Member-only story
For the Coach
Though I never played high school sports
Is there anything comparable to high school gym class? The ugly uniforms, the smell of those uniforms in the Alabama heat and humidity by Wednesday (Can’t even mention Friday). The chance that some kid would pop you with a towel if you dared to take a shower.
The more likely chance that some other kid might try to bust you in the privates, the “nuts” as we used to say.
And all of this came before we had to deal with overcrowding in our school. Our school was meant to hold roughly 800 students. I know this because there were exactly 800 lockers, and I don’t think they were installed with sharing in mind.
I was looking at my freshman yearbook from 1970–71, and it made me realize that in that year, the first year of Jess Lanier High in Bessemer, the student population was still something that looked like 70–30, White to Black. By the following year, though, the percentage went out the window, because the size of the student body appeared to double.
This was mainly because, not only had traditionally Black Carver High closed after the 1969–70 school year, but Bessemer’s other traditionally Black high school — Abrams — was being phased out too, though it lingered on until the mid-1980s. The school district’s plan was to ensure that most of Bessemer’s high…