Jonathan Addleton
Ballard Hudson Middle School
1970-1971
Macon, Georgia
In the fall of 1970 public schools in Macon, Georgia finally integrated. It was also the year my family, Baptist missionaries in Pakistan, returned to their home state of Georgia for a one-year furlough. Gilead Baptist Church, one of their supporting churches, was also opening an all-white academy as their response to court-ordered integration. Some of my parent’s friends planned to transfer their children to Gilead Academy. Knowing the financial constraints facing missionary families, my siblings and I were offered a tuition waiver to encourage us to join them.
Remarkably, my parents let me decide which school to attend. It didn’t take me long to make my choice — sensing even as an eighth grader that historywas being made that year, I was adamant that I should go to public school.
Based on our address on Flamingo Drive in south Macon, that meant enrolling at Ballard Hudson, one of Macon’s previously all-black schools whose distinguished alumni list included Little Richard and Otis Redding. In response to the court ruling, Ballard Hudson was amalgamated as a feeder school into what is now known as Southwest High. The sports teams were renamed as the Patriots and three new school colors were introduced: red, white and blue.
With a tight budget, those of us in the band were issued the old purple and white uniforms previously worn by the now defunct Ballard Hudson band, known as the Tigers.I played saxophone. My parents had to laugh when I returned home in my Tigers uniform, worn before by members of what had widely been regarded as the best marching band in Middle Georgia pre-integration. For them, it seemed so improbable.
That first day, we were directed toward the massive Ballard Hudson Middle School auditorium on Anthony Road, waiting among hundreds of other restless eighth and ninth grade students until our names were called.
We were introduced to our homeroom teacher and then directed down a long, broad hallway to our homeroom class, the majority of my fellow classmates African-American.
It was a memorable year. Even as a 13 year old, I felt that I was watching history in motion in ways only partly related to integration.
Walter “Stinky” Daniels, the best basketball player in eighth grade,went on to win two high school state championships followed by a stellarcollege career at the University of Georgia.
Miss Agnew, my white science teacher, organized a field trip to Stone Mountain outside Atlanta, paying out of her own pocket for students who could not afford it. At the time I was oblivious to the fact that the history of Stone Mountain was inextricably linked with the Confederacy. That said, I also recall that everyone in the class participated, welcoming the opportunity to be off school for the day.
I also recall especially vividly the Georgia History class taught by “Rev Wilson,” a part-time African-American minister. Yet, even then, I was aware enough to realize that the textbook we used, presumably approved by the state education authorities, was overtly sympathetic to the “Lost Cause”.
Given that more than half a century has passed since wide-scale public school integration in Middle Georgia, I still reflect on that historic year I spent at Ballard Hudson. I watched social change unfold before my eyes as an occasionally nervous and mostly passive observer in a predominantly Black middle school.
In particular, I wonder what happened to Tyrone MacMillan, the Black student who befriended me, a new and lonely white one. We corresponded for several months after I returned to Pakistan but then lost
contact.
Or Johnny Waller, for that matter, the rambunctious and fight-prone white kid who is one of the few names from that year I can still recall.
It was an eye-opening year, one that helped shape the person I have become. Apart from everything else, it gave me a broader perspective on the realities of Macon and the diversity of Middle Georgia, the area where my parents were born and raised and the place where all four of my grandparents are buried.
Looking back, I am especially grateful that my parents let me choose which school I would attend — a choice that, for me, meant a newly integrated yet still largely African-American public school rather than the more confining and narrower halls of a segregationist academy that has since shut its doors.
Jonathan Addleton returned to Macon, Georgia in January 2017 after a 32-year Foreign Service career that included assignments as U.S. Ambassador to Mongolia and USAID Mission Director in India, Pakistan, Cambodia, and Central Asia. Born and raised in the mountains of northern Pakistan, his books include Some Far and Distant Place (University of Georgia Press); Undermining the Center (Oxford University Press); Mongolia and the United States (Hong Kong University Press); and The Dust of Kandahar (Naval Institute Press). Since 2020, he has served as Rector/President Forman Christian College, an historic institution founded in 1864 in Lahore, Pakistan.
It has occurred to me in recent years that I should wonder how your parents were missionaries with “CBFMS” which was the Northern Baptist group…vs Southern Baptist. I was primarily from Washington State when we were on furlough. I ended up going to college in the southern Midwest (southern IL). I met Daniel Shinkle, who I then married after graduation, and we spent our first year of marriage in Americus, GA. My husband worked in the finance dept for Habitat For Humanity and we were the caretakers for one of their guest houses. I worked 2 night shifts a week at the local hospital. It was the worst year of my life. I was nieve to the fact that this country had such varying cultures. That was 1983-84. I refused to say “Ma’am” and “Sir” to all those above me….and I was working as a nurse’s aide (despite having a Bachelor’s degree).That made me one of those sinful Northerners. That was just part of it. My best friend, while there, was a black man that I worked with at the hospital. We kept in touch for a few years also. My naivete was amazing.We M.K.’s think our multicultural experience gives us an intelligence, but I assumed America was all one.
My parents had committed their lives to service on the Indian Subcontinent — at that time the Southern Baptist did not have work in either India or Pakistan, hence the decision to join CBFMS as another Baptist sending agency. As for your refusal to use the Southern phrases “Ma’am” and “Sir” in Americus (Georgia), I observed how this can be played out in an entirely different context during 1965-1966 when I was enrolled as a third grader in a public school in Hartford (Connecticut). I hadn’t grown up in the South so was not accustomed to using either “Ma’am” or “Sir”. However, as I recall there was recently enrolled student from the South who DID use that phrase in an effort to be polite — and was stuck with detention for “sassing” a teacher by calling her “Ma’am”! Perhaps the lesson in all this is “When in Rome, do as the Romans do” — or at least try to understand why the Romans do as they do!