I attended Lanier Senior High School for Boys in Macon, GA and was a junior the year that the main building was destroyed in an arson fire. There are lot of great memories of that dysfunctional place that are a real part of me: band, required ROTC, one incredible Foreign Relations teacher, amazing half-time shows, the first SugarBear band, ranger days, band, the first black student, band, great friends, band, and the first girls taking AP classes (there IS a pattern in that list, I am certain of that). There are sad memories as well..the firing of a math teacher when he was outed, the racial bigotry that lingered, and playing Taps one last time as the demolition of the old building commenced.
One of my classmates sent me a link to a Macon Telegraph video yesterday. The last of Lanier Senior High School's buildings (now Macon Central ), the old gym and JROTC area, are being demolished. Symbolically, I am fine with the demolition of a facility that was part of Macon's sordid, segregationist past. There is part of me that would have preferred that instead of erasing this old symbol, named for the boy poet of the confederacy (Sydney Lanier), that some historical acknowledgment of the good and bad of that historical era remain in some tangible form. Perhaps, this demolition is part of a healing process. If that is indeed the case, then expunging the old facilities and what they represented is the right thing to do...oh, but the stories those walls could tell.