Double disruption

If history is a highway, intersections are where things get interesting. A unique open house Saturday at Lansing’s old Main Street School (now Education Child Care Center) will swerve onto the complex cloverleaf where racial segregation, education and the interstate highway system converged on Lansing’s near southwest side in the 1960s.

The once-in-a-lifetime gathering of former teachers and students from Main Street School, along with amateur and scholarly historians and chroniclers, is more than a nostalgic old home week. 

Former Main Street student Burton Smith said the afternoon would present a snapshot of a turbulent time.

Smith will kick off a west side tour, in a classic yellow bus, with former residents of the area on board. The tour will call up many memories of life in the African-American neighborhood largely lost to I496, from Johnnie’s Records to Kalush’s Grocery, the Tropicana Lounge, Friendship Church and Clinton Canady’s dental office.

Off the bus, the day’s events will focus on education in Lansing and the double disruption of I496, which displaced hundreds of families and tore a neighborhood in half, and court-ordered busing, which went into full swing at around the same time.

The construction of I496 from 1963 to 1970 was an almost surreal experience for the people who stayed in the neighborhood.

The neighborhood centered on St. Joseph Street and Logan Street (now Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard) was cloven in half. Over 800 homes and businesses were wiped out at a stroke. To a 12 year-old kid, it was fun and scary at the same time, as if an earthquake pulled the comforting horizon of trees and houses lining Main Street to the distant bank of a concrete riverbed.

“It was quite the experience for those who walked to school,” Smith said. “They went through the trauma of watching some of their classmates’ houses torn down, and had to negotiate not being able to walk directly to school.”

Smith will be among the students and teachers on hand Saturday to share their memories. Teachers who were recruited to Lansing from black southern colleges will be on hand to talk about their experiences here.

During and after construction of I-496, students who lived north of Main Street School had to make their way around a dusty ditch where friends and neighbors once lived, cross at the Everett or Birch Street bridges and circle back to school on the concrete riverbed’s south shore.

At around the same time, the school board began to phase in a busing program with the aim of desegregating Lansing’s schools. Smith was one of 50 students who were bused from 1964 to 1966. He rode a bus from his home on Hillsdale Street to the mostly white Walnut Street School on the city’s north side.

About one third of the district’s students were bused out of their neighborhoods at one time or another during the implementation of the plan, according to a 2011 history compiled by students in MSU’s History Department.

In the summertime, Smith and his friends got together and played softball at St. Joseph Park or gathered on the playground there, but saw little of each other the rest of the year.

“I had to deal with the fact that most of my friends remained in the community,” Smith said.

Busing rolled into Lansing on a bumpy a road of bruising political and legal battles, including the recall of five pro-busing school board members, among them Clarence Rosa Parks and African-American community leader Hortense Canady. When busing opponents sued the school district, Federal Judge Noel Fox ordered it reinstated in 1973. The ruling was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court and remained in force well into the 2000s.

Almost everyone agreed that Lansing schools needed to be desegregated, but the devil was in the details.

Smith said busing led to the “disruption of local community school patterns.”

“You had people that lived almost across the street from each other that wound up going to different schools,” Smith said. “If you lived in one side of Jenison, you went to Main Street. If you lived on the other side, you had to get on the bus to get to Walnut Street School. It was difficult for some people, because they would watch people walk to school, then turn around and go to a bus stop.”

The gathering of former students and teachers is bound to bring a lot of forgotten Lansing history to light. Smith pointed out that one first grade class at Main Street School, taught by Lillian Higgins, produced five attorneys, a TV news reporter and award-winning Detroit area playwright Stephen Mack Jones.

He’s excited to see people he hasn’t seen in 50 years, including his old first-grade teacher, Margaret Groves. (Now in her 90s, Groves will make the trip to Lansing from Florida Saturday.) Smith has found and blown up several pictures of Groves’ classes over the years and will bring the photos to the school Saturday.

In another strange historical intersection, one of Groves’ first-grade students in 1958 was Kirk Branson, who went on to work for the state Transportation Department and became the face of the frustrated commuter “Bob” in a frequently televised I496 reconstruction promo.

“Avoid Bob,” the promo went, showing an annoyed Branson behind the wheel.