On an August morning in 1973, when busing in Memphis more than tripled in scope, Edith Abakare and dozens of other Black students from North Memphis were riding north on Danny Thomas Boulevard toward Westside High School. 

The path was familiar at first — through an industrial corridor that included the Firestone Tire and Rubber Co. plant, several hardwood companies and other factories with numerous railroad tracks and spurs crossing the state highway.

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As the column of buses crossed the Wolf River on what then became Thomas Street, or U.S. 51, in Frayser, the terrain was much less familiar to its passengers.

This is the third chapter in The Daily Memphian’s oral history series marking the 50th anniversary of Plan Z busing, the comprehensive plan that was to bus 39,000 children to racially integrate most of the city’s public schools.

Edith Abakare 

“We had been told what we were to do. Our parents had put us on the bus ... And we journeyed on it — kind of like sightseeing at first. Coming down Danny Thomas and coming into Frayser, just looking around. And things were different.”

On the other side of the Wolf River, Frayser began as bottom land next to the river’s muddy water that carried runoff from the various industrial plants on the North Memphis side.

West of the highway, the International Harvester and Kimberly-Clark plants were on each side of the Wolf where it met the Mississippi River: Kimberly-Clark in North Memphis and International Harvester in Frayser.

Chapter One: Desegregation before the buses

The high school students rode the bus along a highway corridor that included the Frayser Drive-In and the Frayser Maid restaurant, with its bait shop behind it.

Northgate Shopping Center appeared just before the buses took a left turn onto Frayser Boulevard, where it dead ends into Dawn Drive and the Westside campus begins with a football practice field.

The culvert at the end of Frayser Boulevard had two metal rails atop it at the time.

Overnight, someone spray-painted a greeting for the newest Westside High students.

Just before the students on the bus turned onto Dawn Drive and saw their new school — many for the first time — they were greeted by the words “Here Come The N----s” spray-painted across the metal barriers. The epithet was misspelled with one “g.”

When the buses pulled up to the front of the school, a line of white women was waiting with signs to protest their arrival at a “white school.” Westside was seconds away from transitioning to a 50-50 racial mix.

Chapter Two: Busing begins

Abakare was a high school sophomore that year. 

“When we got to that bridge, then the reality kicked in. They don’t want us here. We don’t know why we are being sent here. They don’t want us here. The parents don’t want us. They don’t like us. We thought about just all the other stuff that happened, you know, going through my mind. I didn’t think about being lynched. That didn’t come to my mind, but I was very apprehensive.

“There was no problem inside the building. The problem was outside of the building. And so we as young kids being, I’ll say, forced into doing this, embarking upon this new journey together inside the building — I didn’t have any problem. There was no problem.

“Certainly I was excited about having new books, you know, brand-new books that nobody had read and nobody had torn pages from. The building itself, as far as I’m concerned, was so clean and nice. It was certainly a journey. But to come to school and then to leave in a hostile environment, I think that that affected us more than anything.

“It was normal inside the building. The regular stuff goes on — somebody’s not going to like somebody — somebody might trip somebody up. But that’s normal kids’ stuff. It was outside of the building that we had the opposition, and it was obvious.”

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Parts of what became Plan Z had been outlined in Federal Judge Robert McRae’s detailed December 1971 ruling calling for the school system to draft two plans, A and Z.

In one part, McRae specifically mentioned the larger racial segregation of Frayser and North Memphis.

The two groups of students were largely from blue-collar families; some worked at the same factories on both sides of the Wolf River.

Some of the Westside students and their families had moved to Frayser from North Memphis recently enough that they had attended Guthrie Elementary School and other North Memphis schools that had been white in the recent days of segregation as an MCS policy.

Some of the Westside students and their families had lived in Hurt Village when it was an all-white public housing project and had bad memories of Hurt’s turbulent integration before moving to Frayser.

A different transition was underway in the Westwood area of southwest Memphis as Plan Z moved from a court order to buses on the streets that were supposed to carry more than 39,000 kids to new school assignments.

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O.Z. Stephens

MCS director of planning and research, O.Z. Stephens drew up Plan A and Plan Z — the two busing plans enacted by federal court order in 1973.

“When South Memphis residential areas went into racial transition, we had a lot of white flight and those white folks in South Memphis, many, many of them moved over into the Westwood area. Lo and behold, here comes Plan Z and those white kids are going to be upset again. ‘They’re going to bus in some more Black kids.’

“They bailed on us and that’s sort of the way Southaven got its start in Mississippi. A lot of those folks had, because of the racial transition in communities, felt they had lost their neighborhood, and away they went. So, then what white kids stayed, there was some tension in the schools between some Black kids and white kids.”

Meanwhile, Melrose High remained a predominantly Black school despite Plan Z calling for a school of 770 Black students and 687 white students with the white students coming from Ridgeway and Wooddale High Schools.

Karen Clark

One of the few white students at Melrose High School was Karen Clark, who had been a sophomore the year before at Ridgeway High School. She was the only white student in her homeroom at Melrose.

“We were not from here. We had moved to Memphis when I was in ninth grade — the middle of my ninth-grade year. I’d only been there a year and a half. We were not in tune with everything that was going on with the school system. We’re from Iowa, and we just didn’t know the situation at all. When we came down here, we chose to live in the Ridgeway district because we had heard it was a good school and a good neighborhood. We literally lived on Ridgeway Road. We walked to school.”

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Archie Willis III

Melrose sent students to Ridgeway and White Station high schools. One of the Melrose students assigned to White Station in Plan Z was Archie Willis III.

Willis was no stranger to school integration. His father A.W. Willis Jr. was in the vanguard of the Memphis Civil Rights movement.

He was among the Black parents who had agreed to send their children — 13 in all — to integrate four all-white schools in 1961, five years before the school system eliminated assigning students to schools based on the color of their skin.

The year before Plan Z, Archie Willis III was attending Melrose High School, the first and only predominantly Black school he ever attended.

“I was kind of really enjoying my experience with Melrose. It was a very good school in my opinion, from an academic standpoint and then just the camaraderie and the fellowship and the socialization that was totally different from what I had experienced. Although by the time I got to the ninth grade at Bellevue (Junior High), Bellevue was fairly integrated. But it was totally different in terms of being at a predominantly African-American high school.

“We literally drove by two other schools to get to White Station depending on the route the driver took.”

Clark

“There were people who befriended me who were African Americans. They were bullied because of that. I was. When you are giving out the free meals and you are the only one who doesn’t get one — it was an interesting dynamic at the lunch period.

“There were many days that when I would go into classrooms, the teachers would tell me, ‘Don’t come in until you know there’s a teacher there.’

“It’s people. It’s not Black and white. But it’s the people that have the heart to change to make a difference to say, ‘I’m not going to use this as an excuse. I’m going to be strong.’

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“I remember this one day this guy just said — you know, you usually kind of sit where you would always sit — and he goes, ‘That’s my seat.’ I didn’t say a word. I got up and just went to the back of the room. He said, ‘No, I want to sit back here.’ I was in the 11th grade. I was terrified.

“About that time, the teacher walks in and he gets sent to the office, and I get to be the bad girl because I got him in trouble. I was as terrified as I was wanting to make it work.”

Willis

“We were having class elections that first year, and I’m assuming up until then it was a fairly informal process. So we’re in an auditorium, and people make nominations, and you vote and, basically, you raise your hand. I can’t recall if we had really strategized or it just kind of happened organically. We had a slate of Black kids that were also nominated.

“And of course, if you had four or five white kids running against each other and then even though the numbers were not the majority — if all the Black kids voted for the one Black kid, we literally would have won all the seats. I can’t remember which office it was that that happened.

“Four or five of those white kids were nominated, one Black kid. They started voting, and people held up their hands. And when they got to the Black kid, the Black kid had the most votes. And then the next kid, all the white kids raise their hands (including those who had voted for other candidates already). So it’s like pretty much all of them. Maybe not all.

“But it was clear they saw this is not going to work, and they raised their hands and obviously there are more of them. So the votes would have gone that way.

“We said, ‘No, this is not how you run elections. You just can’t change your vote.’ We don’t win. We walked out and that led to a series of discussions — negotiations, so to speak — between the Black students, white students with the faculty serving as kind of the mediators. We ended up — which you probably saw in a lot of schools — a white this or a Black this in the school (student) offices. That was kind of the compromise, but it was just an interesting experience to go through.”

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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.

“The first year of Plan Z was the last year that ROTC was mandatory for sophomores at Memphis high schools.

“A stash of round Army ROTC shoulder patches were hot underground items among some students. The words Army ROTC were altered to read “my POT” and were showing up on green Army fatigue jackets from Army surplus stores that were a favorite fashion item.

“Westside was a blue-collar school whose students — Black and white — were considered ripe for recruiters as thoughts of college deferments faded while the war in Vietnam and the Selective Service lottery were winding down.

“Recruiters came to the school that spring in an Army helicopter that landed in back of the school near the ROTC armory. School administrators kept a close eye on students as they got a look inside the helicopter, but not close enough. Later in the school day, after the helicopter and recruiters left, they were missing a smoke flare.

“At the end of the school day, the flare was set off at one end of the school, its acrid purple smoke billowing down the junior high school hallways as two laughing and coughing students emerged from the thick smoke, quickly walked down a stairwell and into the legend of that turbulent first year.”

Abakare

“It was small enough that what sticks in my mind is that I ranked number seven (by grade point average) in the class. I think we may have had 100 and some students to graduate. It was amazing how we all knew each other. We got to know each other because we had no choice because we were all navigating this new togetherness together. It was different, and it was a learning experience.

“We were competitive with sports. I was an ROTC sponsor, participated in just about everything.

“But the jewel of being at Westside was that I may not have had the opportunity to be chosen for different things that I was chosen for at Westside. That was mind-blowing.

“Normally, if I was at a bigger school, I might not have been as popular because popularity, you know, tends to get you appointed and chosen for different things at larger schools.

“So that was a plus for me.”

Willis

Willis, at White Station High, was close to the Black students on the bus with him. Meanwhile, the teenagers his age who lived across South Parkway from him went to Central High School.

And there were already some Black students at White Station when busing started who were their own separate group in a large and socially complex East Memphis high school.

“They had a small core group of Black students that were attending the school. There were two neighborhoods right off of Mendenhall that were predominantly Black.

“Where Folk’s Folly (restaurant) is is one of those streets in that area off Mendenhall (Road). And then what was Truse-McKinney, where the Kroger is now — that was African American.

“Those kids already were going to White Station because it was their neighborhood school. So the level of hostility with the white students was not nearly as much as it would have been at some other school where there had not been any significant integration.

“But nonetheless, we were still the outsiders, and it was a lot of camaraderie with particularly the kids from Melrose.

“I was still on the outside, so to speak, because I’d only been there (at Melrose) for a year and a lot of these kids had been going to school together since they were in first grade. They had a different kind of connection. Those were the kind of things that probably no one thought about going into that. It’s something that’s really important for kids. But maybe for adults, it’s like not that important.”

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Abakare

Abakare had problems in her North Memphis neighborhood for attending a white school in Frayser even though the school’s racial identity was radically different with Plan Z.

“We would get together and talk, but then we faced some racial things from kids in our neighborhood saying, ‘You’re going to a white school. You think you’re white? And what are you doing going there?’ Just things like that.

“I got called different kinds of names, you know, from different people.

“In one sense, there was freedom to be home. But then you were still like in the mindset of age because your own peers or people in your neighborhood were saying different things about you agreeing to go and then being all right with going and then excelling in going.

“You became a target for that.”

Dries

“As the first school year of Plan Z neared its end a few months into 1974, squirt guns had become a new fad around Westside, with even some of the adults partaking in the fad as teachers confiscated them.

“An intramural basketball game in the school gym intersected with the new fad with explosive and unexpected results.

“During the game, a white student squirted a Black student who retaliated by either spitting on or striking the white student, depending on who was relaying the information.

“On the other end of the school, a small group of students in the school’s auditorium was being inducted into the Senior Honor Society. The ceremony was done in enough time that the students there had time to walk to the gymnasium at the other end of the school and catch the end of the game.

“What they saw was the players in the game continuing to go back and forth on the court as they watched the crowd in the bleachers on both sides. Those in the bleachers were oblivious to the game, talking in groups as they waited for the buzzer to go off, ending a game that even the players weren’t paying any attention to.

“At game’s end, students began walking out of the gym, some even walking toward the classrooms and lockers. But those who were among the first out of the gym headed straight for the doors out of the building and onto the school’s front lawn.

“Like a brushfire in a hurricane, the fights rolled the length of the lawn and into the street and then back into the school.

“Some were rolling around on the grass with the first Black student or white student who came by. Other fights were hard blows with the force of grudges behind them and meant to do damage. It tended to be boys on boys and girls on girls.

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“I also don’t remember any windows being broken. Some students and teachers locked themselves in classrooms and watched the cascade of brawls from the windows facing Dawn Drive. Others took shelter in the elementary school next door.

“A group of girls had another girl down in the crosswalk by the school’s main entrance hitting her with shoes before other students and adults in the apartment complex across the street counter-attacked.

“Other teachers and students walked across the lawn clearly in shock but watching who was behind them on each pass down the length of the school’s front.

“The first police cars to respond drove up and quickly retreated, giving new energy to the first flash of violence.

“Decades later, a reporter would tell me the police backed off because of a false rumor that students had gotten to the ROTC rifle team’s weapons in the armory. The rifle team had the only working rifles in the armory. The rifles carried by other cadets didn’t have a firing pin in them.

“Inside the school, students — Black and white — walked briskly, either looking for someplace to go or looking for someone — either to fight or to make sure they were not hurt. And it was hard to tell which was the case.

“The exception was a short kid who was normally pretty easy going when he wasn’t obsessing over his car and trying to fit in with the other car guys. Looking straight ahead, he was carrying a large hunting knife by his side.

“The school’s principal, a Marine Korean War veteran named Leon Hurt, sustained a knife wound to his arm. He would later suspend 16 students and rate the violence as much worse than that seen a year earlier at Trezevant High School during Plan A. Another teacher had his glasses broken when he was punched in the face.

“The police returned minutes later in larger numbers and began separating students — Black from white and white from Black.

“They had several Black students in custody immediately. As they sat handcuffed in the back of police cruisers, Black teachers talked to them and the officers as some white students jeered at them. Much later, police began pulling white kids out of the different groups on the front lawn at the direction of Hurt and other adults.

“The buses were called early. Black students boarding the buses were told to get on the floor of the buses — many not understanding what was about to happen.

“To get on Frayser Boulevard and out of the neighborhood, the buses had to pass Dawncrest Apartments, across the street from the southern part of the high school.

“When they did, a torrent of bottles, bricks and brooms flew from the apartment complex at the buses, shattering windows and even hitting a teacher standing on the other side of the buses.

“Late into the afternoon, carloads of white students cruised the area around the school and neighborhood chasing down false rumors of Black students who had somehow been stranded in the neighborhood.

“Some of the Black students getting off the buses in North Memphis immediately headed to Humes Junior High School where junior high school students originally assigned to Westside had been bused. Some made it into the school and roughed up several white students.

“After the riot, school leaders called off classes at Westside through the Easter holiday. When classes resumed after Easter, the school was on lockdown with extra security and no movement other than the exchange of classes at the end of periods.

“All of the measures at a time before metal detectors, locked and secured school entrances and school resource officers were designed to keep Black and white students in the same school separate in every space but the classroom.”