The Long Walk Home

On game days, David Smith and his teammates gathered at the Velvet Freeze across Linwood Avenue from Central High School to catch a bus to the Southeast Fieldhouse, near the entrance to Swope Park. As he walked down Indiana toward Linwood, passersby honked and waved, yelling, "Have a good game!" Smith always wore a suit and tie, and he carried his gym bag so that everyone could see the Blue Eagle silk-screened on the side. "I can't tell you the pride I felt, walking down the street with that bag in my hand," says Smith, now in his fifties.

Rowdy Central fans, some of them the same well-wishers Smith had seen on Linwood, packed the fieldhouse. When he stepped onto the court, Smith felt an almost supernatural power. The band blared Central's fight song. Thousands of fans screamed and pounded their feet against the bleachers while Smith and his teammates ran a fast-paced slam-dunk drill that usually left the opposing team frozen in awe.

In 1966, Central won its first state championship. When Smith joined the team in 1967, a double-overtime loss kept the team from repeating. But those were comparatively small achievements. Smith's coach, Jack Bush, still brags about how ten of the scholars on Smith's team later finished college. Smith went on to basketball stardom at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, where he earned a master's degree. That laid the foundation for a career directing nonprofits such as the Kansas City chapter of the YMCA and the Boys and Girls Club of Greater Kansas City. This April, he won a seat on the Kansas City school board.

Smith credits the community around Central for a lot of his success. "There was as much pride placed on academics as athletics," he says of the school's neighbors.

"During that time, the neighborhood [around Central] was more of a neighborhood," remembers Bush, who still teaches gym at Smith's alma mater. Through the late '60s, the area around the old four-story brick building on 33rd and Indiana teemed with businesses like the TG&Y dime store, Crown Drugs and Kroger Grocery. Smith lived just a couple of blocks away from the school, in a three-story four-square with a wide porch directly across 32nd Street from Negro Leagues legend Buck O'Neil. The neighbors knew Smith. So did the people who worked at the stores along Linwood and Indiana. They knew his family, too. If he cut up, word got back to his house before nightfall.

"Young people, or people in general -- human beings -- need to know they are valued and appreciated and supported," Smith says. "And when you could feel that kind of support from the people around the school, you were proud. You wanted to live up to it."

Central was more than just a school. It was a tower of pride for the black community. But over the years, Smith has watched that feeling dwindle to almost nothing. The decline began in the early '70s, when a steady flow of middle-class black families left the neighborhood. It hit bottom a year ago, when state officials deemed Central "academically deficient."

That failure carries a painful irony for Smith. A dozen years ago, he testified on behalf of plaintiff students in Kansas City's desegregation case -- the most ambitious and costly such case in American history. Now, simply by being elected to the school board, Smith has become a defendant.

As of May 26, the case will have cost more than $2 billion and dragged on for 25 years. There is still no end in sight. The school district is more segregated than ever. The student body at Central is once again almost entirely black.

Legend has it that Central is the oldest public school in the city. In reality, Central shares that distinction with Lincoln, the city's original all-black school. The newly formed Kansas City Board of Education established both schools in 1867. But Central was the first high school -- back then, blacks weren't offered a secondary education at Lincoln or any other Kansas City school.

Central held classes in a nine-room brick schoolhouse downtown. Lincoln operated in a building that, according to one historian, was located in an "unsightly gully and resembled anything but a place of learning."

Twenty years later, the district started providing a high school education to blacks. And as the student populations at Central and Lincoln grew, both schools moved to separate, bigger buildings east of downtown -- Lincoln, just west of Prospect on Woodland, and Central, at 33rd and Indiana. The schools built separate legacies as well. At Lincoln, Major N. Clark Smith's music class became a talent mill for Kansas City's jazz scene, turning out bandleader Harlan Leonard, Bennie Moten's cornet player Lamar Wright, and a musician one critic deemed "the greatest jazz counterbass," Walter Page. Charlie Parker attended classes at Lincoln, though "mostly he was an absentee and truant," writes Ross Russell in Jazz Style in Kansas City and the Southwest. A mile or so to the southeast, Central reigned as the city's premier white high school. Its graduates included baseball hall-of-famer Casey Stengel, movie star William Powell, opera singer Gladys Swarthout, and Stranger in a Strange Land author Robert Heinlein.