Freedom in the Family Read online

  Toward the end of that summer, we were strolling along Third Avenue in Overtown and ran into a family friend named Clifford “Baby” Combs. After the initial pleasantries, he started talking to us about an organization named the Congress of Racial Equality, or CORE. We learned later that CORE was a nonviolent, interracial civil rights organization that had been founded in Chicago in 1942, but at that time Priscilla and I had never heard of it. CORE did not have nearly the recognition of the much older NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) or even the much newer SCLC (Southern Christian Leadership Conference), founded as an offshoot of the 1955–56 Montgomery bus boycott by activists including a young minister named Martin Luther King Jr.

  To be honest, we weren’t too interested in going to a meeting on a carefree summer’s day. But then Baby Combs said, “If you come with me, I’ll get you dinner at Wolfie’s.” That got our attention. Wolfie’s was one of the few Miami Beach restaurants that served Negroes. After that, we agreed to go to the CORE workshop.

  We never got our dinner, but our lives changed forever.

  The workshop we’d been invited to was officially called the Miami Interracial Action Institute, a meeting designed to teach the principles of nonviolent direct action. The meeting was fairly large; including us, there were about seventy-five people there. Some were very young, like us, and others were older, up to their forties. The workshop was led by two CORE field secretaries I would later get to know very well—James T. McCain, who was Negro, and Gordon Carey, who was white. Rev. T. W. Foster, another minister, also had a leadership role. The workshop was held at Overtown’s Sir John Hotel (now long gone, like so much in Overtown), which had nicknamed itself “Resort of the Stars” and was best known for its luxuries: a saltwater pool, barber shop, beauty parlor, health center, and shopping center. Now, however, serious business was at hand.

  I was very struck by the fact that whites and Negroes from all over the country were talking and working together in this conference room, discussing solutions to the problem of racial discrimination. Although I had been exposed to interracial meetings with my mother when I was younger, this was still a very uncommon sight in 1959, especially in the South. There was a very warm feeling in that room.

  Dr. John O. Brown, the first Negro ophthalmologist in the state of Florida, was the president and one of the founders of Miami CORE. He’d been brought to the organization by a white woman named Thalia Stern he’d met at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. Other white members included Stern’s brother-in-law, a banker named Jack Gordon (who later became a Florida state senator), and his wife, Barbara; the Negro members included an important Miami activist, A. D. Moore, who later became the national CORE treasurer. As a longtime member of the NAACP, Dr. Brown came to CORE because he wanted more action on the civil rights front.1

  What struck Priscilla and me most was that CORE had a plan: The organization had developed techniques for direct action, such as sit-ins—where interracial groups of protesters sat in public places to protest discriminatory policies—and had a very specific protocol for how its protests should be carried out: They were to be nonviolent. They would only take place if an investigation of the facts confirmed that discrimination was practiced. Protests would only be a last resort, after talks had failed, and done without malice. CORE taught that you must try to destroy a system, not an individual, based on Gandhian principles of nonviolent protest. It all made perfect sense to us.

  As we listened, Priscilla and I were mesmerized. Although we may have seemed sheltered in some ways, as Negroes we were of course aware of the ongoing problems around us, and it was a frustrating time. A Florida NAACP activist named Harry T. Moore and his wife, Harriet, had been killed when their house was bombed in 1951; we’d witnessed the nonresponsiveness to the Supreme Court’s school desegregation decision in 1954. In 1955, a fourteen-year-old boy named Emmett Till had been killed for whistling at a white woman. Till had been horribly disfigured, but his mother had insisted upon an open casket so the whole world could see what whites in Mississippi had done to her son. Emmett Till’s killers were acquitted, but the episode had helped spur civil rights legislation in 1957. We had read about these horrifying events, and others, in Negro newspapers like the Pittsburgh Courier.

  One incident had hit much closer to home. In May 1959, shortly before the school term ended for the summer, a nineteen-year-old Negro woman from FAMU had been parked with her date and another couple when four white men forced her from a car with a knife and shotgun, drove away with her into a secluded area in the woods, and raped her seven times.2 The white males ranged in age from sixteen to twenty-three, and the FAMU student was still with them in their car, hysterical, when police found them. Although the men were convicted and sentenced to life in prison3—a rarity in the South, where usually rapes against Negro women were dismissed—the attack had opened many festering wounds along racial lines in Tallahassee. The shock of the rape had lingered on the FAMU campus of 3,000 students, so it wasn’t far from our minds. I’d been so enraged about it, in fact, that I’d written a letter to President Eisenhower. After all, the men had probably only been bold enough to carry out such a terrible act because they expected, after decades of discriminatory “justice,” to simply get away with it. Many had before them. I did not know the unfortunate woman involved, but it might easily have been Priscilla or me who had been raped.

  Besides, rape was an explosive issue in the South. While Negro women were often raped or coerced into sex by whites, Negro men were often falsely accused of raping white women. For Negroes, rape often carried a death sentence. My Uncle Bertram, Daddy Marion’s brother, was falsely accused of rape in the mid-1920s after a weekend of tennis at a Negro-owned retreat in the sharecropping village of Kennesaw, Georgia. Beset by the Ku Klux Klan and the sheriff, Uncle Bertram had to sneak out of Kennesaw in the trunk of a car. The entire forty-five acre retreat—known as “King’s Wigwam,” featuring cabins, an outdoor dance pavilion, an artificial lake, and tennis court—was soon closed and sold at a huge loss. The owner, of course, suspected that the charge had been manufactured to rid Kennesaw of “uppity” Negroes, and it certainly would not have been the first time.4 Mysteriously, they ceased to pursue the rape charge after the acquisition of King’s Wigwam. Obviously, there had been no rape in the first place.

  Yes, Priscilla and I were ready to help make a change. As we listened to the presenters describe CORE’s philosophies and strategies and we saw the earnestness of the young people in that room, we felt our hearts and minds blossoming. We had never been exposed to an interracial group that included people our own age. One participant was twenty-one-year-old Zev Aelony, a young Jewish man from Minnesota who had recently spent the summer at an interracial community in southwest Georgia called Koinoinia Farm, which was similar to an Israeli kibbutz where he had lived earlier that year. Koinoinia had been bombed and attacked by racists. “I was in somewhat of a state of shock, frankly,” Aelony says, recalling his first reaction to the treatment of Negroes in the Deep South. “The palpable level of fear and terror came as somewhat of a shock, so I went to that workshop to learn how to deal with that situation.” (Zev didn’t know it then, but his experiences with violence in the South were far from over.)

  Suddenly, everything we had learned from Mother and Daddy Marion about civic responsibility had a concrete form we believed we could make a part of our lives. The workshop was several days long, and we decided we would like to stay. But first, because we were under twenty-one and considered “minors,” we needed permission from our parents. One of the white Miami participants, a Jewish woman named Shirley Zoloth, volunteered to call Mother to ask her if we could stay. (Shirley and her husband, businessman Milton Zoloth, both Northerners, had discovered CORE about six months before that workshop. They’d both been disturbed during their drive from Philadelphia to Florida with their two young children in 1954, when they first saw the WHITE and COLORED signs at a gas station south of the Maso
n-Dixon line.)

  Mother probably agreed to let us take part because her longtime friend Clifford “Baby” Combs was also involved, but I’ve wondered since what she would have said if she had known where that meeting would lead us. Once Mother’s permission was granted, we became full-fledged participants. First, we were told, we would receive instruction. Then, we would be sent into Miami’s community for real-life desegregation efforts.

  In some ways, the CORE workshop was like an Army boot camp. After we had been taught the Gandhian principles of nonviolent protest, the organizers subjected us to verbal abuse, grabbed us, and shoved us hard—exactly what we might expect in a real-life protest situation. We set up tables and pretended to be sitting at lunch counters, and then white organizers called us “niggers” and “nigger lovers.” We were expected not to respond, of course. If someone pulled out a weapon and tried to hit us, we would cover ourselves to try to avoid the blow, but we would not defend ourselves otherwise, and we could not strike back. We were even dragged from our seats, but we were told not to resist. If police tried to arrest us, we were instructed, we also would not resist.

  The preparations were intense and very emotional, but I doubt I fully realized how much they would mirror the events soon to come. Neither Priscilla nor I had ever been subjected to real violence in our lives. I had always shied away from physical confrontations, even as a child, and I don’t believe, at that point, anyone had ever called us “nigger” except at the CORE workshop. Even though I knew the organizers were only playacting, it was strange to hear that hated, dehumanizing word leveled at us by white men and women. I felt myself bristling. But we believed it was all for a good cause. As it turned out, we would rely on those preparations a great deal in only a few short months.

  The CORE workshop was not only theoretical—it was designed to put thought into action—so we took part in lunch-counter testing at Miami department stores and restaurants to see if Negroes would be served. I was one of the Negroes sent to test a Royal Castle, and Zev Aelony and a white woman went as observers to report anything they witnessed. When I sat at the counter and asked for food with a group of several Negroes, the manager looked at us closely. There were angry stares against our backs from other customers. I noticed that the manager looked nervous, with his jaw tight, but to my surprise, he actually took my order and served me a hamburger. None of the other Negroes were served.

  “After they left,” Zev recalls, “a white guy got up and went to the counter. He was just red with fury, and he said, ‘Why did you serve her?’ And the manager kind of gently pushed the cashier aside and said, ‘If they pay taxes, I can’t serve them—but if they come in and speak Spanish, I have to serve them by law.’ ”

  Now, I had spoken with nothing but my usual Southern accent—and I certainly hadn’t said a single word in Spanish—but I was wearing large hoop earrings and had long hair and olive-colored skin, so the manager had apparently decided to pretend he thought I was Hispanic rather than an American Negro. He then had an excuse to treat me like a human being.

  The CORE workshop gave me and Priscilla a very strong conviction that we two could easily motivate other students in Tallahassee to take action against discrimination. Why should we have to attend segregated movie theaters with special balcony sections set aside for Negroes, or separate theaters altogether? Why couldn’t we be served at lunch counters like Woolworth and McCrory’s, especially since those same stores were more than happy to take our money when we purchased other items? Naively, we also believed that the university itself would support us. In any case, we were excited and ready for action.

  Jim Dewar, a young, redheaded white man at the workshop, offered to give us a ride up to Belle Glade, which was roughly an hour and a half from Miami. Once we arrived, he asked if he and Harland Randolph, the other CORE workshop participant who was riding with us, could spend the night at our parents’ house. Two-lane Highway 27 was known as “Bloody 27” because of all the terrible accidents, and he didn’t want to drive all the way back to Miami in the dark. I said yes without hesitation. Priscilla says now that she had some misgivings about it, but she went along with me because I seemed so confident.

  It was late when we arrived, and my family had already gone to bed. Jim and Harland slept in the living room while Priscilla and I retired to our respective bedrooms. As my mother recalled in an interview five years before she died, my grandmother, Alma Peterson, was the first to awaken the next morning, and she panicked when she saw the boys sleeping there.

  “She woke up that morning and came into our bedroom, which was very unusual for her,” Mother recalled. “She asked me did I know what was going on, saying, ‘Those children are going to get us killed!’ I said, ‘What do you mean?’ She said, ‘They have two white boys sleeping in the living room!’ ”

  Life for our family had changed already, and we hadn’t even gotten started.

  Three or four weeks after the CORE workshop, Priscilla and I went back to school for the fall term as two young women with a mission. As soon as our classmates began to trickle back to campus, we knocked on door after door in our dormitory at Wheatley Hall to encourage them to come to the first CORE meeting in Tallahassee. We must have talked to a hundred people, maybe more. CORE was an unknown organization at FAMU and in Tallahassee, but the students we talked to seemed eager to use the techniques used by CORE to eradicate a system that robbed them of their dignity and first-class citizenship. We had our first meeting right in the dorm. We were lucky to be on such a conservative campus, as all Negro colleges were, because young ladies had a curfew—I believe it was 9:00 P.M.—so we really had a captive audience. About thirty people came to the first meeting, and although Priscilla and I were disappointed at the time, we later came to learn that thirty people was actually a very large group for a meeting. (More often than not, you usually had a base group of only five or six people to plan civil rights protests, and larger numbers—hopefully—would attend the actual protests. But we hadn’t learned that yet.)

  In time, I also spoke to FAMU’s assistant admissions director, Miss Daisy Young, who I knew was the advisor for the NAACP college chapter on our campus.5 Miss Young not only helped us recruit white students from Florida State University, but she volunteered her own home as a meeting place. She also took me to a meeting of the Inter-Civic Council (ICC), a Tallahassee organization that had formed during a recent bus boycott. There, I explained the goals of CORE, and we were invited to hold our meetings at 803 Floral Street, where the ICC met in the office beside Rev. Dan Speed’s grocery store. National CORE helped us get started by sending James T. McCain and Gordon Carey, the field secretaries who had helped run the summer institute, to meet with us. Many of us were students from FAMU and FSU, and our first president was a FAMU student named George Brown. Negro adults in Tallahassee’s community responded to the call, too. For example, Rev. T. S. Johnson, another minister, was voted our vice president (and later became president), and an Episcopal minister, Father David Brooks, also allowed us to meet at his church, St. Michael’s Episcopal Church on Melvin Street.

  One of our most vigorous adult supporters was Richard Haley, an FAMU music professor with a distinct speaking voice, whom I had met while enrolled in his class on music theory. I had not excelled in Mr. Haley’s class: He gave me the first “F” of my college career, and it was in his class that I realized I did not have a good “ear” for tone. But I did talk to him about CORE, and although he carried himself in a very sedate manner, he was excited about CORE from the start. Mr. Haley was originally from Chicago, and he wasn’t nervous about getting involved, as were some other FAMU professors. “I’m not concerned about myself, because I can get another job,” Mr. Haley once told Miss Young, advising her to be careful because she had family ties in Tallahassee.6 (His words, unfortunately, turned out to be prophetic; Mr. Haley’s activism would cost him his job.) Dr. James Hudson, FAMU’s chaplain and a civil rights veteran, also became a charter member of Tallahassee CORE.
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  In all, there were twenty-one charter members, and our little fledgling group decided that our first project would be to test the desegregation of the buses in Tallahassee. The city buses had been a hotbed of controversy in recent years.

  In 1956, shortly before Priscilla and I enrolled at FAMU, students Wilhelmina Jakes and Carrie Patterson refused to give up their seats on the bus to whites, and sat instead on a seat with a white woman right behind the driver. The driver told them to move to the back of the bus, and they were arrested when they refused to move after being told they could not have a refund.7 That incident resulted in a bus boycott in Tallahassee very similar to the one Rosa Parks had sparked in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955. One of our new CORE chapter’s charter members, Rev. Charles Kenzie (C. K.) Steele, had been instrumental in planning and carrying out Tallahassee’s boycott. Rev. Steele, who often wore bow ties, was the first vice president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and a friend of the young minister Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who had garnered national attention during the Montgomery boycott. Dr. Hudson had also been very involved. The Tallahassee boycott had lasted eighteen months, and while it never received the same notice as the Montgomery boycott, 90 percent of Tallahassee’s Negroes had refused to ride the buses—using carpools or simply walking—to prove that they would no longer be treated like second-class citizens.8