Three years ago, four black families whose sons once played together on the same AAU basketball team made a decision. They would all move to Mountain Brook, one of America's most segregated suburbs and a social flashpoint inside Birmingham.

Two of the students, football player Harold Joiner and basketball player Sean Elmore, are now seniors and earned athletic scholarships this year. The two others students, basketball juniors Trendon Watford and Alex Washington likely will receive scholarships next year. The families moved to Mountain Brook for their children, but for many reasons it has not been easy.

They are not the first black families to live in Mountain Brook, but their high-profile status has made some of them feel like racial trailblazers. The complex history of racial justice and segregation in Birmingham have made them targets, and brought to the surface some difficult truths about a still-fractured city more than six decades after the Civil Rights Movement.

They have endured racial slurs and taunts.

There have been incidents of intimidation and harassment.

People have called them liars again and again and again.

The ugliness hasn't come from people inside Mountain Brook, the state's wealthiest suburb located just outside the Birmingham city limits. The hate has come from people outside the exclusive hamlet, from people in Birmingham who, according to the Mountain Brook families, view moving to Mountain Brook as tantamount to turning their backs on their race.

"It's been a smear campaign," said Chris Washington, Alex's father.

The families moved to Mountain Brook for athletics and education, which are the reasons most families with the means to do it move to Mountain Brook. One of the students, Harold Joiner, gave up basketball with his friends in favor of football, and signed a scholarship with Auburn last winter. The three other students play basketball for Mountain Brook's young and talented coach, Bucky McMillan, who has turned Mountain Brook into an unlikely hoops powerhouse. The Spartans have won back-to-back state championships.

The families coordinated their moves together, according to Chris Washington, because they wanted other black families to lean upon.

"If you don't laugh and have fun, then you'll be crying every day," Chris Washington said. "So, we have tons of fun."

In the spirit of dispelling some myths about themselves, and hoping to perhaps represent a healing bridge for a divided city, the two families whose sons return to Mountain Brook next year spoke at length with AL.com about their experiences in the Birmingham suburb known as "the tiny kingdom." They want more black families to move to Mountain Brook and say the complex social dynamics of Birmingham are preventing people from moving there. It's more than money, said Earnest Watford.

"Collectively, you read certain things that are false about the perception of blacks being at Mountain Brook, and almost being used as some kind of slave mentality," said Watford, Trendon's father, "or you're a sellout to your community, or they paid you to come over there, and they pay everyone else, or they buy you an apartment, or they do all this [expletive] that's not true.

"There ain't no basis to it; no facts to it at all. It's all false. It's all rumor."

That a high school basketball team in 2018 can be so scrutinized for racial diversity underscores the complicated social web of Birmingham more than a half century after the Civil Rights Movement. The city has moved forward in many ways in recent years, but it also remains deeply segregated between haves and have-nots. Economically, the division was called "a tale of two cities" by Birmingham city councilor Lashunda Scales during a recent Birmingham City Council meeting.

For many people, Mountain Brook is where that story begins.

The intense emotions towards Mountain Brook are based on entrenched stereotypes that have been passed down from one Birmingham generation to the next. Geographically, Mountain Brook is located "Over the Mountain," which removed it from Birmingham's steel-town pollution during the Industrial Age. Mountain Brook's stigma grew during the Civil Rights Era, and that legacy of separate and unequal continues today.

Mountain Brook's unofficial nickname alone (Tiny Kingdom) speaks to the foundational apparatus of social segregation that remains strong in modern-day metro Birmingham. According to a 2016 study by National Public Radio, two of the top three most segregated school districts in the country border Birmingham, Mountain Brook and Vestavia Hills.

In terms of monetary separation, though, there is a striking difference between even those two predominantly white school districts and Birmingham. In 2016, the median property value in Birmingham was $86,100. In Mountain Brook, it was $558,900.

In her Pulitzer Prize-winning work about the Civil Rights Movement, Mountain Brook native Diane McWhorter called Birmingham the nation's "sentinel of segregation," and the introduction of the book details Mountain Brook's role as the architect of that fortress.

Members of Mountain Brook's basketball team would like to see that reputation change.

"This isn't the 1960s anymore," said McMillan, the team's young basketball coach and a Mountain Brook native. "A family can move wherever they want, and do whatever they want to do that's in the best interest for their child."

Unfortunately, it is not that simple.

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In addition to the four students mentioned in this story, nine other black students attended Mountain Brook High School this year, so the school is not as monochromatic as it once was. For many in Birmingham and beyond, however, the words "Mountain Brook" still elicit extreme resentment. Birmingham-area residents have long since referred to the cloistered suburbanites of Mountain Brook as "Brookies." The pejorative connotation translates roughly to "elitist snob."

In truth, Birmingham's rise nationally in the industry of medical research has helped reshape Mountain Brook socially, but strong stereotypes remain throughout the city.

For some of the families profiled here, many of these generational stereotypes and opinions have manifested into some awkward and offensive situations.

According to Chris Washington, he was accosted in an Ensley barbershop by a local high school basketball coach. The coach didn't like that Washington was sending his son to Mountain Brook, and "we got to shouting a little bit."

Last basketball season, Roselyn Elmore, the mother of senior Sean Elmore, experienced racially charged derision about her son and his teammates from a Huffman football coach. The incident occurred at Huffman High and was reported to the AHSAA.

"It was halftime and I was heading to the bathroom," Roselyn Elmore said. "As I walking out of the gym, I heard a man, a big man, I didn't know who he was at first, say, 'What about those black-ass kids at Mountain Brook? Ain't no black folks at Mountain Brook.'"

After the game, the Birmingham police officers at Huffman asked the parents of Mountain Brook's black players to use an alternate exit when leaving the school, according to Roselyn Elmore.

"They said, 'Y'all need to go out this door," Elmore said. "'We are escorting the children to the bus because there has been some verbal threats.'"

First, the obvious question that needs answering, why have these families received so much blowback from Birmingham's black community? Chris Washington did not mince his words.

"Because people hate Mountain Brook and it's not about our kids," he said. "It's about the elitist community that Mountain Brook is, and Birmingham being not being that. And, OK, I understand it. It's almost like, you own everything, you're the executives, and you're [expletive] on us again.

"It's almost like the wage issue. Remember the wage issue that was last year, and everyone came over to Mountain Brook and picketed? It's that same exact thing. We're just getting the brunt of it. So, it's so much bigger than our kids, it's just that everyone can latch onto that and run with it and say, 'OK, Mountain Brook has the money, they're recruiting, they're paying our bills, they're doing all this.' They must not know how hard we have to work. But it's, 'They're doing this, and they're doing that,' and it's just so far from the truth."

If Washington sounds fed up, there's a reason. He has had to prove his residency multiple times throughout his son's time at Mountain Brook because he also owns a house in Hoover. To satisfy the Alabama High School Athletic Association's requirement for a "bona fide move," the entire family moved to Mountain Brook three years ago and rented their house in Hoover to a tenant.

His wife, Yolanda, has since moved back to the house in Hoover with their daughter.

"With a younger daughter, she didn't really know herself yet, and I didn't want to bring her over here (to Mountain Brook) and she just change her whole personality and start acting white," Washington said.

Washington said his son was old enough, and self confident enough to move and not allow it to affect his personal identity. He also had three former teammates from the same AAU team, Alabama Elite, to help with the transition.

Alex Washington has excelled at Mountain Brook. In addition to helping Mountain Brook win back-to-back state championships, he is also a star student at the school. He is a member of the National Honor Society, Mu Alpha Theta and the National Art Honor Society. He has won prestigious state awards for two of his sketches.

Washington was homeschooled for a year before attending Mountain Brook. His first year at Mountain Brook Junior High was an adjustment.

"Coming from home school, I would have class like two times a week," Alex Washington said. "I would have homework, but not a lot. And then when I got here, I was like, whoa, I got to study, I got to do all these things.

"I stayed up a lot of nights, like 12, 1 a.m., and playing basketball as a freshman, trying to compete with seniors my first year here, that was hard."

Of course, people on the outside assume Alex just attends Mountain Brook for the basketball, and that statement alone, without knowing anything about the young prodigy of a coach who works there now, would have sounded ludicrous to someone familiar with Birmingham-area high school sports a handful of years ago.

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The entire history of Mountain Brook basketball is pretty easy to summarize. There is everything before Bucky McMillan, and everything after him.

McMillan, who is 34 years old, was 24 when Mountain Brook High made him its varsity basketball coach. The school, a basketball afterthought for most of its existence, has reached the state semifinals seven times since 1968, and five of those appearances have come in the last six years. Since 2013, Mountain Brook has won four state championships.

Why is he so good?

"The way he just pushes you," said Trendon Watford, the Spartans' star player. "He demands a certain level of respect that some other coaches obviously don't require, and he demands excellence from his players and holds everyone accountable. That's why we're so successful."

Mountain Brook is also successful because it has the state's best player. The Alabama Sports Writers Association recently named Trendon Watford its Mr. Basketball, an award given to the state's player of the year. Among other talented players, Watford beat out Sacred Heart senior Diante Wood, who signed with Alabama.

A 6-foot-9 small forward, Watford is one of the nation's top-rated recruits for the class of 2019. He says he will narrow his list of college suitors by the end of the summer,and announce his commitment next basketball season. It's worth noting that his father, Earnest, is a huge Alabama fan, and refers to the Crimson Tide as "we."

Trendon could have played high school basketball anywhere and still been an elite college prospect, but his father wanted him to play for McMillan because of McMillan's demanding commitment to team concepts and defense.

"You can't win anything by yourself, so the way I get my teammates involved, that puts pressure on them and helps us be successful at the end of the day," Trendon said. "One player can't win it. You a need a team."

Over the past decade, a steady trickle of parents have moved their children into the Mountain Brook school system to play for McMillan. Throughout the state and country, parents move their children from school system to school system for athletics all the time.

What's so arresting for people in Birmingham is that black parents are now crossing the social color line into Mountain Brook for "Bucky Ball."

"Good ol' pioneer, dog," Earnest Watford said jokingly.

Earnest Watford, whose son, Trendon, was first offered a scholarship by Alabama when he was in the eighth grade, wanted McMillan to coach his talented son, so he moved from nearby Irondale to Mountain Brook after Trendon's eighth-grade year at Irondale Middle School. Trendon played for Shades Valley High as an eighth-grader.

A 27-year veteran of the Jefferson County sheriff's office, Earnest Watford has a magnetic, outgoing personality that's easy to like. He is originally from Adamsville, located in west Jefferson County. Watford was a beat cop for 16 years and now works for the civil division of sheriff's office.

Watford's oldest son, Christian, starred at Shades Valley in Irondale before playing for Indiana. Christian originally attended Clay-Chalkville with DeMarcus Cousins, but that team never materialized after the Alabama High School Athletic Association ruled it ineligible for competition due to recruiting violations.

Asked about recruiting by McMillan, Earnest Watford said he recruited Mountain Brook, not the other way around. The Watfords now live in a Mountain Brook subdivision a few minutes from Mountain Brook High.

Why was it so important for his son to play for McMillan?

"These guys work so hard, man," Earnest Watford said. "That ain't easy what (McMillan) does. Sure, talent supersedes a lot of things, but how they play together ... Trendon has really bought into hard work over here, and every college coach who comes to watch him, they go, 'I've got to have this guy.'

"He works as hard as anybody else. I don't want him treated like a prima donna because prima donnas don't make it. You got to be gritty. You've got to be grindy. You got to bring it every day. Bucky requires it to the smallest of details."

It's a demanding program, and extremely competitive within Mountain Brook. For those reasons, McMillan begins preparing Mountain Brook youngsters for "Bucky Ball" at a very young age. All of this information is important background when framing this next sentence.

According to the Watfords, there are parents in the Mountain Brook basketball system who aren't happy when move-ins, black or white, transfer to Mountain Brook with the expectation of starting for the varsity basketball team.

That's probably an obvious observation to someone peering into Birmingham's social bubble from the outside, but there is a prevalent narrative throughout basketball in the city that Mountain Brook is just a bunch of rich people buying championships for their rich kids by bringing in ringers.

Earnest Watford calls that myth laughable.

"The perception that people have that Mountain Brook pays athletes to come and play on teams here, that would be like so far from the truth," Earnest Watford said. "When you talk about Mountain Brook, no one from here wants their kid not to play. They are competitive with their kid. I think being over here, and looking at it, they've always been that way from elementary all the way through.

"So, I don't know anyone who is going to pay somehow to come in, and take their kid's spot. I haven't found that out. Nobody is going to do that."

In reality, the Mountain Brook basketball team is successful because of how hard the team works, and how well the team plays together. McMillan says the 2017-18 team enjoyed a team chemistry like he has never experienced at Mountain Brook. Over the past two years, Mountain Brook has a record of 65-9.

"It's a common bond that I haven't seen between kids, and it has nothing to do with someone's social, economic background, or what color he is, or where they live at," Earnest Watford said. "They genuinely care about each other. Of course, now, when you grind like we do, from August 28 to March 3, and that's all you know, and that's all you see, those are brothers, and that's what we call them, and that's what we call each other."

With Trendon Watford leading the team, the Spartans are the favorites to win their third consecutive state championship next season. The team is hugely popular within the guarded enclave of Mountain Brook, and the subject of intense scrutiny outside of it. Brothers through sport, the Mountain Brook basketball team will remain controversial within a city with deep scars running through its soul.

The team hopes it can be more.

Joseph Goodman is a columnist for Alabama Media Group. He's on Twitter @JoeGoodmanJr.