Freedom in the Family Read online

  Priscilla and I, and nine others, had been charged with “disturbing the peace,” among other charges, because we tried to order food at Woolworth. If not for segregation, and the fact that we were all Negroes, we would have been served without incident. At our trial on March 17, 1960, Judge John Rudd ruled that our lawyers should “get off that race question.”1 He also accused us of being affiliated with Communists because we had acted under the auspices of CORE, even though it was not a Communist organization. By the end of our one-day farce of a trial in a segregated courtroom in the segregated South, all eleven of us had been found guilty. Our punishment: a $300 fine, or sixty days in jail. I had not expected a fair trial in the South, but I couldn’t help but be outraged by the blatant disregard for the facts in our case and the injustice of the entire system.

  Mrs. Gaines chose to have her fine paid, although $300 was a steep fee in 1960 and her employer had already dismissed her from her job because of her arrest. “I was working and one day she said, ‘Mary, I think I’m gonna try to do my own work.’ She didn’t want me involved,” Mrs. Gaines told me later. Still, Mrs. Gaines decided she would not consider serving a jail term for what she had done. “That’s the thing that went through my mind: ‘We hadn’t done anything. What are you arresting us for?’ The people who were bothering us were the ones that needed to be arrested,” she recalled.2

  Priscilla and I, as well as six others, had made our decision before we entered the courtroom: We would not pay a fine to support a system that did not treat us as equal human beings. We would not pay for segregation. If we had to go to jail to further our cause, we would go to jail. If we went to jail, I thought, all of America might learn the truth about the South. Suddenly, our sit-in had turned into a “jail-in.”

  I was twenty years old, a college junior, and not yet a legal adult when we were sentenced to sixty days in the Leon County jail. Not only was this the first time we had been jailed, but it was the first time any activists in the student sit-in movement had chosen jail rather than pay their fine. We pioneered a tactic, becoming the first “jail-in” of the student protest movement of the 1960s. Locally, our jail sentence opened a lot of eyes, since the whole community was surprised. They expected us to be tried, pay our fines, and end it there. When we said we would go to jail, the reality of the plight of Negroes was much more clear.

  The eight of us who had chosen jail over bail were me and Priscilla; Henry Marion Steele, a tall, gangly high-school student who was only sixteen; and Barbara and John Broxton, Angelina Nance, Clement Carney, and William Larkins, all students at FAMU. We did not have to report to the county jail until the next morning, so we had one last night of freedom. I knew that Henry was the son of Rev. C. K. Steele, and I had been friendly with some of the activists previously, but most of us really did not know each other on a personal level. Our association had been through demonstrations, when there wasn’t much time to learn about each other’s lives and personalities. Now we were about to undergo a very trying ordeal together. We met and held a prayer session at a local church, then we tried to prepare ourselves emotionally for whatever lay ahead of us, based on our CORE training. We shouted epithets at each other, pushed each other, pulled at each other’s clothes—whatever we could think of to prepare us for what we thought jail might be like.3

  Looking back now, clearly the preparations were not enough. You can never truly appreciate the value of freedom—even limited freedom in the segregated South—until that freedom is taken from you. The most intimidating aspect of jail is the degree to which your lives and safety are in the hands of others, whether it’s other prisoners or guards. It became clear very quickly that some of our jailers felt a great deal of ill will toward us.

  The verbal abuse began as soon as we entered the jail, with the jailer, a man named Mr. Chairs, and another woman, Miss Love, who processed us. I honestly think Mr. Chairs had some sort of sickness, and Miss Love’s name became terribly ironic to me. She and Mr. Chairs were full of anything but love: You niggers are causing all that trouble in town, but you won’t last long in here, no sir. These folks in here don’t like troublemakers. Ya’ll make it bad for everyone else, and they’re gonna make it bad for you.

  We were separated by gender. The jail was also segregated by race, but all of us were Negro. Each cell had four bunks, an open commode, and a sink, although our particular cell had no running water, and all were dank, dreary, and lonely. The thin, ratty blankets we were given smelled foul, as if they had never been washed. Food consisted of fatback, grits, and sweet breads, and it was awful. Most of us could not eat it. The males were forced to work on county roads, cemeteries, and ditches by day, and the college sit-in students were definitely worked harder than the other prisoners. Henry Steele recalls, “I felt so sorry for the other guys. [The guard] wanted them to look like they had been put through the mill so he could look good when he got back.”

  We females had to scrub what jailers called the “bull rank,” the common area with tables outside the individual cells. At night, the concrete cells seemed very cold, and I had only a single sheet for a cover. Because of overcrowding, Henry Steele didn’t even have a bed of his own. He had to sleep on a thin pallet on the floor, where he caught a terrible cold from the draft. In fact, according to Barbara Broxton’s notes during the time, Angelina and Priscilla had colds within our first days of incarceration. I was ill, too, and a Negro doctor, Dr. Charles Stevens, was summoned to see me.4 Not that it was easy to sleep at all. Jailers sometimes purposely rattled the bars to wake us up, calling us “bad niggers.”

  Our visitors were screened by race. After the first couple of weeks, none of the sympathetic whites were permitted to visit us, a further indication that they, too, were affected by discrimination. When whites were barred from visiting, says longtime Tallahassee activist Clifton Lewis—who is white—they gathered outside and sang inspirational songs for us. “We would be outside singing, and there would be policemen all around us. We were hoping you all could hear us in that jail,” she told me later.5

  Our jailers tried to use other inmates against us, which was a common tactic in Southern jails. One day, a mentally ill woman named Ruth was placed in our cell. She is completely out of her mind, Priscilla wrote of her in her diary. She is a very dangerous person. She needs to be in an insane asylum. The night Ruth arrived, we stayed up half the night trying to keep an eye on her, Barbara Broxton wrote.6 After Ruth was removed from our cell because she refused to keep her clothes on, the jailers brought her back. This time she had a wire hanger. “I’m going to put your eyes out,” Ruth promised, stalking us with that sharp hanger while we huddled to move out of her way. Ruth was our first real source of fear in jail because she threatened to kill us several times. We weren’t just afraid of her because she meant us harm, but because we knew the only reason she could have gotten a wire hanger was through our jailers. Luckily, Ruth never followed through on her promise, although in the following days she did kick both Priscilla and Barbara Broxton. A prisoner and trustee I only knew as “Geech” was a real godsend to all of us, since he spoke to us kindly and tried his best to look out for us.

  Once Mother learned we were in jail, she came to see us right away. Tallahassee is a twenty-one-mile drive east on Highway 90 from where my mother was raised in Gadsden County. Like most Negroes in the South, she grew up hearing tales of racist horror, so she was very frightened for us to be incarcerated in nearby Leon County. Some of those fearsome stories were from her own doorstep; she’d heard whisperings about her great-uncle John, who’d been dragged out of the house and lynched. No one ever told her the details, and it probably happened before she was born, but the story loomed large in her imagination.

  As bordering states, Florida, Alabama, and Georgia had more in common than location; they were also well-known for their mistreatment of Negroes who tried to change the status quo. Between 1900 and 1930, Florida had more lynchings per capita than any other state in the nation.7 I remember hearing about how
Dr. William S. Stevens, a physician in Quincy, was tied to a tree in the 1940s after he tried to register Negroes to vote. Afterward, when Dr. Stevens built his own hospital to provide better medical care for Negroes, city fathers refused to allow him to open the facility’s doors. Longtime residents also never forgot the spectacle of seeing a Negro man tied to the rear bumper of a Model-T Ford and dragged around the courthouse in downtown Quincy.

  The terror had begun in earnest for Mother with our protests and arrests. She never shared it with us until later, but she had been wrestling with her own anxieties from the first time she heard we were leading the Tallahassee demonstrations. “Every time the phone rang, it was like someone shooting a gun. I jumped every time,” she told us many years after the fact. Our names were in the news, and her neighbors had begun giving her their sympathies, treating our arrest and jailing like something shameful, which made her angry. Our grandmother was pleading with her to do something about our activism, telling her we had gone crazy. Daddy Marion, naturally, was being chastised by his superiors in the Palm Beach County school system, where he was then a principal, for not controlling his children. Mother was also very worried because Priscilla had just been prescribed a special diet because of her tendency for ulcers, and she was sure Priscilla would not be fed properly in jail. (She was right on this account, but we didn’t want to alarm her. The food served to us in jail was not fit to eat. Despite the plentiful food later brought to us by visitors, Priscilla was sickly for a time and had to consult a doctor.)

  In many ways, Mother never recovered from the days and years to follow. But despite her feelings, which she was struggling to keep under control, Mother didn’t come to the jail to try to talk us out of what we were doing. Instead, she just wanted to stare us in the eye and make sure we were not being coerced by CORE or anyone else. After making the eight-hour drive from Belle Glade to Tallahassee, she gave us very tight hugs and searched our faces. “Girls,” she said, “are you sure you want to do this?”

  Priscilla and I reminded her that she and Daddy Marion were the ones who had taught us that all citizens must stand up for their rights. Further, we pointed out what we considered a painful truth: “Mother, if your generation had done this, we wouldn’t have to do it now. It’s time for all of us to be free.”

  Mother listened to us with sad brown eyes, knowing that she could not argue. “Well, then, girls, you have to do what you have to do,” she said curtly, with only traces of fright in her voice. “Don’t you worry about school. Don’t you worry about the money we’ve spent on tuition. Whatever happens now, you’re doing what you think is right.”

  Still, I felt a need to try to express myself better in writing. In a letter dated March 20, I wrote to Mother and Daddy Marion from the Leon County jail:

  We cannot be contented with the condition here in the South any longer. Our very souls are being taken from us by discrimination. How can we be content, saying we’ll put it off until we’re independent? How many independent people are willing to make the necessary sacrifices for freedom? You know, and I know, that there are only a few, a very few. I hope my parents are included in that few.… We cannot sit back any longer. I’d rather not have an education if it is going to make me afraid to fight for my rights. We all would like to tell two great leaders that they were right when they said “Give me liberty or give me death” and “We’ve got to fill the jails to win our equal rights,” respectively Patrick Henry and Martin Luther King.

  Daddy Marion visited us initially, but he could not come as often as Mother because his brother had just died and he had to make the funeral arrangements. What a stressful time for our family! But soon his letter arrived:

  March 23, 1960

  Dearest Priscilla and Patricia:

  One thing we want you to know and that is: We both love you very dearly and want nothing but the best for you. This, in itself, may make us seem pretty hard and objectionable to your ideas, since we know where such may lead in the final analysis. We, by no means, are letting you down. The fact is that we are stronger for you now than ever and will always hopefully be behind you and pulling for you.

  We cannot come right out and say we are pleased with the whole situation, as we realize its worth and what such can do for the whole in general, but we are concerned as to how much you might hurt or suffer for such. Loving you as we do we can do nothing but be most concerned, anxious, and, yes, worried. I am a bit more outspoken than your mother. There are things she wishes to say but puts up fronts with her heart being torn to bits. She has lived her life for Walter and you, and has felt no sacrifice too great for either of you. There could come a time when she may break down under the tension or under the mental strain and anxiety.…

  I came to the place on Sunday to see you, to tell you that I too love you both just as much as is humanly possible, but we were not allowed to see you. She buys every paper, listens to every broadcast, gets the ideas and thoughts of other people, all in an effort to assure herself that all is well with you as she and I, both, want the best for you. This is one of the reasons for the words that we feel sure you must still hear—Please count the cost. Cost does not always mean dollars and cents. Cost can mean anxiety as well.…

  Write to us often and keep us posted on your situation and more about your welfare.

  With love,

  Mother and Daddy Marion

  As I reread that letter today, my eyes fill with tears because I realize how our actions, beginning in 1960, took such a toll on Mother. All of that worry may have shortened her life. At the time, as horrible as it felt that we might potentially be contributing to our mother’s nervous breakdown or our stepfather’s future lack of employment—as he’d mentioned in his previous letter, and such concerns were by no means unfounded—a bigger imperative was at work while we were in jail. All of us there knew it. But I must say, it is very difficult today for me to reread Daddy Marion’s letter, which always brings tears when I realize how much stress Mother suffered during that time. My brother Walter tells me today that she and Daddy Marion never once mentioned our arrest or jailing in his presence in the beginning, so they somehow kept up a brave face in front of him. Although I had no time for tears in the 1960s, now I wish with all my heart it could have been easier for my parents.

  CORE leadership tried to reassure our parents with a letter. James Robinson, the executive secretary, wrote to them: “The faith shown in Tallahassee is a major factor in the growing pressure nationally to change Woolworth’s policy. The chances are good that we shall win. If so, much of the credit must go to the Stephens sisters.” Richard Haley, my music professor and a CORE member, also wrote a letter to our parents on March 28, trying to reassure them that CORE was not a Communist organization and that our incarceration was not in vain: “It is pointless for me to try to express my feelings for these young people. Long ago I exhausted my vocabulary of words with the strength and breadth and depth equal to my admiration for them. I would be proud—and humble—to be able to say of any of them, ‘This is my child.’ It is my hope that this is your stand, and that you will not be moved.”

  If those of us in jail needed a reminder, we had received a very meaningful one only the day after we went to jail. A telegram had arrived to further demonstrate that we were not alone, that we were part of a far-reaching social movement, however young it might be. The telegram came from a thirty-one-year-old minister who had learned from his own experiences that the pressing needs of Negroes in the South must supersede personal concerns. He, too, had been arrested. His home had been bombed in Birmingham, while his wife and infant daughter were at home and might have been harmed. Like Daddy Marion, his own father had warned him to consider the cost. He wrote us:

  I have just learned of your courageous willingness to go to jail instead of paying fines for your righteous protest against segregated eating facilities. Through this decision you have again proven that there is nothing more majestic and sublime than the determined courage of individuals willing
to suffer and sacrifice for the cause of freedom. You have discovered anew the meaning of the cross, and as Christ died to make men holy, you are suffering to make men free.

  As you suffer the inconvenience of remaining in jail, please remember that unearned suffering is redemptive. Going to jail for a righteous cause is a badge of honor and a symbol of dignity.

  I assure you that your valiant witness is one of the glowing epics of our time and you are bringing all of America nearer [to] the threshold of the world’s bright tomorrows.

  Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

  March 19, 1960

  Today, Priscilla wrote in her diary, we received a wire from Martin Luther King Jr. congratulating us on our courage and willingness to go to jail. In that day’s diary entry, Priscilla also documented a strategy that may well have ensured our safety while we were in jail: Each day, we were told, two local ministers would visit us in jail at 6:00 P.M. This was unusual, of course, because jails have special visiting days set aside, but that demonstrates the unique nature of our imprisonment. The rules were different for us, in some cases. The local clergy—including Rev. C. K. Steele, Rev. Dan Speed, Father Brooks, and many others—wanted to make certain we would be looked after and prayed with.

  Our third day in jail, a Sunday, hundreds of Tallahassee residents came to the jail to encourage us; they were white and Negro, young and old, students and community members alike. The day of rest has finally arrived, Priscilla wrote in her diary. The special day set aside for God’s Children to give all their praises and prayers. It is this and more to us. It is the day of visitors here in the jail. The day people get to express how they feel about us and this worthy cause.… They all made us feel very proud of them.

  Our welfare, as it turned out, would matter to more people than we had thought possible.