Westside High School students returned from spring break 1974 to a school on lockdown.

A riot just before the break was Memphis City Schools’ biggest disturbance during the first school year of Plan Z busing — a court-ordered plan to integrate Memphis schools by assigning 39,000 children, grades one through 12, to board buses bound for different schools.

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There would continue to be walkouts, small fights and even a shotgun fired at the front of a school on the last day of classes, but nothing on the scale of the Westside riot, which The Daily Memphian detailed in Chapter Three: Plan Z busing begins.

Most of the Black children went to their assigned schools. Many of the white children did not, leading to white flight that would translate into a broader exodus in the coming years and decades. The two different reactions to busing changed the racial makeup and destinies of many Memphis neighborhoods.

Smaller individual incidents of bullying, betrayal and unfairness on both sides of the color line still loom large in the memories of the children, who, half a century ago, were at the center of the storm that was Plan Z and yet had little power over their circumstances.

This is the fourth chapter in The Daily Memphian’s oral history series marking the 50th anniversary of Plan Z busing.

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 low point of the lockdown was one of the few times I used the restroom at Westside. The bathrooms were hangouts where kids mostly smoked like chimneys. If someone wanted to settle differences or start something, the bathrooms were also the spot for that, even before busing. During my four years at Westside, I avoided them as much as possible.

When I stuck my head in the bathroom tentatively during the lockdown, I was amazed to see no one else there — not even a wisp of smoke. When I got all the way in, I noticed someone was in one of the stalls. And whoever it was had a walkie-talkie — one of the old-time big brick ones, like those in 1960s TV shows about World War II — with a large antenna you could see over the top of the stalls.

Chapter One: Desegregation before the buses

Even adults have to go. But, with the radio serving as a reminder that school was on lockdown, it was depressing and emblematic of the crossroads we had reached.

The idea was to get us together, Black and white kids. That happened at our school — and for teenagers, that was the whole world and the center of the universe. So we were in the same classroom and the same cafeteria and on the same sports teams. But we had to be watched closely to make sure we didn’t get too close to each other as groups.

Betty Bolton

Betty Bolton, a white teacher at Melrose High School who was part of the successful integration of school faculties that preceded the busing by about two years, saw a few white kids as Plan Z began.

“I got very few white students. I did get some once in a while. But mostly, all I had was 100% Black. I wasn’t even afraid. I wasn’t afraid of my kids, of my students. If I needed to discipline somebody, I did it and got support for doing it. The kids that I had chose me. They chose to come to my class. It was not required. They signed up for me.”

Karen Clark

One of the few white students at Melrose was Karen Clark, who was trying to make things work at her new school and hold on to friends from her two years at Ridgeway High, her neighborhood school.

“Orange Mound was a happening place on Friday night. Uncles, grandparents, brother, sisters — everybody went to the games (football and basketball). … And everybody knew everybody. … There were a lot of people who could never afford a house. And in Orange Mound, those were some of the first African Americans who were able to buy their own homes. It was a community. They were proud of that.”

Chapter Two: Busing begins

The 1970s were a golden era for Golden Wildcats basketball, with the team going undefeated — 33-0 — and claiming the state championship in its 1974 season. The year before, Melrose alum Larry Finch led the Memphis State Tigers to the NCAA finals against UCLA.

Clark’s parents were active at Melrose and Ridgeway, with children at both as well as Dunbar Elementary. And that activity extended to Melrose students bused to Ridgeway. Her mother volunteered in the Melrose school library.

“My parents tried. They were the most honest people. And there was no rule-breaking. They went to every school meeting. They tried to do everything the right way to make it work.

There were no accommodations made for the Melrose players on Friday nights before football games. I remember my mom making lasagna for players after school before games. I felt sorry for the players from Melrose when family could not show up for games. In Orange Mound, it was a community event every Friday night. Not so much when they had to leave their neighborhood schools.”

Transportation was an issue — and a divide — in the experiences of Black and white parents.

Busing opponents spread yard signs reading “Happiness Is A Neighborhood School” throughout white subdivisions across the city. But neighborhood schools were more basic to the way of life in Black neighborhoods that still had corner grocery stores for the same reason. 

Roshun Austin

Austin grew up in the Hyde Park area of North Memphis and was an MCS student who was bused later in the Plan Z years. She is president and CEO of The Works Inc., a community development corporation and also is on the board of Memphis Fourth Estate, the nonprofit that owns The Daily Memphian.

Today, she is working on an adaptive reuse of Northside High School as a mixed-use development and has renovated an apartment complex near Martin Luther King Jr. Prep School in Frayser, what was once known as Frayser High School.

“If both parents were working and they had multiple children, it was highly unlikely that they could make it to this community a few miles away. If there was only one car and they had another kid that was doing the program around the corner, it was easier for people to go around the corner. My parents, I don’t remember them attending programs, especially not during the day. But certainly not even in the evening. Maybe a few parent-teacher conferences, but not often. And so I do remember that distinctly from my childhood. I blame it on the fact that I was the middle child. But I think it’s mainly because of me being bused. They could not do both.”

Chapter Three: Plan Z busing begins

Dries

“Deep in west Frayser that first year, there weren’t a lot of forays into the neighborhood around Westside. The post-riot lockdown contrasted sharply with teenage relationships coming together with all of the surprises and shifts inherent to the age group. In recalling the riot nearly 50 years later, happier parts of the year that ultimately prevailed and resumed come to mind.

Going into the mid-1970s, the basic fashion of blue jeans and T-shirts was still holding up well across the racial divide. The syndicated television show “Soul Train” was also crossing the divide as Black students came to school on Mondays talking about it. It would be another year before Elton John broke the color barrier on the show.

Reruns of “The Untouchables” were another common influence in a city with three commercial television stations before cable television blossomed. The link to reruns of a TV series that ended in 1963 about the gangster era of The Great Depression focused particularly on the Frank Nitti character and the way he was dressed.

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Music, particularly top 40 radio, was a racial mix of Black and white artists — Hall and Oates, David Bowie, Al Green and Isaac Hayes, Carole King and Roberta Flack, Ohio Players and Led Zeppelin.

Fashion seen in the “Soul Train” dance segments began showing up in bright colors and platform shoes worn by Black and white Westsiders. Afros were as big as they could possibly be — culturally and literally. I chose a seat near the back of the class for one and only one specific purpose — the magnificent afro my classmate Jackie Smith wore with great pride. It was so big I could sit at my desk normally and be completely obscured from view.

Archie Willis

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.

At White Station High School, Willis was considering his place among at least three distinct sets of teenagers — the kids Black and white for whom White Station was their neighborhood school, the kids he rode the bus with from the Melrose area and the kids across the street from his home who went to Central High.

Class elections were an immediate conflict at White Station when Willis and other bused students put up a slate of Black candidates against several white candidates. White students tried to take back their earlier votes and unite behind a single white candidate once they realized they had stumbled into a political predicament that still comes up in the adult politics of Memphis. Black students walked out, and ultimately, there was a compromise that included Black and white class officers.

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“I think it was more just recognizing that we can’t do things the way we used to. The tension did ease over time. I’m sure a lot of those kids were not happy about the ultimate outcome. And again, if you think about it pragmatically, that’s not how typically you would expect that kind of result. But it was probably the best outcome in terms of making sure there was some degree of stability and camaraderie throughout the school year.

And, of course, the (class) officers ended up learning to work together, so it didn’t create any issues there.

We ended up learning to navigate the situation, and I’m young. I met a lot of folks at White Station. We became friends and the kids that I went to school with. You know, we would ride the bus every day. So we really got to know each other, and then we hung out socially as well.”

Steve Steffens

Steve Steffens was at Whitehaven High School after being bused to Geeter Junior High School.

Whitehaven High and Mitchell High School were paired in the busing arrangement, with white students at Whitehaven going to Mitchell and vice versa. 

Steffens, who was now attending his neighborhood school, was still carrying some observations from his time as one of the few white students at Geeter and also seeing more gradual changes at Whitehaven High, which was a predominantly white school as busing began.

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“It seemed like Geeter didn’t have as much money as, say, Oakshire or Whitehaven. And they just weren’t given the resources. But that didn’t prevent me from having wonderful teachers and having people who cared about my education.

I did notice that my sophomore year (1974-75 at Whitehaven High), I’d say it was about 55% white. And then, by the time I graduated in May of ’77, it was about 53% Black. It just slowly changed over that time. … When I was there, there were people who had gone to Whitehaven Elementary and Whitehaven High for all 12 years. … I think the last person to do that was like 1977 in my class, from what I remember.”

Dries

“The human relations office of the school system and the National Conference of Christians and Jews picked out two groups of students from Westside — one group Black and the other group white — to meet off campus and talk about the tension that led to the riot. They also wanted the names of troublemakers and wanted to keep that part of the gathering secret.

In separate gatherings, they got their lists: Black troublemakers from the group of whites and white troublemakers from the group of Blacks, with some students who made both lists regardless of their race. Most in the meetings were hesitant to name names, but the students who were anxious to talk more than made up for those who didn’t. None of us should have expected it would be secret for very long.

As soon as each group got back to the school, they were confronted by students who wanted to know if they named anyone and why they would agree to go to something that was racially divided.

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Some of us felt like we had moved past the adults in a very short, compressed and, at times, tense few months. The adults were on the outside looking in — maybe with good intentions, but some of them had kids our age, and we wondered where they went to school.

Even a school as small as Westside had layers, and what was inside the school wasn’t immune from the forces outside that spray-painted hurtful words, buried a school bus and formed private schools on the borders. 

The students collectively made the school building something of a sanctuary. It wasn’t a fortress, to be sure, with new faces constantly coming into and leaving the experience — the journey different for all. 

In the space of a summer, more of us would leave either by graduating or by white flight. New students would take buses along the same routes set out in the court order. “Us” would be different in the gap of a summer. And soon, the communities that students walked through to get to school, while others walked to bus stops to take them to a school further away, would begin to change.

O.Z. Stephens

Stephens, the director of research and planning for Memphis City Schools who drew up Plans A and Z, remained in contact with Federal Judge Robert McRae. The Supreme Court decision in another busing case still applied; the busing plans could not be adjusted to compensate or anticipate for white flight.

“I got hooked up with Dr. James Coleman, who did the infamous Coleman Report out at the University of Chicago.”

Coleman’s report concluded that Memphis public schools were some of the most rigidly segregated in the country.

“He and I appeared at several court hearings on the (school) systems going through desegregation as expert witnesses on white flight. And at almost every one of them, we were not allowed to testify because — again — white flight was not a reason to not be about doing your Constitutional duty to desegregate your school system.

The Judge (McRae) designated me as a witness for the court. There were several times that I would get a phone call from his office. And he would ask me questions about one of the plans or what I did, what did we mean about such and such a school or a satellite area that we were transporting somewhere. They were just questions like that. I maybe took three or four calls from him, but he never really meddled.

He had a choice for every plan that the Board of Education submitted. The plaintiff (the Northcrosses and Memphis Branch NAACP) was also submitting a plan, and they had their expert witnesses. He could have accepted their plans, although we finally ran out of white kids to bus in our plans to desegregate every school.”

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Roderick Richmond

Richmond’s entire time in Memphis City Schools as a student was under Plan Z. In 1974, he attended kindergarten at Shannon Elementary School, a predominantly Black school in North Memphis that was within walking distance of his home. In first grade, he was bused to Wells Station Elementary School.

“Really, to be honest, I didn’t know why I was on the bus. Just kind of looking back, many of the kids who were on the bus were my friends. So, I really didn’t look at it as being anything unusual outside of just not walking to school.”

Clark

At the end of the 1973-74 school year, Clark was preparing to leave Melrose High to return to Ridgeway High. But she still struggled with making Melrose work as her school while keeping ties to classmates she had left when she took the school bus from the Ridgeway area to Orange Mound.

“My mom just wanted us back in the neighborhood. Mom said, ‘That was my hardest issue in life. But I was determined that I was going to have you graduate with your friends.’ She just wanted me to be back with my friends and didn’t want my other brother to miss his friends. My parents are the most unprejudiced people you will ever meet.

When I went back to Ridgeway, the people were still there. I think I was much more in tune — I know I was — to the differences and the sacrifices that those that had come to Ridgeway (from Melrose) had to make. And I realized they had to leave their great community to come all the way out here. It broke our hearts really because half of my class had graduated. They went off to college. We were a much smaller class. I felt like because of decisions that were made way outside of our ring, our path was changed forever.”