Memory from the Class of Harper High 1969

The invitation came via the Internet as most things do these days and I almost choked when I saw that it was for the 40^th year reunion of my high school graduating class. I hadn’t felt old before I opened that I email but once reading it I felt like an aged troll sitting at my desk, glasses sliding down my nose, streaks of gray hair reflecting the extra light that I needed to see any damn thing. The class of 1969 of Charles Lincoln Harper High in Atlanta, GA was being called to account for itself for a December 18, 2009 class reunion.

Everything I needed to know about life I learned my last year at Harper. At first it was just a high school that I attended because the catholic one where I had spent my freshman and sophomore year closed due to lack of interest from the white catholic community. In catholic school I had been one of 40. At Harper I was one of 317 and it was hard to make yourself known if you hadn’t been there for all four years. I lived next door to the assistant principal. The senior counselor lived in the house immediately behind me and the principal had been a classmate of my father’s when their principal had been the well known southern educator Charles Lincoln Harper my high school’s namesake. I felt I was watched like a hawk. But that did not prevent me from living every moment I could as a person about to graduate from high school.

There are so many things to remember about that last year. I had passed Mr. Hillman’s chemistry class without flying colors (nobody did that) and did not have to take another course in science. Once again I had Mrs. Carter for French. She was a rough teacher and the reason I was able to enjoy studying Italian in college. My favorite teacher was Mrs. Georgia Allen. She taught English and ran the Drama Club when there was one. In 1969 we didn’t do a play. But the next summer she directed me in Imara Baraka’s “A Black Mass” at Spelman College.I was excited that I was no longer a student but an actress. She reminded me that summer that I wasn’t the Juliet of my audition piece yet, but that I had potential. Last time I say her she was the aged grandmother in Tyler Perry’s “Madea’s Family Reunion”. It was Mrs. Allen who inspired me to use all my talents as an actress and a writer. But I had to get out of high school first.

Senior year we dared ourselves to be different. Our skirts were amazingly short, our dashikis spotless. Without asking my mother’s permission I gave myself an Afro, tightly curling my shoulder length locks I was trying to live up to the latest mantra of my generation that year. James Brown’s “I’m Black and I’m proud” was on my lips all the time. It came out in late ’68 after Dr. King died, just in time to fuel the fire of so many of my classmates. The world of the black man was changing and we were not the catalysts. We were the recipients of the brave new order and what we wanted to do was set the world on fire.

There were moments when our desire to do that was real not just literal.

The most important thing we actually did as a unit was register to vote. 317 young black people in the South were ready to take on the system. We had watched nearby Dixie Hills burn when King died, we had grown up with the tragedy of the four little girls blown up in an Alabama church branded in her skulls and we had heard stories about our parents, teachers and ministers trying to vote and the abuse they took to get to the polls. Oh yeah, baby, we were ready to burn the building down when the white registrars couldn’t get their pronunciation correct for our new generation and allowed their drawls to say, as they gave us the instructions: “Now where it says race since you are niggras you check colored.”

We were very loud and black and pissed off after that for about ten minutes. The majority of the class of 1969 rose from where we have been seated in the cafeteria cussing and screaming at the audacity of the white man who was standing behind the public address system his face flushed red asking “What did I say?” to our teachers. Those educators who had gone to great lengths to set up an in school registration, something unheard of back then, did not let us escape the cafeteria because of this minor infringement on our youthful dignity. One of them took over giving the instructions and made sure that we all got registered before we left. It was the look of 317 black faces set in anger that made the white voting officials take the ballots and make sure everything was proper before they left campus.

And they left quickly.

If was the year one of the female students lost control of her car while trying to  leave campus at lunch time for the local burger joint, which was not allowed, and rolled over the chickens in the yard on the other side of the school parking lot. The principal called the senior class into the auditorium to chastise us saying this would have been a major disaster had the rooster been killed along with the families means to make a living. I don’t remember much of what he said for all the laughter that was going on. Later when learning to drive I always remembered to check both ways for chickens when I backed out of anyplace. The real question from that day was why didn’t anyone trust us to leave campus and return. Most of us were near 18, real adults. Why were we being treated like babies?

There were moments when the faculty thought we weren’t going to make it to graduation. We were a hard bunch to control because we had lots of questions, demanded answers so our punishments were stuff. There was no play from the drama department and no trip for us seniors. We had to fight to keep the senior prom which was held at a place on Bankhead Highway that had once been a bowling alley. When we marched down the aisle at the Atlanta Civic Center we were ready to escape the clutches of old education systems and old Atlanta. We were ready to move on to the new world our ancestors worked for.

Most of us didn’t get far. There was Viet Nam- how many did we loose there physically and mentally? Then there was Cambodia. Some former student got killed in a disturbance at a University somewhere. Little tragedies that held us together for a moment. I’d ball up my first and think I’m black and I’m proud I got this far. Got to keep going.

Now there are the children we had and the grandchildren. There are those of us who became famous and those of us who retired. There are some in and out of jail, and some who have gone on to glory as recently as August.

I feel young when I think of that year but the invitation says I am old. I am sure I have forgotten more about the class of 1969 than I remember, but at the reunion there will be others to jog my memory. That’s what reunions do sometimes. They make you young again and they make you remember what you were before you lost your hair or your 401K. Forty years and counting. The class of 1969 of Charles Lincoln Harper High. Say it loud. . .