Freedom's Children (11 page)

When we left the camp to go home, we got on an interstate bus in Tennessee headed to Birmingham. We sat in the front. At home we had been doing bus demonstrations. We just wouldn't sit in the back of even a school bus. We weren't making any noise or anything. By the time we got to Gadsden, Alabama, all of a sudden there were these police cars. The bus driver came and told us to get up and move to the back. One of us said, “We don't have to. This is an interstate bus.”

Then policemen came to bodily take us off. They were mean policemen. I had had so much fun at camp, I was hoarse from all the singing and laughing and shouting. At the police station I was talking, and evidently the policeman couldn't hear me because I was so hoarse. He slapped me. My brother reached for him, and they grabbed him to restrain him.

The police took all our memorabilia—photographs and papers, all the addresses from people we'd met. We had had such a good time. It's sad that the police took all of that. Out of all that they did to us, that was the worst.

We were in jail overnight. Pat and I were in a lady's cell. Fred was directly under us, and he sang all night long. We had been singing softly on the bus. I think he sang to let us know that he was okay.

The food was horrible. It was fried dried bologna and grits with grease. The toilet was an open bowl with the worst smell. I was afraid, but I was mostly hurt that they took my stuff, all the plays, the poems, and the pictures. At that camp they had made us realize that you are somebody and you can use your mind and develop. And the police took everything.

At the doctor, we had separate waiting rooms, one for the colored, one for the white. The colored room was smaller, and was in worse shape than the white room. I was thirteen or fourteen. My sister, Lula, and I challenged that. We said okay, we're going to the white room. They had a black nurse for the blacks and a white nurse for the whites. The white nurse came over and told us we had to get out of there. She got the doctor. He called my mama and told her, “Look, don't never bring them back down here no more.” And that was that. We didn't go back.

We would go after school to the MIA office, and we would organize. First of all we would find out who was going to what store. Girl/boy, girl/boy. Nobody went by themselves. We would always have a mixed group. We'd get the names, telephones, addresses of next of kin for the different people who were going.

Usually we would have a nice little rally before we'd go. We would talk to the Lord. Everybody was very close to the Lord. We would have a prayer. Got to have a prayer before we go to do battle. And we would get out the picket signs.

Kress's and H. L. Green were segregated. By the time we'd get down there, usually the police was waiting on us. Let's say a group of six was picketing in front of H. L. Green, or going to sit-in at the counters. The first group would go in, and we'd see what happened to them. If they got arrested, we'd have another group come in. Then they'd get arrested. And all of a sudden everybody would end up in jail.

Don't even ask me how many times I was arrested! They arrested us for unlawful assembly and demonstrating without a permit. They would get us for disorderly conduct, or disturbing the peace, even though we were very orderly.

They would take you to jail after they read you the riot act. If you were a juvenile, you were supposed to go to Juvenile Hall, but usually if you were a demonstrator or picketer, you'd go where everybody else went, to the old city jail.

Going to jail, oh, it was a badge of honor during that time! When you demonstrated, you already knew it's possible you're going to jail. It's possible you're gonna get hurt. It's possible you're gonna get killed. But our minds were made up. We had an understanding with the Lord that this is what we wanted to do. And He was always out there with us. So as far as having fear, we didn't even know what fear was. We just had our minds set on freedom, and that was it.

 

When I became twenty-one, I
ran
down to the poll and registered. It was the proudest day of my life. Oh, I was excited. After working so hard on different voter registration drives, literally pulling people off the street to register to vote—hey, I was so proud, I didn't know what to do when my time came.

I still vote. Oh God, I wouldn't miss it. A lot of progress has taken place. And we helped make a lot of the changes here in Montgomery. All kind of changes—jobs, education, housing, voting.

I have no regrets. None whatsoever. Everything we did back during the civil rights movement was from the heart. You know how some people holler, “Where's my fame?” I don't look for that. I got mine. I got mine. It's like Dr. King said. If you haven't found something worth fighting for, then you ain't fit to live anyway. You got to have something that makes it worth it.

The Freedom Rides were among the most famous of the civil rights protests. The Supreme Court had ruled that buses traveling interstate could not be segregated; nor could waiting rooms and restaurants that served interstate bus passengers. Although in this instance United States law was on the side of the protesters, most southern states ignored these laws. James Farmer, head of CORE, called for a “Freedom Ride” to force southern states to obey the Court rulings. On May 4, 1961, thirteen people, seven blacks and six whites, left Washington, D.C., on buses headed for New Orleans, Louisiana. They sat wherever they wanted on the bus and planned to use all the local facilities along the way.

Just outside Anniston, Alabama, some fifty miles from Birmingham, an armed mob of segregationists fire-bombed the first bus and beat several of the fleeing passengers. The second bus was surrounded by a raging mob at the Birmingham passenger terminal. Some of the riders were beaten so badly they suffered permanent physical damage. In a report to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), an informant stated that Birmingham's police commissioner, Eugene “Bull” Connor, had agreed to give the mob fifteen minutes before he sent in the police. News coverage of the brutal attacks on the Freedom Riders horrified the American public. The attacks took place on Mother's Day and became known as the “Mother's Day Massacre.”

After the attacks in Anniston and Birmingham, the Freedom Riders decided to end the bus trip and fly to New Orleans instead. But a group of young people, mostly college students, believed that the Freedom Rides should continue. Diane Nash, head of the Nashville Student Movement, said that if the Freedom Riders were stopped “as a result of violence ... the future of the movement was going to be cut short.” The students argued that integrated groups of passengers had to travel through the South until the system of segregation was broken. From a pool of volunteers, Nash carefully chose a new group of students to continue the rides. They all discussed the grave risk of physical danger, possibly death, that lay ahead.

At first no bus driver was willing to continue the trip from Birmingham to Montgomery, Alabama. Finally, with pressure from United States Attorney General Robert Kennedy, the governor of Alabama agreed to provide state police protection on the route between the two cities. When the bus arrived in Montgomery, however, all police protection vanished, and the riders were viciously assaulted by segregationists at the bus station.

The next night a mass meeting was held at First Baptist Church in Montgomery. A screaming white mob surrounded the church, trapping those inside. Federal marshals and the Alabama National Guard finally arrived to disperse the mob in the early morning hours, preventing massive bloodshed.

The Freedom Rides continued throughout the summer of 1961. In Jackson, Mississippi, integrated groups of riders were routinely arrested for violating the local segregation laws at the bus station, and sent to prison. Finally in September the United States government issued additional regulations regarding integration at interstate bus stations, and the arrests stopped. The Freedom Riders had won.

Thereafter civil rights workers throughout the South were often called Freedom Riders, regardless of the particular projects they worked on. In fact, the term became a badge of honor in the movement.

It was in the afternoon when they started bringing the Freedom Riders to Bethel Church. White kids and black kids had been beaten. That was the first time I saw human blood being spilled for the cause. I actually saw people hurt and scared. They were holding handkerchiefs to their heads to stop the bleeding.

These kids weren't too much older than I. They were college kids. I knew that the police would beat up black people, so that was nothing unusual for me. But white people beating up white folks ... I did not believe a white would do that to their own kind. You have to realize the mind-set of a black from the South—white folks all stick together. Yet these were their own people they were beating up!

I saw that they were bleeding just like we were bleeding. I realized then the connection was not racial. To see the inhumane treatment of their own made me realize it was not the color of the skin, but the principle they believed in.

I could tell when something was going on because our phone always rang. I had heard that these young people were coming down to test the system. They expected trouble. I was excited that something was going to happen, yet fearful because we knew the wrath of the southerners.

When the Freedom Riders came through, they brought Jim Peck to our house. We had a guest room, and my mother had a beautiful white bedspread in there. They laid him on that spread. He was so bloody, we never were able to use any of that bedding again. I had been involved in a lot of things, but I hadn't seen that much blood anywhere at any one time.

My mother had a degree in teaching and in nursing, and she ministered to him. Here was a man whose dad had to be rich since he owned the Peck and Peck department store. And he would give up perhaps his life to come and do this for me. I had a lot of respect for him. I don't know if I said anything to him. I might have brought Mother something to help her. I just really admired his courage for coming to help us.

On that Saturday morning down at the bus station, I was with a bunch of college kids. I was a freshman. We went down there when we heard the bus was coming in. We saw the mob attack the bus. I was in the crowd of persons who were beaten. Although I was not hurt, I was mashed up against a building getting away from the mobs.

The troopers withdrew from the scene. The city police withdrew from the scene. The county sheriff withdrew from the scene. Colonel Floyd Mann [Alabama public safety director and head of the state highway patrol] was the only officer who stayed there, and he enforced the law as a professional. I saw him personally step into that mob with his pistol and force them to back off.

I saw the Freedom Riders beaten. I cried. I just couldn't believe it. Human beings beating other human beings like that. I mean, they were beating them viciously. One particular guy, who was a short, cigar-smoking, potbellied guy, a salesman at one of our local car dealerships, beat people like he was going crazy.

At that time we didn't have ambulance companies like we have now. Funeral homes did ambulance service. The white ambulances would not go. I was talking to a schoolmate of mine, and he told me that his dad was driving that day to help pick people up. They tried to go in there and the bricks hit them. Finally the ambulances were allowed to come through. Blood was flowing down there like some of those Civil War battles.

About four of us who were college kids were watching it and shaking our heads with disgust. The crowd dispersed after the beating. I went directly home and got on my typewriter and wrote President John Kennedy, begging him for help, telling him how bad it was here. I had never seen it that vicious before. I never got an answer, but the next night when the federal marshals held the crowd back at the [First Baptist] church, that more than paid for it.

That next night I was in the church. It was indescribable. President Kennedy had sent in about four to five hundred U.S. marshals who were supposed to enforce the law because the city police had completely abdicated. I can remember seeing these marshals transported from Maxwell Air Force base in postal vehicles. They ringed the church. Looking out the window, you could see the postal vehicles all up the street.

The church was packed. I would say fifteen hundred to two thousand people. When we started chanting those songs, you just got together and started singing and rocking with the wave. It was something to behold. Never in history has a group ever stuck together like that.

All of a sudden you could hear the crowd outside getting louder and louder. You could hear bricks hitting the building. They were screaming, “Kill the niggers! Bring them out, bring them out! Let's go in and get them out!” We had a little recreation room and we had baseball bats downstairs. So a bunch of us were going to grab some bats, but the older people said, “Put them down!”

The telephone service at the church was on and off. The wires were interrupted. Someone said, “How are we going to get a message out?” I remembered having muscled my way into church once or twice for choir rehearsal. So I went out the side window. There was a drop of about twenty-five feet. I jumped back on a little retaining wall on the side of the church and went behind the houses and through the block to my grandmother's house and made phone calls for Reverend Abernathy and some parents who were concerned about the safety of their people. And I made some calls for other people who wanted their families to know where they were. I went in and out of the church that night. Only the Reverend and some other people knew I was going in and out. The mob was in the front of the church. I slipped in between the houses. If they had had somebody back there, they would have definitely had me.