Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 8, 1990 TAG: 9004080276
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: F1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By ELLIOTT MINOR THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: VALDOSTA, GA. - LENGTH: Long
It was the year that young blacks and whites from the North poured into the Southeast with dreams of vanquishing deeply entrenched segregation.
Hardee, a teacher in a segregated high school where his students wore hand-me-down football jerseys from the nearby white school, had had enough. He and his family headed for Chicago.
Now Hardee is back, part of a migratory trend that has reversed the century-long exodus of blacks seeking freedom from segregation and opportunity in the North.
"We talked about it, prayed about it and decided our youngsters were at the age where they needed to be closer to the areas where we grew up to get to know their relatives and be around black people," says Hardee, an assistant to the president of Valdosta State College.
"I wanted to be closer to my family," adds his wife, Wyonnie. "I was tired of the hustle and bustle. I just wanted a different environment, especially for the boys."
Both of them took pay cuts to make the move, but they were not alone in making the decision.
A Census Bureau report released in January said the share of blacks living in the South is growing for the first time in more than a century. The proportion of American blacks living in Southern states was 55.9 percent as of March 1988, up from 52.2 percent in 1980 and the first increase in at least 100 years.
Those numbers do not include Hardee's younger son, a New York financial analyst. And his elder son plans to return to the North, for him the scene of happier days.
But the parents are glad to be home.
"Many blacks used to be ashamed to be from Southern states," Hardee says. "Now they're proud. There used to be nothing in the South for a black person except to work and go to church. Blacks now own businesses, and the South generally is a better place for black people to live."
Hardee grew up in the coastal Georgia city of Brunswick. His father, C.S. Hardee, was a Baptist minister. His mother, Macedonia, earned $18 a week as a school cafeteria worker and $2 an evening as a maid.
The couple emphasized education, and all of Hardee's seven brothers and sisters earned at least some college credits.
Hardee earned a teaching degree at Clark College in Atlanta, where he met his wife, an Atlanta native.
When he started teaching math at Center High in Waycross, he found black students using hand-me-down books and football jerseys that were no longer needed in the white schools. He earned extra money as a waiter in a white club and as a laborer in tobacco warehouses.
"It was very disgusting to me to have a college degree and have to wait on tables to make ends meet," he recalls. "The people I waited on had far less education, but they treated me like nobody. In order to get a tip, I had to say, `Yes sir' and `No sir.' I played the game."
His wife earned 50 cents an hour working in a pecan shelling plant. She said blacks had to stand beside a conveyor belt in a noisy part of the plant and remove shells, while whites worked as foremen or operated bagging machines in a room equipped with stools.
"There were two of everything," Hardee recalls. "Two public schools. Two sets of drinking fountains."
Blacks had to sit in the balconies of movie theaters, blacks were not allowed in downtown restaurants, blacks had to sit in the back of buses and were expected to be off the streets by sundown.
"If blacks were traveling you had to carry a box with your lunch," Hardee recalls. "If you had to go to the bathroom, you had to stop and use the woods. Most service stations didn't have a restroom for blacks. They'd have a big sign on the door saying `Whites Only.' "
Frustrated with his low teaching salary and lack of opportunity, Hardee accepted a grant to work on his master's degree at Fisk University in Nashville, Tenn. He earned his advanced degree in 1963 and accepted a teaching job at a predominantly white school in the Chicago suburb of Maywood.
His new job paid $10,000 a year - four times his salary in Georgia. He eventually was promoted to a $26,000-a-year job as the principal of a mostly white elementary school.
Wyonnie Hardee, meantime, took a job as a telephone operator for Commonwealth Edison Co., an electric utility. She later became a customer service representative, a job that increased her earnings to about $23,000 a year.
"We had a nice house with a small mortgage," Hardee says. "A lot of people couldn't understand why we would give all that up to move back to the South."
But even in the North, racism had continued to haunt them. Hardee recalls that he was turned down for an apartment in a white neighborhood. He says banks and real estate agents discriminated against blacks by rejecting loan applications and refusing to sell them homes in certain neighborhoods.
"There were incidents in various sections of the North that were as racist as what had gone on in the South," he says. "There was always the matter of some unions that were opposed to having blacks as members."
Hardee says he believes desegregation went smoother in the South than the North. "You didn't have the violent confrontations in most areas of the South as you did in the North, even regarding busing."
Hardee decided he should get a doctorate before returning to Georgia, so he commuted 120 miles twice a week for two years to earn the degree at Northern Illinois University. The Hardees arrived back in Georgia in 1976.
In Georgia, Hardee took a $17,000-a-year job as an administrator and math teacher at Fort Valley State College, a historically black school near Macon. His wife became a secretary at the college.
The couple's two teen-age sons, Gerald and Sidney, had attended a mostly white Lutheran school in Illinois, but at Fort Valley enrolled in Peach County High School, which will end a tradition of holding separate black and white proms this year.
Gerald Hardee, now 29, says he plans to move back to Illinois when he earns a degree at Valdosta State College. An avid wrestler, he had to give up the sport because his new school didn't have a wrestling program.
Going to school in Georgia, he says, "was a lot different. People made fun of the way we talked. I think I became quieter down here. Up there I was a star in football, wrestling, and had more friends."
Sidney Hardee, 24, who found that "some of those suburbs of Chicago are more racist than the South," graduated from Yale in 1988 and works as a financial analyst for Solomon Brothers Inc. in New York.
Their father transferred to Valdosta State in 1984 as an associate professor. The next year he was appointed assistant to the president, responsible for affirmative action programs and for helping black students succeed at a predominantly white college.
"By the time I got back, most schools were desegregated, the Civil Rights Act had been passed. . . . I think whites had made up their minds that they had to include blacks in the economic growth that was taking place in the South," Hardee says. "The whole attitude, especially around the larger cities in the South, had changed dramatically in the treatment of blacks, in terms of jobs, living conditions and in terms of services in the black community."
Hardee's wife, concerned that too many black students are ill-prepared for college, earned a degree in Fort Valley and began teaching in 1986 at the Lomax-Pinevale Elementary School, a mostly black school in a poor section of Valdosta. She stays late to work with students and often drives them home.
Her dedication has not been overlooked. She was selected Valdosta's teacher of the year for 1989-90.
"When I left Georgia, I didn't have any white friends. It was strictly segregated," Wyonnie Hardee recalls. "When I came back, we lived in a black community in Fort Valley, but here in Valdosta you live where your money will take you. I have black and white friends."
Hardee also is active in civic affairs. He covers a 41-county area making speeches on behalf of the college and teaches Sunday school classes occasionally at Bethel CME Church.
The Hardees live in a brick ranch-style home surrounded by pines, palms and a eucalyptus tree in a white middle-class neighborhood. Their carpeted living room has a piano, a fireplace and a cabinet full of photo albums. Many of the pictures, some faded and out of focus, were taken during sightseeing trips to the Grand Canyon, Niagara Falls and other attractions with their sons.
"I couldn't have written a better script for my life," Hardee says. "Although in the North I was financially all right, there were other areas that were missing and there were things money can't buy.
"People were closer in the South. You passed people in the street - white or black - and they would speak. Those were the kind of things I could feel good about coming back to."
by CNB