(calm music) - [Narrator] When Howard Porter moved from Stuart, Florida to Sarasota, Florida the plan was to leave trouble behind in search of a better home.

It was the mid 1960s.

The school year was about to start.

It was a year that would change not only Howard, but the lives of thousands around him.

(jazzy music) Howard was a six foot eight teenager with an equally big passion for basketball.

His mother, Ada Mae, made forced him to wear dresses when she left him alone.

The tactic was meant to humiliate him into staying off the basketball court.

It never seemed to work.

Howard was hanging with the bad crowd so Ada Mae moved him into the Newtown neighborhood of Sarasota.

They ended up next door to Al Baker, a full-time police officer and a part-time basketball coach.

Sarasota seemed to be exactly what Ada Mae hoped for.

The sleepy little town was rich in history, the arts, powdery white sands, and palm trees but not everyone could enjoy it equally.

- We were raised over town.

It's called the Rosemary District now.

There was certainly separation where we were, where we lived.

They called it Black Bottom, we called it the community - Further south of that area, that's where Caucasians were living and they had a problem when they wanted to literally visit people at the Rosemary Cemetery that's located off central, they did not want to walk through the area that was known as Black Bottom, known where African-Americans were living.

And as such they began to go gradually, gradually, gradually forced the African-Americans to move in what we now consider the Newtown area.

- Desegregation, racism was all around me because the boundaries of my community was, you could go to the railroad track to the east.

You could go to coconut to the west, and you can go to 10th to the north and you could go to fourth to the south.

And that was about it, when you cross over them it was, you was identified an outside of your neighborhood.

Crossing those tracks, you did that at your own risk.

Because you didn't know what was on the other side of those tracks, because we'd been told, don't go on the other side of the tracks.

The first time I ever saw a white person was on our side of the tracks.

And I ran home and I said, mom, mom, I saw this, I don't know what it was.

And she said, I described it and she said, Oh, that's just a white person.

I said, what's a white, I've never seen a white person.

And she said, well, they are there, but be careful.

Don't look at them, don't talk to them, just stay away.

- Sarasota used to be what they call a sundown town.

And that was known throughout the south, that was a term meaning that if you were black by the time the sun went down you had to be back into the community where you lived.

- [Narrator] Failure to follow the curfew meant arrest or vigilante violence.

- I used to go downtown with my granny and I wanted an ice cream cone, I love vanilla ice cream.

And so we were walking by this ice cream shop and I asked granny for an ice cream cone.

So she told me, she said, you go sit there.

Told me to sit on the curb and she went to the counter and got my cone and came out.

Now, I looked at her, I looked at the people sitting in there, I'm saying, wonder why we think that's me wondering as a kid but you didn't question adults, at least we didn't.

You did, as you were told - The community was a close knit community.

During that period we didn't have the ability to venture out in other communities in Sarasota.

So we had to depend on each other.

- [Rachel] There was a time when you have more than 60, and I'm saying that correctly, black businesses that were owned and operated in the Newtown area.

At one point we had our own, our very own theater.

- [Jetson] We had restaurants, we had clubs, we had dry cleaners, you know, we had, we had all sorts, barbershops, we have beauty problems, you know, all of this was in our community.

- It was close knit.

Everybody knew everybody, literally.

Now some people may have known more people than others but I knew a lot of people 'cause I worked at Mrs. Solomon's store.

People from different parts of the community come in the store and there's people right around.

So when I was there during the summer, all year round, open the store in the morning, close it at night.

- [Narrator] Howard spent his off season shooting at a hoop made of an old bicycle tire.

He ran 10 miles along train tracks from Newtown to Palmetto.

- I think that was one of my biggest jobs, was condition them to the point that they could actually play at their best performance, and what we tried to do and that's very difficult.

And different players express but when it's all over, they could understand what I was trying to do.

You can play better when you in condition.

- I went out for the team that summer of my, when I was going into my junior year from sophomore and I was practicing with the team and I intended to be on the team.

I was asthmatic and so during the practices and the coach would have us run around the court.

And a period of times my asthma come down on me and I started slow it up and if you slow up the coach will behind you with the paddle.

So I got paddled a few times and I told the coach, I got asthma!

And he told me he was going to run the asthma out of me.

- Booker was the school in the community that everything kind of rallied it around the high school.

We had a tremendous support system.

The teachers, you know, the the principal, was a very supportive system.

Parents during that period, they took the word of a teacher.

The teacher was kind of like the grown up in the community and anything your kid had done anything wrong, if they checked with the teacher and they validated it, they get punished.

So the school was very, very important, Booker was very, very important.

- [Narrator] The Booker Schools were named after Emma E. Booker, a teacher in the Sarasota community during the 1910s.

Her passion was the proper education of the black community.

They had no school buildings.

She taught them in churches and they used hand-me-down books from the white students.

Funding for the Booker schools followed.

- And so now I'm impressed when I go to Greater Hurst Chapel Church or when I go to Bethlehem I'm not just visiting church.

Now I know Bethlehem Church was the first African American church in Newtown.

Bethlehem Church board of trustees were the first ones to pay for the salary of Emma E. Booker who later became the Booker principle.

And now all of it connects.

- Students were separated all over the country based on race.

You had black schools, you had white schools.

Here in Sarasota you had Booker High School.

In Manatee County you had Lincoln Memorial High School.

Those high schools were set up solely for African-American students because those students couldn't go to white high schools.

- A lot of times we rode together from the first grade through the 12th grade.

So a lot of students, you know, were there all the time.

And during those times we actually cried together, we'd play sports together.

For the most part we came together as a group of kids.

- [Narrator] As Howard Porter would discover to be a Tornado in 1966 was to be raised and educated among and family.

To walk among star athletes and scholars - Everything that moved at Booker I was a part of.

And the Drama Club, we'd do different plays and build our own scenery, that sort of thing so.

- [Narrator] Sanders herself had drawn the attention since grade school.

She could read, write, and tell time at the age of five.

At 10 she convinced her classmates to refuse to put their dimes into a local bank.

The bank provided tours to nearly every school except Booker.

- Protestors were not just one socioeconomic class.

And I think that's important, many times people think, Oh, you're protesting because you don't have.

No and protesting because I do have, and I don't think you should be denied.

- [Narrator] Sanders became a youth leader in the NAACP.

So did Fred Atkins.

The city turned him and other black children away from nearby Lido Key Beach.

He helped fellow students register voters and attended school board meetings.

- I participated in the boundaries and the discussions.

I used to go to school board meetings and meetings in different places to see what was going on.

- [Narrator] He still found time to play multiple sports on the field alongside James Logan.

Logan was the junior varsity football captain and a member of the National Honor Society.

- We had our own football team, we had our basketball team, we had all of it, we had everything that we need, or at least from our point of view, we had everything that we needed and everything that we wanted.

- [Narrator] Something was brewing on the basketball court.

The Tornadoes had lost in the state final the year before.

They planned to finish the job this time.

When they started the journey they needed a center.

Now coach Baker had one, one who had literally landed at his doorstep.

- [Hugh] Well, we had high expectations, as I said, from seventh grade on up.

We knew at that time that we had, we had about as I said, early we had about 10 basketball players who could really play.

And then along came Howard Porter, we had everything but a dominant center and here comes Howard Porter as a sophomore coming into Booker High School at six seven, six eight, which was very tall during those days so that's all we needed was him.

- We had had a great team the year before, and we were expecting to have an excellent team for the '66-'67 season.

We had nearly all the players back except for one or two and Howard Porter and Arthur Bali Johnson was our leaders scorers on the team the year before so we knew we were gonna be ready.

So we expected to win it all.

- I have always stated, we was trying to improve so the year before we were runners up, which was a big surprise.

And then the article came out sayin', Al Baker was sayin' he will always try to improve on the previous season.

And now in order to do that you have to be state champs.

- See, in 66 he over practiced us.

That's why we lost, 'cause we was tired when we got down to play ball, we was tired.

- But you know, the year that we were runners up the week before the state tournament three starters were getting over the flu, they ain't even practice.

- They outscored opponents, what was, 102 to 58?

I mean, their victories were average 40 points.

It's noteworthy because you would not see this collection of talent pop the bottom on one team anymore.

Chances are they'd go off and play with their friends or different locations for better schools, different coaches.

But back then, you were kind of limited.

(upbeat music) - Well, we were never ones to make predictions as to how many games we would win because actually we were a very small school and yet we were playing the big schools.

And the most you could hope for, you wouldn't tell your players this but at the split, we went 32 games in 1967, 68 year without a loss.

In my wildest dream, I never would have predicted that because we played, Gayle, St. Petersburg, Tampa, we played Middleton, Layton, we played at all the top teams in our area.

And to be able to do that and be undefeated was unbelievable.

- Back in those days, the ball went through the center.

It's not like basketball you see now where everybody shoots from the three point line.

Back then there wasn't a three point line, there was no shot clock.

So you could take as long as you wanted to score a points.

You didn't have to shoot it within, you know, 40 seconds like you see now.

He was unique in that he was a six foot nine guy who could work underneath the basket like most big men, but a lot of big men at the time had to stay there because they weren't very athletic.

They couldn't run fast, they couldn't dribble, they couldn't shoot from outside.

This guy had the total package.

Even though Howard scored 35 points, the player took the best shot.

In other words, if Howard didn't have the best high percentage shot just because he was the star he would automatically take the shot, he'd look for the guy, the open guy, to get the ball and he would shoot.

And coach Baker made you do that because if you didn't do that you were sitting on the bench.

- [Al] Arthur Johnson, he was the best guard I've seen on anybody's team.

- I didn't play because that was brought up from the JV.

But they guys played.

Obviously you know Watson, boy, I'll tell you what, I wasn't mad I wasn't out there.

Those guys showed out.

- Team overall had a tremendous impact on the neighborhood.

A lot of people were talking about the team and a lot of people were supporting the team, a lot of people were attending games on a regular basis.

The community overall I think came together.

- I probably was one of the most adamant fans of that era because during that time I was a ninth grader, I was getting ready to go into high school at that time because high school started at 10th grade at that time so I was a very active, I did everything I could to get to every home game possible, including climbing up gymnasium walls through the window.

- You didn't really think about the winning part.

I mean, that was, you know, coaches worry.

We only accomplished what we did because of the things that he was coaching and teaching about.

A lot of the players, and in fact, all the players, you know, took that very serious.

So when the winning started that was a product of all the the training and exercise and the teaching and so forth.

- From what I gathered talking to coach Baker and just knowing, I don't think coach Baker played favorites.

I mean, you hear some coaches now where they treat each player differently because you're not gonna treat your bench warmer the same as you're gonna treat your superstar.

You're maybe going to make allowances.

I don't think coach Baker made allowances for anybody on that team.

- We used to meet up there by the Goodwill where the bus picked all the players up.

And you had to be there at a certain time.

And Howard Porter was late comin'.

He left him.

Coach Baker said this right here, star or scrub, be on time.

He left Howard Porter, he left 'em.

But a guy picked him up and brought him.

Stopped us in Palmetto.

And we stopped the bus and he got on the bus.

Coach Baker was a disciplinary, he was tough.

- As an athlete and you had a curfew and he was a policeman at the time and also a teacher and coach so if you stayed out and beyond a certain time, he would be in his squad car along with another coworker and if you were out someplace where you shouldn't be you know, he'd catch you.

And if you did that then you had to pay a price.

Usually there was a punishment, if you were playing basketball there's a punishment.

If you were playing football there was a punishment.

It extended from running extra laps, you know, to actually doing sprints and staying after the practice.

So you learned to kind of, you know, do the things that you were supposed to do, which is go home and go to sleep.

(chuckles) - [Narrator] The season would be tough.

All black teams travel to play at all white schools in front of all white crowds.

- Ordinarily we had to get special permission for a white team to play a black team.

And somehow the principals worked that out.

- We'd go to Clearwater to play them.

We had to go and play them in the daytime.

We had to get a police escort.

Yeah, yeah.

'Cause they were scared of us, these people were afraid to play us, man.

- [Narrator] Even the playoffs were segregated in Florida in 1967.

13 years after the Supreme Court said it was unconstitutional.

- If we start with Brown vs Board of Education 1954, it was not the first Supreme Court decision on racial equality or the 14th amendment.

But it was the first that affected public schools.

And they wanted, in terms of expenditures, in terms of facilities, teachers, that sort of thing, they wanted to test the principle that school segregation mandated by the government, by a government, was unconstitutional, violated the 14th amendment equal protection of the laws clause, even when there was equality between the various components.

- [Narrator] The school district faced a deadline.

If it didn't integrate its schools by the next school year it would lose federal funding.

Dr. Thomas Guilford was the superintendent of schools.

Herbert Field had been chairman of the Sarasota County school board for nearly 12 years and he was reappointed during the time of Sarasota's desegregation.

Field oversaw the development of six plans to comply with the court order.

Plan six would redraw the line so that Booker would be a neighborhood school for both black and white students.

Plan one was very different.

It called for the closure of Booker schools over the course of four years.

On the court none of this got in the way of the Tornadoes.

- [Hugh] We had high expectations on the team, the coaches had high expectations on Brown, the state of Florida had high expectations on him because we were ranked, at that time we were ranked number one in the state of Florida.

So our expectation was everybody knew that we, you know, we gonna at least play in the finals.

- Coach Baker didn't want to like play back and let the team come to you.

He wanted to pressure you, pressure creates mistakes if you don't have the wherewithal and that's what they capitalized on.

So as you combine points off mistakes, points because they're offensively talented, that's how you get scores like, you know, it was ridiculous 121 to 27.

That just shows you the talent disparity between Booker and some of their opponents.

You would never see a score like that in a high school basketball game now, it's just unheard of now.

- James William at Tampa Blake, one night I was playing Middleton and he came down at half time and said, he used to call me Shorty, so he says, "Shorty, why do you always wait until you get behind before you play a man for man or zone pressure?"

And I thought about that and from then on we played, nobody in this area was playing full court zone from the first quarter, we were different.

Nah, I wish I had for one game let them do what they wanted to do and the night they say they wanna do it I would pull the bolts, that's when that backboard was broken.

They were gonna do what they could do that night but at halftime, I forgot what the score was but it was amazing how many points they scored in two quarters, and as a matter of fact, and they probably wouldn't have noticed, in some games the defense outscored the offense.

That 1967 season people were lining up three hours in advance of starting time in order to be guaranteed to get a seat.

Then on the outside, up on banisters and it would be crowded and around the court.

- I'm going home at 3:30 and all the white folks coming parking cars at 3:30.

I'm going home, coming back for the game, and like I said, damn near over 500 people.

And you couldn't get in there, people standing outside the walls, man.

Sittin' by the walls linin' up to see this ball club, man.

It was like going to the Harlem Globetrotters man, it was something else, man.

- [Hugh] It wouldn't of mattered who, if we were gonna to beat a team, the matter is were we gonna bust the clock on 'em.

- I tried to keep the scores down but the student body would start yellin', we want 100, we want 100!

During Howard Porter's senior year, I cannot imagine a why, but he received a lot of hate mail, for some reason there was a group that wanted to discourage him from playing college basketball in the state of Florida.

So much so that he leaned toward going out of state.

- [Narrator] On February 28th, parents of white students submitted a petition signed by 311 people from Northern Sarasota.

They said forcing their children to walk to school in Newtown would pose a significant threat to their children's safety.

Instead, they wanted the black kids bussed to the predominantly white schools.

After hearing a half hour of these complaints chairman Field eliminated plan six.

- The story was, we had inferior teachers.

They were too inferior for the white kids to come to our school.

But they wasn't too inferior to go out there and teach at the white school, 'cause that's what they did.

They used all kinds of excuses not to have the white kids to come to Booker.

The teachers were inferior.

They taught us, taught us well.

- You see, I never even heard of attending an inferior school until we started talking to whites.

And so I was confused, I said, what's inferior?

I mean, when did we get, I do math.

I do reading, I do science, I do all of these things, and you're telling me that somehow my school is inferior.

You gotta remember, I was angry when I found out that they wanted to do that.

I got really angry.

I understood that at some point desegregation would occur but not in that way.

And what the adults wanted and what we wanted was not the same.

- I personally believe that some of it was racism, either directly or indirectly.

And by directly, I mean white administrators not thinking black teachers were effective.

Indirectly by white administers pandering to white parents' fear of their child getting an inferior education from a black teacher.

- We were hearing different schools being closed down, it almost happened like overnight for us.

We just came back one day, they didn't even, I felt like the principal should have let me have a meeting with the players, that wasn't done.

But I've noticed the principal from Sarasota and Riverview, they were up in the bleachers and they would probably picking out the ones they wanted and that the way it was done.

- [Narrator] near the end of the season Booker was the number one team in the state, black or white.

- Our team being number one in the nation in basketball really put us on the map.

Because before that, people all over the country .

had not heard of Booker High School.

And suddenly it's like, you're from Sarasota, Florida?

That's where Booker High School is.

So it wasn't just the beaches and a few attractions that brought Sarasota lots of good press.

The fact that our team consistently scored over 100 points in every game and that the guys on the team were good students.

- [Narrator] All eyes were on the prize.

The basketball team was 31 and 0, it went where the previous year's team couldn't, the state championship for black schools.

- It was glorious, ss a matter of fact, our course was at the state and what I didn't know, they had written a song before the game started, for some reason there was a little break, I went outside and when I came back in before the game started the chorus stood up and they sang.

- Coach Baker, you star maker.

- Wherever you're going be going your way, and that was very touching.

- The most well-known game was the one that they want for the state title.

They went undefeated during the season, outscoring their opponents by 50 points.

But then in the playoffs, they beat five opponents to win the state title and they beat Hungerford.

They beat them by 33 points in the championship game.

Usually a championship game should be more highly contested than that because the two best teams in the state, but the fact that they were able to win by 33 points just shows you how much better they were than even the next best team.

- [Narrator] On March 12th in Fort Myers, the Tornadoes won 93 to 60.

The verdict was that Booker High School was the best basketball team of any kind in the state.

- Surely enough we were state champs and number one team in the state of Florida.

- [Hugh] Very exciting for us to bring that trophy back home to Sarasota.

Like I said, our expectation was high so it wasn't like, you know, we did something that wasn't expected of us.

We all knew that we had the best team in the state of Florida, I don't care what classification it was.

So bar none we knew that we had to win the state championship.

No way we could have lost it.

- As a matter of fact, Howard Porter which went on to Villanova, he won the hearts of the people in Sarasota.

As a matter of fact, I think he should've been buried here.

- The people who know basketball in this town will know that you say Booker High School, you know, Howard Porter, 1967, it's held with reverence because that kind of talent really hasn't come through this town probably before and since then, no doubt.

- There was a guy, and I can't remember his name, he was actually the executive over football and basketball and at the state meeting, he called me up on the stage and gave me an old beat up basketball and told me to go home and practice.

And that's the year that he told me to do that we ended up going 32 and 0.

I wanted to go back to a state meeting and give him that ball back and I didn't get a chance to do that.

That was the only gratification.

That's what I wanted to do, I wanted to go back and walk up on stage and give him that ball back.

But I didn't get that chance by the schools being desegregated.

I missed out on that meeting.

- [Narrator] Nine days later, the board officially adopted plan one by a four to one vote.

The lone no vote, William Muirhead, cited a worry over the rush for a solution.

Booker would be closed.

- My love and I think everybody that grew up in this community, their love was Booker High School, being at Booker.

And we grew up, I never knew Review High School fight song, I still know the Booker High School fight song.

And I went to high school at Review, never went to high school at Booker, but I still know it because it was sung in our household and sung in the community all the time.

And so it was just things that, how we grew up, we grew up just being a part of that and it was all taken away.

I knew that I was gonna be the starting quarterback, I was gonna be a starting basketball guy, and I was gonna be to catcher on the baseball team.

I knew that growing up at Booker, none of that happened.

- [Narrator] The basketball team dealt with some turbulence of its own.

Booker had earned a spot in the National Black High School Basketball tournament in Montgomery, Alabama.

The Tornadoes were confident they could keep on crushing the competition.

Their spirits were high.

- After they had won the state title they play University of Tampa, which is college kids, I mean, basically some of them are grown men by now and they won 136 to 98.

So they beat a college team by 38 points.

- We were state champs.

Nobody, we were the undefeated team in the state that year.

So we went to the nationals in Alabama.

And then the Chicago White Sox baseball team let us use their airplane.

- That was my first plane ride.

I think it was all our first plane ride.

So that to me took my attention right away.

- It was like a bag job.

I mean, Booker went to this home, This arena where the home team was, the home officials, the home crowd.

And they think they got, the expression is jobbed, they didn't get a fair, there were whistles being called on fouls that weren't being committed.

So they say that it was a bag job from the very beginning that they were destined to lose.

But that was the only game that they lost.

- They wouldn't let us win.

We was the best team there.

There's five teams there, we were the best teams, we were the best team in the tournament.

But they said a team from Florida would never win the nationals and they dismantled the nationals after '67.

- [Narrator] The players rejoined their classmates for a final graduation.

Those who weren't seniors faced the unknown.

- We gonna win his thing again in '68.

But the country shut all the black schools down.

So I had to go to Sarasota High.

People that lived on one side of town, you go to Riverview, people that live on the other side of the town go to Sarasota High.

Coach Baker goes to Riverview as assistant coach.

That was wrong there.

- That was one of the saddest moments I've ever had, as a high school student and as a young black male.

I didn't see any need for it.

I thought it might've been political.

I saw it was something that wasn't really good for the black neighborhood, or black community.

I thought that and I hoped.

that it would stem some complaints or some movement, you know, to not let that happen.

- But the thing that really hurt, I had given that school 14 years in so many different ways.

That was a bitter pill.

- And Coach Baker coming from a championship team had to go of course behind the coach that was already there.

- Whatever his philosophy was, I tried to help them carry out his philosophy.

But that wasn't, it wasn't easy.

- The coach at that time at Sarasota High's name was Bill Lee.

And he had retired after the '67 basketball season, but when the school was shut down, he knew he was gonna get some good basketball players so he took his contract back and went back to coach.

Yeah, he went back.

- [Hugh] Really think, if I look at it really, which I've been looking at it all the time, the way they did it was because of the basketball team.

We were able to get five basketball players on the south side, five on the north side.

So to this day I think that was the plan they used to make sure that one school didn't dominate their basketball team.

- It was a very disheartening process that we went through because even though as a young man, I I participated in the boundaries and the discussion, I used to go to school board meetings and meetings in different places to see what was going on but the reality was that our primary preference was not to leave and not to have to leave Booker High School.

Have some people de-segregate Booker High School.

And since I just lived a couple of blocks up the street I just knew I'd be going to Booker but when it all was finally drawn out I wasn't able to live those dreams so I had to find another vision.

- [Narrator] Every year a grade level would move from Booker to either Sarasota or Riverview high school.

- I think it's the way it was done that made it really, really hard.

If they had started with the younger kids, you know, just like growing up together and stuff, but they just took that line and put it down 27th street, they didn't care what grade you was in and stuff.

- [Narrator] In the end the students would have to leave Newtown during the day.

- What people don't ever talk about, we knew what happened to the students.

They don't talk about what happened to the teachers, what happened to the coaches, what happened to the people that worked on campus, because call them had to leave as well.

They had integrated as well and on top of that, some of the lost positions, went from being a head coach to an assistant.

Some of them lost pay.

Some of them were the top performing teachers at Booker and they weren't anymore, it's almost heart wrenching when you hear about it.

- And when it all boiled down they drew boundaries about athletics more so than academics.

- The school board, that was not their concern.

They had no desire to deal with black children at all.

I know that the adults had been pushing desegregation and integration and all this stuff and it had been unsuccessful.

- It was something I'll definitely never forget, anybody that goes through that would never forget because you're torn out of one lifestyle and stuck in another.

Not only are you stuck in another, you're stuck in another that people that's in control don't want you there.

So it was an ongoing battle.

- [Hugh] You got all the your classmates who you've been with since first grade.

And all of a sudden you got to go one way and they got to go the other way, so it was really devastating.

- [Narrator] As plan one continued the Booker campuses grew quieter.

The pride that rang out so strongly so often slowly gave way to a sense of grief.

- I walked to school, walked home from school, all of that was lost.

And now suddenly I'm spending half an hour on a bus to get to school and half an hour on a bus to get home from school and no stops in between that.

I mean, that's an hour of my day you just robbed me of that I could have been doing some other activity.

- We never had cars.

So it wasn't a big deal for us.

But when I got to Sarasota, I'm looking around at all these fancy cars and all these, you know, convertibles and blah, blah, I'm thinking, wow, these teachers are pretty dog gone rich, they got lots of stuff.

And then I find out that's not the teacher's cars, those are the kids' cars.

I'm going, Holy crap!

I've been missing out, the world's bigger than I thought.

But I'm still scared, now I'm really scared because I'm looking at all these cars on the parking lot and they're not the teacher's cars.

And as I walk out the door down the steps to the bus second floor windows were opened, back in those days it was still hot and they probably use air conditioning as much as you do now.

And they could raise the windows.

They started throwing things at me out of the window, calling me names, calling me the N-word, go back to Africa.

I mean, all kinds of crazy stuff.

- Not only did the students give us hard times, but we fought back of course, but there was teachers that was just as prejudice or even more prejudice than the kids.

And my dad had a standing rule that whenever we was in a classroom to sit on the front row, I was taught that all my life going to school.

So I'm in this one history class and I go in and I pull up on the front row and this guy who was a teacher, he asked me, he says, what're you doing?

Just sitting here, you know.

He said, what are you doing sitting right there?

I said, I'm just sitting here.

He said, you need to get up and go to the back.

- They weren't accepted at those schools.

Just recently two weeks ago I heard someone tell me that in 1957 her and her sister were Caucasian students at Riverview High School and they couldn't understand why the black students were being ostracized and penalized for being late and they came all we on this side of town to the bus stop to find out it was being sabotaged, sabotaged because of bus driver was intentionally coming late, picking them up late.

They were getting to school late and they were getting consequences for being late.

- They were being moved into a hostile environment and even in an environment in which you don't want to go and that fear factor along with not being welcomed had to have tremendous esteem and tremendous cultural ramifications of anger, confusion, you know, and disbelief.

Fred Atkins is interesting because he had a plan to be an attorney and he ended up quitting school and delaying his education.

- The worst time was when one kid came to school, when I saw him coming in the way I leave that morning early he had a German Shepherd with him.

And in today's mind as an adult I understood what he was looking like.

He was a Nazi.

He came in all dressed up as a Nazi.

And I was sitting in the back of the room, so he knew where I was sitting at.

And we had my room was the first room in the entryway and right next to the room is the bathroom, the boy's bathroom.

And the next thing I know I heard a loud pop, zing.

I was sitting in my chair and something went behind me.

And next thing I know there was four adult men racing in the room and one of them was the principal and he says, get up, get in the middle, don't say a word follow us as quickly as you can.

Move, now.

I got up, you all ran down his office.

He sat me down in a room and said, stay right here, do not move.

I will come back to get you when it's time.

And there were police on the campus looking for the kid, looking for the dog, looking for the gun.

And I remember the principal getting up and getting on the PA system and says, said so many words about how we were going to deal with problems with the world today, this is a good learning experience.

And he said these words, but this will not become another Selma, Alabama.

- [Narrator] The final blow was the planned destruction of Amaryllis Park Elementary School, a sister school of the Booker campuses.

- There was no basic training of introduction on how we were going to interact with each other.

And so everybody's was flying by the seat of their pants.

And so when we said, they finna send our babies into this mess, we said, no, no, no, no.

We've taken the brunt of this but Hey, we need a different process to desegregate.

- Forcing black children to leave the school they went to in their neighborhood, forcing them to go across town to a school in another neighborhood.

And the answer is, it was a mistake.

- It wasn't a great concern until they decided that they were gonna close the elementary school.

And that was just going a little bit too far.

- They wanted to physically cut up Amaryllis Park and move it.

We were told that it was constructed that way.

We were told that we were so bad you couldn't allow white children to come into our neighborhood 'cause we were just not even human, we were just terrible.

- But when it came time for the school to be removed the young people led that struggle.

- We came along angry, young kids, and we did more in a week than the adults had been able to do in a very long time.

Because we actually created a movement.

We created something that had not been done that I'm aware of before, where you mobilize the community.

You mobilize not only blacks, you mobilized whites.

- [Narrator] Dr. Christine Russell is a professor emerita at Boston University.

She's written four books about desegregation in the United States.

She said what the Newtown students did was unique.

- I was not aware of any protests in black communities by black students during the height of the civil rights movement.

- There was no model, we just did what needed to be done.

See, the amazing thing about children is children are very smart.

They are so much smarter than grown ups gives them credit for.

They assumed that we couldn't do these things.

And we, I hate to say instinct, but maybe that's what it was.

We looked, we said, here's a list of things that need to be done.

A big one is keep these kids off the street.

They must be in schools so that the police have no excuse to come in here and do anything.

They must be learning.

We've got to come up with a way to make sure that they don't get too far behind.

They have to eat.

So we've said all of these things, we just made a list.

- We figured that if we was going to have a boycott we needed to go to school.

- [Narrator] They decided to start their own schools, freedom schools.

- We had to come up with a way to make sure that the kids were not walking around, not getting into trouble.

The only way to do that was to set up freedom schools.

So we went to churches, we went to people who had grocery stores.

We went to a variety, we said, what would it take to keep things going?

And we went after those resources and the resources were good, they said, yeah, we support that, we support that.

- [Narrator] Local businesses provided food and nearby new college students joined the seniors in teaching the younger kids.

- Those very young people that started the process said, hey, we'll be the teachers.

We didn't even ask adults to be the teachers.

So the juniors and senior classes took over the different schools.

- I felt like I was the boss.

I was in charge of somebody other than myself and they had to listen to me and I had been a bright student in school so they couldn't pretend that I couldn't help them say with homework or anything like that.

- They made sure they had like five or six different locations, most of 'em was in churches, and they'd locate them by grades.

- We'd break off into this grade would be in this section and another grade in another section.

- You know, anything like that you're not going to get 100% participation.

But we was trying to encourage kids not to get on the bus and not go to school.

- [Narrator] Atkins, Sanders, and Logan spread the news and transported students to the freedom schools.

It worked.

85% of the black students in the county joined the boycott.

- The people that was in charge of it, they did a tremendous job.

- I don't know how I became, I don't remember how I became superintendent of freedom schools.

I just know that it happened.

It was very subtle and we just started doing it because all of the day-to-day stuff, the day-to-day decisions, you know, I spent a lot of time walking around to different churches where we were holding the kids.

- We did not go and that was because the parents embraced it also.

Because if the parents are sending their kids to school it'd been hard for them not to have gone.

So there was no pressure from inside the community.

We got the, you know, the regular cries from outside the community, oh, you're gonna get suspended.

Oh, you're gonna get arrested.

Oh, you're not gonna be able to do this.

But when it all boiled down to the negotiation was about when are you all gonna decide that the school is not gonna be moved?

And when are we gonna go back is gonna be based on what y'all decide you're gonna do with the students that walked out, which is over 95% of 'em.

- And I don't know if you know about how it works, you know, that's why they take attendance everyday 'cause that's how schools get their money.

By how many people were in the seats.

So with us gone and not going to school that hit 'em where it hurt.

And usually protests like that does have to be done where it touches the money.

'Cause when you start touching money a lot of people say, hey, wait a minute.

- [Narrator] Dr. Guilford took the lead during a heated district meeting.

He read a letter that was about to be sent to the population of Newtown.

The parents faced fines and jail time.

The students could be suspended or expelled if they didn't come back in three days.

The crowd booed, a majority walked out.

- This is a very short period of time, you gotta remember.

If you read it, it looks almost like we did this for a month or so now.

Now, yes it was longer than a week in the sense that the preparation was longer.

But this was a very short boycott, it didn't take very long.

- [Narrator] After five days, the board caved.

Amaryllis Park Elementary School would stay open.

Jerry Strickland, the assistant superintendent, said that it wasn't enough.

He quit his position so that he could reopen the Brooker schools.

- We'd finally won one of these discussions.

And so we felt as young people, invincible for the moment.

We thought we could win some more battles.

They came few and far between after that but we were able to say that not only did we stop the the elementary school from being transferred but then we went right on to moving toward reopening Booker High School.

- Some people thought that it was about desegregation and integration.

And we said, that's not what the boycott was about, it was about saving our school.

That's what we wanted to do, We never asked to go to white schools, we never did that.

Again, if you think about it, why would I assume that my school was inferior?

I didn't.

- That's why that protest that we're talking about was huge.

Because a lot of other communities that have black schools they lost 'em completely.

It's just what happened, they don't have 'em anymore.

They're not there anymore.

And so for what those guys did who were the leaders at that time, this community should be forever grateful to them.

(calm music) (moves into upbeat music) - In 2017, I made an arrangement for every student at Booker High School to integrate another school's year.

We gave every single student a Booker High School diploma.

(students cheering)