His memory, like his heart, still unbowed by inequity
By MARY JO MELONE
Published March 3, 2004
Andrew Manning has kept the instrument all these years, since he was a boy: It's a pint-sized black plastic flute called a flutaphone.
As long as he has it, he can never forget. The flutaphone is an emblem of what separate but equal meant in the days when black kids like Manning were bused past white schools to attend their own.
While white kids could play just about any instrument in their school bands, black kids like him had a choice of only two: the flutaphone or drums.
Manning tells this story to anybody who'll listen. He wants us to know about his place in Tampa's history. His name was the first listed of the eight plaintiff schoolchildren in the lawsuit, Manning et al vs. Board of Public Instruction, which forced the integration of Hillsborough County schools.
The suit was filed in 1958. School officials resisted for more than a decade. Busing to achieve desegregation didn't begin until 1971. In the intervening years, here and there a black child enrolled in one school or another, if he and his parents were brave enough.
Manning and his mother, Willie Mae Manning, were brave enough. In 1962, when he was in the fifth grade, she moved him from all-black Dunbar Elementary to MacFarlane Park Elementary in West Tampa.
He entered the school without incident. Of his classmates, he says, "They wanted to feel my hair, and I wanted to feel their hair."
He has a picture from those days, a group portrait of his sixth-grade class, in which his is the only black face. He has a stack of yellowed newspaper clippings dating back to the '60s. He can't let the memories go.
A quiet movement is developing to find a way to memorialize this period in Tampa's history. It is led by the Rev. W. James Favorite, pastor of Beulah Baptist Institutional Church. He recently circulated a letter asking for ideas on what kind of memorial would be fitting, so that people like Andrew Manning and his mother will not be forgotten.
After he made history, Manning's life was a hard road of his own making. He parlayed his love of music into a solid career as a soul and disco radio DJ but was brought down by alcohol and cocaine addiction. He ended up on the streets. But today he is an evangelist.
Manning is a big man of strong opinions. He believes there was no way but school integration to break down the color line. But he also believes nobody, not even Dr. Martin Luther King, foresaw the downside of integration. "We thought all the black kids would get equal opportunity, go off to college and come back to the black community," he says.
Instead, those who could leave childhood neighborhoods did so. Community stability was replaced by desolation and abandonment. "Our neighborhoods," says Manning, "have become dope holes."
A judicial order closed the historic case three years ago. This fall, for the first time, some children will attend schools of their choosing in a new plan intended to keep campuses racially mixed. But only 11 percent of eligible kids signed up.
Manning keeps the photograph of his sixth-grade class on a living room wall. He knows the occupations of several of his classmates. He knows which ones landed in jail. He even keeps the phone number of his now-retired teacher. When I called the teacher, 76-year-old Sebastian Agliano remembered Andrew Manning instantly as a quiet boy who blended in well.
If Manning felt otherwise, he doesn't say so now. He picks and chooses his memories, like we all do. In them, his mother is paramount. He shows me a worn portrait of her. In it, Willie Mae Manning wears heavy black glasses and a slight smile. Her arms are folded firmly in front of her. She must have been a force to be reckoned with.
Whenever he had a problem, Andrew Manning says, his mother told him to pray, just as she did.
Now, he prays for this:
If they're going to remember the brave black people who opened the schools to everybody, couldn't one of those schools be named for his mother?
