Ed: The following is an assignment for my book writing class that is due tomorrow on the theme of “A Matter of Principle”. I just finished it. We’re supposed to practice writing narrative non-fiction. Comments always welcome. Heidi Hadsell is my maternal aunt. John Hadsell is my maternal grandfather.
Farivar, Cyrus
January 30, 2005
Prof. Freedman
“A Matter of Principle”
WC: 1264
Most days, Heidi would walk to school. Her house sat up on a hill, along the edge of Claremont Canyon, with a view of the opposite side to the north, and the San Francisco Bay to the west. On clear days, she could make out some of the Golden Gate Bridge in the distance. The cardinal directions that remained were something of a mystery. Well, not a mystery exactly, but something whose echoes bounced off the canyon walls and reverberated into the East Bay down below. The East. The South. Lunch counters. Marches. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Boycotts. Birmingham. Atlanta. Montgomery. Riots. Protests. We Shall Overcome.
She attended Willard Junior High School, built on a plot of land owned by an old family member. The City of Berkeley had taken it over some years back to build the school. It was a bit farther to walk than her elementary school, John Muir, but the walk became shorter when she would stop in at a lunch counter, Ozzie’s, for a milkshake on the way home.
Life at John Muir Elementary School had been with almost entirely white school kids – probably not much unlike how it had been 30 years before, when her father was a schoolboy there. By the time she finished elementary school, in 6th grade, in 1961, some of her friends moved away. A small handful of children, whose parents, even in Berkeley, did not want their white sons and daughters breathing the same oxygen as the black sons and daughters of Berkeley. Unlike some schools in other parts of the country, there were no “separate but equal” schools. Rather, it was housing patterns that determined the racial makeup of schools.
John Muir was much closer to the Berkeley Hills neighborhood, anchored by the stately Claremont Hotel. The hotel stood, and still stands, in its gleaming whiteness, framed by Claremont Canyon on both sides. It is perched looking west, and guests can play tennis within its shade. Willard was much closer to the Ashby neighborhood and South Berkeley. This was a point that several racial neighborhoods converged on. Just under half white, just under half black, and the rest Asian.
When Heidi started at Willard, some of her friends were sent to Catholic school, or moved away entirely, she wasn’t completely sure why. It was more coded then. While she may not have known exactly what was going on, her parents did. John and Virginia Hadsell, a pastor and a schoolteacher, consistently had discussions at the dinner table.
“Should we have our children pay the price for our ideals?”
Heidi’s parents were against segregation, but sending their children, their two daughters, to racially integrated schools could be problematic. There could be tension. There could be violence. And they worried that the schools themselves might not be as good. An all-white school did exist, as did an all-black school, but those were in other parts of town. Willard was where Heidi rightfully belonged. Well, geographically, anyway.
Before Heidi’s first year at Willard, she attended summer school along with a group of two girlfriends, both white. Somehow, Heidi’s clique started butting heads with a much larger, and much scarier squad of black girls. The larger group made threats and Heidi and the other two ran away. Some parents found out, and they did the only natural thing that they could do. The black girls were invited over for lunch after school. The enmity ceased. Despite this brief moment of harmony, it wasn’t easy for all the kids to trust each other all the time. At the end of a hallway, if Heidi saw a group of black boys together, she would be very reluctant to walk by them.
“What’re you lookin’ at?”
By the time Heidi got to 8th and 9th grade, she began to feel more at ease, and worked into a racially mixed group of friends. She began to feel awkward around homogenous groups, such as one time she and her friends went to a school basketball game in Marin County. All whites. Heidi’s crowd had a slight tinge of superiority about them, because being integrated was cool.
But perhaps it wasn’t so cool for some of the adults in Berkeley in 1963.
A family friend nicknamed Sparky, who sat on the Berkeley school board, asked Heidi’s father, John Hadsell to head what came to be known as the Hadsell Committee. Their task was to study the reasons for Berkeley’s de facto segregation in the elementary schools and to set up a way to integrate it. An account of the committee’s meetings appeared nearly daily in the local newspapers.
Heidi became increasingly aware of the drama unfolding around her. Tensions built up, and the sides started to fall into place. While most of her family and friends were good Berkeley “progressives” she encountered some who were not so keen on the upheaval of the status quo.
“What the hell is your father doing ?!?!”
One day that year, Heidi’s best friend Nancy invited her over to her house. Nancy lived in a nice house at the bottom of the hill from Heidi’s, on a street called The Uplands. The two young girls were in the kitchen when Nancy’s mother came in.
“Your father is the head of this committee?”
“Yes.”
What Heidi made up for in moral courage, she lacked in tenacity – at least at that moment. She found herself valiantly defending her father. But what could she say, as a 14-year-old girl, which would convince this middle-aged woman otherwise? Heidi tore out of the house on The Uplands and never returned. Even now, she cannot pass the house without evoking this memory.
The Hadsell Committee ruled in 1963 that in the absence of fair housing laws, true integration could only happen with bussing. Kids were transported across town to create more racially integrated elementary schools.
Medgar Evers was shot dead in front of his wife and children. James Meredith graduated from Ole Miss.
“People actually thought that the United States could be fixed. All we had to do was to fix the gap between the rich and the poor and fix the gap between the blacks and the whites and we could have a society run properly.”
Martin Luther King Jr. had a dream. John F. Kennedy was assassinated.
“My parents’ generation thought they could fix things. They were really mad at the powers that be in the US government and mad at the segregationists and so forth but were very idealistic about the capacity of human beings to change.”
The following year President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
“What happened was the Vietnam War and that’s when people stopped being quite so idealistic — that’s when I stopped being so idealistic. Part of it has to do with the massive power that the US unleashed in Vietnam and against demonstrators here. With the Civil Rights movement there were deaths and it was a hard struggle but it wasn’t near the massive military power as on show as one saw in the Vietnam War. And that’s when I became a little more cynical about the possibilities of making an imperial power live up to its expressed ideals.”
The Free Speech Movement reached its zenith. The sit-in at Sproul Plaza began, barely two miles from Heidi’s house on the hill.
