At the end of 1971, U.S. District Judge Robert McRae ordered two plans for court-ordered busing as a means to racially integrate Memphis City Schools.

By April 1972, he wanted Plan A – involving the transfer of 13,789 students, 9.5% of the school system’s 145,000 total enrollment – to take effect that August at the start of the school year.

But he delayed it until January 1973, the second semester of the school year.

Chapter One: Desegregation before the buses

Plan Z, involving 39,085 students – or about a quarter of MCS students – was to follow at the August start of the 1973-74 school year.

The plans came 19 years after the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown vs. Board of Education decision that said racial segregation of school systems by law was unconstitutional and must be dismantled with “all deliberate speed.”

The Memphis Branch NAACP pushed the court fight locally. Meanwhile, a set of Black Monday protests that included class boycotts in 1969 changed the Memphis school board.

NAACP executive secretary Maxine Smith was one of three Black school board members elected to the board that had resisted racial integration for almost two decades.

Both busing plans were approved by McRae and drawn up by O.Z. Stephens, director of research and planning for Memphis City Schools.

Even before Plan A took effect, “white flight” had begun – about 10,000 students had left the school system before the first buses picked up students in January 1973.

A fledgling set of schools organized by the group Citizens Against Busing, as well as white churches forming private schools, were major factors in those students leaving MCS.

This second part of The Daily Memphian’s oral history series marking the 50th anniversary of Plan Z begins with prophetic words from McRae’s December 1971 ruling that set the stage for Plan A’s implementation.

Days before the buses would put Plan A into action, Memphis police showed up at the Firestone Tire and Rubber Co. plant in North Memphis.

They arrested Robert Lawrence Payne, a worker there, on a misdemeanor charge of attempting to burn personal property.

Payne, according to police, had reached out to leaders of Citizens Against Busing, offering to destroy the fleet for money.

The CAB leaders immediately contacted police who, with undercover officers, set up a meeting with Payne to more fully outline what he planned to do.

Marcus Pohlmann

Pohlman is a Rhodes College professor emeritus of political science and author of “Opportunity Lost: Race and Poverty in the Memphis City Schools.” The book is required reading for teachers in the Memphis-Shelby County Schools system, for which Pohlman has worked as a consultant.

“I think we saw through that whole litany of effort to desegregate and then later consolidate and so on, that the problems run much deeper. It’s not to say that those things didn’t need to happen. But they were necessary but not sufficient.

It was a very trying time. And it tore the city and the school system apart. I’m not sure it ever recovered, whether there was another way to do it.

To the day she died, Maxine Smith felt that it was all necessary in order to make white Memphis take the public school system seriously.”

Steve Steffens

Steffens arrived in Memphis with his family from rural Illinois and Arkansas in 1972, a semester before Plan A began. As an eighth grader, his neighborhood school was Oakshire Junior High in Whitehaven. Oakshire and greater Whitehaven were predominantly white at the time. Steffens and his family were part of that white majority in a city whose housing patterns were as segregated as its schools.

“Basically, ... the dividing line, I want to say, was Neely Road. … It was somewhat Black and white between Neely Road and Elvis Presley (Boulevard) and of course east of Elvis Presley was all white. It was very, very suburban.

My family and I were avid newspaper readers and we took the Press-Scimitar at that time and we watched local news and we kept up with it. We lived in an apartment complex along Hudgins which at the time ran from Holmes Road down to State Line Road and we were just on the east side of (Interstate) 55.

We kept up with what was going on and I had gotten to know some kids my age at Oakshire. The newest thing I could find that I hadn’t experienced was that they had what they called portable classrooms at the time in little trailers next to the building.”

When the second semester of the 1972-73 school year began in January 1973, Plan A assigned Steffens to Geeter Junior High School because he and his family lived in an apartment complex zoned to be bused there. Geeter had been a high school until Plan A began; it then became a stand-alone junior high.

“That had kind of shaken up the neighborhood … and it was startling. The people that I knew that lived east of Millbranch; a good portion of them were saying, ‘Well, we’re going to Bishop Byrne next year. We’re not going to Geeter, right?’

And my parents were like, ‘No, you’re going to Geeter. It won’t hurt you. You might learn something new.’

My parents were a bit more progressive than most people I knew at that time. It may explain some of my views.

But I was like, ‘OK, we’ll see how this goes.’

I hated having to get up at 5:30 in the morning to be on the bus at 6:30. But, you know, I did it.

I can even tell you what the route was. We went down Holmes all the way to Neely. And we drove around through the Fairley area, and then, we wound our way back to Horn Lake Road and to Geeter.

It was 20 to 25 kids on the bus. It was about what I had expected.

It was the first time in my life I’d ever been the minority in any place. I’d grown up in rural Illinois and rural Arkansas prior to moving here. But it just seemed different and interesting.

I only got in one fight the whole time. It was like we threw a couple of punches at each other and that was it. I don’t think anybody even got suspended. In fact, I don’t remember seeing the other guy again but it was, you know, ninth-grade stuff.

Edith Abakare

In North Memphis, Abakare was a student at Humes Junior High School in 1972.

Humes had been a white high school from its opening in 1924 through the 1950s when Elvis Presley was a student there.

It became a Black junior high school in the 1960s as it began showing its age, a pattern in racial segregation of the school system.

Abakare was looking forward to high school the next year at Northside High in Klondike.

The Klondike neighborhood had been a Black subdivision as long as Humes in a different part of North Memphis had been a school. Northside in 1973 was seven years old.

It was a large school with an auditorium that would hold 1,800 students, an auto-body shop, a print shop and a two-level library in mid-century architecture where students’ artwork was displayed in a setting surrounded by courtyards.

“We were all excited about Northside because it was the best that we had — the best for us, you know, for students on my side of town. And so, to look forward to doing that, to being there. It was still new to us. Even though it was a few years old, it was still new.”

Roshun Austin

Austin is the president and CEO of The Works Inc., a community development corporation whose affordable housing developments include a restoration of the Klondike subdivision. That is paired with a separate plan for the redevelopment of Northside High School as Northside Square, a multi-use development that will include senior housing and public facilities, but no school.

Austin — who is on the board of Memphis Fourth Estate, the nonprofit that owns The Daily Memphian — is also a child of North Memphis, growing up in the Hyde Park area.

In preparing Northside High for renovation, Austin and others came across old class photos of Northside in the school’s library that show its first classes in the mid-1960s – after the school system abandoned assigning students by the color of their skin – included white students.

“So it’s mid-'60s. There were a lot of efforts around integration happening already. The Memphis 13, the first to integrate the school system, were a few years before that. And so it wasn’t just about Klondike. It’s too small of an area for that high school at that size to have just been meant for Klondike. It was probably meant for the Smoky City neighborhood, which people know as Black. But Smoky City clearly was not Black if Elvis went to Humes because our public housing wasn’t integrated in the ‘40s and ‘50s. Neighborhoods were not that integrated.

And so Smokey City was not really a Black neighborhood. It’s become that, which is what happened across the city. Cherokee wasn’t. A lot of places were not Black, even Barron Heights in Orange Mound. I have a friend, she’s in her early 80s. She and her husband were the first to integrate Barron Street in 1961 or so. But if you’re not that old or somewhere close, you don’t know that.”

Northside’s role in Plan A was minor. It picked up students from Douglass High School. Northside and Douglass, along with Manassas High School, were the three predominantly Black high schools in North Memphis in the early 1970s.

As Plan A was underway, McRae’s approval of Plan Z followed, which included Northside being paired with Westside High School in Frayser.

Abakare

“The first thing we thought about, well, you know, we really don’t think it’s going to be safe. I don’t know if they’re going to like us. What are we going to do? What is it going to be like?”

Frayser quickly became the epicenter of opposition to busing as Plan A got underway. The closer you got to the schools in Frayser, the more yellow yard signs you saw at homes reading “Happiness Is A Neighborhood School.”

A Citizens Against Busing protest in Frayser included burying a full-sized school bus.

Frayser had plenty of what some students came to call “popcorn schools” popping up at the numerous white churches there.

With Plan A underway, there were walkouts at the Frayser schools.

Students from Frayser High drove over to Westside High during the school’s lunch hour to urge Westside students to walk out of classes. While some students left, most regarded it as a clash between two rival schools.

Sometimes police came to patrol the boundary between the two student groups.

CAB organized a school boycott that was most effective at Frayser schools. Many classes at Westside had no students.

As Abakare and other Humes students were contemplating where the boundaries fell in their neighborhoods that would determine whether they went to Northside or Westside, students at Westside were doing the same.

What they and other students in the school system would learn is that the width of a two-lane street in a residential subdivision would be the boundary in many cases, with kids on one side continuing to walk to school and kids on the other side heading for a bus stop.

Karen Clark

Clark had moved to the city with her family from Iowa when she was in the ninth grade. They moved to what was then the easternmost area of the city, specifically to go to the Ridgeway set of schools built and opened in 1970. 

In looking over the busing maps and piecing together who would ride, Clark was also learning about what other students had already become well versed in: how to get around being bused.

“I was a sophomore in high school when they started telling us that we were going to be bused next school year. We were waiting on the map to be drawn. I was getting ready to be a junior and those that were a year ahead of me, it didn’t matter where they lived because they were going to be grandfathered in and could stay at Ridgeway.

There was no rhyme or reason to the map that was drawn. There was no straight line. It was just let’s take this area in, let’s not take this area in. We didn’t know before that summer where we were going to go to school. There were several of my friends whose parents were educators, and they got them into summer schools to take it for senior English. 

A lot of my friends did that and then decided they wouldn’t graduate that year. So they are in the yearbook twice as seniors. A lot of my class went ahead and graduated early.”

Archie Willis III

Willis came from a family that was in the vanguard of the local civil rights movement. His father, A.W. Willis Jr., was an attorney and the first Black state representative elected to the Tennessee state House of Representatives since Reconstruction.

As Plan A unfolded, he was in transition in several ways – none of them involving riding a bus, so far.

“My brother, Michael Willis, who’s now Menelik Fombi, was one of the Memphis 13. He and the other 12 kids integrated the Memphis city school system in 1961. He’s two years older than I am. So he went to Bruce, and then I followed him in his footsteps. I went to Bruce and then went to Bellevue. We started out going to majority-white schools until I got to the 10th grade.

My parents actually had recently divorced and my mom was planting her stakes. We were planning to move to South Parkway, and Melrose was the high school for that neighborhood.

We actually hadn’t moved yet, but I was assigned and I went to Melrose and I actually got a ride to school with a school librarian who lived in our neighborhood.

So she literally drove me to school every day the first year.

That was the only time, the first time and subsequently, the only time, I went to a predominantly African-American school.

So it was a great experience for me to be around all these kids. I knew a few of them but not many of them.

Any time a kid goes to a new environment, you’ve always got to feel your way through that process.

But I met a lot of good people, a lot of people I stay in contact with even today. It was really, really a great experience.

Bill Dries

Editor’s note: Dries is a native Memphian and has been a local reporter for more than 45 years. He grew up in Frayser and is including his own experiences as part of this series. Below is his first-hand perspective.

“I came to Westside High School in the ninth grade in the 1972-73 school year from eight years of Catholic school at Our Lady of Sorrows parish on Thomas Street and U.S. 51.

It was a culture shock coming from a small school with only two Black students led zealously by nuns.

Westside seemed much bigger but it was the smallest high school in the Memphis City Schools system.

Just as I got used to the “big school” and its decidedly un-Catholic ways, there were signs of another much bigger wave of culture shock as Plan Z approached.

It wasn’t at Westside yet, but new church-based private schools were popping up everywhere nearby, two on the school campus borders.

Because of the significant number of students who were being bused, there was no longer the concept of a handful of Black students in a situation where they were the overwhelming minority in what had been all-white schools.

On the other hand, the number of white students who got on the bus was that small and their feeling of being the overwhelming minority was a new experience.”

McRae set a goal of each school’s racial minority, Black or white, being no less than 30% of the school’s student body.

In each case, the students crossing the racial barrier were still in neighborhoods that at the outset were largely segregated by forces beyond the federal court order.

The ever-present rumors of protest, walkouts and violence, some stoked by adults and political leaders, found the teenage environment in high schools like a hothouse where they grew quickly.

The rumors collided with spring fever as Plan A’s only semester neared its end.

At Trezevant High School, the spark was a school assembly showing a “Ma and Pa Kettle” film for a quarter a head. Some Black students protested the admission fee and it sparked a riot that quickly spread across the campus several times over.

A student was slashed across his stomach with a linoleum knife. Another was injured by a rock thrown through a classroom window.

Police waded into the melee with nightsticks.

The violence made the NBC network news that evening.

A ripple of isolated fights on and off school property, walkouts and angry confrontations dotted the school system up to the end of the school year.

The summer sent both groups of students back to their isolation from one another.