The Grace of Silence (14 page)

What the
Birmingham News
and other mainstream newspapers failed to acknowledge was the large pool of black veterans who were also eager to embrace their civic duty to vote—in the newspaper’s words, “this responsibility of civilian citizenship.”

Throughout January and February that winter, black men who had just returned from duty were descending on city hall, trying to register. My father was released from the navy on January 21, and the very week he returned to Birmingham, black veterans were defiantly parading through the downtown business district. On January 23, a group of black men made their way to the County Board of Registrar’s office.

The postwar months were a season of parades, and the black veterans’ march took place eleven days after the most memorable of the postwar processions. On January 12, the 82nd Airborne Division had led thirteen thousand men through a blinding blizzard of swirling ticker tape in downtown New York to celebrate America’s victory in World War II. An estimated four million people had lined New York’s “Canyon of Heroes” for the largest parade since General John Pershing had led the 1st Division along the same route in 1919.

Also on January 12, a group of men in a smoke-filled chamber in Montgomery, Alabama, reluctantly announced that “qualified Negroes” would be allowed to vote in what had previously been an all-white primary.
¹
The members of the Alabama Democratic Executive Committee had been given little choice in the matter. In 1944, in
Smith v. Allwright
, the U.S. Supreme Court had determined that all-white primaries were unconstitutional. Black voters—long locked out of the voting process—
saw a grand opportunity to exercise their right, especially black veterans who had fought for democracy overseas.

The Southern Negro Youth Congress (SNYC) held city-wide registration clinics for veterans. Officially, there were two main requirements: (1) the ability to read and write any portion of the United States Constitution; and (2) ownership of three hundred dollars’ worth of taxable property. SNYC, needless to say, focused on the first at their clinics, conducting classes about the Constitution and the history of the United States government.

On that Wednesday morning, January 23, eleven days after the 82nd Airborne’s victory parade down Fifth Avenue, black veterans in Birmingham held their own. Instead of thousands marching, there were dozens. But while the size of their gathering was minuscule in comparison, they nonetheless made a large and loud statement by stepping out of the roles prescribed for them by Alabama segregation. Henry O. Mayfield, the chairman of the Southern Negro Youth Congress, was among those who led the group, carrying a large white sign that read,
JOIN US TO REGISTER—BRING YOUR DISCHARGE PAPERS!
²

There it was. Discharge papers. Just like the folded document my father had on his person the night of his confrontation with the police. The sign calling for discharge papers is clearly visible in a photograph of the black veterans. Before going into the courthouse, the men had stopped to pose for a picture. There are about sixty in the picture, almost all of them dressed in overcoats and fedoras. Most are smiling broadly. Some have their hands tucked into trousers with knife-edge pleats. A few are wearing work clothes and floppy hats of the kind that protect farmers from the sun. They, too, are smiling. All are radiant with possibility, staring at the camera as if tilting against the weight of history.

I yearn to know if my father was among those men who
marched to that plaza in front of the courthouse. The boldest among them assembled for a photo. Others hung back on the street, concerned that the photo might appear on the front page of newspapers and invite the ire of their bosses, their families, the city police, or even the Klan. Those who posed that day stood on the steps beneath these words of Thomas Jefferson’s, inscribed in stone atop the courthouse door:
EQUAL AND EXACT JUSTICE TO ALL MEN OF WHATEVER PERSUASION
. Years later and thousands of miles away from Birmingham, my father used to carry a pocket-sized version of the U.S. Constitution in his back pocket, along with his wallet and an Afro pick. I am ashamed to say that I teased him about that when I was a teenager. It was one of his little eccentricities, and though I ribbed him about it, he always got the last word by hitting me with some specific constitutional question about section this from article that. And when I tried to laugh away the fact that I could not provide an answer, I’d get his standard retort: “Listen, girl: ignorance is no laughing matter.”

That little brown book takes on a whole new meaning now, as does the collection of
I VOTED
stickers I found in his dresser drawer after he died. He got those oval stickers whenever he went to Eugene Field Elementary School in South Minneapolis to cast his ballot. A former neighbor once reminisced about how he and my father used to ride the bus to and from their jobs in downtown Minneapolis, both toting lunch in brown paper bags. Though Dad kept a series of simple yet beautifully maintained cars, he would not dream of driving downtown to pay for parking when he could spend a fraction of the money on bus fare. While people on the bus were reading paperbacks or the
Minneapolis Star and Tribune
, Mr. Johnson said, my father would sometimes reach inside his back pocket, pull out his little brown copy of the Constitution, and lose himself in its pages until the bus pulled up to Forty-ninth and Chicago.

I wonder if he was drawn to Amendment 15, Section 1: “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” Or perhaps the 24th Amendment: “The right of citizens of the United States to vote in any primary or other election for President or Vice President, for electors for President or Vice President, or for Senator or Representative in Congress, shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any State by reason of failure to pay any poll tax or other tax.”

I imagine a young Belvin Norris in the weeks after he arrived in Birmingham from serving his country. In my mind’s eye I can see him busying himself with study of the laws of this great land, assiduously preparing to assert his right to vote. For this was a grand obsession in black Birmingham, the subject of sermons, talk at the dinner table, and chatter in barbershops, the background noise wherever blacks spoke freely about their ambitions. Whites in Birmingham might have sensed a shift in attitude had they been privy to the goings-on in black Birmingham’s inner sanctums. They would have heard talk of a new day coming; they would have heard men and women reciting the Constitution or quizzing each other on the formation of government. In the restrooms or phone booths in the black business district along Fourth Avenue, they would have seen posters trumpeting a single word spelled out in heavy letters:
VOTE!

Readers of the
Birmingham World
, which touted itself as “Alabama’s largest Negro newspaper,” were reminded of their civic responsibility with every new edition. A small box appeared in each issue, just under the masthead, alongside the subscription rates and a message from the managing editor, Emory O. Jackson. Inside that box readers would spy a message from President Franklin D. Roosevelt:

The authoritative eloquence of the president ran smack into a white wall of resistance in the South, particularly in Birmingham, where considerable energy had been spent to ensure that the voting booth was closed to people of color.

In Alabama at that time, fewer than four thousand blacks had the right to vote, a tiny fraction of the state’s black population. If blacks were suddenly allowed to rush to the ballot box, it would likely upset the state’s power structure. State lawmakers moved quickly to slam that door by proposing the Boswell Amendment in 1945. The measure, named for State Senator E. C. “Bud” Boswell, was crafted “as a device for eliminating negro applicants.” It gave local registrars broad powers to screen prospective voters with a test, under which citizens would have to prove that they understood and could explain any randomly selected section of the U.S. Constitution.

Using the slogan “Vote white, vote right,” Alabama’s Democratic Party stoked racial fears by warning that blacks would “take over if the amendment loses.” Boswell Amendment supporters said it was “the only means short of intimidation” for white people in Alabama to preserve their political dominion. Dixiecrat demagogue Horace Wilkinson was unapologetic in explaining his unwavering support: “No Negro is good enough, and no Negro will ever be good enough to participate in making the laws under which the white people in Alabama have to live.”
³

On January 23, 1946, Birmingham’s black veterans must have caused quite a scene as they assembled to register to vote. These black men proudly approached the courthouse, marching
up the walkway and into the building in lockstep formation, four abreast. Inside, amid the bustle of other citizens paying their poll tax or registering, white and Negro registrants formed separate queues outside room 102.

According to news accounts, after waiting in line for hours, a substantial number of black veterans were turned away. Some were told that they had failed to fill out their paperwork properly. Others were denied because they could not “interpret” excerpts from the U.S. Constitution or provide correct answers to questions ranging from “What is meant by veto power in the U.N.?” to “How many suds are in a bar of soap?” Captain H. C. Terrell, an army chaplain who’d led the delegation, was taken into custody by military police for “using his Army uniform for political activities,” but other than that, the voters’ rights demonstration was peaceful and without incident.

The bold ambition of the black veterans inflamed local politicians and newspaper columnists, and the voting efforts were of grave concern to the Birmingham police—the force that Alabama power brokers relied on to keep black aspirations in check.

Decades before the glare of television cameras would make Birmingham police chief Eugene “Bull” Connor the bogeyman of the city’s civil rights protests for turning dogs and hoses on youthful demonstrators, Connor had already built a national reputation as a fierce segregationist. In the 1940s he had been a particularly fierce opponent of the federal government’s meddling with a state’s right to determine and enforce its laws and customs. The police commissioner’s passionate concern for states’ rights and his prodigious ego are both on display in a letter he wrote to President Roosevelt, dated August 7, 1942. On city-issued stationery hailing Birmingham as the “Industrial Center of the South,” Connor wrote:

The “racial problems” Connor spoke of most certainly applied to the rising tide of black veterans now eager to flex their muscles at the ballot box. Black men who had spent their lives being called “boys” returned to Birmingham from the war with a gust of pride that most certainly would have registered several degrees beyond uppity in Jim Crow’s curious calculus of acceptable “negro behavior.” Their status in the military had been stunted, but when they stepped off trains and buses upon their return home they were wearing the same uniforms as the white soldiers and sailors. (This fact underscored an equality of manhood, hinted at but not fully realized when black and white men donned business suits.) Those uniforms and a shared experience allowed the men a strut in their steps and a swell in their chests.