He and his wife had to battle against discrimination their entire lives, and they watched as many of the gains they fought for have eroded. They knew that behind Birmingham’s new skyscrapers and fancy restaurants that served polenta instead of grits, the Old South still lurked. Racism had gone underground but not away. Reeves marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma on Bloody Sunday in 1965 to achieve voting rights, only to watch decades later as the Supreme Court used a case from his home state to strike down key provisions of the Voting Rights Act, which the march had helped secure. As school systems across the South and the nation have resegregated, the Reeveses understood that the federal court order from 1971 was the only reason their own children, and now their grandchild, were able to attend integrated schools.

Rickey Reeves anxiously waited for Clemon and the other lawyers representing the plaintiffs to make their case. Their argument was simple. Clemon had helped establish a precedent that secessions were not permissible if they undermined court-ordered desegregation. Judges had looked the other way and allowed other towns to leave. But if Gardendale seceded, it would take with it a substantial number of the white students left in the Jefferson County school district, and most likely more, if it annexed additional white communities as others had done. The fewer white children who remained in the system, the harder desegregation would become. The lawyers presented expert witnesses who explained how, if Gardendale left, too, Jefferson County would become even more black and how students who had once been assigned to Gardendale’s integrated schools would, as a result of the separation, be rezoned to heavily segregated ones.

The Legal Defense Fund also argued that it was racism, not the desire for local control, that was behind the secession effort. They pointed to a Facebook page that Focus activists had created. The very first post stated that forming their own school system would give Gardendale “better control over the geographic composition of the student body.” In another post, an organizer noted that the Jefferson County school district was busing children into “our schools ... from as far away as Center Point” and that “a look around at our community sporting events, our churches are great snapshots of our community. A look into our schools, and you’ll see something totally different.” In another post, an organizer wrote that “nonresident students are increasing at a [sic] alarming rate in our schools. Those students do not contribute financially. They consume the resources of our schools, our teachers and our resident students, then go home.”

Secession supporters had argued that their tax dollars should go to educate their own children instead of children who lived outside their community, that their shared responsibility stretched no further than the arbitrary borders of their town, even though for the vast history of the state, black taxpayers paid for white schools that their own children could not attend. The activists did not acknowledge that the public schools in Gardendale do not belong to Gardendale. They are paid for by the tax dollars of the entire county, including the parents of black children bused in. Moreover, students from neighboring Mount Olive also attended Gardendale schools, but Gardendale residents voiced no concerns about these students leaching resources or looking different from the community that showed up at Gardendale’s sporting and church events. Instead, the conversations among Gardendale activists revolved around whether the town should annex Mount Olive so that its children would remain in the system. Mount Olive is 98 percent white.

The lawyers for the black children of Jefferson County laid out a chronology that showed that when Gardendale secession advocates started working on secession, they assumed that breaking off would allow them to exclude from their schools all black children from outside Gardendale, including the children in North Smithfield. But after Gardendale’s lawyers first announced their plan to the court in February 2015, the advocates discovered that Judge Pointer’s 1971 desegregation order required all splinter districts to maintain a certain percentage of black students and that there were not enough black children in Gardendale’s city limits to comply. The new district would have to include North Smithfield after all. The plaintiffs’s lawyers presented emails and Facebook posts written by Gardendale residents saying they would never have supported secession if they knew that their new school district, paid for by taxing themselves, would still include the students who did not live in Gardendale.

When it was Reeves’s turn to testify, he walked from the gallery to the witness stand, raised his right hand, spelled his name for the court reporter, then looked at Clemon. The two men were of the same generation and had seen many of the same things. Law school had been Clemon’s escape from segregation. Reeves chose the armed services.