Dion Goldbourne walks into the Enoch Davis Community Center promptly at 3 p.m. for his piano lesson. The athletic 9-year-old enters a small room lined with two pianos, and a dusty organ. Ten boxes of sheet music are piled in a corner.
“Warm up now,” says his 76-year-old teacher James Bolden, his voice gruff and quick.
Goldbourne hops onto the bench. The toes of his blue-and-white shoes barely touch the floor. His back is straight and his fingers curve over the keys as he tentatively plays a new warm-up routine.
Bolden leans over the piano, squinting to follow along with the notes. He points to the score with a long purple wooden baton.
“Have you been practicing?” he asks.
Goldbourne nods. But Bolden knows better.
“Practice every day,” Bolden says. “I can tell you’re not practicing.”
Bolden has been teaching music to students in St. Petersburg, Fla., for more than 50 years. His lessons in dedication drove his students through more than 30 years of segregation and desegregation in the Pinellas County schools. Now the school board is considering a plan to send the students back to schools in their neighborhoods and end race ratios, a move that some fear could result in a return to segregated schools. Bolden’s lessons in commitment ring true for the kids he teaches now, the grandchildren of his former students.
Bolden began playing piano at age 8, at the insistence of his grandmother. One day his friends came by to visit. “Can Jimmy come out and play?” they asked. “No,” she said. “He’s practicing piano.” Bolden started purposefully playing the song wrong. His grandmother was not pleased.
“I didn’t know she could read music,” he said. “I got a whipping, my first and last.”
Bolden grew up in Wilmington, Del. After his parents divorced, he lived with his grandparents and mother in a lower-class neighborhood on the east side. Wilmington was segregated, so blacks had to go to Philadelphia to see a movie, eat in a restaurant or hear the orchestra perform. In high school, Bolden tried to break down the barriers of race.
“It was time for us to make a difference,” he said. “To try to make Delaware more like Philadelphia.”
Growing up during the depression, Bolden learned structure and discipline that he would draw on for the rest of his life. He went to work with his grandfather in a steel factory at 18. He came home on his first day, tired and dirty, and fell asleep on the living room floor. He told his grandmother he couldn’t go back, but she said he had to. The money he earned in the summers would help pay for college.
“They expected me to do better than what they had done,” he says.
Bolden washed dishes in hospitals and unloaded ice cream treats to earn money. He got a scholarship to attend Fisk University in Nashville. Five years later he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in music. He accepted a job in St. Petersburg, Fla., at 16th Street Junior High, a historically black school.
Bolden opens the lesson book to the song, “My Big Bass Drum.”
Goldbourne studies the music. He claps the beats and counts out loud.
“One – two – three, one – two – three,” he sings, then pauses, unsure of where to go.
“Come on,” Bolden corrects. “After three comes one. You can’t wait — there’s three beats in a measure.”
Bolden points to the sheet music and Goldbourne follows along.
“You have to be able to look at the music right away and know how to play it,” he says. “It’s like reading a book. You have to be able to pick it up right away without knowing the story.”
Understanding the symbols used in sheet music is important, Bolden says. It allows a musician to know where he is going.
Bolden rode in the black section of a passenger train all the way from Nashville to St. Petersburg. His school principal met him at the station, set him up in a boarding house and showed him the lay of the land. St. Petersburg was just as segregated as Delaware had been. Blacks had separate drinking fountains, restaurants and beaches.
Bolden arrived in 1955, not long after the Brown v. Board of Education case outlawed separate schools for blacks and whites. But the Pinellas County school district didn’t begin desegregation until 1962 and16th Street Junior High still had a largely black population. It lacked the amenities that the white schools had, like air conditioning. One hundred students sweated out songs in Bolden’s cramped room. The students had used books, and their song recordings were missing. Bolden used his own money to buy replacements.
In the classroom, Bolden was a no-nonsense teacher who mixed lessons about musical history with lessons about racial acceptance. Bie Harvey, Goldbourne’s grandmother, had Bolden for music class in 1965. She said he brought the students together in a difficult time.
“It was all about the team, about the group,” she says. “Everybody was all about sharing their talent and having a good time.”
But Bolden’s classes were strict. He expected his students to pay attention and work hard. He told his students the class would prepare them to handle life situations.
“He didn’t accept anything less than your best because he didn’t give you anything less than his best,” says Erik Bolden, James Bolden’s 44-year-old son. Erik Bolden’s friends frequently asked him why his father was so mean.
In 1970, the school district approved a new desegregation plan that bused students and reassigned teachers to achieve a more balanced ratio of black and white classrooms. Bolden was moved to Pinellas Park Junior High School because it needed a black teacher in the music department. He was angry at first. He had been at 16th Street for 15 years. Teachers with longevity weren’t supposed to be moved.
On the way to his first day of school in Pinellas Park, which was predominantly white, Bolden drove by demonstrations at Dixie Hollins High School. The white students were protesting the decision to pull the rebel flag from use. He saw yelling and fighting. The police were called. Despite the violence outside the window, Bolden didn’t worry about what could happen at his new school. He lived through desegregation at 16th Street. He knew the route by heart.
At Pinellas Park, Bolden worked to break down the students’ preconceived notions about each other. White students at Pinellas Park were apprehensive about the black newcomers to their school and the black students felt out of place. The first few years of integration were rough. The black students were bused sometimes 30 to 40 minutes away.
“(The black students) were used to going to neighborhood schools,” he says. “Now to be transported and ride almost into the night, I can see that it’s hard.”
Over time, things got better. The students wanted to make integration work. Bolden made his room a place where students could focus only on music. He would make them form a circle. They joined hands and sang, “Let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with me.”
Today he’s still playing that same song as the minister of music at New Philadelphia Community Church.
“You’ll recognize this one,” he says to the congregation from the corner of the room. The keyboard starts slowly and voices chime in. They stand together. “Let there be peace on earth and let it begin with me / Let there be peace on earth, the peace that was meant to be.”
In the church, Bolden is a mainstay of Christian consistency and stability. When his wife died two years ago, it was Bolden who comforted the church family, not the other way around.
“There’s not the absence of conflict in his life, but in spite of that, what he was able to impart was his personal stability,” says Don Gaskin, head pastor of Bolden’s church. “No matter what the crisis or the conflict, he was still Jim.”
Bolden’s life hasn’t been easy. He’s consistently worked two jobs to make ends meet. He beat colon cancer in 2001. Now, he’s fighting bone cancer. When times get rough, Bolden doesn’t accept pity from anyone, says his son, Erik. Instead he draws strength from his childhood experiences working in the steel factory.
“All these things that have happened were done with a purpose in mind to (God’s) glory,” Bolden says. “Maybe there’s something else I can do here.”
The waiting list for a class with Bolden is months long. These days he only teaches 20 students. He’s getting older. He’s not as patient as he once was.
When Bolden gets a new student, the first thing he does is look at their hands. His students can’t play if they have long fingernails.
“It’s like playing on stilts,” he said.
Next, he listens to them play and looks for proper form. Their hands should be curved over the keys so that they are struck with the fleshy part of the finger.
“A lot of students I inherit from other teachers and they’re teachers who don’t stress curved fingers,” he says.
The first step is breaking the student of bad habits.
This summer the Pinellas County School Board is reorganizing the way students are assigned to schools. They are considering eliminating the racial ratios that have dictated the number of black and non-black students at each school. With students going to schools closer to home, it’s likely that some schools could be mostly black. Bolden says he has one piece of advice for the people doing the reorganization: Make sure the schools are equal.
“It’s got to be fair,” he says. “The idea of desegregation was to make all the schools equal but they weren’t equal. They have to have equal equipment and facilities.”
Bolden’s students at the Enoch Davis Center are learning the same lessons he imparted to their grandparents’ generation. These children are much different from the ones he taught in the 1950s. They communicate constantly through cell phones and computers. They have interracial parents. They have friends of every color. And Bolden’s still telling them the same things: work hard, don’t give up, love one another.
“To me, it’s no different,” he says. “Kids are kids. They come into this world knowing nothing about black or white.”
