Member-only story
I Was The Only Black Kid In My School
What happened when I moved from a black-majority city to a rural small town.
Names have been changed to protect the identities of people living in a town smaller than my first high school.
In September 1994, I was a fourth-grader living in Birmingham, Alabama with my parents and my younger brother. We moved to Birmingham in 1985 when I was a baby and my brother was born there. Like many mid-to-large Southern cities, Birmingham was doing surprisingly well in its post-Jim Crow existence. The city had a strong black middle class even with the War on Drugs reaching its peak in the 1990s.
We lived in the West End, which was a part of the city that was crime-ridden. But that was okay because my brother and I were attending Princeton Alternative Elementary School, a magnet school that had a solid reputation. We were getting a pretty good education at a black-majority school, led by a black principal, in a city that was over 75% black, that was led by a black mayor. Not bad for a city that was nearly ravaged by…