Friends Who Came From Different Worlds
Washington Post Wednesday, May 12, 2004
Just a few miles from the Supreme Court, which in 1954 decreed that segregated public schools were illegal, Prince George's County continued to maintain its segregated school system for years after the ruling.
As was the case in many Washington area communities, in the late 1950s and 1960s whites and blacks lived on opposite sides of the tracks, in some cases literally, in Cheverly and elsewhere in the county. Like most Prince Georgians, former county executive Wayne K. Curry (D), who is black, and prominent development lawyer John Lally, who is white, began their educations attending separate schools and leading largely separate lives.
The Brown v. Board of Education ruling began to have a ripple effect when Curry and Lally were in elementary school. In 1959, Curry's father, who eventually became vice principal at all-black Fairmont Heights High School, pressed the school board to allow his sons to attend a white elementary school near their home.
He prevailed, and that year, Curry and his brother Daryl integrated the school after attending an all-black elementary school in Beaver Heights. Lally, meanwhile, lived in Riverdale and went to an all-white Catholic school.
Their paths merged later at Bladensburg High School, when Curry joined a small group of black students at the school. Later, a 1972 lawsuit led to full integration in Prince George's public schools.
Curry and Lally became buddies. Lally was a member of the school's basketball team; Curry was the team's manager. By their senior year, 1968, they were so popular that the student body elected them president and vice president of the senior class.
It is a friendship that has endured. Both men still live and work in Prince George's and have had highly successful careers as lawyers for developers.
They spoke recently to Washington Post Staff Writer Krissah Williams about their experiences in high school and with integration in Prince George's.
“So where did you grow up?”
WAYNE CURRY: Well, I started as far back as I can remember, at the Addison Chapel apartments which were some postwar barrack-style apartments right up on Addison Road and Reed Street, in a two-bedroom apartment there. First thing I remember in terms of living space.
And I went to Fairmont Heights Elementary School for I think a year, maybe two, and then the new elementary school at Beaver Heights. So anyway, and then at some point my parents moved down the Hill to the fourth ward of Cheverly which was --
“What was that like?”
CURRY: Cottage-style houses, sort of typical move up houses for that time. The community at that time was on the cusp of white flight, so to speak. I mean there were still some white folks who lived there, but many were starting to sell and either go to the other side of Cheverly or to other places.
But as far as I was concerned, it was a neat little packaged tidy neighborhood, little bungalows and cottages and, of course, at that time we as kids paid zero attention whatsoever to the racial makeup of people we played with.
I can remember a couple of Italian families that were still in the neighborhood. Ironically, Frank Pesci, who was later to become a state delegate, and others was still in the neighborhood when my parents lived there. But it was a very tidy suburban enclave of upwardly mobile black professionals, largely teachers, one doctor, a lot of government workers and all sorts of combined and blended in the same hodge-podge of residential development that segregation produced. We had the guys with the biggest income and the guys with the least income all living together in the community as the strivers moved up.
And it was there in the fourth ward of Cheverly which was quite literally separated from the rest of Cheverly which was the quote "white" side of Cheverly by the railroad tracks. So it was almost the stereotypic southern story of the other side of the tracks. So when the postwar pressures to accommodate returning veterans and other professionals happened, the fourth ward, which was the small piece on the wrong side of the tracks, is where it began to happen first.
And so for many years the fourth ward had sort of been the bellwether for what was to come and the Maginot line was drawn at the railroad tracks. Except for, you know, then inexplicable kinds of events like my old man's attitude, which was at a point in 1959 he and some of my neighbors sort of agitated the fourth ward, which was by then overwhelmingly black, to send the children to the school that was closest to our house, which was Cheverly Tuxedo, but which at the time was a white school.
At that time I think I was attending Beaver Heights Elementary which was one among the black schools, I think Fairmont Heights Elementary had been closed and Beaver Heights took its place. Beaver Heights is in the vicinity of Fairmont Heights, just over the D.C. line in Deanwood, it would be the Deanwood section of D.C. but in Maryland right on Addison Road.
Fairmont Heights Elementary was right down where the Ebony Inn, where the big intersection of Sheriff Road and Addison is, where the park is now used to be an elementary school.
And so anyway, you know, in 1959 my father and others decided that they were going to make the county adhere to the 1954 Brown decision and so they insisted that the kids in the fourth ward be allowed to go to Cheverly Tuxedo. That would have been the summer before my fourth grade year and my brother's fifth grade year.
So anyway there was much agitation, of course, going on. We weren't party to the strategics of it, you know adult stuff -- it was grown up stuff. All we knew is we were going to a new school and in years subsequent, daddy explained his recollections about it and it was essentially, to digest it and abbreviate, they insisted we go to the closest school. The School Board, of course, said, 'We don't do that.' The parents kept on instigating around the subject and so ultimately the school system said, 'You can't do this, you work for us.' He was a teacher you know.
And he said, 'Well if you don't do it, School Board, then I'm going to sue you.'
And they said, 'Well if you sue us, we'll fire you.
He said, 'Well, then I'll sue you twice.
And long story short, you know, it concluded with the Board throwing in the towel and basically saying, 'You know what, you need to be careful what you ask for. If you want 'em to go, we're going to send 'em. See how you like that.'
And so off trundled my brother and I and one other kid from the neighborhood to Cheverly Tuxedo to integrate the elementary school. And of course all the other kids, initially it was supposed to be the whole community was going to do this but by that time the summer was over ... it was just us looking at each other going, what the -- where's everybody else?
All my buddies weren't there with us and in fact it was so funny the day they took us for orientation and sitting there with daddy and my brother and, you know, they called out a teacher's name and then they called a bunch of students who are all sitting in the multipurpose room and you go line up behind X teacher, you know.
And so they had to go through that process and I thought it was quite amusing and I said, 'This is interesting. Look at all these people over there doing this stuff.' And so they called a teacher's name and then called my name and I sat there. And the old man's elbowing me like, 'Hey, up and at 'em, that's your new teacher.'
I said, 'What do you mean that's my new teacher?' He said, 'This is your new school, that's your new teacher.'
And I sort of look at him and I said, 'You mean you're leaving me here? This is where I'm going to go to school?'
So he took me out into the foyer of the multipurpose room and explained things to me in his inimitable way. I said, 'Yeah, you're leaving me here.' But in any case, he was always more persuasive that way ... and so off I went and that began the odyssey through Cheverly Tuxedo Elementary through Bladensburg Junior High and ultimately to Bladensburg Senior High, which is where I met John.
“Wasn't John in one of your classes?”
CURRY: Yes, John was in my class. His wife was in fact in my class in elementary school, yeah elementary school. In fact, it's kind of funny, I mean a lot of the people that I knew in elementary school, you know, as we went up, because the irony of this whole experiment or whatever it is -- this whole phenomenon, maelstrom, cyclone of social activity around integration -- is that actually John and I had graduated from Bladensburg High School in 1968. The foremost litigation to desegregate schools didn't occur until 1971, so I was actually up through and out of the white school track before the desegregation litigation had ever ripened to the point of and out and out formal litigation.
That isn't to say there weren't a whole bunch of other stresses going along as minor accommodations were made along the trail to try to mollify the movement. But actually, I was already out of high school in the white track by the time that the litigation had even been instigated. So it was sort of the fulfillment of a lot of stuff that my dad and my neighbors and the activists in the community had started almost a decade before by the time I graduated.
And then, of course, John can tell you, Cheverly was, I think, the white part of Cheverly, the upwardly mobile middle-class white community. Most of this place was rural at that time, so that's where all of the white folks of clout and status lived in a university enclave.
And so it's been ironic to watch the transformation in this community and to have learned a skills set, frankly, for which I'm ultimately grateful that [it] enables me to deal with people of all backgrounds, without the unspoken terrors that come from the confrontation of these disparate social backgrounds. So I did well through the course of that, even in the hostility of the junior high school.
Cheverly was kind of cool. Most of the people were kids of professionals. There were only a few roughnecks, only a handful.
JOHN LALLY: Neanderthals.
CURRY: Bladensburg Junior High was quite another story. It was my first encounters with ducktail haircuts, pointed-toed shoes and those pants, the jeans that clung -- I mean, for my first real exposure to the white redneck.
LALLY: And that's the girls.
CURRY: But anyway, even then it was a fascinating voyage.
“I read something about your Boys Club football team when you were in junior high and couldn't play against, since you were integrated competing --“
CURRY: Yes, my father and mother had along the trail sort of made friendships with people on the other side of the tracks, one of whom was a family by the name of Wolfe, which was Bob and Ruth Wolfe, who were also participants in this vanguard of social change. And so they would get together as the adults and plot out these scenarios that we would then be introduced to once they had come to a conclusion.
And Mr. Wolfe and his boys were huge baseball fans, among other things, and activists and respected people in their own right. And so they'd collaborate with my neighbors and parents and stuff and among the things they came up with was, we're also going to integrate the Boys Club. And so we did and somebody -- I don't know if it was the school system or parks and planning -- but somebody decided that we couldn't have any Boys Club teams and they raised an issue of our participation.
And while that thing percolated -- and there was litigation around that, too -- but while it percolated, it was kind of funny. They insisted that the way to denote our dubious status, our questionable status as eligible to play, was that my brother and I and a couple of other guys from the neighborhood, when we showed up at practices and stuff, we'd have to wear our jerseys inside out. Which, of course, struck me as a mite redundant, as ... you could sort of look at us and tell, guess which ones are the guys, you know, whose status is being questioned. It was all part of the idiocy, the lunacy of that time and how people behaved.
Nevertheless, there was another lawsuit then and my parents and Mr. Bill Healey, who's park and planning commissioner and been an activist since my childhood, prevailed in that litigation as well. I think they sued, it was either park and planning or the School Board, which then had to put pressure on the Boys Clubs because they were using public facilities for these practices and games. And long story short, that was another big brouhaha and fight and another on which my neighbors and my parents prevailed, and so we played Boys Club ball on an integrated team as well.
It would have been great if we'd have had an integrated team that actually won something. It's hard to field all the nerds and win.
“Tell me about Bladensburg High School, John.”
LALLY: Well first, I was like a transplant. I was a Catholic school kid so I went through St. Bernard's over in Riverdale. Riverdale Woods was a very church-oriented new suburban community my mother dragged her five kids back to and pretty much the church was kind of the center of what you did -- the CYO, the social, the dances, the school. It was really a nuclear kind of set up which is kind of typical of the '50s and the '60s suburban churches.
It's kind of like it's an echo now. You see the churches, the African American predominantly churches, that are in the county now are doing the same kind of role.
So I went to Carroll High School, a boys school downtown, and we ran out of money. So my mother would inform me that despite the fact that my brothers and my sister had gone to Catholic school, now I get the grand opportunity to go to Bladensburg. Up to that point of time it was a sentence of death. I mean we used to call kids who went to public schools "republics." I'm not really quite sure why. We knew there was some negative connotation being a Republican but they were "republics" because they had to go to that godless school.
So actually, over at this place there's 3,000 students there. I know nobody. Nobody. And they're all heathens. And it was a relatively new school -- it was only about 15 years old. My sophomore year, Bladensburg was a three-year school. You started as a sophomore.
So, there's like 3,000 kids and you know nada and you just survive. High school's a god-awful experience for everybody, I don't care who they are -- the top jock, the top student, I don't care. It's a trauma, but it's one you navigate.
So the first year, the first semester is kind of just a blur of not wanting to be there and then starting to assimilate, starting to play sports and that kind of stuff and get active. I don't think you showed up till -- you were there your sophomore year?
CURRY: Yeah, I was there.
LALLY: Okay. You try to know somebody in a school of 3,000, it's just -- well now the numbers are back up there with our big schools, but back then it was just a phenomenal number. And of course there were very few African Americans there. A handful, maybe six or seven in our class.
CURRY: Yeah, because I don't think until the point that we graduated there were 20.
LALLY: Exactly. So the racial things just weren't a part of my cognizance. I mean when you play sports, especially in CYO, you played against kids that were African American and they usually beat you, so that was kind of a searing experience. But they're the same Gabriels of the world, the Catholic Churches over in the African American communities. You play with them and you know them as good athletes and it was no big deal. But there wasn't anybody in our neighborhood where I grew up in St. Bernard's, it was still pretty white and black type of communities.
As Wayne said, blue-collar, the trades were what were out here predominantly. Then farming. Big trades, folks that migrated out of the city, you know -- Italians and Irish, the trades folks who moved out here. And then you had a smattering, University Park and Cheverly were the two enclaves, the two places where the smart kids lived if you will.
And I guess part of the phenomenon of my experience in high school was the kids I met that were African American were the sons and daughters of aggressive, intelligent, articulate, assertive people. So you end up meeting those kinds, those were what the kids were like, so you're meeting kids that are funny, intelligent, athletically skilled, artistically skilled, there's this high level of engagement. So you became friends, you started doing activities with --
So my experience was really meeting -- like the Dealey brothers, one of 'em owns a stock brokerage firm now and a brother who had a career in the government -- So just a lot of talented folks.
I was trying to think of what the ramifications of Brown was. Brown didn't really do anything, it just held up a flag and said, 'If you all really want to do this, it's here. You can come and start to push.' But it took people to get up and go, start to change the social interrelationships and it took a long time, it took a relatively long time to do it.
CURRY: Well even with my parents and neighbors it was five years after the case when they first pushed on the elementary school side, and between that time and the time we graduated in 1968, I mean there was some agitation here and there and just a lot of revisionist history out here in the county now as to who was here doing what and when. But I mean that was '54, right, and it was 14 years before I graduated from high school in which there'd been essentially only a modicum of progress, an occasional concession here or there to the dictates of the law, and these are the rules. And, of course, people in Prince George's County didn't think they had to adhere to the U.S. Constitution. What we got to listen to that for?
LALLY: It was cultural. I mean I get shocked, stunned I guess is the better phrase, because my mom was a nurse and she raised us after my dad passed away and she was night supervisor over at PG hospital. We still get to say PG! We invented all that crap. We get to say PG.
But my mom was night supervisor over there in the '60s and she'd come home with stories about how someone was in the room that night and they brought a patient in who was African American and the guy said, 'No, no, no. I don't want him in here.' And the protocol was to move the person to another room. And my mother said...'We're not going to do that.' And everybody got in a hassle... all the hierarchies were all atwitter about African Americans in the hospital. Hell, there's actually an institution, that will remain nameless -- it's still in existence, it no longer does this -- but one of its founding principles is [that] money would be donated to the hospital but it could only be for taking care of white children. How someone sat down and wrote that, always just kind of appalls me.
CURRY: And which dictate didn't get untied and unraveled until the '80s.
LALLY: So you've got a whole culture of people thinking they're right when they're doing appalling things. And that takes a while to change. And Brown, it unlocked the door -- it still needed to be kicked open. And a whole bunch of doors were just being kicked open in the '60s.
And we'd have incidents. I don't remember a lot of racial fights when we were there. I remember class fights, meaning economic class. Rich kids would get in fights with kids from Palmer Park. There was always the gangs if you will --
CURRY: And Palmer Park at the time was overwhelmingly white, working-class, blue-collar neighborhood with some roughneck white boys. These were not college-bound nerds. These boys were rough. And it's been interesting to watch the transformation, you know, as that place and Kentland and all these places metamorphosed into something else. It was just like wow, you know, if the early guys could have seen this they'd be going, what in the world's happening here?
LALLY: And I personally think that race is just a lazy man's analysis of economic class distinctions. I mean it's just, oh well, I'm a certain economic level so I can quickly say I can look down on this group because of their color, be they whatever, Hispanic or whatever.
But the same phenomenon occurs, I think, in every race. So an African American, as they ascend the economic ladder, I think are just as susceptible of doing that to each other or to other groups as we were, or are. It's a lazy analysis of what you think of someone [who] is to say, 'Oh they're a different color, therefore I don't like them.' What you're really saying is [that] they're a different economic class and you don't like that, or you're afraid of that.
CURRY: I mean it's an easy way to have a summation -- I mean it's kind of easy just to look at somebody and say, 'Oh boy, I can bracket you kind of easy, you know. I know which one in my mind I'm going to put you in because I can see your skin color and therefore I'm going to bring to bear all of the other prejudices and stereotypes I've got about it.' Which in the end will have a substantial amount to do with economics, as did the whole institution of slavery.
While there clearly are attributes of, you know, social pathology around race in this country that strictly relate to looking at somebody and attaching a whole bunch of baggage to 'em that may or may not be applicable, it's just an easy summation. It's a contraction for having to meet, talk to, work through differences and working through that stuff.
LALLY: And your own inadequacies, your own failures.
CURRY: Right, your own insecurities and stuff about engaging the so-called enemy, only to discover that we're not enemies and are all in one short moment of a lifetime here and hope to do it well and leave, you know, legacies with our kids, families and communities.
But it takes a great deal of social courage to start with the premise that the differences should be explored, talked about and resolved, or at least accommodated. And people aren't normally willing to do that.
I mean one of the great fascinations to me living in a black community and going to school in a white arrangement in the educational community and all the other stuff that goes with it ... was how little either side of the divide would allow themselves to be engaged by the other.
Now, I mean me and my brother and the guys that went up through the vanguard of this mess were obviously in a novel position because we were in both camps, and had to have, you know, a social repertoire that got you through both camps. Because when John describes Bladensburg, he's very accurate. He simply left out the part [that] it was also a vocational technical high school. So a large portion of the high school was guys that were going on to do trade stuff and [had] big arms, burly bodies, you know, roughneck attitudes. I mean, that was the VOCATS, man. They were the vocational boys. And they brought all of them kind of attitudes into play so you have to figure out how to maneuver and navigate all these different groups. It was just a different day and time.
Talk about how that worked for you when you were, were you president of the senior class?
CURRY: Vice president, he was president.
LALLY: Well it was kind of funny, we had become --
CURRY: Talk about the whole ticket, that was a funny ... the slate was me and John McDonough. And John McDonough, the subsequent political genius of Prince George's County, was the only guy that lost on our slate and he's been punishing us ever since. That's why he's been such a major domo in subsequent real politics, you know, to stake out his territory. That was a fluke.
LALLY: We were going through -- actually, I was the junior year and all the jocks were in charge of stuff and of course all the jocks didn't do anything, they were a whole bunch of jocks, of which I was one of them. So they all didn't want to run again, so we just concocted this slate where we'd all, you know, we'd just be like a party because we all knew each other.
But during the year we had our little reign of terror of course, you know, when you run a high school and you do all the things you want to do and proms and that kind of stuff.
But I remember when King was shot distinctly because it all kind of, it just became different. It was just, oh [expletive], what's going to happen now? I remember calling Wayne and saying ... 'What do you think is going to happen?'...and he was kind of [like], 'I've no idea, just hold onto your hat.' And strangely enough, everything was, it was a shock for everybody and then the riots started downtown and it just got really -- you saw a lot of kids starting to think that this is serious business. It's not just, oh, those are the kids from Cheverly Tuxedo. It's now, this is the city of Washington and something's going on. And it was a heightening, it was a tragic thing to happen but you could see that there was --
“Did you have any kind of –”
LALLY: Conflict?
“No, not conflict. But did the principal bring everybody together, did you guys talk about it?”
CURRY: You know, to tell you the honest truth I don't recall.
LALLY: No, I know that he did not because I was conscious of, you know, trying to anticipate what we should do and there was just, everyone was sort of watching. Everyone was holding their breath for about a week as things evolved downtown. And then things kind of just subsided. But the whole thing just started to -- the whole tone of the debate, you could see in kids' faces, they really weren't involved at all. I mean they weren't social activists, they were just kids.
But everyone had a -- there was a fear, I think a tangible fear, of the unknown -- what was going to happen.
CURRY: And of course there was this huge and unmitigated sorrow in some of us about what happened and, of course, there was elation in some quarters about what happened. But as school kids go, it was largely subdued and mellow -- it never led to any serious clashes. There was occasional classroom discussions of the implications and, as John said, it subsided and people resumed whatever sort of loose knit relations that they had had but with a different eye on it.
And kids being kids, as the pain or the controversy and the apprehension sort of ebbed and we go back to our same hierarchical pecking order, you know, stuff and social stuff, including a subsequent observation by some of us that cracked us up. There were a couple of guys at the school, white guys from Palmer Park, whose father was a D.C. policeman. And so in the course of examining the consequences of the shooting and then the riots and everything, there was obvious condemnation for the looters and predators who would use that opportunity to enrich themselves. And so we were all quite amused that the sons of the police officer came to school for the whole rest of the year every day in something new! They came to school every day in new, I think those pants were called sansabelts or something, they had new slacks and they had those knit shirts with the suede and the wool. Man, they wore something new every day while everybody talked about the people downtown who were stealing. And I was like, hmmmm.
One of the other ironic benefits of having gone through that stage at that age is, of course, that it's much easier to call a spade a spade when you see something and to permit yourself to talk about it to somebody, particularly around tender racial issues, you know, which this country just has a hard time dealing with. People won't even permit each other to tell the truth about much of that stuff and some people won't even address it all, pretend it's not there.
LALLY: And the truth of it is on both sides. Or all sides.
CURRY: Absolutely.
LALLY: I mean every human being has -- you have some degree of feelings about where you are in the world. Every race has some kind of defense mechanism against difference, and you've got to deal with it. And I think the good thing -- well the important thing as people rise in the social and political order -- is, hey, you still got it, don't do this. Don't do what other people did. It's not right to do it. So everybody should recognize that they've got it inside their guts and they've got to control it. Or deal with it. Don't let it command, don't let it make you do things.
And I think that's part of when you're the under class, you're just kind of playing defense all the time -- just leave me alone. But then when you emerge as the over class you've got to -- I think it is intelligent to say, 'I have these feelings in myself and I've got to control them and not act upon them.'
“ How did you, as a high school student, deal with that then? Because it seems like it's something that you overcame very early on.”
LALLY: Well, I think one of the biggest benefits I had was to be exposed to, like I said, talented kids that were better than me in certain things, be that athletics ... be it popularity in school, you were more popular than I was. I mean there were things that you could like say, 'Well, okay that guy's superior.'
In academics there's guys and gals who were doing things a little bit better than me and I did other things well, too. When you're among the best and the brightest of a generation, that helps you.
But now there's a different set of dynamics, you have to -- the kids now, once they have the substantial economic mix, then you've got to be. It's not just startling. You don't have that excellence just jump up in your face.
CURRY: But see, even in regard to this, John and I disagree about the primacy of economics as the motivator. And I'll just point to obvious things, like --
Well, wait a minute. Now, you know, for my entire life we've been dealing with the politics of racial change which basically intensified in the '70s and has attenuated every decade since. But the '70s was the decade with the massive migration of black folks than any other, the heated acrimonious reaction of political leaders...
Economics is only part of it because if it truly was just an economic thing, or even a primarily economic matter, then the people who fled would come back. Because the black folks that came here got more in the way of education, clout and economics than the white folks that left. So if it was just a question of the economic class struggle, then we'd get past the racial struggle because they'd be mollified by the notion of, 'Well gosh, I was all scared that these folks would come, they wouldn't have any money, they'd have no class, they'd have no social regime to protect their neighborhood.' But instead what's happened is it's elevated Prince George's County to an inconceivably high level among all American counties.
So in essence all of that goes to say they were wrong, and white flight was wrong and, to a degree, the fact that people didn't then breathe a sigh of relief and say, 'Well, I'm not running anywhere because this is better than what I had,' sort of rebuts and defies John's purpose. Now, of course, he's much more of a pacifist than I am on this subject and [he'll] just tell people, 'look man, I understand where you're coming from,' and let them defend their territory. Like me, when I'm on one of my little tender spots or rampages, you know --
LALLY: No one's ever accused you of being shy.
CURRY: Thank God they don't really know me is all I can say. Leave me alone, I'm just here to do the work.
But also ... when you're that age, you either take for granted or you defend from the other little social assaults that people put on you -- the cracking and joking and busting that people do to you -- you just put that in perspective. We were friends, we did a lot of high school stuff together, stuff that you did ... as a teenager. And there were people that liked or didn't like our clique or association and you defended on that basis if you were learning the codes, the social codes that go with being part of your group of people.
For example, we'd occasionally go to musical shows and dinner and stuff afterwards. It was probably more like after college, and you'd get tired of waiting in a long line so I would pretend I was an African dignitary, you know, bemoaning the line and inevitably somebody would make a concession and let us sit down and eat. Man, it worked out pretty good. Couldn't do that now, you know what I mean. It ain't no novelty now. 'Oh, we seen a whole bunch of you yesterday, this ain't nothing.' So it's very different now.
And the whole notion of how you make change, how you get over it, make progress and remedy the tension and the sensitivity people have to address racial subjects.
You know, as John said, I mean there were thousands of kids at this school, overwhelmingly white school, and I was vice president of my class. I managed to develop a repertoire that let me go through the vocational wing of the school without getting whipped up, you know, hang out on the academics and the college-bound side and the white boys from Cheverly you know and girls, ladies, whatever you call them now. But I mean you literally developed a whole ... scheme, man, a repertoire.
Survival and personality driven, you know. For example in the vocational wing, I got caught in the hallway by myself in the vocational wing one day and four or five of these guys, 'Man, give me your lunch money.' And I'm like, 'Damn, I can't give 'em my lunch money because my brother and my old man would wear me out. If I don't give 'em the lunch money, they're threatening to wear me out.'
So I'm saying, 'Uh, I got a problem here.' So I just started rapping you know, going through this histrionic tirade and stuff and, 'Man I'm not giving you jack ... if you want some money I understand that and I know how you guys operate, but you ain't getting my money.'
'Well, we'll beat you up, we'll do all this stuff.'
'Oh, okay,' I said. 'Well, everybody's going to have to do something and I'm going to hurt one of you while you all are killing me. Somebody else is going to be hurt in this little cabal,' I said. 'But I don't understand you guys, you're supposed to be so smart anyway.'
'What are you talking about?'
I said, 'Well, now rather than you all whip me up and take my money and, you know, have me react in the way I'm going to react, you know, what you all really ought to do is find somebody else that'll just give it to you. Maybe I can help! Look, you're going to have to fight me every day, every single day until we rectify whatever happens in this hallway, but you'll [be] some idiots, because I know some guys it's easier to take money from. So let me go. We'll have a loose-knit cabal here, you know, but you let me go.'
And they cracked up, they thought it was hysterical. They thought I was a nut. Here you're confronted with this overwhelming force and ... these were Kentland and Palmer Park guys; these were guys that weren't going on to build rocket ships later. And tattoos and ducktails and tight pants and pointed shoes.
LALLY: But they were people, they were guys -- I mean there were some good guys and there were the thugs. But the normal guys, the guys and the girls, they were just working class folks and they weren't college-bound; they didn't have the benefit of parents that said, 'Your standard's up here.' So their standard was down here but they still were, you know, still okay folks.
CURRY: Same sort of guys that elected me vice president of the class. In the end you develop a repertoire, you get over the terror and it's the same terror which, in other expressions later in life, makes you scared to go confront the banker, you know, scared to contest the developer. Those apprehensions and fears that people develop and won't even admit when they go to the table emanate from that kind of lack of preparation, you know, where you actually imbue the other side with all the terrifying attributes...
“Talk about how things have changed, for instance, how the county is different today. I know you have a daughter who's still in school in Prince George's.”
LALLY: I think this county -- in terms of, we're bigger [and] further away from the nation's capital -- barring some disaster, it's going to keep getting better and the train stations are going to be phenomenal.
CURRY: Yes and no, because even when Kelly began this process and the council and the executive were big on trying to change the image of Prince George's County, there still was this restraint [and] huge inhibition about the subject of school integration and what's the right approach to take, the subject of residential segregation. And people were still scared of it and they really did believe that the arrival of masses of black people would cause the county to go down.
“And was that the time when that was starting?”
CURRY: Yeah, and nobody believed that it would actually produce the irony it has today of raising the county up. That simply wasn't in the composite mind -- nobody believed it among the leadership.
LALLY: But was the data there to be believed? I don't know. I think the emerging middle class that came out of the city of Washington, the federal, two-income worker, that was a phenomena I don't think was on a lot of people's charts. That there was this massive middle class that was being --
CURRY: You can't excuse 'em John. They just didn't want it to happen there.
LALLY: Oh, they thought that blacks were going to move in and it would be poor-income blacks, low-income, no question about it. That was in their mind.
CURRY: And it was, you know --
LALLY: And some would arrive at a different conclusion, I don't know.
CURRY: Well of course, but a guy like me would look at the same demographic and go, 'You actually think that people can be lower than these guys that moved out to Kentland? What are you talking about? You've got to be kidding.'
LALLY: Clearly, the political leadership thought --
CURRY: They were terrified.
LALLY: -- more blacks that are going to be low-income.
CURRY: And drag it down, drag things down.
LALLY: And in a sense it was a political codeword to say, 'Oh, let's have higher-income homes because you know they can't afford [them].
CURRY: They can't afford [them].
LALLY: And it was politically, 'I'm not going to [expletive] anybody.' Politically, for Kelly to be saying those things was a statement of sorts of 'Let's get higher-income homes because we can.'
But getting back to my original point about economics, it's almost like if someone says they're coming and going to buy a $300,000 home. Oh, okay, what the hell?
They just didn't believe that. They didn't believe that that could happen and now it's just gone supernova to the other end. Now you can't get --
CURRY: Multimillion-dollar houses sales in the area. It's something you have to believe and not be terrified -?
See, I think a lot of this emanates from the fact that people are scared to confront these kind of things openly, you know, as he and I have debated this stuff for 30 years or more. But a lot of people don't permit themselves.
LALLY: I think it's still a bizarre phenomenon that people don't realize that they can own a house, regardless of their income bracket, regardless of their, well they've got to have a job. If you've got a job you can own a house. I don't care what happened to you five years ago, getting a divorce, a lot of other stuff, I'm not really in that business, but I've come to watch it and see how many people -- I've seen professionals say, 'I wonder if I can buy?' What are you talking about? If you're making $100,000 a year you can do anything you -- well if you're making $30,000 a year you can own a house. And a lot of that's just being afraid to ask, was what Wayne said, that imbued thing of, 'Oh, I'm afraid I'm going to get turned down.'
CURRY: Self check.
LALLY: Self check.
CURRY: But in terms of the other great irony, though, when you measure and look at these changes and you measure in signs of change, one of the other great ironies [is that] aside from the fact that Woodmoor was essentially designed as a protected enclave for the elite white folks ... over these last 30 years, Woodmoor has only come to be and flourish and achieve its highest expression because of minorities that moved in. I mean that is a huge irony here, when it was really built as a place to protect yourself from the demographic changes that were coming.
The other huge irony is that the private schools that busing spawned in the '70s -- and white folks said fine -- had two consequences: one, 'We ain't paying no more taxes because 60 cents out [of] every tax dollar, property tax, goes to the school system. The school system's now under siege by African Americans, I ain't paying for it.'
So let's do a tax freeze and take it directly out of schools. And two, let's have our own school, private. Well now all the private schools are competing to get the best and the brightest black kids in their schools to sustain the school operation.
These are huge ironies because those schools were established to defy the tenets of the public school under the Brown decision, so it's a huge irony now that even the private schools -- the elite ones on down, you know -- are now competing for the best and the brightest of African American children, when the whole thing was born out of resistance to African Americans. It's a huge irony.
LALLY: But the '70s -- in our young adulthood I think what we experienced in high school prepared us really well for young adulthood. We were very fortunate. Winfield Kelly has my eternal gratitude because he hired me and he didn't fire me on several occasions when he should have, and he gave us all an opportunity to get in at a young age and have impact and do things. And I think he made some political maldecisions that were mistakes because it cost him votes, it cost him African American votes in an irony of ways, but he did the right thing. And police integration may be a little slower than everybody thought but he did the right thing in the fire department. I was ... reading that story three times, when you can't cancel that class, remember? Kelly did the same thing back in the '70s when they had guys in the class.
But to a certain extent we were over there whispering in his ear because you know politicians -- you're listening to people and that's the business. 'Am I doing the right thing? Am I doing the right thing?' And if you don't get positive reinforcement on what you're doing, you're going to go in a different direction and I think that we had a role to play in that -? to the regret of some of the senior advisers perhaps -? but we were there kind of whispering in his ear saying, 'well, you know it's kind of the right thing to do on certain things' and he had the courage to do it. And he gave me a shot, gave Wayne a shot, gave Al Wynn his first job in the government.
CURRY: Yes, and frankly set the stage, set the table if you will, for even more and better events later. I went to work for Ken Michael while I was in still in law school and of course he's a huge name in land development out here, and there weren't any black folks involved in commercial land development out here. That was back in the '70s, so being in the vanguard of these changes that have taken place has been phenomenal, and as a result I've had an opportunity to learn and to overcome my own fears about how you do it.
I mean I didn't start, you know, being indifferent to the power or clout bankers, developers -- I was just as scared to go to the table as everybody else. The first time you went, you know, wondering how you were going to be taken advantage of. We've got to learn this. And so you go through the process of learning and through the process of acquiring the best talent you can and displaying it. And that attitude has sort of pervaded all of it from the elementary school all the way [with] you through those offices and even college, where at Western Maryland there were 12 black kids and I was president of my freshman class. An unheard of result, you know, and law school the same thing. You've got to learn these systems of activity and then use 'em and put the best people you can in them all the way up through the executive ranks.
We had a complement of employees who were thrilled to be in Prince George's County, happy to be able to be part of the new expression that was taking place and who were in many respects, you know, the elite of their various fields. And who happen to be African American and others so it was like you could get all of it, not just part of it. So it's one huge benefit of being on the beach first you know in all of these different layers and levels.
“ What's your sense of integration in the county now?”
LALLY: What's my sense of integration in the county now?
CURRY: Yeah, now that you're overwhelmed, now that you're a minority, what's your sense of integration. How does integration feel now [laughs]. Now that you're the overwhelming underdog is it a little different? Does it feel a little different?
LALLY: I hope to be continually integrated into the system.
CURRY: I've got to give John credit. He still lives here, his kids still work here. I sort of marvel at people who express this sort of one-for-all egalitarian view of the world who lived in places like Woodmoor and who still moved out when it became overwhelming minority. You know, it kind of belies [the fact that] here you live near a world class golf course, rich multimillion-dollar houses and a majority/minority, so you still move [and] you still haven't told the truth yet about what is motivating you. If that's not good enough for you, my gracious, man, what is? It's just interesting.
LALLY: I think what's happening --
CURRY: I'll let John be their apologist now.
LALLY: You bought me some time, man.
CURRY: I'm trying to help you out here, man. We're going into the intellectual four-corner stall, you know.
LALLY: ...I think you have a huge story [in that] as you've replaced a prior economic elite...and a richer elite has moved into this county than the county I knew. I mean the rich guys back then had some land or they were building some houses. You have high-tech guys...you have a whole economic strata that's in the county and running things, that's great. What I like about the status of integration in the county is [that] my kids have a far different view of the world than I did. I was always walking around trying to think, 'Am I doing this right, am I doing it right?' They're just best buds with folks and my son, a Filipino kid is his best buddy and there was a big mixed bag at Bowie when he went through Bowie. And I just see them very comfortable with each other and they're far more mobile than we were.
Whenever we ventured out it was always this, you know, we're going on safari, and we might get killed. I mean a bunch of us guys went down to Ocean City in '68. We're all, you know, a bunch of thugs going to Ocean City. So we're signing into the hotel room, we've got all our stuff, Wayne comes strolling in with his stuff and the guy looks up and says, 'Oh, I'm sorry, we made a mistake. There's no vacancies.' He said there aren't any vacancies and I mean we'd just checked in and I'm just ... crying. I'm not used to people [messing] with me... Wayne grabbed me by the arm and he said come on, we're outta here. I said, 'What?'
He said, 'We're outta here.'
I said, 'Why?'
He said, 'You're in Ocean City, man, you're not home.'
I said, 'Okay.'
You know this a lot better than I do but because of the mobility. My children have a lot more mobility and their friends are -- they just kind of glide in and out. And I like that ... and of course their kids are at a certain social status with -- you know, their kids are going to college and that kind of stuff. But that is a good feeling to see they're not walking on as many eggshells as we had to walk on.
CURRY: What happens when you're in the lead, when you're at the front of that trail and you start to challenge it? And it's so ironic to see what's changed here. I mean when I was growing up it was small, it was rural and it was overwhelmingly white. And to have lived through all of that turmoil with school desegregation only to emerge from wherever we are along that continuum with this community defining Prince George's County is an irony -- it's a huge irony. It's almost poetic justice in a way, except you know the problem with what we have here is that because it's a demographic that's never existed anywhere else in the country in the history of the country, we're all pioneers. And whatever stage somebody entered on a time continuum of change, you're a pioneer because there are no precedents, there is nobody that already did it. There's no other community to ever reflect your profile.
Our responsibility, you know, in the '60s and '70s, particularly among African Americans, we would frequently get ... 'Well they this, and they that,' talking about the dominance and oppression of whoever was in charge of political system who were white.
Well now we're the majority and every time I hear everybody talk about 'well they did this and they did that,' which they now are we talking about now? Because you're a majority, we're a majority. It's our obligation to work [and] fix reflective systems that make the community better. 'They' is now 'us' ... We found the enemy, guess who it is? We're in charge, we're the majority now. And with the majority in a democracy you can do a lot of important things if you have the heart and if you don't surrender to your own insecurities about it. You watch what happens politically, you watch who's pulling the strings behind the curtain and all that sort of thing. Clearly, Prince George's County is perhaps the most influential jurisdiction for Democrats anywhere in the state because of the abundance of the votes here on which Democrats usually feast and harvest.
Well, that's all well and good except the legitimate expression of politics is 'You scratch my back and I scratch yours.' So now we've got to measure what comes out of it for being in that team lineup.
So it's been astonishing to watch and rebut these premonitions, fears that people have had, particularly around the racial demographic, for 30-some years and to still be dealing with it to the point where now, is it the Republican Party, for example, that introduces the first successful statewide black candidate to Maryland? ... So that's a great irony considering what this community offers.
So we are not out of the challenge ... the struggle for fairness and justice and political expression even though we're the majority. So people have to adjust their game to the changing dynamic of our demographic. So of course that hasn't happened yet despite the majority status and people ain't playing like they're the majority.
LALLY: But the economic opportunity here is just huge.
CURRY: Huge.
LALLY: Just huge.
CURRY: Off the chart.
LALLY: All the guys, like Wayne said, the guys, I wave goodbye at 'em as they drive out of the county. I say, 'See you guys, I'm staying here, there's gold here.' And not just a huge spike, it's a just a step we're having to leap to go up and that's great for our schools. The political leadership has got a hell of a challenge in front of it because ... there's so much happening. It's not like we're being ignored, we're now a location.
As I told Wayne once, it's one thing to conquer, it's another to occupy. Easier to conquer than to rule.
CURRY: No question. I understand now what happened to Caesar. Brutus was the guy [who] fixed his reign.
© 2004 Washingtonpost.
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