For 83 days, Mary Beth Ford noticed a change in her son.
She thought he had “found his tribe” at Pizitz Middle School in Vestavia Hills, where he had a good group of friends and was active in sports. But since his first day of eighth grade in August, he started to act more withdrawn.
It wasn’t until January that Ford finally learned the reason: Two of her son’s white classmates had been calling him racist slurs every day at P.E. class while others watched and said nothing, she said. Ford and her son are Black.
