Chapter 2

For there had been a huge uproar in Mountain Brook, which was a nearly all white suburb of Birmingham, due to the fact that the Alabama State Legislature had redrawn the boundaries of all the state’s school districts. Yes, even in the red state of Alabama, the legislature had drunk the progressive Kool-Aid and now all that mattered was integrating the schools so that the upper middle class white kids benefited from the diversity of mixing with the chronically underprivileged, which was just a nicer way of saying that they would be forced to be around the poorest of the poor and kids who hadn’t received any parenting at all.

Nearly all of the vast wealth of Mountain Brook and other wealthy nearly all white towns across the street had gone into preventing integration but even those millions hadn’t helped as the Congresspeople who might have voted against the integration of the public school system were terrified of being labeled as racist. In the end, the measure passed in a landslide as new school boundaries were drawn in the oddest of shapes. They were configured however they needed to be so that each school now mixed white with black. It could have been worse, Rebecca’s parents, who were both attorneys, thought in consolation. For at least Rebecca would stay at the same school and who knew, maybe it would all be as they were told and their daughter’s life would be substantially enriched. In the end though it would be a disaster for the entire family and a nightmare worse than they ever could have believed. It would rob them of everything they had, even if the family managed to stick together. And it all started on that first day of school and then progressed more quickly than anyone could have foreseen and, when it was done, the Freeman family would make a spectacular fall as they went from being wildly successful to instead being virtual slaves.