Plethora of Pop’s Rate-A-Record

I Could Have Been Your Man

But never your mayor, at least in 1970

Photo by Jack Bulmer on Unsplash

Cause I was only 14 in that year, the year I started high school: Jess Lanier High in Bessemer, Alabama. Here’s where boundary lines get tricky.

Until that year, Bessemer had three high schools, two primarily Black schools and one primarily white school. The western city fathers, though, had another plan: build another school in their part of town — the extreme western limits — for 800 students only (there were only 800 student lockers built), and those students, drawn from that very white area, would be able to avoid integration, or at least full integrated immersion.

The plan was somewhat ingenious in that racist way so many school districts had back in those quaint days from my childhood and adolescence. When I started Jess Lanier in 1970, barely making the zoned cutoff, the ratio of black to white students was something like 25–75.

The Alabama courts weren’t fooled, however, and so in someone’s infinite wisdom, two of the high schools were closed (converted to middle schools), and that left two options for anyone attending public school in Bessemer (and at least two others in that private “academy” way of life). You can well imagine that the 800-seat Jess Lanier High had some…