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"My heart leaps for joy whenever I find a young boy who's grown into manhood who has a family, who's working, making a living, taking care of the family, bringing his children up as they begin to bloom," she said. "Some of these people are doing simple things. They're not generals. They're not doctors or lawyers. But they're good, fundamental citizens. I see some of them in the grocery store and they have just come from work and they are not very neat, but I reach out to hug them. Now, we've got a lot of those kind of people around." Old-timers still referred to it as Baptist Hill, a knob in the shadow of the Fort Worth skyline named for old churches long since gone. On Monday morning, the road to I.M. Terrell led up the hill, through red-brick tenements of the Butler Place housing projects. A few blocks of the projects had existed when Hall was a boy, but nothing like what now sprawled for blocks in every direction like a small city unto itself. Hall grew somber in the passenger seat, looking out at children playing on patchy lawns. "Clarissa, look at those kids," he said. "To see that this has grown so much tells me we're going in the wrong direction." That was only the first in a morning of bitter disappointments. Part of the Terrell building had been reclaimed as an elementary school. But that morning, Hall found that most of the yellow-brick edifice was still abandoned and forlorn, as it had been for 29 years, ever since its closing as part of Fort Worth's school integration plan. A middle-aged man named Hendricks Cunningham, a hall monitor at the present-day I.M. Terrell Elementary School and a former Terrell High graduate himself, unlocked the old doors and guided Hall through the dusty interior, past a pile of old textbooks in boxes that clogged a stairway into the basement. Dirt and pigeon droppings lay thick on the floor. The faint smell of chemicals was still present in Mr. Tinsley's science classroom, but the room was shorn of its blackboards and bookcases. Upstairs in the gymnasium, rusting basketball hoops dangled over the warped and tattered parquet floor. In the auditorium across the hall, the hundreds of seats had been removed, rafters in the ceiling were exposed, and the skeletal remains of a large pigeon lay beneath the crumbling stage. Hall felt stricken. As a member of the debate team, he had given many speeches from that same stage; had watched all those school plays; had listened to the boy named Billy Tom Rockwell sing the song Tangerine. He felt a little naive, too, having expected to find anything close to the grandeur of his old school that had helped so many transcend the evils of Jim Crow. How could the city and school district let this happen? Did people not remember what the school had meant? Hall was told of plans to eventually restore the building and use it as a teacher training center, but that was not much consolation. "This should be the mother school of Fort Worth," Hall said in what remained of his old school that morning. "This should be a high school, an emblem of what can be, not of yesteryear. So much came out of this building. It looked so pretty from the hotel. It looked like a beacon. I never thought it would look like this." He thought of the housing projects just down Baptist Hill that had spread like a rash. And the great educational institution that helped his generation and so many others rise above racism and poverty had been allowed to disintegrate into such shameful disrepair. On his way out of the building, Hall grew melancholy, running his fingers down a scuffed handrail he had remembered from 60 years before. "Many a hand has touched this rail," he said. "If this rail could talk. Whatever you do, don't let that go the junk pile." Copyright (c) 2002 Star-Telegram. All rights reserved. Reproduced with permission of the Star-Telegram. Any unauthorized reproduction of this article is strictly prohibited. For reprint information contact the Star-Telegram at 817-390-7573.
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© 2003 WETA/Reading Rockets. All rights reserved. Photo Credit for Bearden Elementary: Maude Schuyler Clay |
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