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Unlikely pioneer: Parker High's first white graduate
Crystal Wadsworth, a native New Yorker, gets her diploma Wednesday from the mostly black Birmingham, Ala., school.
from the May 24, 2007 edition
Page 2 of 3
US trend is toward resegregation
Public school integration peaked in 1988, when 43 percent of black students attended integrated schools, according to The Civil Rights Project at Harvard University. Today, 31 percent do; in Alabama the figure is 29 percent. Indeed, nearly half of African-American students in the state go to schools at least 90 percent black – a trend toward resegregation found in the North as well as the South.
The US Supreme Court is expected to rule within the month on two cases that could further define the degree to which race can be used as a criteria for assigning students to schools – and possibly whether school districts will be permitted to maintain the status quo established, ironically, by 40 years' worth of court orders requiring desegregation.
Though Crystal is proud of her achievement, she's an accidental activist.
Her family ended up in Birmingham six years ago after their car broke down. Crystal, her sister, her mom, aunt, and grandmother were on their way to Louisiana to start a new life, but instead they found themselves at a homeless shelter in downtown Birmingham.
From there, they moved to a predominantly African-American housing project and then to a house in the west end. Crystal is the only breadwinner in the family. She works at Subway sandwich shop most nights until 10:30 and is often up past midnight doing homework.
"She's a hero, but these kids are all heroes," says Gene Edelman, one of Crystal's former teachers at Lincoln Middle School.
Her formula for peaceful coexistence as a minority is simple: Act natural. "You've got a handful of people who have hostilities [toward whites] still, but when I think of black people here, they're at ease, just laid-back," she says. "It's when you start tensing up ... and start acting the way they expect you to act, that's when they start kicking at you."
It hasn't always been easy. She's been called "Q-tip," "snow bunny," and "cotton ball." The words seem harmless enough, but they stung, she says. They made her question whether people were really as accepting as they seemed.
Technically speaking, Parker High was integrated in the 1980s, and some white students have attended in the past. But it wasn't until last year that the school graduated its first nonblack student, a Latino.
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