Breaking Diversity
I like to joke that my junior high was 95% black, 5% hispanic and five white guys - I was one. I don’t really know how many white people there actually were, but it wasn’t many. The school was a adjacent to “chocolate city” the name locals had given to HUD housing apartments. Not a great area.
We had a “Gifted Program” which consisted of something like five or six “qualified” individuals, but only 4 tended to be in the class during any particular year - I was one. One year we lost an especially geeky/nerdy kid. In those days (maybe today too?) the only way to go to a different school than the one in your district was to go to a magnet program (more on that in a bit) or to find a class not offered or likely to be offered in your particular school. He picked latin at a time when ebonics was being given serious debate (not necessarily in our school, but it was in the papers) and got his “out”.
During my time there I lived through racial tension and riots. In the early 80s, a hispanic cop named Luis Alvarez shot a black man, Neville Johnson in a video arcade in Overtown. (The details of the case are fuzzy to me due to the passing of years. I originally confused a second shooting, that of two black men on a motorcycle as being the same case) This became quite personal to me, a scrawny white kid, when I was lifted up off my feet and slammed into a locker in the boy’s locker room by a black boy in the class. On the walk between gym class and lunch we had to pass by the auditorium, several sneering black kids (I hesitate to use a term like “men” to describe teenagers) lined the hallway. As I passed, there was a flash of movement in my periphery as I was attacked by one guy. I think he was the short one, but I wasn’t looking at them as I passed. I should have fallen, but I was too scared. My ear was busted and bleeding - to this day there is an almost imperceptible indentation where the scar is.
That night the principal called my mom to assure her that nothing further would happen at the school. The next day was eerie, half the school was out. My friend Gabriel was scared, his last name is the same as that cop’s - he stayed home. I don’t remember much about the day except the ride home on the bus. We didn’t travel on our regular route, the cop cars lined the street, lights flashing. Cops stood at the ready: riot shields, helmets, masks, batons all poised and ready. There might have been a half dozen “scary” days in all, but those days stick with me.
The high school I was slated to go to had a similar racial makeup, just on a larger scale. I never really thought about going to a different high school until one day a bearded, balding photography geek named Jerry Eisner showed up to talk to a few people about a magnet program beginning in the fall at South Miami Senior High. It had a really cool name, ComTec - communications technology - and offered photography, television production and some kind of computer graphics/designer class. Television production interested me and I signed up.
The reason the magnet program was instituted was diversity. South Miami Senior High at the time was heavily hispanic, it is just blocks away from the famous “calle ocho”, and not far from Little Havana. I enjoyed my years there in the underpopulated school but highly funded programs that were ComTec (it was renamed CMA, Center for the Media Arts within two years of inception, because ComTec was too “harsh” and not “artsy” enough for the artists they wanted to attract <shrug>)
The Supreme Court has just ruled that such programs are unconstitutional since we can no longer look at race to determine whether a school is diverse or not.
