Shades Cahaba: 100 years of history

In anticipation of the Shades Cahaba school’s 100th anniversary, Homewood graphic designer Shawn Wright decided to take on an oral history project.

His original goal was simple: record some memories from people who have attended the Shades Cahaba school. He made a podcast series with 23 total episodes. As his podcast project grew, though, he realized he had enough information to start a book.

“Since we were all kind of isolated and work was kind of slow (because of the COVID-19 pandemic), I started putting the book together, thinking, ‘This will be simple, right?’” he said. “Months later, I finally got the book out.”

Wright released his book, “Shades Cahaba: The First 100 Years,” on Sept. 1. This was just a couple of weeks before the 100th year since the school opened its doors for the first time, which was Sept. 19, 1920.

Wright was a student at Shades Cahaba from second to fifth grade in the early ‘70s. His two children also attended the school. Wright said he remembers how the school was old even when he was a child. He heard stories then about it being a high school, but Wright said no one talked about this history much or seemed to care. He noticed stairs went up and down in strange places that he didn’t understand — he would later learn that this was because of the school’s many expansions. He would hear rumors about some of the school’s oddities, but he didn’t get many answers to his questions.

“One of the big ones is that if you go to Shades Cahaba today, there is an owl by the original front door, up on top,” he said. “But when I was in school, there wasn’t an owl. It came back in 1978. So the questions for me were where was it? Why was it gone? Why was it taken down?

“There were all these little things that I had always kind of wondered, but I didn’t really care about them until I became an adult.”

Through his podcast, he was able to find some of the answers to these questions and share them with other people. He enjoyed putting the podcast online and getting responses from other people, even if other people corrected the history.

“Memories are short, and people are dying off, unfortunately, and some of these stories are going to get lost,” he said. “It’s been fun trying to go back and figure out what happened.”

One of his favorite stories in the book is about the integration of the school, he said. When he posted online about the podcast, a man named Herman Maxwell reached out to Wright. Maxwell attended Shades Cahaba in 1967, and he was one of the first black children to integrate elementary schools in the state of Alabama.

Wright was surprised to hear that the school integrated easily, he said. In Maxwell’s experience, he integrated well and was able to make friends, he said.

“It worked out well in Homewood, whereas it was not going as well in Birmingham,” Wright said. “(Maxwell)’s older sister was a senior at Shades Valley, and it didn’t go well for her.”

When Wright interviewed Michael Gross, who was the first high school principal at Shades Cahaba, Gross said the same thing. Gross told Wright that the school system worked hard at integration, though, and said they had support throughout the communities.

There is a theme that runs through the history that has stuck with Wright, he said.

“I live in Homewood, so I’ve got the rose-colored glasses. I’ve been here all my life. I realize that,” he said. “But the thing that stood out to me … for 100 years now, people in this community have stood behind the school and the education. It’s the thing that makes Homewood Homewood, in my opinion.”

“Shades Cahaba: The First 100 Years” is available for purchase on Amazon and digitally on Apple. For more information, go to shadescahabahistory.com.