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  “It was very, very unnerving,” Holder said. “The next year, it got a little bit better because Leon had an encounter with some boys, and he let them know that he wasn’t going to take it. It got to where they weren’t throwing spitballs or chewing gum anymore. There were a couple of teachers who were nice to us, but there also were some teachers who let us know that they weren’t there to help us.”

  At least a few white students tried to help. Dr. Cary Speaker, who retired in May 2015 as pastor of Mountain Brook Presbyterian Church in Birmingham, was a junior at Woodlawn High when Cynthia and the other black students integrated the school. He had a study hall with Leon Humphries, and remembers other white students pelting him with spitballs on the first day. After witnessing what happened, Speaker moved to the chair directly behind Humphries. The students fired spitballs at him instead.

  “I remember giving them what I thought was a dirty look,” Speaker said. “I don’t think I intimidated anyone.”

  The next spring, Woodlawn canceled its junior-senior prom because it would have to be integrated. The school’s social sororities decided to have their own spring dance, and the female members sent out invitations to every student except the African Americans. Speaker, who was a wide receiver and safety on the football team, went to principal Elmer Eugene Moree’s office to voice his concern.

  “Do you know what’s going on?” Speaker asked Moree.

  “Of course I do,” Moree said.

  “You don’t have a problem with it?” Speaker asked.

  “Would you want your date dancing with a black boy?” Moree said.

  “Well, I would think that would be up to her,” Speaker said.

  Speaker and three of his friends boycotted the dance and went on a canoe trip instead.

  Getting home from Woodlawn High was often the most stressful time of the day for Cynthia and the others. On most days, Cynthia’s father, Thomas Holder, who worked at the National Steel plant in Birmingham, picked her up from school. But on some days, Cynthia and her friends took the school bus home. Bus routes didn’t extend to her all-black neighborhood of Zion City, which was located between West Boulevard and the airport, so Cynthia and her friends got off at a nearby stop, and then walked through an all-white neighborhood to get home.

  “We didn’t like to wait for my dad,” Holder said. “If he wasn’t there when the school day ended, we jumped on the first bus because we didn’t want to have to wait in the bus line. I hated walking home. White kids would harass us, and we were always looking around to see if more kids were coming.”

  Somehow, Cynthia and the others survived. In June 1967, Cynthia, Rita King, Leon Humphries, and Myrtice Chamblin were among the first African Americans to graduate from Woodlawn High. Three other African American seniors—Delores Ambers, Carolyn Powe, and Webster Ware—enrolled at Woodlawn at the beginning of the 1966–67 school year, along with another eight black underclassmen. They defied great odds and graduated, despite facing enormous obstacles at the school.

  “My shame about it fifty years later is that I wasn’t brave enough to do anything more about it,” Speaker said. “I grew up as a racist like any other white kid in Birmingham at the time. I knew it wasn’t right, but I wasn’t brave enough to do anything about it.”

  In the late 1960s, few opportunities were available for black students to become part of the student body. Woodlawn High’s football team wasn’t integrated until 1970; the sports teams and other extracurricular clubs were largely reserved for white students. The goal for African American students like Cynthia and the others was to get through the school day, stay out of trouble, and do well in their studies.

  “It was a very cold shoulder,” said Hank Erwin, who served as chaplain of Woodlawn High’s football team in 1973 and 1974. “Integration was forced on the black community as well as the white community. The black kids were forcibly bused to the white schools to satisfy integration. The football team was the last bastion of white control. They couldn’t keep the black children out of school, but they could keep them off the football team. They couldn’t keep them from trying out, but they could make it very difficult for them to stay. It really took defiance and determination for the black kids to stay on the team.”

  Finally in 1970, five black players joined the school’s B-team football squad, which was coached by Tandy Gerelds. The Colonels had an all-white varsity team until the following year, when Coach Gerelds became head coach. Five African American players—­Jimmy Daniels, Rod Grigsby, Rickey Jones, Gary Speers, and Steven Washington—­made the roster in 1971.

  After Gerelds was named the school’s head football coach in 1971, he had a difficult time persuading the best black athletes to try out for the team. At some point, Gerelds asked Julius Clark, the African American who worked as the assistant boys’ advisor, for guidance on how to get more black students to play football. Clark’s solution was simple.

  “If you set something up for them to eat after practice, they’ll come out for football,” Clark told him. “What they’re doing right after school is hurrying home so they can make sure they get their dinner. If they don’t get home, they won’t have anything to eat. Their brothers and sisters will eat everything.”

  Gerelds arranged for Woodlawn High’s booster club to provide post-practice meals. Not long after, there were a growing number of black players on the varsity, B-team, and freshman squads, including a promising freshman defensive back named Tony Nathan.

  “I remember going out for freshman football,” said white player Denny Ragland, a ninth-grade quarterback in 1971. “We were all pretty wide-eyed and probably scared to death because we didn’t know what we were getting into. It was my introduction to African Americans playing sports. I had been a pretty good athlete and did pretty well in grammar school with white guys; but when I was introduced to African Americans, I figured out there was a whole new dimension to sports.”

  Woodlawn High’s first African American football players faced staggering odds. They not only had to fight to earn acceptance from their largely white teammates, but also their own communities. African American classmates criticized Rickey Jones and Steven Washington for playing what had been a white-only sport, and they were sometimes pelted with sticks and rocks by black neighbors while walking home from school.

  “They were ostracized by their own people,” said Reginald Greene, an African American lineman at Woodlawn High from 1971 to 1974. “They called them traitors.”

  In the early 1970s, there weren’t many other extracurricular opportunities for black students at Woodlawn High, so it was difficult for them to find their place in the student body. In 1971, the Tri-Hi-Y Club, a Christian service organization, had forty female members—thirty-nine whites and one black. The National Honor Society, comprised of juniors and seniors, had five white boys, seven white girls, and no African Americans. The National Junior Honor Society for sophomores was also an exclusively white club.

  The school’s marching band had about a half dozen black members, but the majorettes and flag corps didn’t include any African American females. The Warblers, the popular men’s choral group, had five blacks among fifty-two singers, and the women’s Glee Club had three blacks among sixty-six performers. Vocational clubs such as Future Nurses, Future Teachers of America, and the Home Economics Club were more integrated, and the French and Spanish clubs, which had African American teachers as sponsors, also were more open to black students.

  Six years after Cynthia Holder and the other pioneer black students first walked through the door, Woodlawn High was still segregated in most areas, even though more African Americans were attending the school. Tension between black and white students continued to mount, so in 1971 school administrators formed a race relations board made up of students and faculty. But that didn’t help much, and the school’s environment only became more toxic and dangerous.

  “It wasn’t about color,” Julius Clark said. “It was about pride. When the school districts were redrawn, they
transferred white kids to Woodlawn High. They transferred seniors from Banks High to Woodlawn High, and those kids had to start all over. Some of the white kids had never interacted with black people in a social setting. They didn’t know how to adjust.”

  It didn’t help that there was constant turnover in the school’s administration. Principal Moree was a World War II veteran whose right leg had been broken by shrapnel in Northern Italy in October 1944. After Moree was injured, he was carried out of the Apennine Mountains on a stretcher by a mule, then a jeep, and then an ambulance. Moree, who spent more than a year at an Italian hospital and received the Purple Heart for his injuries, attended Howard College (now Samford University) in Birmingham and then the University of Alabama. He was a basketball coach at St. Clair County High School in Alabama, and then boys’ advisor at Banks High and principal at Robinson Elementary School before taking over Woodlawn High.

  In 1972, Moree left Woodlawn to become headmaster at Franklin Academy, a private school in Birmingham. B.B. Storie, a former Woodlawn High assistant football coach and head coach at Ensley High, replaced him and lasted only one year. Homer Wesley, who had two sons attending Woodlawn, was named the school’s new principal in the summer of 1973.

  In the late 1960s and early 1970s, it didn’t take much to set off a disturbance at Woodlawn High. During the 1971–72 school year, a group of African American students asked administrators for permission to organize Black History Week, which Wesley granted. The week culminated with a program for the entire student body in the school’s auditorium. As an African American girl recited a poem, the bell rang signaling the end of the period. A group of white students rose from their seats and left. Some of the black students felt they were disrespected, and a large argument ensued with pushing and shoving.

  Rickey Jones, who was now a linebacker on the football team, jumped onstage and grabbed a microphone. He tried to calm everyone down before a melee broke out. Many of Jones’s fellow African American students chastised him for trying to make peace, calling him an “Uncle Tom.”

  In the early 1970s, African American students started to fight back against oppression and became well organized in their efforts. While Reginald Greene was eating lunch in the cafeteria as a freshman in 1971, Steven Thomas, one of the leaders of the African American students, came running into the lunchroom with a handful of other black students. They went to where the black students were sitting and started pounding their fists on the tables. They screamed, “Get up! Get up!” The black students marched to the football field, where Thomas read a list of grievances that African American students wanted the administration to address. Gerelds came to the stadium and saw Greene standing in the mob. Gerelds pointed at Greene and motioned for him to come over.

  “I don’t want my players caught up in that mess,” Gerelds told him. “You go back to class.”

  Gerelds had a simple rule for his football players: if a fight broke out in a classroom, they were supposed to leave their class and go to the gymnasium.

  “Our players could not be involved in it, no matter what their feelings were,” said Jerry Stearns, the team’s defensive coordinator and a physical education teacher. “It could have ruined our entire team.”

  While some of the incidents at Woodlawn High were simply misunderstandings between teenagers, others were violent, racial attacks. Julius Clark remembers the mother of a student calling the front office one day to ask if her son had arrived at school. When she was told her son was walking through the front door, she told Clark to keep him in the front office until she arrived there. When the mother walked into the office, she told her son, “Give it to me, now!” The boy, an African American, pulled a sawed-off shotgun out from under his trench coat and turned it over to his mother.

  During one of the worst incidents in the fall of 1972, a fight broke out between white and black students on the front steps of the boys’ gymnasium. Roderick Walls, an African American student and now an attorney in Birmingham, remembers a fight between black and white students on the football field during his PE class. Two days later, when Walls and his black classmates tried to enter the gym, a mob of white students blocked the doors. Another fight broke out on the steps, and the violence quickly spread to other parts of the school. Making matters worse, a few of the white students often wore bicycle or motorcycle chains as belts. When fights broke out, they’d wrapped the belts around their fists as weapons. On this day, as the white students hurled their belts during the fight, some of the black students used two-by-fours from a construction site to defend themselves. A few students were seriously injured before teachers and coaches broke up the melee.

  “My sister was in a classroom inside the school, and she saw a lot of blood when she left,” Walls said.

  After that particular fight, the Birmingham Board of Education made the decision to close Woodlawn High for a few days to allow tempers to cool off. Birmingham police officers monitored the hallways when students returned to classes the next week.

  “It was ugly,” said Walls, who graduated from Woodlawn High in 1975 and attended law school at the University of Alabama. “It was unnecessary. Woodlawn was tough and there always seemed to be tension. Sometimes, I wonder how I survived.”

  Students weren’t the only ones causing problems at Woodlawn High. At least one African American former student who was dismissed for disciplinary problems sometimes waited in the parking lot to cause trouble after school. As football players Bubba Holland and Kirk Price made their way to Holland’s green Volkswagen Bug after practice one day, the former student, who was popularly known as “Ikner,” and four other black students attacked them as they climbed into the car. Ikner believed Price was harassing a younger black student, and Ikner was going to make him pay.

  Price was sitting in the passenger seat, and Ikner reached through the open window with a knife. Price tried to cover his face to protect himself, but he was trapped in the small car and could barely move. He suffered several cuts on his arms and hands. Holland tried to reach across the car to roll up the window, but another man reached into his side of the car and started pummeling him.

  As Ikner began to make his way to the other side of the car, Price reached into the backseat and grabbed a shotgun off the floorboard. He drew the gun back as far as he could and rammed the butt of it into the face of the man attacking Holland. The blow knocked the man back, but Ikner, who had made it around the car to the open window, now had control of the gun. Ikner shattered a window and pumped the shotgun. He quickly took aim and pulled the trigger. The next thing Holland and Price heard was, “Click!”

  The shotgun wasn’t loaded. Thankful to be alive, Price burst out of the car and rushed the group of attackers. Holland ran toward the athletic complex to find help. Price was left to fend off five would-be assailants, who had him cornered in the street. Ikner picked up a stop sign, which was lying nearby on the ground and swung it at Price’s knees, knocking him to the ground. The mob jumped on Price, repeatedly kicking and punching him. Badly injured, Price heard shouting. His teammates were running from the school to save him. As Holland, Peyton Zarzour, Bobby Thompson, and a couple of other players ran toward Price, Ikner and his friends fled.

  As the situation at Woodlawn High became more violent, students weren’t the only targets of people who wanted to do harm. As Gerelds left the lunchroom on the first floor of the school one afternoon, he was surrounded by an angry group of black students. The crowd backed him into a corner near the stairwell. Frantically looking for help, Gerelds saw a black teacher coming down the stairs. When black students initially enrolled at Woodlawn, a few African-American teachers were transferred to the school to help ease their transition. For whatever reason, the teacher turned around and left without saying anything.

  At that point, Gerelds realized there was no way out. Suddenly, Gerelds heard the familiar and thunderous voice of a friend. Clark, the African American assistant boys’ advisor, heard the commotion while sitting in his office down th
e hall. He muscled his way through the mob and stood between Gerelds and his would-be attackers. “You’re going to have to hurt me if you want to hurt him,” Clark told the students. Instead of taking on Clark and Gerelds, the crowd dispersed.

  “Tandy always gave me credit for saving his life,” Clark said, “but I’ve always tried to figure out what I did to save it. We were really close. The thing that really knitted us together was our religious beliefs.”

  Over the next two years, Gerelds’s faith would be tested myriad times as he tried to build an integrated football team at Woodlawn High. White students didn’t like or trust the black players, and the black players didn’t like or trust the white players—or their white coaches. Gerelds knew the distrust wasn’t a recipe for success. Somehow, Gerelds had to find a way to make it work.

  CHAPTER THREE

  THE COACH

  While Tandy Gerelds was still a student at Woodlawn High, he injured his right shoulder at football practice. Since he was also on the baseball team, he taught himself to throw left-handed until his injured shoulder healed. He would catch balls in the outfield with a glove on his left hand. Then he’d remove the glove and throw the ball left-handed. Undersized compared to most of his classmates, Gerelds knew he had to become a scrappy player and an overachiever to succeed. From an early age, Gerelds never wanted anyone to outwork him. He carried that same mind-set into coaching, often telling his players, “There are going to be times when the people you are competing against are more physically gifted than you are. You can’t control that. But what you can control is your own preparation. If you outwork them, sometimes it doesn’t matter if they’re more talented. Through hard work, discipline, and execution you can and will beat superior talent. Don’t let the thing you have control over be the thing that beats you. Always outwork your competition.”