my elementary school class, and we played Khoury League baseball together. Franklin S. McCallie, his predecessor as principal, was still living in the South and just coming to the realization that he was a racist. Charles Lee "Cookie" Thornton would be born the following year.
In the 55 years since that first day of school, I have spent most of my life in Kirkwood and much of it writing about race. So, when I heard on the evening of Feb. 7, 2008 that Thornton had murdered five officials at City Hall and gravely wounded my friend, Mayor Mike Swoboda, I had to report the story — even though I had retired from the Post-Dispatch.
At noon the day after the shootings, hundreds of people from Kirkwood's mostly white neighborhoods jammed into the Methodist and Presbyterian churches in the town center. At the same time, two miles away, about 100 people, white and black, crammed into a room in the old Turner School in Meacham Park where black students once attended segregated classrooms. Segregation even in grieving. I went to the Meacham Park meeting.
Most news accounts of the meeting featured a quote from Ben Gordon of nearby Webster Groves, who called Thornton "a hero" for standing up to racism. Few mentioned that after the scattered applause for Gordon, the Rev. Miguel Brinkley, pastor of the Kirkwood Church of God, pointedly disagreed. Brinkley, sporting a Tiger Woods cap, said Thornton's actions "were not the way God says things should be handled."
The two-hour meeting was filled with such expressions of pain and oppression that it seemed impossible that only a month earlier Barack Obama had won the Iowa caucuses on his way to the White House. Notions of a post-racial society seemed absurd amidst the expressions of racial distrust. Residents complained that the police were tougher in Meacham Park; human rights complaints went nowhere; the neighborhood redevelopment was a land grab. No one mentioned that Cookie Thornton had been one of the strongest and most empowered proponents of the redevelopment.
At school in Kirkwood
I remember only one black student at Tillman and then North Junior High. Her name was Jackie, and she asked me to dance during elementary school dance classes. I hated dance classes, was embarrassed to be asked to dance by a girl and was especially embarrassed to be asked by a young black girl. It probably showed.
The dividing line for attending North, the almost all-white junior high school, was down the middle of our street. Our house was on the north side of the line. My parents wanted to buy a house they liked across the street, but that meant I'd be going to Nipher, the junior high school with black students. So they didn't buy the house. Our graduating class from Tillman felt sorry for those in our class who had to go to "dangerous" Nipher.
I wouldn't consider my parents racists. They favored civil rights and my dad was proud of having hired a black postman to work in his service station in Maplewood. He was also proud of a young African-American from Kirkwood who was attending Washington University Law School, Harold Whitfield. My dad gave him cheap gas to help him get by, a favor still remembered by the man who became Kirkwood's first black city councilman in 1972.
But Bull Connor's fire hoses were one thing; sending their only son to Nipher was another.
During my entire childhood through high school, I never went into Meacham Park, nor did I have any friends who lived there. When I read recently about the tragic deaths of five children in a Meacham Park fire in 1966, I had no recollection of the event, which occurred when I was a junior in high school.
I do remember a friend commenting about how sorry he felt for my girlfriend -- now wife, Margie Wolf -- because she lived close to Meacham Park. I also remember feeling a mixture of shock and admiration when a close friend agreed to accompany a young black woman to a high school dance.
I didn't have any black friends in high school. I had one black teacher, Marion Brooks, who gave me my only C. At the time I was ready to blame it on her race, although I realized later it was my sloth.
I watched George "Thunder" Thornton star on the Kirkwood basketball team but never said a word to him. The next time I saw him was from a distance at the packed Kirkwood United Methodist church when his brother, Cookie, was buried.
In college, my wife and I took a class, Racism and Prejudice, during our sophomore year. As a project, we returned to Kirkwood and administered an amateurish survey of teachers' racial attitudes. In a quite horrible paper, I wrote this:
"When we walked into Kirkwood High School on the first Monday of Christmas vacation, we were returning to a life we had lived a little over a year earlier. We remembered the domination of white cliques; remembered white students most often referred to blacks as a 'gar.'"
I also wrote this: "I was about 10 feet from the corner of Longview Blvd and Taylor Avenue when I saw the two black faces. ... Nineteen years of Longview Boulevard had never placed black faces so close to my home ... that black couple seemed out of place ... Something is wrong when this conditioned reaction proceeds out of what should be a natural human situation. And this reaction is integral in Kirkwood, Missouri."
The survey found most teachers said they didn't have different attitudes toward black students, but three-fourths of the teachers thought their colleagues did. It also showed that almost half the courses had no content about blacks and half the teachers had not assigned a book by a black author.
Some teachers thought fewer black students were in advanced classes because they were "lazy" or "lack inner motivation." Most thought they were "culturally deprived." The teachers were overwhelmingly opposed to the Black Power salutes of black Olympic athletes at the 1968 Olympic games in Mexico City.
Coming back home to Kirkwood
When Margie and I came back to St. Louis to work for the Post-Dispatch, we made the conscious decision not to move back to Kirkwood because we wanted to live in an integrated community. We moved to University City. But most Fridays we played volleyball at the KHS gym. One of the people I met there was Mike Swoboda, a funny conservative, with a good left-handed spike.
At the Post-Dispatch, I covered the St. Louis-St. Louis County school desegregation program and was proud that Kirkwood was among the school districts that first agreed to join the program. I met McCallie when I came back to Kirkwood to report on the progress of the desegregation program. The day I visited KHS, McCallie had to wrestle a gun from a student from the city.
McCallie was part of the reason that we moved back to Kirkwood when we were transferred back from the Post-Dispatch's Washington Bureau in 1992. Before school started that year, McCallie introduced us to Patrick Jackson, the orchestra teacher who was working wonders for the school's music program. Jackson is African American. All four of my children played for Jackson. He was their favorite teacher and became their friend. The McCallies and Jacksons came to their weddings years later.
Just about the only African-American students who came to our house were Jackson's daughter Patrice and several other young women who played in the orchestra. Only one of my children, my youngest, J, went to a friend's house in Meacham Park. That friendship, like other friendships with children from Meacham Park, did not last until high school.
McCallie and I often spoke professionally and personally about race. Over time I heard his personal story of growing up a racist in Chattanooga. His father was headmaster of a prestigious private boys school. Lucille was a black woman who worked for the family. "She bathed me, she fed me, but when I was a senior at McCallie School I argued for segregation." That was 1957.
In the early 1960s McCallie accompanied a group of all-white students from his Rhodes College to talk to black students at a nearby campus. He had thought blacks were stupid, but these students were smarter than he. They told of the indignity of shopping in Memphis, having to catch a bus to "colored town" if they needed to eat or go to the bathroom.
McCallie and his siblings soon began to have passionate fights about civil rights with their father, the headmaster at McCallie School. One day his father pounded his fist on the table in frustration and his mother told him to stay away if he was going to argue about race.
Not long afterward the local newspaper headlined the admission of the first black member to the Kiwanis Club. McCallie went to congratulate a local leader he thought had led the effort to integrate the club. "He looked at me and he said, 'Son, it was your father who did that.'"
One of the stories I reported was the decision by McCallie and his wife, Tresa, to take in one of the young African-American transfer students, Nicole Tart, now Reine Bayoc. She had a 2.1 grade-point average, but during her senior year, with the McCallies, it shot up to 3.7.
McCallie assumed he knew what had changed -- the study environment in the McCallie house. But, as he recalls, "Ten years after she graduated from KHS, I asked our African-American daughter if I were correct. Her answer made me extremely embarrassed and disappointed. And it had a great deal to do with my failure in a most important goal -- probably my most important goal, my 'mission' -- I had as principal in both areas of academics and social justice.
"Her statement was this: 'When I became your daughter, everything changed for me at KHS. There was only one teacher I had who did not have to change how she was treating me, because she always treated me as if I was supposed to achieve at the top of the class. But for every other teacher, I was now somebody who was expected to make A's. And I did.'"
One other eye-opening experience for the McCallies was that the "young, black man who dated my black daughter was stopped (by police) five or six times. When people came to date my white daughters, they never were stopped."
In the years after moving back to Kirkwood, I ran into Swoboda often. He seemed to be at every school and civic function.
One Christmas Eve, after a family game of ultimate Frisbee at Kirkwood Park, my California daughter-in-law, Cynthia, decided to run home. She got lost. A little desperate she stopped a man driving by. The man was hurrying to the grocery store before it closed. He asked who she was.
"Come on and get in," he said. "I know where you live."
It was Mike Swoboda and it was Christmas 2007.
William H. Freivogel
Name: William H. Freivogel
Date of Birth: Aug. 7, 1949
Place of Birth: St. Louis
Dates of residence in Kirkwood: 1949-1967; 1992-present
High school: Kirkwood, class of 1967
College: Stanford, class of 1971; Washington University Law School 2001
Position with Beacon: Beacon contributor, author of Law Scoop blog, married to Beacon editor Margaret Wolf Freivogel.
William H. Freivogel is director of the School of Journalism at Southern Illinois University Carbondale and a professor at the Paul Simon Public Policy Institute.
