Roy S. Johnson: We have a lot to learn from Birmingham’s “teacher” Odessa Woolfolk

This is an opinion column.

Her knees outlasted mine. Your 90+ year old knees. They are “teacher” knees, maybe that’s why. They are unyielding, determined, persistent. They are used to standing until the lesson is taught. Then stand again. Stand and teach.

Odessa Woolfolk still has a lot to teach us. Even 61 years after she stood in a classroom at the long-gone but beloved Ullman High School, the second high school for black children in Birmingham. In May 1963, she stood up and taught an immeasurable lesson by turning to the blackboard and turning her back to the children in the room as many jumped from their desks, crawled through the windows and ran to join the movement.

Gather with other students from across the city at 16th Street Baptist Church. To join and confront Eugene (Bull) Connor, to face the Birmingham police and their dogs, firemen and their hoses.

To confront racism in Birmingham.

Change America.

Ullman was on lockdown that summer day in 1963 because the school principal and many black adults in the town thought it unwise to send children to such work. To take such a risk. To march against the heartless, racist Connor and the police army he controls. Marching against discrimination in downtown Birmingham stores because adults could not do so and risk losing their jobs and their ability to support their families.

Woolfolk believed that the lesson for the children who jumped through those windows to join the movement was far greater than any risk—far beyond any knowledge she might have written on the board that day.

It was a lesson in the cost of change. About overcoming fear. Overcoming prison. Overcoming racists like Connor. Overcoming dogs and fire hoses.

Overcome racism.

We still owe a debt of gratitude to these brave youth, the “foot soldiers” as we know them. Still grateful for her courage.

And for the woman who taught many of them and who still teaches us. Still standing and teaching.

One evening, Woolfolk stood under the classical rotunda at the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute (BCRI) for several hours taught. She was there to be honored as the recipient of the 2024 Rev. Fred L. Shuttlesworth Human Rights Award. She joined a list of esteemed recipients, namely the Grand Tetons (forget Mount Rushmore; there are far too many who deserve it) of civil rights icons.

Among them: the fiery Rev. Shuttlesworth, of course (“I called him Rev. Fred,” Woolfolk said that night), Vernon Jordon, Myrlie Evers-Williams, Angela Davis, former mayor Richard Arrington Jr. and Harry Belafonte.

And now the tiny teacher from Titusville.

Organizers reserved a chair for Woolfolk at the start of the evening, but if she used it at all, it was only for a few moments. “This is all a bit overwhelming,” she whispered to me early on, between smiles and hugs and laughter.

The plexiglass podium was lowered from the small stage when she needed to speak and teach so she didn’t have to step on stage. “Because of my knees,” she said before the show began.

“I understand, believe me,” I shared. Or better, My Knee understood.

Soon she was at the microphone and began teaching. “I prepared a few words,” she said with a laugh, simply arranging several papers. She later added: “Once a teacher, always a teacher.”

Always teach because there is always a lesson to learn.

BCRI is the house that Woolfolk built. That’s what she had imagined. That in the 1970s, as co-chair of a task force convened by Arrington, the city’s first black mayor, she guided her through the labyrinth of rejection and concern to explore the idea of ​​a home that would document Birmingham’s role in the civil rights movement. This idea was actually initiated by his predecessor, David Vann.

Woolfolk said Vann was inspired by a trip to the Holocaust Museum in Israel.

“David Vann said: ‘What we should do in Birmingham is take a similar approach to remembering our heroines that we wanted to escape from… That’s what we should do.'”

We didn’t, at least not at first. “Desegregation progressed slowly in the 1970s,” the teacher said, “and there was some reluctance in our leadership to publicly discuss racial issues.” After all, the Yankees always talked about our backwardness — some of which we deserved . When I started visiting them, I also noticed a certain backwardness in them. That’s a different story.”

teachers teach.

Birmingham voters “roundly rejected” the idea of ​​using taxpayer money for a museum, Woolfolk said.

“There were some arguments against establishing the institute,” she said. “That we shouldn’t reopen old wounds, the institute would reignite the racial conflict, there are more pressing problems… And you don’t need a new facility for a handful of old papers.”… Whites won’t come and blacks will use the institute as a place of incitement .”

teachers teach.

I could listen to Woolfolk all night long even if my knees couldn’t stand it. She still has so much to teach and we still have so much to learn. Not just about our past, about how we got here and what we had to endure along the way. It’s not just about how an institute was built (and how it needs to be reborn).

But how do we navigate now?

“Help this place get to the next level,” the teacher urged us. “We need it now more than ever. “Some of the fundamental civil and human rights to which we have dedicated our work are under attack. So just remember our mission: to educate every generation about civil and human rights by exploring our common paths and working together in the present to build a better future.

“That was our mission back then. This is our mission now. That should be our mission forever.”

The teacher paused. “It sounded like I was giving a sermon,” she said. “That’s because I was influenced by Rev. Fred. He would always start talking and say, ‘I sense there’s a sermon coming.'”

teachers teach.

About Us. About how we can navigate our precarious present.

“I am a true believer,” she said. “I think this country can use the truth, the knowledge of history and bringing together people from different backgrounds or walks of life because that’s the only way we can survive as a community, as a nation.

About how we treat each other. About empathy. About how we heal.

About what it will take so that those who have more do not see those who have less as less.

“The ideal community exists,” the teacher said near the end of the lesson, “when those who have not been hurt by problems like poverty are as outraged as those who have suffered from it.”

Such a community emerged in Birmingham more than 60 years ago to build an institution that honors all participants.

Such a community is urgently needed now. In Birmingham – to protect the innocent from those who spit on life. Including their own.

In our nation – to help us persevere.

The teacher left the podium and never took that seat. She stood there, smiling and posing until the last of us students departed.

She boasted of her 90-plus-year-old knees – too weak to climb onto the platform, yet sturdy enough to stand and teach.

More robust than my own.

“These are my originals,” Woolfolk said. “And wherever I go, I take her with me.”

And teaches us lessons that we absolutely need to learn. Again.