By Spencer Frye
In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that American schools must end segregation “with all deliberate speed.” Clarke County, Georgia, where I live, took 16 years to deliberate the matter but finally integrated its school system in 1970.
That year, black students from Burney-Harris High and white students from Athens High were brought together in the new Clarke Central High School. It was an interesting class of kids who graduated from Central those first couple of years, including Oscar-winning actress Kim Basinger, NFL running back Horace King, musicians Ricky Wilson and Keith Strickland of the B-52’s, and the son of a local sharecropper, a kid named Mike.
Mike eagerly enrolled in a course on black history offered at the new school, but was troubled to find the class had no textbook. Resources for K-12 education in the subject had been around for more than half a century by that time, produced by organizations like the ASNLH (Association for the Study of Negro Life and History), and several states had kicked off black studies programs for their schools during the 1960s. But Clarke County, Georgia, hadn’t deliberated quite that far just yet. And when Mike raised a little sand over having no text to study, his teacher told him, “If you want a book in this class, why don’t you go write one.”
Most kids would have taken that advice in the spirit in which it was given, but Mike Thurmond was a different kind of kid. He began working on a “pamphlet” on local black history, which expanded to a booklet and eventually grew to become Thurmond’s first full-length book, A Story Untold: Black Men and Women in Athens History, published in 1978 and re-released in a newly updated edition just this month.
Mike Thurmond’s “Why don’t I do it?” philosophy has served him well during the past 47 years, during which time he became an attorney, was elected to Georgia’s General Assembly, served as the state’s commissioner of labor for more than a decade, and served as superintendent of DeKalb County schools before being elected CEO of DeKalb County in 2016. Recently, Thurmond became the first African American appointed to the Stone Mountain Memorial Association and has advocated for a redesign of the park to provide broader historical context to the 76-foot tall neo-Confederate monument which was dedicated in the very same year that Clarke County integrated its schools.
Mr. Thurmond has long been an inspiration to me, and following his philosophy has taken me places I never thought I’d go, including being elected to the General Assembly to represent Athens-Clarke County. If you’d told me 30 years ago when I was a young student at UGA that one day I would occupy the seat Mike Thurmond then held at the Gold Dome, and count him as a personal friend and role model, I’d have said you were crazy. But there is tremendous power in asking that one question—“Why don’t I do it?”
It was that way of looking at the world that first got me started in business. A friend pointed out how much industrial oil was going to waste in discarded filters and pads. So we thought, “Let’s start reclaiming and recycling it,” and we created a successful company doing just that. When an urgent need for international assistance arose in Haiti in the late 1980s, I thought, “Why don’t I go?” and the decision changed the course of my life. I became a builder for Habitat for Humanity, and am now the executive director of the Athens area affiliate.
Clarke County, Georgia, is among the top counties in the nation when it comes to wealth inequality and housing stress. And it’s going to take a lot more “Why don’t we do it?” kind of thinking to fix that. But there’s no doubt in my mind that it can be fixed.
About a year ago, a friend of mine from the U.S. Green Building Council of Georgia was commiserating with me about all the barriers in so many outdated building and zoning codes that block a lot of high-efficiency housing from being constructed or even proposed here in Georgia. Well, we decided if we wanted change, it was up to us to point the way. So along with SK Collaborative we co-sponsored a “Kinda Tiny Home” design contest, with the goal of building small-footprint, energy-efficient homes within the current Clarke County codes and sparking a discussion of what more could be done if those codes were updated to allow even smaller homes, more accessory dwellings (so-called “granny flats”), and other innovations that are helping provide decent housing around the nation that lower-income residents can actually afford to live in.
Today, after two winning designs were chosen for the prize, we’re preparing to build those homes. And more importantly, the new mayor and county commission are already talking publicly about reviewing local codes with an eye toward efficient, affordable options. But that would not have happened if two friends complaining about the need for change hadn’t thought, “Why don’t we do it?”
As a non-profit director and a state legislator, I meet people every day who do great things. Some are famous people, well known in politics, business, medicine and other fields. But most will never be celebrities, never become multi-millionaires. Yet they transform lives just the same. And they all started by looking at a problem that they faced and, like Mike in his history class nearly half a century ago, posed what may be the most powerful five-word question any of us will ever ask ourselves — “Why don’t I do it?”
