Reggie Wrestles with the NAACP – Part 1 3

 Dr. Thomas Nathaniel (Nat) Burbridge was one my father’s best friends in San Francisco. Together the two of them led an effective and lasting impact improving various sectors through, to my father’s mind especially, and unlikely organization, the NAACP. 

How about we go to the last thing that we did which was the 50’s.  The NAACP and meeting befriending Nat (Burbridge).

Just about the time when we moved into Belvedere St. a question came up about what they were calling Central High. Central High was the building on Hayes and Masonic which had been Lowell High School, I guess. Lowell moved out and then they went to make that a junior high school. The problem was that one of the floors in the school was really condemned. The school was not in the best shape and they had done this class/color thing again. They moved everybody (almost all white) in Lowell to a nice new school and then they had moved all the colored people into…

You can have my hand me downs.

 Yeah. And your mother agitated me actually. She said “Look, there’s a situation you’re talking this talk and they need some leadership, why don’t you go out there and do it?” And I said, “Oh shit.”  (Laughter) So I did.  It took us a couple of months and we had the school board pissed off at us. They were going at us full strength and I was fat mouthing. And a lot of stuff happened but we essentially won our fight and in the pushing of our fight the local politicians jumped in part of those local politicians involved Nat Burbridge. Now I met Nat, I had met him already because…

Wait, who was the “we” at the school board?

Grattan Family and Friends, something like that. We organized a community group.

So you had a single agenda which was Central Junior High and you organized a neighborhood community group to deal with this one item.

Yes. One issue alone. There were several groups, and there was a central committee and I was part of the central committee. At the very same time Beverly (Axelrod) lived up the block and she started throwing these parties and she invited me to one of these parties and to the party I went.

I went around and I met her buddy Nat. We sit around and bullshit and Nat realized that I was part of this United Grattan Family and Friends thing. And so Nat said to me, “Did you ever consider the NAACP?” “No way,” says I. “Ignorant, Right wing.”  And he’s the upcoming president of the NAACP.  I knew something about them. I had read things in the paper. So I just let that go and went about my business.

So I run into Nat again at another party and he picks it up where he left off. He ask me, he says well, “What’s your criticism of NAACP’s  freedom and education?” I fat mouthed a bit and let him know. He said, “That sounds good to me.” He said, “Well tell me something Reggie.”  I think he had ran the Education Committee. I think that was the situation and he was about to become president and he explained that he was compromised. They figured he was a mild little professor and that he that he wanted me to join him in a conspiracy. He that he would back me to the hilt. “Whatever you decide you automatically get my back.” I really didn’t want to but he talked me into it. And it did sound interesting.

So that’s how you became NAACP education Chair?

 That was quite a thing in and of itself.  You have to understand, not that we (Blacks in SF) are not so progressive now but we were terrible then. We had one black man on the Board of Education. Black for purpose of identification only, his name was Stratton, James Stratton. Republican. I think he’s dead now. But they made him in charge of probably CYO, it was a prison thing.  He was the man on the board. The first night I came out there I was quaking in my boots.  I made my little speech about integration. And he looked at me and said, “Who are you? I know you don’t represent the NAACP” He looked at me like I was some kind of imposter. So I really don’t remember what I said but it was just a retort off the top full of force and authority. And oh he was in bad shape. From then on I fought the Board but a lot of my fighting was him.

SFUSD Board of Education Building

I got some allies.  What happened was incredible. We had a good committee. They (The SF Board of Education) were claiming that there was no discrimination and what not.  Beverly organized oh about 100 lawyers and I deployed these lawyers in these specific places and they went door to door asking how many kids there were and what schools they went to. They didn’t ask color but they noted color. And we could see clearly the pattern. They would take kids and shoot them past the school that was closest.  That shook the Board up no end. They kept trying to do stuff.

Then they came up with a school bond issue. I tried to convince the NAAP to oppose it because it took a 2/3 vote to pass a school bond and that meant they had to have the Black vote to make it. And I felt that if we just opposed it, if we defeated that school bond they would have a whole lot more respect for us.  We did a number of things. Bill Bradly came into that. He took charge of CORE.  (Congress for Racial Equality)  He decided to run an Asian woman up there, not to cooperate with me but so that CORE would have an education position. I managed to sit down with her and a couple of the people in CORE and talk to them and say know you we can’t have this, the community standing up in front of the Board of Education with two things. They agreed, they got back to Bradley and he backed off. And sure enough Margaret, I think her name was, she made her little maiden speech and Jim Stratton tore her poor ass up and down. I caught him in the brink. I said, “Why don’t you try that with me you Black mf.” He was pissed and at the same time he’s not gonna do much. I was seriously pissed. I said, “I’m willing to kick your ass right here.”

Exactly what did he do?

 What he did was to try and take advantage of the fact that the young girl was new at the Civil Rights thing. She was just making a little pitiful speech. She was new to the community. The others just ignored her and just went on about their business. But no he’s gonna tear her up. And so in the break he came steaming in there, he was so hot because he knew I was serious. He can run that old principled thing all   he wanted. He could run that thing all he wanted; Stratton was 20 years older than I. I was quite willing to take him out.

And so when we got around to the bond issue thing then these guys started to take us seriously. And then it was funny. We got a lot of what we wanted.

So that you would support the bond?

 No.  They put those things in so that we would not oppose the bond.

Do you remember what any of those things were?

 No. It may be in my boxes somewhere.  (Later my father came back to long term education committee success.) The consent decree that we ended up getting through the courts was a result of the work that had been done again by the committee. I can’t say it was me. I did some of the work, but it was the committee.

Or as  Found Education  says:

“The Education Committee under Reginald Major pried loose long-secret, school-by-school racial data, the first in an ever-increasing stream of information given out by the S.F.U.S.D. With Lois Barnes, the Committee compiled reports on the relationships of pupil race to teacher salary to student achievement, school-by-school. The Branch again sued the Board of education to integrate elementary schools, and in the Spring of 1971, it prevailed. The S.F.U.S.D. is still operating under Judge Wiegel’s orders from this case.”

Next week the original SF chapter of the NAACP is dissolved and replaced with four small chapters because of the radicalism of my father and Nat.