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Thread - Given the national discussion about racist images in yearbooks, I wanted to share some items I discovered while doing research some years ago.
I was writing the nonfiction book “The Book of Isaias,” about children of Mexican immigrants growing up in Memphis.
The teens I was writing about were attending Kingsbury High School in northeast Memphis, near Summer Avenue. I started studying the school’s history.
The school had been constructed in the late 1950s. The first-ever yearbook was published in 1959, and included this ad promoting a young singer who lived in the area, Johnny Cash. 
Well into the 1960s, Kingsbury High was still an all-white school. This image is circa 1964.
I found some remarkable images in the 1960 yearbook. The caption for this photo says "The junior officers find making up for the minstrel quite fun." The caption identifies these student junior class officers as president, VP, secretary and treasurer.
I found it notable that adults at the school would allow a blackface event - but that's apparently what they did, and it happened on quite a large scale.
This image gives you a sense of the scope of that year's minstrel show. I did a quick count just now, and it's about 108 people in blackface, give or take a few.
More images from the 1960 Kingsbury High School yearbook, which describes the minstrel show as "a howling success."
Here's how I wrote about it in "The Book of Isaias," published in 2016.
Time passed. In the early 1970s, courts ordered busing to end school desegregation. In Memphis, enraged white families found a dramatic way to protest – they dug a big trench, then buried a bus. Here's a news photo from the time.
But busing for desegregation happened anyway. Many white families left Kingsbury High. By the 1981-1982 school year, the proportion of white students had dropped from 100 percent to 48 percent.
When I was an embedded reporter at Kingsbury High in 2012-2013, white students still accounted for 15 percent of the student population. That was a far higher percentage of white students than most city schools, which were overwhelmingly African-American.
By the 2012-2013 school year, Kingsbury enrolled hundreds of Hispanic students. It happened because the white flight from the neighborhood around Kingsbury High left low-cost housing. Those houses were highly attractive to new immigrants from Mexico and elsewhere.
According to the latest state data, Kingsbury High is now 52 percent Hispanic, 35 percent black, 10 percent white, and 3 percent Asian.
To the best of my knowledge, Kingsbury High is the first majority public Hispanic high school in Memphis. There are several other majority Hispanic schools for younger kids, including some near Kingsbury High.
The story of the old blackface photos, the desegregation fight and the dramatic demographic change illustrates how the history of racism and segregation left a mark on one Memphis neighborhood.
For more on this issue, please see the article by @corinneskennedy , focusing on other such incidents in Memphis. commercialappeal.com/story/news/201…
Our columnist @ryanpoe weighed in as well. commercialappeal.com/story/news/loc…
Also see the @USATODAY project on blackface and other racist images in the 1970s and 1980s. commercialappeal.com/in-depth/news/…
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