Cooley High School

In the fall of 1969 I entered Thomas Cooley High School. The school held three grades - 10th, 11th, and 12th. There were over 1,000 students per grade.
That morning I had taken a city bus on 6 Mile Rd. from the end of my street, Lesure St., to Hubbell. From there I had a transfer and rode about a mile when I was dropped off at the front of Cooley High School. I had seen the school many, many times (my older brothers had attended there), but it seemed bigger that day.
The design of the school is a Gothic style. It was built in 1929 out of yellow brick. I still remember looking up, up, up as I walked to the entrance.
I knew only a few kids there. My best friend, Debbie Wedes, had gone to Cass Tech because she wanted to be an actress more than anything and Cass Tech is a school for the performing arts. There were 2 other LDS kids there. Among 3,000. I was a little more than intimidated.
That first year I had been publicly honored for an essay I had written and later that year I was publicly humiliated for an essay I had written.
The next year things changed. I had made friends and knew my way around the school. However, there was a new problem. Civil rights had been put in the spotlight. The inner-city schools were almost all black and the schools in the outer-city were mostly white. Politicians in their usual clumsy fashion decided to bus kids from inner-city to outer-city and from the outer-city to inner-city schools to insure integration of the races.
I believe it wasn't the integration that was the problem, I think it was taking children out of their neighborhoods, friends and family - randomly - and thrusting them into an alien element.
At first it seemed to be working, but there had been riots that tore our city apart just a few years earlier. Feelings were still raw. And remember, it was 1970. It was taking a while for earlier generations to accept equality. The races still did not trust each other.
Riots broke out at Cooley High that fall. They were small, isolated incidents, but they were real and they were frightening. I was one of two white kids on the city bus. I saw a group of black kids beating up a white boy. I was so scared that when I got home I was shaking.
My oldest brother, Dan and his wife, Kathy, started taking me to school and picking me up. However, during school I was on my own. Under the window of my algebra class, kids were being beaten up by other kids. Going from the portable classroom to the main school we had to go through lines of kids challenging us to fights.
It wasn't too long into the second year at Cooley High that my father removed me from school. The principle of the school had sent around a memo to the classes telling us to stop the rumors of riots. They weren't rumors.
On my last day of school at Cooley, Dan and Kathy picked me up. We went around the block and saw a huge group of white kids walking to Cooley with clubs and sticks.
The next day school had been cancelled. It remained closed for three days. However, I never went back.
My parents had made the decision to move the family to Eckford and build houses.