Carlmont’s rocky racial history

SoPHIE GURDUS

Carlmont is known for its academic excellence and high-quality learning environment.

But that reputation was not always the case. Whispers of “Dangerous Minds” and “Crackmont” are nothing new, but Carlmont’s past goes beyond the campus myths.

Beginning in the 1960s, Carlmont was fraught with tensions. Newly developed inter-community busing was introduced, leading schools like Carlmont away from the segregated reality they once had been. The population shifted from a mainly white population to one with white, Black, and Latino residents. In doing so, strong sectional lines were drawn based upon race.

“You had a lot of racial tensions here,” said David Gomez, a Carlmont U.S. history teacher. “I mean, you always have racial tension everywhere. But it was particularly bad in the ‘60s and ‘70s. A couple of my older teacher friends that had been here for a while we were like, ‘Wow, sometimes it wasn’t even safe to go to the bathroom. You could be attacked.’”

Although Gomez himself was not present to witness the racism of the earlier decades, the same patterns continued into the ‘90s, when he began working.

One event, in particular, stood out to him: a not so peaceful protest about the Persian Gulf War, coincidentally in the midst of a parade in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Students walked out of class and to the field to hold their rally, but Carlmont had both anti-war and pro-war sentiments. The two soon broke out in fighting.

The administration labeled it as a “racial incident” after seeing Black students involved in the fighting. They called in the local police, which came outfitted in full SWAT gear. At their arrival, the peaceful protest for MLK Jr. rounded the corner.

“The police attacked them and rounded them up, hitting one boy in the head when he protested that they had done nothing wrong,” said LouAnne Johnson, a teacher at the time. “The administration rounded up every brown and Black kid and took them by bus to East Palo Alto — whether they lived there or not!”

Johnson worked at Carlmont in the early ‘90s, when she wrote and published “My Posse Don’t Do Homework,” which was later adapted into the movie “Dangerous Minds.” It depicted her time as a teacher to a so-called “class from hell’’ and the lengths she took to better their lives.

But, Hollywood does have a reputation for dramatics.

The students themselves were presented in a more exaggerated manner. The supposed “Dangerous Minds” were really just students coming from a lessprivileged background. Still, they weren’t exactly easy to teach.

“Those particular students, because of their socioeconomic background, tended to be a little tougher. Tougher in personality, tougher to teach, and tougher to reach,” Gomez said.

Of course, there were the typical differences in the movie versus the book: a character wearing a leather jacket as opposed to the then-trendy Oakland Raiders jacket or one single character depicting the lives of multiple real-life students. The Hollywood depiction went beyond just that, though.

“Everything in my books is true,” Johnson said. “Much of the movie is made up. I gave respect, and I demanded it in return. It worked because I gave true respect. I wasn’t playing.”

The movie’s exaggerations did not extend to her influence on her students, though.

Her role as a teacher to those students was significant, both to herself and them. Her classes were made up of kids at a disadvantage — kids whose parents didn’t go to college, kids without economic safety nets, kids with problems beyond school. She worked to prepare these kids as best as she could for the real world.

“A lot of these kids had never been to a restaurant before. So she would take kids to a restaurant and teach them the etiquette,” Gomez said. “Try to expose them to things that would be good to know. You know, the things you get when you’re going through life and looking for jobs and stuff like that.”

To Johnson, bettering her students’ lives was worth everything, especially considering the treatment they got. She worked to teach them how to demand respect, equality, and fairness.

“Those kids were not stupid or lazy. They just had no confidence,” Johnson said. “That was my focus with every group. And when they realized I was

sincere about wanting to help them be successful, happy people, they embraced me.”

Johnson’s impact on her students was profound, but she herself could not change the tide of the whole school. The racism plaguing Carlmont remained all throughout the ‘90s.

In 1997, around 30% of Carlmont’s population was from East Palo Alto (EPA), and a majority of those students were Latino and Black. Students at the time reported segregation in classes and friend groups.

These self-inflicted divides were not the biggest issue. Or rather, they weren’t until violence and aggression were coupled with them. Students vandalized school property on multiple occasions, leaving racist graffiti messages to greet the buses of students from EPA.

Past student Natasha Carroll-Ferrany reported messages reading “Welcome to the zoo” and “Don’t feed the animals or the ignorance” following a dispute between white students and a Latino EPA student.

Gomez remembered a similar but separate instance.

“One day we came to campus, and I remember some racist had painted the n-word because we had a lot of AfricanAmerican students at the time,” Gomez said. “And they painted ‘go home’ in big letters on different parts of the campus.”

As these incidents piled up, former Principal Debbra Lindo refused to stand idly by. She held schoolwide respect days, rallies, and community meetings.

“It’s kind of like the George Foreman approach to leadership: you get in the ring, get punched, and then you fight,” Lindo said.

And while nobody can deny the rampant racism at Carlmont in the 90s, Lindo also recalls moments where students came together as a community.

In 1998, EPA flooded badly. Families were displaced, the American Red Cross was called in, and the state declared the region a state of emergency. In one day, Lindo organized a school clean-up day.

“We showed up as a school. 10 busloads of kids got on buses in the same spot where they had been throwing rocks at their classmates from EPA and went down there and helped with cleanup,” Lindo said. “This flood gave us some empathy. It gave us our humanity back.”

White, Black, and Latino students all worked together to help the community, lugging carpets out of houses, putting furniture on the street, and picking up glass. The school came together for a rare moment, overcoming their differences to produce real change.

This isn’t the only instance of Carlmont’s togetherness in the 90s, though.

When the Columbine shooting happened in 1999, students from Carlmont banded together to show their support in a time of immense grief.

“Every kid went out on that football field with markers, and they wrote notes to the kids of Columbine, to the students and families. We rolled that up and shipped it to the principal,” Lindo said. “It was another one of those moments that gave us an opportunity to reflect. It gave us an opportunity to be our best selves and then continue the conversation because it was in our face.”

This progress was not linear, and there is still, there is much to do. While things are now a far cry from the racism clouding Carlmont then, its role in the system is not insignificant now.

The racial divides lasting from the ‘60s haven’t disappeared. They may not present themselves as violently as they once did, or maybe they are better disguised, but they’re present all the same.

“The tensions are still there. I don’t know if they’ll ever go away,” Gomez said.

Staff and administration have been working to lessen the harmful impacts of these racial tensions and improve opportunities for underprivileged students for decades now.

During Lindo’s time, the AVID program and College Track took off, and they now spread across the country in four different states. Nowadays, efforts have resulted in the newly instated and now active freshman history course, Ethnic Studies, and programs like Sojourn to the Past are designed to educate students about the Civil Rights Movement.

Becoming comfortable leads to a lack of change, and Carlmont has plans to be continuously moving towards a more accepting, less racially motivated future.

“You start by telling stories,” Lindo said. “They need to be part of yearbooks. They need to be part of the Historical Society. They need to be a part of your story and the stories that you talk through every day in school. That makes the place better.”