Kim Green, center, cheers on Florida's gymnastics team at last week's "Link to Pink" meet at Exactech Arena/O'Connell Center. (Photo: Maddie Washburn/UAA Communications)
BHM: A Young Black Girl, a Segregated Hometown, and Her Journey to Gators Associate AD
Thursday, February 16, 2023 | General, Scott Carter
Share:
By: Scott Carter, Senior Writer
GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Between what historians consider the peak of the Civil Rights Movement – Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have A Dream" speech in the nation's capital in August 1963 – and King's assassination less than five years later on a motel balcony in Memphis, Kimberly Gail Cephus was born.
She entered the world during a tumultuous period in American history and called home Greensboro, Ala., a small town about an hour south of Tuscaloosa that, in so many ways, symbolized the times. Greensboro is located in what is known as the Black Belt – a region named for its dark, rich soils – and the town's culture was built around the cotton plantation system before the Civil War. Greensboro has evolved today as the center of Alabama's catfish farming industry.
Still, change has never moved swiftly through the historic streets of Greensboro. Cephus, now known as Kim Green, became a student in the Hale County Public School System more than a decade after the U.S. Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education ruling in May 1954 that effectively ended racial segregation in public schools.
But while other parts of the country complied faster, Green walked the halls of segregated Greensboro Public Schools East, engaging with only kids who looked like her. The integrated Greensboro Public Schools West, located on the white side of town, offered a different experience.
"We had no white kids that attended at my school,'' said Green, a UF associate athletics director who was valedictorian of her 77-member graduating class. "But there were courses that my school taught that the other one did not, so they would bus kids over for class and take them back because our school was in the Black neighborhood.
"My first white friend was in my sophomore year of college."
Green left her hometown in 1982 after graduating from high school and followed in her father's and older sister's footsteps, attending Tuskegee (Ala.) University, an HBCU founded by educator and reformer Booker T. Washington. Green's father, Alonzo Cephus, became a high school agricultural teacher who did research under George Washington Carver at Tuskegee. Lynne Cephus, Green's older sister by two years, was a student at Tuskegee when Green arrived on campus. Their mother, Wilma Cephus, attended Miles (Ala.) College, also an HBCU, and later earned a graduate degree from the University of Alabama for her career as an educator.
While opportunities were limited in Greensboro for the Cephus girls during their formative years, Alonzo and Wilma taught them that a big world existed outside Hale County.
"A lot of people did not have the focus in the household about careers and advancing in the society that we found ourselves in,'' said Lynne, who went on to a 30-plus-year career in banking and now lives in Tuscaloosa. "But being both of our parents were college educated, there was not a question of that. This is what we do."
*****
Green's story is indicative of an era that seems so distant some days and too close for comfort on others. But whatever hurdles she faced growing up, she persevered to create her way and discover success.
In her role with the Gators, Green serves as the lead administrator overseeing the UF gymnastics and women's tennis teams and assisting daily operations in the compliance office. She has worked closely behind the scenes with UF student-athletes since joining the University Athletic Association full-time in 1994. Green, who studied engineering at Tuskegee, settled at UF in 1988, planning to work on her doctorate. She got sidetracked by a graduate assistant role with the Gators women's basketball team and changed career paths.
"That started my quest really trying to do what I could,'' she said. "One, represent, and two, help kids reach their potential in whatever they want to do. We have a lot of athletes that are of color, and I do think that it's important that they see people that look like them. I don't take that for granted."
Keith Carodine, who retired in 2017 as senior associate athletic director of academic affairs, was one of former athletic director Jeremy Foley's first administrative hires. He could tell Green was determined to make a difference, which led to the department creating a position for her.
Kim Green, right, talks with UF gymnastics coach Jenny Rowland after last week's "Link to Pink" meet at Exactech Arena. (Photo: Maddie Washburn/UAA Communications)
"Highly intelligent, highly organized,'' Carodine said. "She understood the whole concept, had a great relationship with student-athletes. She would be very firm and disciplined with them."
Meanwhile, Green was entering a male-dominated industry. She was not only a woman but a woman of color. Once again, not many of her professional colleagues looked like she did.
Carodine said that was never a deterrent from what he saw once Green decided to enter college athletics rather than continue on her engineering path, a journey that had included a stint studying abroad in Italy and internships with Honeywell in Minneapolis and the Mitre Corporation outside Washington, D.C.
"I respected Kim because she didn't let race become an issue,'' Carodine said. "That's kind of where I am. People ask me, how did it feel to become the first Black to do this or the first Black to do that? First of all, I'm a grown man. I was raised just because there is racism out there and people want to hold you back, that's no excuse. You need to take care of your business. I saw that in her too, and I respected that."
*****
To truly know Green, you must take a trip back to Greensboro and the years following her father's death from a heart attack in 1970. Wilma, the youngest of Robert and Emma Thompson King's 17 children, was left a widow with two young girls to raise in a mostly segregated town in the Deep South. Lynne was 7, and Kim, 5. Robert King, Green's maternal grandfather, was born in 1872 and died before Green was born.
That is when "Mama Emma" moved in and stayed until her death in 1987 at the age of 94.
"She had breakfast ready. The house was clean. The laundry was done. Dinner was ready,'' Lynne recalls. "She spoiled us rotten."
Mama Emma was firm, too. She could not read or write, but she knew how to raise kids and make a house a home. Kim was a self-described "homebody" in those days and cherished long evenings with Mama Emma and hearing her tell stories. Kim Green's uncle, Clarence "Pijo" King, was a teammate of Hall of Famer Willie Mays with the Birmingham Black Barons. (Photo: Courtesy of NLBPA website)
She had so many.
Mama Emma told her how the times were changing, teaching her about MLK and the Selma March and what it was like to live through the Great Depression. One of her sons, Clarence "Pijo" King, played in the Negro Leagues and was once a teammate of Willie Mays on the Birmingham Black Barons. Uncle Pijo taught Kim how to play the card game bid whist.
Kim heard Wilma had burned the back of her left leg so severely that she could barely walk. Since she walked to school each day, that was a problem. Mama Emma, who was from Bessemer, Ala., intervened.
"She couldn't ride the bus,'' Kim said. "My grandmother talked to the bus driver, and he allowed her to ride in the front seat. 'I'll take care of her.' That was how it was."
Mama Emma has been gone a long time, and Wilma is now 86 and recovering from a severe bout with COVID-19 and three strokes over the years. Still, their girls carry the lessons they taught them everywhere, knowing they live different lives than Mama Emma could have imagined after being born in 1892.
Her final resting place is Martin Luther King Jr. Cemetery in Hueytown, Ala., not far from downtown Birmingham.
"One of the wisest people I knew,'' Kim said.
*****
The 58-year-old Green has put a lot of miles on the life-experience odometer since those days in Greensboro. She met David Green after moving to Gainesville, and they got married. Their son, David Jr., was born prematurely at 23 weeks in 1998. He spent the first 100 days of his life at Shands Hospital but graduated from UF in 2021 and is now in seminary school at Virginia Union University.
Green's passion is lifting others. If sharing her story helps, that is another tool in her toolbox when talking to 18- to 22-year-old college students, many African Americans chasing the same dreams she once had.
Green played basketball and volleyball growing up and would change from her basketball uniform into a cheerleading outfit when the boys basketball games tipped off.
"In high school, you name it, I did it,'' she said.
University Athletic Association staff photo of Kim Green, UF associate athletics director.
When the "homebody" finally ventured outside Greensboro, she never returned except to visit family. Times have changed, but they remain far from perfect.
One of Green's most troubling memories from her childhood happened in high school. It's one she said she has never even told her mother. A classmate invited her to a movie in Tuscaloosa in 11th grade. On the way home, the usual route back to Greensboro was blocked. They had to take a detour on backroads.
"It was pretty late, and there were just a lot of cars and this bonfire. And then you see like these men in coats,'' said Green, realizing it was a Ku Klux Klan gathering. "I don't know how we're getting home, but I think we need to turn around. Those are things you kind of heard about growing up but never really experienced. That night could have gone a much differently had we not realized that this is the kind of meeting we're probably not a part of."
They turned around and made it home safely.
More than 40 years later, the racial divide remains a prominent topic in the media landscape, for better or worse.
"Growing up, all of downtown Greensboro would close at 12 o'clock on Thursdays,'' Lynne said. "The department stores, the post office, the bank. And as I got older, I was like, 'why in the world would they do that?' In my research, I found out that Thursday was slave-trade day [before slavery was banned]."
According to its website, the Greensboro Post Office in 2023 is open only from 8 to noon on Thursdays.
Change moves slower in some places than in others.
"We lived it,'' Lynne said.
Added Kim: "Even today, blacks and whites, in general, don't worship together in those small towns. That's just kind of normal."
In her day-to-day job, Green encounters people of all races and ethnic backgrounds. That's part of the role she enjoys most.
When she thinks back to that first white friend she had, those are some of her best times. It was during her summer internship in Minnesota while in college. She moved in with a white family and became part of the family.
She hopes others can have similar experiences and pay it forward.
"It was a very different experience,'' she said. "I learned a lot about them, and they learned a lot about me. I was fully embedded and did everything with them. That was an awesome experience. There are differences, but there are so many similarities if people will take the time to figure them out."
