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There Went The Neighborhood - Audio Interview: James Bryant

When: June 12, 2022

James Bryant attended Jones School from kindergarten to fifth grade. When Jones School closed in 1965, he was bused to Pattengill Elementary, and he remembers a tumultuous period of racial conflict. He helped form the Black Student Union at Tappan Junior High and Huron High School.

More interviews are available in the There Went The Neighborhood Interview Archive.

Transcript

  • [00:00:02] HEIDI MORSE: Today is June 12th, 2022. I'm Heidi Morse, an archivist at the Ann Arbor District Library, and I'm speaking with James Bryant about Jones School in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Could you please say and spell your name to begin?
  • [00:00:19] JAMES BRYANT: Yes. My name is James, J-A-M-E-S Albert, A-L-B-E-R-T, Bryant, B-R-Y-A-N-T.
  • [00:00:35] HEIDI MORSE: When and where did you grow up?
  • [00:00:38] JAMES BRYANT: I'm sorry.
  • [00:00:39] HEIDI MORSE: When and where did you grow up?
  • [00:00:42] JAMES BRYANT: I grew up in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I was born in 1954 at the University of Michigan Hospital.
  • [00:00:59] HEIDI MORSE: What brought your family to Ann Arbor?
  • [00:01:03] JAMES BRYANT: Job opportunities. In 1942 my mother left Union City, Tennessee, jumped on a train in Nashville with the soldiers heading north. Ended up in Ann Arbor, Michigan and worked for the University of Michigan until she retired and had a family of nine. I have six additional brothers and sisters, so we ended up having a family of 15 kids through different marriages, and we didn't have a lot, but we were a darn happy family. We loved each other.
  • [00:02:08] HEIDI MORSE: What are your parents' names?
  • [00:02:13] JAMES BRYANT: I'm sorry. I better turn this up. My hearing is not that good. What are my--?
  • [00:02:18] HEIDI MORSE: What are your parents' names?
  • [00:02:21] JAMES BRYANT: My mother's name is Emma Sula Simpson. My father's, that's after marriages, my father's name was Eugene Bryant.
  • [00:02:42] HEIDI MORSE: Whereabouts in Ann Arbor did you live?
  • [00:02:46] JAMES BRYANT: I lived in the household of 351 Beakes Street for the majority of my young life, and that's at the corner of Beakes and Summit, just across from the old train station and the Broadway bridge.
  • [00:03:17] HEIDI MORSE: Do you have any childhood memories of growing up in that area or that neighborhood that you'd like to share?
  • [00:03:24] JAMES BRYANT: I do. The kids that I grew up with lived in an area from Beakes and Summit, north, heading to, let's see, I'm trying to think of the streets that were-- There were railroad tracks heading north, and I can't remember what the railroad track street is after that. It was almost like a triangle circumference of land, where it was a predominantly African American [NOISE] community, and we, the kids there grew up together and we were associated with the park called Summit Park, which I think the name is now changed in reference to the only African American mayor of Arbor. But kids that I grew up with will always call it Summit Park.
  • [00:04:58] HEIDI MORSE: I understand you attended Jones School. What can you share about that? What stands out of your experiences there?
  • [00:05:09] JAMES BRYANT: I attended Jones School from kindergarten to the fifth grade, and in 1965, Jones School was closed down due to some studies that the city had created, saying that we were too segregated. But as I look at the picture of my fifth grade class, it was probably the most integrated classroom in Ann Arbor. We had a multitude of kids. When I say integrated from the perspective of African Americans and Caucasian kids, we also had Asian kids as well. We had kids from I think the Lum family was from China, and the Hoag family was, I'm not sure if they were, I think they were a Korean family. Everybody else was white and Black.
  • [00:06:59] HEIDI MORSE: Do any teachers or coaches stand out from your time at Jones School?
  • [00:07:12] JAMES BRYANT: My last teacher was Mr. Johnston. The teacher before that was Mr. G-- [INAUDIBLE] and I'm trying to think, oh, and my kindergarten teacher was Ms. Blue. [LAUGHTER] I could remember, one winter it was so cold. Ms. Blue was concerned because we were pretty poor kids and she was concerned that my shoes had holes in them and she was like, "James we have to get you some better shoes." And I said, "Why? It's a tradition that we get the shoes from my brothers and sisters." We always had hand-me-downs. But she thought I should have better.
  • [00:08:24] HEIDI MORSE: You mentioned that there were discussions about segregation at Jones School. Do you remember, as a child, what kinds of things you heard about that, if anything?
  • [00:08:42] JAMES BRYANT: Well, what we were promised--that our school, it was an older building and it did not have all the credentials of the new schools like fancy libraries and we didn't have science rooms. So the promise was that we were going to get a better education. Most of the kids originally didn't resist at all. We were like, "Hey, we're going to get a better education? Let's try it. Let's go." We had held out hope that our school wouldn't close down because there was another person in that school, Mr. Perry, who taught the kids how to play baseball at lunchtime and so that was the big thing. Getting the chance to play baseball at lunchtime with Mr. Perry. But they closed it down anyway.
  • [00:10:29] HEIDI MORSE: Can you take me back to that first day of school when you went to a new school after Jones had closed?
  • [00:10:43] JAMES BRYANT: Well, I'll take you back to the first week. We knew we were going to get bused. But for a whole week, we didn't get a bus and we were outside our homes going, "Where's the buses at?" It took about a week for the city to figure out what they were going to do. And finally in a week, we got our first bus. We got on that bus and it was about 9 miles away. So we went from my school-- And, understand, we went in seven different directions. All of the friends that we had were all split up and went to different schools. I went to Pattengill. Pattengill was on the outskirts of Ann Arbor, past the old Allen Park area. But it was way out off of Packard Road. So we get to-- [LAUGHTER] All the kids were fired up and we were like, "We're about to get there." And then we come up, we turn into where [NOISE] Pattengill is and all of a sudden there was all these people out. They had protest signs and they were like, I'm not going to use the N-word, but, "N-word, go home." "No, don't get off that bus." "This is not your home. Go away." I kept hearing it, "N go home, N go home, N go home." It was like, not only the parents, the kids were out there. They were hanging on our bus. We looked at each other and we said, "Look, this is not going to be exactly what we thought, so let's huddle up." We were all football players as kids. We said let's huddle up and let's agree that if anybody put their hands on you, we will make them pay for it. Eventually the principal, I think his name was Carpenter. Mr. Carpenter came up to the bus and he says, "Okay, I'm going to guide you all in to the school and I'm going to make sure you're going to be safe." Because they were just really pounding and really raising ruckus and we weren't so much scared because we didn't know what was going on. We didn't understand what this problem was because we just came from a school that we had white kids, Black kids, Asian kids, and we all got along. There was no major fighting or anything like that. Nobody was calling us out of our race. But after that day, I would say for the first 25 days, maybe longer, there was a fight every day. There was people getting beat up and my job was to protect everybody. [LAUGHTER] Do not ask me why I took on that position, but I did. I remember we said if somebody messes with you what we would do at lunchtime is we would address them on the field at lunchtime, and we did. Any kid that got beat up, they will report to me and then we would go and take that kid and beat that kid back up. Finally, after a while, the principal pulled me aside and he says, "Look, Jim, we can't fight every day." I said, "Well, what do you want us to do? First of all, we didn't ask to be here. Second of all, we thought we were going to get a better education and third of all, it's not easy getting up two hours earlier to get on a bus to go to school 9 or 10 miles away from my home. And then after that, we didn't have any life. Because remember, we had to go back home. It was a bus there, and it was a bus back and most of the time, it was still dark when we left to go to school and dark when we got home during the winter season, so it was very difficult." But Mr. Carpenter looked at me and he says, "Do you have any ideas what might help us resolve this problem?" I looked at Mr. Carpenter and said, "You know what, if you have a talent show, people will get to know each other and I think that will help us." A week later, they advertise this talent show. And we were kids from the Motown era so we would say, "Okay, we're going to bring the Temptations. We're going to bring Marvin Gaye. We're going to bring the Four Tops. We're going to bring The Supremes." And these were kids that were pantomiming. [NOISE]
  • [00:17:46] JAMES BRYANT: We had the talent show and it was the greatest thing that could happen because the kids looked at each other and said, "Hey, you're just another kid like me." And we all became friends. Shortly after that, you remember it was a movie that came out, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, because after that, [NOISE] the kids started inviting us to their homes and we became friends with all these kids. Some would say that we became rock stars because all of a sudden, people were saying, how do you do that temptation walk? How do you do that Motown music? Not another fight the whole year. Everything stopped, and of course, that happened. Until the end of the year we were good. Then we had to start junior high school. Excuse me just a second. Sorry about that.
  • [00:19:24] HEIDI MORSE: No problem. Is there a notification that you can turn off? There's notification sound happening sometimes.
  • [00:19:41] JAMES BRYANT: Where would it be? Under mute or what? Stop video?
  • [00:19:48] HEIDI MORSE: It's probably from another application like email or a phone dinging, I'm not sure. It's not a big deal if you can't find it.
  • [00:20:00] JAMES BRYANT: No. [LAUGHTER] I'd would have to have my staff come to me.
  • [00:20:08] HEIDI MORSE: Okay. Don't worry about it. Don't worry.
  • [00:20:11] JAMES BRYANT: Maybe up there where it says recording. Is that what you're saying?
  • [00:20:15] HEIDI MORSE: No.
  • [00:20:17] JAMES BRYANT: No?
  • [00:20:18] HEIDI MORSE: No. Don't worry about it.
  • [00:20:21] JAMES BRYANT: [NOISE] No, I'm not that techy.
  • [00:20:29] HEIDI MORSE: Did you hear from your former Jones classmates how things went at other schools that they had been bussed to?
  • [00:20:40] JAMES BRYANT: Yeah. I think the majority of us went to Pattengill, but the numbers were much smaller at these other schools. I think it was Pattengill that had the most impact. It was a large school. I think there was 1,200 kids in that elementary and I may be wrong, but it was a pretty big school. But some of the other schools like Allen and some of these other schools were smaller schools and they were only having six or seven kids. We had, like I said, 40 kids on our bus. [LAUGHTER] We had a significant course of folks that we all knew each other. Like, for example, if someone didn't show up for the ride home, we wouldn't let that bus leave. We had to know. You had to let me know or whoever, I think we had a bus monitor. You had to tell that bus monitor, "Hey, I'm not going to be coming home on the bus. I've been invited to [NOISE] another kid's home." Otherwise, we weren't letting that bus leave because we weren't leaving anybody in that neighborhood because even though the kids were now getting along, it still wasn't that safe of community for all of the kids. At least that's what we felt. But again, after that talent show, it was crickets. There was no more fighting. Kids started to know who you were, but before you know it, this school year was over and then we had to deal with the junior high schools. Then there was fewer of the junior high schools. I think there was Slauson, there was Tappan, there was Forsythe. I think [NOISE] those were the major junior high schools. Now what happened at Slauson--I mean, I ended up going to Tappan--Tappan was, well, let me step back a step. The schools knew. [NOISE] Excuse me.
  • [00:24:04] HEIDI MORSE: Bless you. [NOISE].
  • [00:24:22] JAMES BRYANT: The schools knew they had to respond to these kids who had basically been taken out of their environment, had nothing--our after-school life was all of a sudden gone. So they hired this man named Vic Turner. [NOISE] Vic was our life savior.
  • [00:25:03] JAMES BRYANT: Vic was hired by the schools and they started using the old Jones School facility as the after school facility. [NOISE] That helped a lot. But when we went to-- [NOISE] I'm sorry. When we went to these junior high schools, we were dealing with more racial problems. The older kids in the school were like, they had heard about me and they were waiting on me. [NOISE] I had to go back to fighting again, [NOISE] I would get off the bus, somebody would be waiting for me and I would have multiple fights. There was parent protest and then they would bring out people like Victor Turner to help. Eventually, I had a counselor at Tappan who, her name was Ms. Coyne. They would always call me Jim. She said, "Jim, I can't defend you fighting. [NOISE] But I got a solution. I'm going to take you downtown to Stein & Goetz and buy you some football cleats. I'm going to ask you to put those football cleats on, and instead of you hitting the kids here at our school, maybe you can hit these kids at the other schools, like Forsythe and Slauson. And I said, [LAUGHTER] "Why not? " Tappan was this all-white non-athletic school until we got there. Tappan had never won city championships until we got there. When we got there, we mixed in with the kids in Tappan from the Burns Park area, who had a few African Americans in their neighborhood. We became the city's best athletic teams in the history of Tappan, winning basketball tournaments, winning [NOISE] football teams. All of the things that Tappan had never won, we won.
  • [00:28:58] Again, [NOISE] there was another point that I had to bring up. There was a drill team called the French Dukes. We, as kids had grown up to be able to march in this drill team called the French Dukes. In 1969, the governor of State of Michigan had asked this drill team to participate in the inaugural parade for Richard Nixon. Actually, right before that we had gone to New York City and we were going to be on the Ed Sullivan Show. We were getting notoriety as this drill team. Then we were at Tappan, I think I was 14 years old, all of a sudden, the kids were like, "You guys are part of French Dukes? [NOISE] You're going to be in the inaugural parade?" Because they did this campaign to raise money for us to get to DC. We were all poor kids, we had no money. We ain't going to get on no plane and go to Washington DC. But that year we did. And the governor was George Romney. You know Mitt has a father named George Romney and that was--. You know Mitt Romney who's in Utah now? His daddy was the governor of Michigan and a former owner or president of American Motors. He knew about unions and all that stuff. He'd seen us drill one time. He says, "You guys can represent the state of Michigan at the inaugural parade." And we did. All of a sudden, there was these Black kids who were not considered a positive in Ann Arbor, now we're heroes. Whatever school you went to, whatever junior high you went to, you got recognized. And at Tappan we were heroes. After, like I say, a few years of having fights and stuff like that, that went away.
  • [00:32:17] JAMES BRYANT: We evolve into high [NOISE] school. Huron High School. You know they have Pioneer and Huron, well Huron had just opened in 1969. Most of the kids on our side of town went to Huron. Now we were separated from all those kids we used to go to school with, we were separated and we went back to the kids that we never went to junior high school with. Another crazy experience that was continual unrest. Civil rights was a big thing at that time. I guess over the years, there was this superintendent that came along, his name was R. Bruce McPherson. He was going to change the world. He was going to change Ann Arbor schools and have participation from all the minorities. In essence, the year we graduated, which was in '72, he forced the schools to recognize the minorities. Usually you have a prom and then there's a prom committee. Those prom committees don't include anybody but the president of the school and the folks that are considered the [NOISE] big cheeses of the school. But Bruce McPherson said, "No, you're going to add to those committees that affect the proms, affect all of the the minority kids. You're going to create an honorable award for African American students. I forgot to tell you, at Tappan school before we left, those kids that I grew up with, we created the first Black Student Union. Even the high school didn't have that. And so finally, we went to Huron and there's all this unrest, people fighting all the time and we created the Black Student Union. I don't know if you ever look at our yearbooks and stuff, [NOISE] but I was the president of the Black Student Union. I was actually honored to be honored as the Martin Luther King Award winner. That was why my sixth grade teacher sent me that postcard and said, "I'm proud to see that." I was like, "Wow, I wonder how many of her students that she reached back to and say, "Hey, I'm proud of you." But I know she knew that we [NOISE] were like the test tube kids. Because when they decided to do integration, they knew that there was going to be impact on these kids. They even agreed to make sure that we had help so that we wouldn't be negatively impacted. But public schools did not live up to what they had said they were going to do to make sure that whatever impact we would have, it would be mitigated by services that they would provide. And they never provided them. But the interesting thing was when we graduated, when those Jones School kids graduated from Huron High School in the class of 1972, which was the original class of the kids who were part of integration, they recognized that that was a feat. Also in this postcard, Ms. Lyman mentions that I was going to go to Western Michigan University. You know the chances of those Jones School kids going to college was slim to none. When we left Jones School, we were headed to the military, to jail, or we were just going to be left out in the streets. We were going to be somebody's custodian. We were going to be somebody's mechanic. I don't even know if they were going to be that. But we weren't supposed to be successful. There was a couple of us, as I look back. There's a kid, Robert Foster. He took off after graduating from, he went to Pioneer High. He took off and went to LA. And I used to call him and go, "What's up? You're in LA," and he would go, "Yeah, man. I'm living the life. I'm in Pasadena." I was like, "Wow, Rose Bowl, all these things." I said, "One day I'm going to do that." Then one day I went to Western Michigan for three years and I said, "No more winter. I'm going in California.".
  • [00:39:32] JAMES BRYANT: If someone took a look at the study they should have looked at and said, "How did they all come out? How did James Bryant come out? How did Grant Sleet come out? How did Alan Payne come out? How did John McDonald come out? How did Brian McCoup come out? How did Richard Payne come out? How did Gary Drury come out? If you just look and see, in the end believe it or not, busing, the whole project of integration, actually worked for some of us. I can say my wife and three children: my oldest son is an attorney; my daughter is a philanthropic or whatever they call that, she runs non-profits; my youngest son is an executive vice president of SEIU International Union, biggest union in the country. If you looked at all of us, Grant Sleet, Alan Payne, all the kids that lived on our street, Larry Mitchell, Debby Mitchell, [NOISE] Larry Bird, the Wilsons. If you looked at our neighborhood, the Dixons, you will find there's a history there that somebody has to write about. And when I talked with Debby, she said, "Somebody needs to talk to you, James, about this." Because I had grabbed Debby's brother and a few of my other friends and said, "You got to come to California. There's opportunity there."
  • [00:41:51] JAMES BRYANT: I've been fortunate. My friend, Robert Foster, his family--daughter is an attorney and son is upstanding in the Los Angeles area. I mean, we were renegades. [LAUGHTER] We were the two top renegades that went to Tappan Junior High School. But we turned out with great families. We proved against all odds, that busing worked. Believe it or not. The majority of those kids from that 1965-66 experience have done well. They're smart, successful, and their story needs to be told. That might be after now that I've retired, many different phases in life, maybe I write this book. I'm still having friendships with some of the most, not just the African American kids that were impacted, but Caucasian kids that were impacted, the Asian kids that were impacted. All of the other kids that we went to school with, that were impacted by desegregating the schools. Because it should have been done, but of course, we said, "You shouldn't have took our school, because Jones School was the greatest school." We might not have had a science lab or equipment that these new schools had, but we had character. Probably the smartest kid that I didn't even mention, Robert Newcomb, white kid, who lived on the north side of Catherine Street. I haven't seen him, I don't know whatever happened to Robert. I know he was one heck of a smart kid.
  • [00:44:34] HEIDI MORSE: You told me where your children, where they landed in their careers. What about you?
  • [00:44:40] JAMES BRYANT: [LAUGHTER] Well, I went to San Francisco, and I was from Ann Arbor. I wasn't supposed to go and become a cop, because [LAUGHTER] that would have been against everything that Ann Arbor sent me to be. I was supposed to be a radical. But my first four years I was a cop, then my next 31 years I was a transportation worker. I became a leader in the union, and I did that for 20 years or so. l was a public employee for 35 years. I use those skills as a public employee, a union rep and public relations guy, to form my own public relations company, and I came up with this idea of hiring locally. In San Francisco, we created this law. It was the local hire law. It said that 30 percent of the work that would be done by contractors, from the public perspective, 30 percent of it had to be done by local natives, local workers. [NOISE] So if you're going to be in San Francisco, you can be part of the union, but if you're going to do work in San Francisco, those contractors had to consider hiring from the local areas, and not outside of San Francisco and then you come back. So that was my spin on life. And then I continue to be a--I mediate--I do this thing called construction partnering, which is pre-mediation of agreements between cities and general contractors. I try to hire locally from neighborhoods that I live in. I've been fairly successful at it. It's a tough job. Because I believe it, but it's [LAUGHTER] not what everybody else believes. I've been married 44 years, three kids, all college grads. All three of them from the University of California system. Six grandkids. I've got the best of the worlds. I own homes in San Francisco and El Cerrito. [NOISE] I've had a good life so far. It all started catching that bus. I never even thought about it. I took a bus to California. Maybe because I already had a bus experience. I wasn't afraid to get on that bus and leave that cold weather in Michigan and go to California. I was actually excited. I remember I got on that bus, a Greyhound bus. Greyhound bus had a deal, $50 to take you across the country. And so I got on that bus and as far as I got was San Francisco and that's where I ended up.
  • [00:49:17] HEIDI MORSE: Thank you so much for sharing all of this.
  • [00:49:22] JAMES BRYANT: Thank you.