Freedom's Children (9 page)

That type of taunting was almost expected in light of [Alabama governor] George Wallace. I mean, here's a man running around the country saying, “Segregation now and forever,” and that he'd stand in the schoolhouse doors to block integration. He became the symbol of resistance, and he was here in Montgomery, the capital.

 

There were the overt racists in school, who took delight in taunting you. In the hall they'd be the ones who'd say “nigger this” or laugh or do things that were just dirty. Then there were those who chose to pretend you were not there. Their form of racism was as painful. They would almost make you feel like you had some disease. They'd never say anything, just ignore you.

Then there was a group, primarily of the Jewish kids and some Maxwell Air Force base kids, who were sensitive and courageous. There weren't many Jewish kids, but I remember most of their names. They were the ones who'd try to be conversational. They wouldn't participate in the taunts, and occasionally one would sit with you at lunch. That was unusual because typically the lunch-room experience was solitary.

The only physical incident that happened to me was at lunch. Somebody threw a carton of chocolate milk at me. Struck me right on my head. What do you do? You just clean yourself up and go on.

I guess I had been conditioned to believe that struggle was just a part of the process. And that there were people out there who would make it difficult for us. We were constantly told, “Keep your mind on your study, don't fight back. Just leave them alone.”

I've always thought that children, black and white, have a much better basis for overcoming racism than adults. But white children back then had been told by their parents to expect the worst of us. They'd been told by the governor, by the mayor, by all these folk in power. They knew nothing about black folk. They thought we were monkeys from Africa for sure. All they knew came from the media and the fools who were in leadership. It was just a hot climate.

The first year was the worst year, but it didn't even take all year to get over the hump. I think the teachers realized that we weren't dumb, or if we were, we were no dumber than whites. Grudgingly, many of them were surprised to know that we were bright. And students realized that we were bright. That was very surprising to them, and some of them eased up. Some never did.

I don't count a whole bunch of friends, but I never was that much on socializing. We weren't into going over there to be liked. That's why I didn't get all uptight about it. I went there to do as well as I could and go to the next stage. I wanted to be a lawyer. I thought that Lanier could give me a better foundation than a poorly funded segregated school.

Going to Lanier removed this mystique about white being better. I had been told by teachers at the black junior high that you are as good as they are. But when I got to Lanier, I realized I shouldn't make white people my standard. It's not that we're looking for association because we think association makes us as good as they are. It's that there are opportunities here that we are not being given.

I know a black woman who teaches at a trade school here. She recently told me something I didn't know. I had gone to speak to her class, and she was walking me to my car afterwards. She told me about a certain white teacher from Lanier she had seen. The white teacher mentioned my name and said to my friend, “Something has haunted me for a long time. Delores Boyd should have been valedictorian of her class. But we just couldn't believe a black child could be that smart, and that's why she wasn't.”

I told my best friend the story, and she got all upset and angry for me and wondered why I wasn't angry and bitter. I said, “Well, in the first place, I don't know if it's true or not. I did graduate in the top ten percent, but I never looked for standings. I never asked anybody how the valedictorian was chosen. And most of the teachers were fair in grading. It's possible, but that's over twenty years ago, and why should it anger me now? Lots of things were done, I'm sure, that were like that.”

I had heard that the other schools around here maybe would be integrated, so I said, “Hey, you all, how about us going to Gibson?” I talked two of my brothers and a couple of friends into going. I was a senior. There were seven of us that first year—four seniors, two sophomores, and a junior. We had a hard time that year. My friend Marionette and my brother used to fuss at me ‘cause my big mouth was the one that talked them into going.

The first day all of the white people parked around the school. I remember seeing a couple of police cars, but they were across the street. Everybody was scared. I think Bernell was walking first. He asked Marionette if she was scared. She told him, “I'm so scared my knees feel like they're going to buckle under.” All of the white kids were standing around the front of the school, looking. So I said, “I'll go first.” I didn't let them know my knees were wobbling oo.

Then we went in the gym. Some of the whites were in groups saying, “I smell a nigger, I smell a nigger.” That's all you heard all the way till you went in and sat down.

We had so many prejudiced teachers who didn't want the schools to be integrated. Like my history teacher. She wouldn't come right out and say we didn't have any business coming over there. She'd say, “People ought to stay in their own place.” She would say that in class, and I was the only black in class.

Going there made me realize how unequal the schools were. Stuff they had had in the seventh and eighth grades, we were just getting as juniors and seniors at the black school. I had had French 1 at the black school, but at the black school all you had to do was learn to count from one to twenty and to say the alphabet. Got over here and they were conjugating verbs. I mean, they could read the stuff like they were reading English. It took me a whole lot of catching up. But I got so I could read before I got out of that class.

We had homework every day. Shoot, we maybe had homework once a week at the black school. We weren't used to that. Sometimes we wouldn't get through until it was time to take a bath and go to bed. The white kids were used to it because that was a good school.

 

Barbara Lee's mother lost her job. The lady that Barbara's mother was working for was our P.E. teacher. Now, she was real prejudiced, you could tell. When she found out Barbara was going to McComb, she fired her mama from cleaning her house. Barbara took a lot of heat, but she was the smartest of all of us, bookwise.

I was baby-sitting for a white lady for her little girl, who was about three years old. Her son was in the tenth grade, and I went to a French class with him. He was asking me one evening had I got out my homework. His mom just looked at him. She didn't say anything then, but I heard her talking to him after I had left the den and was back in the kitchen. Then she told me she wasn't going to be needing my services anymore.

In school no matter what kind of locks we got for our lockers, the white kids always knew the combination or could find the key to open it. Maybe because their dads owned all the businesses. Bernice had a big pile of dog stuff put on top of her books one day. She was reaching up to get a book, and she ended up sticking her hand in it. She went to the principal and told him about it. He wanted her to clean it out. She told him she wasn't going to clean it out because she didn't put it there. He finally made the janitor do it.

Two girls you'd occasionally see smiling at you, but they wouldn't let their friends see them do it. I think those were the only two who tried to be friendly. The rest of them were standoffish. They called us “nigger” almost for the entire year. I tell you, we went through something that year. Two of the black students didn't graduate. They had to go to summer school.

 

Sometimes I hated myself for doing it because it cut out all of our social life that last year. We couldn't be in any of the extracurricular activities. No kind of clubs, no sports, nothing. All the blacks had to stay in homeroom while everybody was going to clubs.

But I am glad I did it. By graduation things had gotten lighter. We were the first two blacks to graduate from Gibson High, and we weren't going to miss the graduation ceremony after that hard fight. We had made it! It was light and easy. A lot of blacks were in the audience. Some of them we didn't even know. They were just coming because they knew blacks attended there. It was lively.

I got a very hard handshake from the superintendent and the principal. I remember, they shook my hand like they were glad it was done.

Following page:
A freedom bus burning outside Anniston, Alabama.

After the bus boycott in Montgomery, many of the early civil rights protests took place in Birmingham under the courageous leadership of activist Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, pastor of the Bethel Baptist Church. When Alabama state officials banned the NAACP in June 1956, Reverend Shuttlesworth organized the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights (ACMHR). The ACMHR sponsored many events to integrate city facilities. Segregationist reaction was violent. So many black churches and homes were bombed that the city was sometimes called “Bombingham,” with one particular black area known as “Dynamite Hill.”

Birmingham Police Commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor was a rabid segregationist who took every opportunity to arrest civil rights protesters. But the racist violence and the complicity of the local police did not stop Reverend Shuttlesworth, who continued to organize protest actions throughout the fifties.

Although these demonstrations had been taking place in Birmingham, the civil rights movement as a whole did not become widespread and receive extensive national attention until the full-scale student sit-ins began in 1960. On February 1, four black college freshmen in Greensboro, North Carolina, went to a local Woolworth's store and bought some supplies. But when they sat down at the “white” lunch counter, they were told they wouldn't be served. If their money was “good enough” to pay for supplies, they argued, it should be accepted for food as well. They remained seated at the counter until closing time, never having been served.

News of their protest action spread rapidly to other schools. Within weeks, students were sitting-in at lunch counters in cities throughout the South. Sympathy protests also were held in northern cities. At a Woolworth's store in Boston, Massachusetts, for example, where blacks were allowed to sit at the lunch counters, protesters nevertheless marched outside, asking people not to shop there until Woolworth's ended segregation in its southern stores.

On Easter weekend 1960 more than a hundred students met at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina. Encouraged and inspired by SCLC worker Ella Baker, they formed a student organization to coordinate the sit-ins and other civil rights activities. It was called the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, pronounced “snick”). SNCC became a major organizer of civil rights activities in the South in the sixties.

Civil rights demonstrators believed that racist laws should be disobeyed and challenged. And they were willing to go to jail for their beliefs. “In order to change the law, we had to break the law, and that's one thing I knew,” says Ricky Shuttlesworth. “The only way you could change things was to demonstrate.”

And so the demonstrations expanded beyond lunch counter sit-ins. Protesters had wade-ins at segregated pools, kneel-ins at all-white churches, sit-ins at segregated movie theaters—protests at most every kind of public place. Fred Taylor, for example, went with a group to sit-in at the Montgomery public library. Although today it is difficult to imagine, in the 1960s blacks were not allowed in the library. “Their argument,” he says, “was that we needed a library card. But they refused to grant us permission to apply for the card.” That discriminatory policy “was the basis for the court challenge that led to desegregation of the library.”

 

The civil rights movement was based on the idea of nonviolent direct action. This meant taking to the streets to confront discriminatory barriers, but doing it without any use of force. The Nashville Student Movement, headed by Diane Nash, was one of the most influential of the student groups. The Nashville students had been trained at weekly workshops in nonviolence led by divinity student James Lawson. It took courage and strength, they learned, not to use force to accomplish their goals, not to strike back, but rather to try to convince people of the justice of their protest by the way they expressed their ideas and by their behavior.