As I was writing this web-book I became increasingly aware that I was engaged in a kind of metaphorical gentrification. I kept hearing the voices of our classmates who never came to our many reunions or who dropped out or who may not have been successful or may have suffered physical or emotional crises or who may have become cynical or pessimistic or angry. In my spreadsheets I could not remember the faces of those classmates who dropped out after the freshman or sophomore or junior years and even in our graduating class there were many that I didn’t know. I would wager that 100% of us who went to reunions were on the college track and not the vocational track. I realize now that I should have reached out to more of my classmates but like all of us I was living in my own bubble that obscured my view!
No doubt there were many aspects of growing up on the South Side of Chicago and going to Hyde Park High that were not ideal yet in my rear-view mirror my years in high school were positive and beneficial. Of course my subjective perspective is hopelessly influenced by my own race and status but when I look back it seems that it was just pure serendipity that the various children in a changing Chicago poured into Hyde Park High School in 1952. If we had to imagine the ideal educational atmosphere, would we want a physical setting that included a university, parks, museums, a lakefront, and a wild diversity of stores and buildings? Would we want it to be in a time of general economic prosperity? Would we want an almost a perfect ratio of diverse classmates? Yet for one fleeting moment in history, it happened.
Was the Hyde Park High School class of 1956 unique? The Chicago historian Christopher Reed has pointed out that Marshall High School on the southwest side was similar to Hyde Park High and there were probably other high school students in New York or other cities who experienced the 1950’s as we did. Some historian should write a book about these exceptional schools not only because they were a rare anomaly in the 1950’s but also because they symbolized a tolerant and diverse American society that we are still fighting for today.
In a recent column in the New York Times (September 29, 2017) David Brooks contrasted sincerity and authenticity as opposing ways of being in the world: “Sincerely is what you shoot for in a trusting society. You try to live honestly and straightforwardly into your social roles and relationships. Authenticity is what you shoot for in a distrustful society. You try to liberate your own personality by rebelling against the world around you…” His extreme dichotomy is wrong. Our Chicago of the 1950’s was both a trusting and distrustful place and within this dualism we attempted to fashion both an authentic and a sincere life and to merge them into a unified personality. At no time was this quest more acute that during our high school years and a minor theme of this web-book has been my own search for both authenticity and sincerity while I was a student at Hyde Park High School.
There is another and more pessimistic way of looking at ourselves. Is it a “trick” of the system to have a few exceptions, not only for Blacks, but also for the rest of us and do we play into that? Dawn Lundy Martin writes in N + 1 (Winter 2018) that “I want to be your exception because it means that I get to escape, at least in part. I can be your shining example, and if I am, you can ignore the mass incarcerations, murders, …what have you.” (p. 16)
The major theme of this web-book is that in the Chicago of the 1950’s—consciously or unconsciously—we absorbed the idealism that grew out of post World War II America for a real United Nations, for world peace, for the end of prejudice, poverty and oppression. We not only wanted ourselves to have a prosperous and comfortable place in the world, we wanted to make the world a better place of peace and tolerance and we thought that the micro-society of our high school class would translate into a future ideal society. We now know how naïve we were and how far America is from that ideal. But surely in the long struggle for what America could be the history of the Hyde Park High school class of 1956 deserves to be remembered.