Blues singer gets high school diploma decades after being expelled for his hair
US blues musician Otis Taylor – whose critically revered song Ten Million Slaves has been featured on major films and television shows – has received his diploma from the high school which expelled him decades ago because of his hairstyle.
As CBS News Colorado reported Wednesday, the 74-year-old Taylor was studying at Denver’s Manual high school in 1966 when he drew unwanted attention from administrators because of his long hair.
“You had to have that James Brown haircut – you can have all you want on the top, but you had to be clean on the sides,” Taylor told the news station. “The whole school district was coming down on people who didn’t look how they wanted you to look.”
Taylor, then 17, rebuffed school officials’ ultimatum for him to cut his hair, so they forced him to leave. He described how his parents were so upset that they grounded him for three days, and the first thing his father did at the end of the punishment was to take him to a barber.
Since then, laws have been passed which prohibit discrimination against students over their hairstyle. Meanwhile, Taylor grew up to pursue an award-winning career as a musician, recording more than a dozen blues albums. Besides being an accomplished singer, he also played the guitar, banjo, mandolin and harmonica.
Arguably his best known song is Ten Million Slaves, which many first heard in the 2009 Johnny Depp movie Public Enemies. The song later appeared on the FX show Justified and to promote a season of the Discovery Channel reality show Sons of Guns.
More recently, Denver’s public school district “wanted to right [the] wrong” inflicted on the prolific music star as a teen, according to the CBS report. Officials invited him to a ceremony this week in which they presented him with an honorary diploma symbolizing the one he would’ve received if the modern rules were in effect at the time he was a student at Manual.
“Today is a day that we rectify the failures of the past,” the Denver public school board’s vice president, Auon’tai Anderson, said at the ceremony. “I know what Otis experienced along with others will no longer happen in the state of Colorado.”
Taylor told the CBS station he doesn’t regret his expulsion – not when he raised children who went to college and his wife of 37 years still loves him. In fact, on the day he was kicked out, he recalled thinking to himself: “Oh, I’m out of school!”
“The wrong happened a long time ago,” Taylor said, according to the CBS report. “How can I regret?”