The Warmth of Other Suns (76 page)

Sometimes the Clements would come out to visit them in Los Angeles, and Robert would put on his most charming performance to prove how well he had made out in the Promised Land. He invited the colored men of importance in the city to meet with his father-in-law and alerted the
Los Angeles Sentinel
so that the visit could be captured for posterity, as the Clements would have expected. The two men would never be close, but Robert knew how to put on a show when he had to.

By 1966, President Clement had risen to such a level of esteem at Atlanta University that a building was named in his honor. Clement Hall, an august red brick classroom building on the campus promenade, had its formal dedication on October 16, 1966. Alice and Robert’s youngest daughter, Joy, in bangs and a white headband, cut the ribbon with her grandfather right behind her. Alice stood watching in a pillbox hat and tailored dark suit and corsage. Bunny was there in a tweed peacoat and gloves, with her Jackie-Kennedy-in-the-White-House bob and beautifully chiseled sixties cover-girl face, in a show of support for her grandfather. Robert did not attend.

The man who had managed to oust W. E. B. Du Bois from Atlanta University by lobbying the university’s board of trustees all those years ago was in New York in early November 1967 for the regular meeting of that same board of trustees.

On the afternoon of Tuesday, November 7, during a break in the board’s proceedings, Clement collapsed in his suite at the Roosevelt Hotel. He died of an apparent heart attack. He was sixty-seven years old.

He and his wife, Pearl, had planned to embark on a round-the-world tour after the board meeting. Instead, plans for interment were made. Pearl would have to move out of the president’s mansion at Atlanta University, which had been her home and decorated to her liking for most of her adult life. She would have to move in with her next of kin, her beloved only daughter, Alice, in Los Angeles. Robert would have a wing with a bedroom and sitting area built for his mother-in-law and would try to make the best of it.

News reports of Rufus Clement’s death appeared in the
Atlanta Daily

World, the New York Amsterdam News
, the
Los Angeles Sentinel
, and elsewhere. The
New York Amsterdam News
wrote that, “in addition to his widow, he is survived by a daughter, Mrs.
²⁰³
Robert Foster of Los Angeles.” Robert himself went unmentioned.

A POLICE WAGON
pulled up to a West Side hospital over at Division and Kedzie, amid a rabble of placard-waving protesters on strike against the hospital, Walther Memorial. The strikers marched at the entrance in the biting cold. They were picketing for higher wages for the orderlies and nurse’s aides who did the kinds of things nobody notices until they go undone.

Inside the police wagon, bundled up with coats and purses, looking wide-eyed at the people protesting in circles along the sidewalk, were Ida Mae and her co-worker and friend Doris McMurray. For several weeks in February 1968, that was how Ida Mae went to work each day.

Ida Mae respected the strikers, knew them by name, had worked right beside them, and got along with most of them, but she wasn’t going to stand out there and strike with them. She had been working since she was big enough to get behind a plow. She had had all kinds of backbreaking, mind-numbing, sometimes dangerous and usually thankless jobs and had finally come into a position as a hospital aide. She had gotten the job in 1949, after more than a decade of scuffling from domestic to steel worker to press operator. She had finally come into a job she liked and that suited her temperament. She had come a long way from the cotton fields in Mississippi for the chance to work indoors with people rather than outdoors with crops and to get paid for the job and feel some dignity doing it. She had never stood up to a boss or refused to work or tried to petition for more money, even though she surely could have used it and more than likely deserved it. She had faith that whatever she needed would eventually come to her. The concept of not working a job one had agreed to do was alien to Ida Mae.

So when her union local announced it was going on strike at the beginning of 1968, Ida Mae and her friend Doris never considered that they would stop going to work. Decades earlier, colored migrants, unaccustomed to unions and not understanding labor politics, had been brought in by northern industrialists specifically to break up strikes. White union members resented the migrants and beat them for breaching the picket lines they had unwittingly been brought in to cross.

Ida Mae was not schooled in the protocols of union organizing, but she knew she couldn’t afford to lose her job and couldn’t see how not working was going to help her keep it. She was under more pressure than ever. She and George had just bought their first house, the three-flat in South Shore, and had new and different bills coming at them than ever before—from the mortgage to the utilities to property taxes and hazard insurance.

“My pastor was just begging me,” Ida Mae remembered. “Please don’t cross that picket line.”

Her children were worried for her. “They didn’t want me to go,” Ida Mae said. “But I wasn’t studyin’ them.”

George was his usual contained self. If he was scared for her, he didn’t let on. The idea of not going to work was as foreign to him as it was to Ida Mae. “I don’t reckon he ever knowed no different,” Ida Mae said.

She made no apology for doing what she felt was living up to her responsibilities. Even the union boss teased her and said he knew why Ida Mae couldn’t strike.

“She can’t stay off,” he said. “She got to pay for that three-flat building. She got to pay that house note.”

“You right,” Ida Mae said.

When Ida Mae and Doris told management they were going to keep working, the hospital arranged for a driver to pick them up at a designated location and escort them into the building.

One day, the strikers beat up the hospital driver after he had dropped the women off, and, for the first time, Ida Mae realized the seriousness of this thing. Then the hospital came up with another way to get Ida Mae and Doris to work: it arranged for a police wagon to pick up the two women at a designated bus stop.

“It was just like we were going to jail,” Ida Mae said.

They would climb out of the police wagon at the entrance to the hospital, and the police would walk them past the pickets into the building.

“Scabs!” some of the picketers, shivering on the cold sidewalk, would yell at Ida Mae and Doris.

“You a scab,” Ida Mae would shoot back, not knowing the labor union meaning of the word but hurling it anyway because, to her, everybody should have been working.

Ida Mae couldn’t let a heckler go unanswered, and it frightened Doris.

“Shut up, Ida,” Doris whispered. “
Ida, hush.
”

The two of them were working on the sixth floor in surgery and on their breaks could look out the window and see the pickets below. After so many hours outside, the strikers had to find ways to protect themselves from the freezing wind. They would scurry to their cars and sit for a while, and they would use buckets instead of the toilet in the building because the hospital wouldn’t let them in.

The strikers never threw anything but names at Ida Mae and Doris, and when the two of them looked back on it years later, they marveled that they had never gotten hurt.

“I wouldn’t do that now,” Doris said.

Ida Mae turned to Doris. “Well, I didn’t really understand,” Ida Mae said. “We all supposed to be working.”

THE EVENING WAS
unusually cool for Memphis in April.
²⁰⁴
It was shortly before six o’clock, and Martin Luther King, Jr., was heading to dinner before attending a rally for striking sanitation workers. He was standing on the second-floor balcony of the Lorraine Motel on Mulberry Street just outside his room, room 306. A half dozen of his aides were with him, gathering themselves to leave. Someone reminded King of how chilly it was getting. He agreed and went to get his topcoat.

At the precise moment that he turned back to his room, a minute past six on April 4, 1968, a single .30-caliber bullet was fired into the balcony. The rifle shot, thought to have come from a flophouse across the street through the bare branches of the mimosa trees, struck him in the neck
and severed his spinal cord. King was pronounced dead at St. Joseph’s Hospital at 7:05
P.M.
, Central Time. Within hours, the poor, colored sections of more than a hundred cities went up in flames.

That night, George Starling was rounding the corner at 131st Street and St. Nicholas Avenue in Harlem. He was returning home from a night out with the guys and saw the fires rising up ahead. He was trying to get to 132nd and Lenox, not yet knowing what had happened to set the people off. The whole thing was a blur, and he was looking for a way to get around the mayhem.

“It was in the direction of St. Nicholas Avenue,” he said. “It could have been on Broadway, St. Nicholas, or Amsterdam. It was up on that hill. They were burning everything up there. The sky was lit up like it was the end of time.”

He made his way home, and it was “only when I got into the house and turned on the radio that I heard the news that Martin Luther King had been shot in Memphis.”