A bus ride to enlightenment

With metal lunch pails in hand, they climbed on school buses for a short but historic journey across the foothills of Pasadena and Altadena.

It was the fall of 1970 and a federal judge had just ordered Pasadena’s public schools to mix up the races.

For Karen Iwamiya, then in the second grade, this meant a trip eastward across Lake Avenue in Altadena, an invisible dividing line separating races and social classes. She traveled from her less-affluent neighborhood to a nicer one, with a nicer school — Noyes Elementary, where black, white, Latino and Asian American kids like her were now all thrown together.

“To me, they were all just my friends,” said Iwamiya, who was 7 years old then and blissfully unaware of any controversy surrounding her presence at this new school. “That was the beauty of it. We didn’t know.”

Iwamiya, now a real estate appraiser, ended up staying in those integrated Pasadena public school classrooms until she graduated from Muir High School in 1981. Last month she attended her 30-year high school reunion at an Altadena park, alongside her old Latino, white and black classmates.

“We were lucky,” said Cameron Turner, who is African American was a student leader in his high school days. “Whenever someone asks me, ‘Can integration work,’ I say: ‘It already has.’”

When those first, court-integrated classes graduated from Muir High circa 1981, Muir’s student body was closely balanced between blacks (about 50%) and whites (34%), with sizable minorities of Latinos (12%) and Asians (4%).

It was a fleeting moment of egalitarianism. For two decades or so, black and white, well-off and struggling, attended the Pasadena public schools together in large numbers. It really didn’t matter what you looked like or where you came from — everyone more or less got the same education.

Muir isn’t fully integrated anymore. Its demographics look like those of a lot of other urban public schools in California: 66% Latino, 29% black and just 2% white. To the great shame of all Californians, public education has become re-segregated.

Talk to the members of the Muir class of ‘81, all now in their late 40s, and they’ll tell you they owe a lot to their integrated schools. It gave them a deeper understanding of the way the world works. They see that prejudice is born of shallow thinking.

“From that day forward, in classrooms and on sports teams, in student government and singing in the choir, you were with kids who looked like you and who didn’t look like you,” Turner told me, referring to his own busing experience.

“It’s hard to walk out of that experience with stereotypes still in your head,” he said.

We Americans are rightly proud of our traditions of equality. We are a country of “equal daughters, equal sons … all alike endear’d,” as Walt Whitman once wrote.

But look at American history and you’ll see that equality never comes without a fight.

That’s how that first court-ordered school integration came about. In the late ‘60s, inspired by the civil rights movement and the great victory of Brown vs. Board of Education, a group of parents filed suit against a school system that largely separated blacks from whites.

When those parents, most of whom were black, won the case, a lot of white parents decided to stick around.

Mike Hedblom’s mom and dad told him that by getting on that bus to go to school with black kids, he was doing a good, necessary thing. Being 7, his only response was: “I get to ride a bus to school! Cool!”

He was bused westward, a short trip to the once largely black Audubon Elementary. “I later learned that it was a very poor, run-down campus, but I didn’t see that as a kid,” he said. His mom joined the PTA there and helped organize a project to paint the walls.

For years, he didn’t think much was different at his integrated schools. Then, as a teenager, a relative used one of the ugliest racial epithets in the English language to ask him what it was like to go to school with black kids.

“I was floored,” Hedblom remembered. “That was the first time it hit me that it wasn’t normal.”

But for Hedblom, as for others, going to Muir redefined what normal was. All classes and most school activities were integrated, including the theater’s stage crew, of which Hedblom was a member.

“I knew kids whose parents taught at Caltech and kids whose parents swept the floors at JPL,” said Hedblom. “We’d go to the poor part of Pasadena to hang out, and then drive up into the hills and all do something together.”

In the years that followed, a lot of the graduates went on to successful careers, finding themselves especially well prepared to navigate the new California.

“The more opportunities you have to live around different kinds of people, the better prepared you are to live in this world,” Turner said.

Muir High in 1981 wasn’t a racial utopia, by any means. But for the most part, it was a school that worked.

Another Muir graduate, Pablo Miralles, argues that what killed integrated schools wasn’t racial intolerance but the budget wars that slowly consumed public education after Proposition 13 passed in 1978.

“Once school funding became a bigger issue than race, the middle class families left,” said Miralles. The son of Argentine immigrants, he’s making a documentary about the class of 1981, a clip of which can be seen online.

“I lived on a street that was all middle-class African Americans,” Miralles told me. “Now they’re not sending their kids to public school either.”

Hedblom remembers going back to Muir in the 1990s and meeting up with one of his old stage teachers.

“This is a dumping ground,” the teacher told him. “These kids can’t learn anything.”

Hedblom was stunned. “The whole school felt, for lack of a better word, tired. Beat up,” he told me.

Those graduates who return to Muir agree that there are still many excellent teachers there, and an eager student body. But the teachers of today are clearly working with fewer resources, and the students of today have less opportunity than their parents’ generation.

It’s up to us today to fight for them — again — and to fight for the equality that makes us a stronger California.

hector.tobar@latimes.com