“Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters.”
—Frederick Douglass
I didn’t go to college expecting to get swept into the civil rights movement. Like any young person, I was excited about living away from home for the first time, and I was eager to begin more serious study in music, which had become the great love of my life. I considered myself very good on the trumpet by the time I graduated from high school, and my dream was to make a life as a musician or band director. I had a new high school band director, a man named Eugene Woods, and he was very conscientious about helping his students secure music scholarships. I ended up getting several offers for scholarships, including from two Negro colleges; one from Central State College in Wilberforce, Ohio, and one from Florida Agricultural & Mechanical University (FAMU) in Tallahassee.
To show you how young I was emotionally, I made the decision to go to FAMU because I didn’t want to be too far away from my family. My parents were still living in Belle Glade then, almost 500 miles from FAMU’s Tallahassee campus. When I told my family I wasn’t sure how to choose one of the schools, they reminded me about a summer I had spent with my mother’s cousin in Haddonfield, New Jersey, while I was a junior in high school. I missed my daily conversations with Mother so much that I had called home every single day. Based on that experience, Mother told me, “You know, you don’t need to go too far to school. Remember what happened when you went to New Jersey? We can’t afford all those phone bills, and it’s more expensive to come home from farther away.” That was all the convincing I needed. I forgot any ideas I’d had about going to Ohio, and instead I registered at Florida A&M University, remaining deep in the South to begin my life as an adult. If I had not made that decision, I’m certain my life would have taken a very different course.
My naivete showed in other ways, too, giving my parents very little warning of the serious business that would soon overtake my life. The summer before I began college, I lived with my biological father in Miami and worked as a waitress at an Overtown restaurant called the Third Avenue Dining Room. In the 1960s, Overtown was a thriving Negro community. (Despite the black community’s recent efforts at improvement, such as the renovation of the historic Lyric Theatre, and other proposed changes, Overtown today is one of the poorest areas in Miami–Dade County.) Because of segregation, Overtown was home to pharmacists, dentists, doctors, entrepreneurs, and lawyers, providing a full spectrum of Negro life; educated and uneducated, professional class and working class, well-to-do and struggling. They all had their skin color and discrimination in common, and they lived side by side. Overtown also boasted several renowned Negro-owned hotels, where celebrities like Billie Holiday and Dizzy Gillespie stayed and gave impromptu performances because they were not permitted to live in the segregated hotels in Miami Beach, where they were headlining. Wasn’t Jim Crow something? These Negro artists were good enough to play at the white hotels, but not good enough to sleep there. But Overtown benefitted from segregation, because that was the place to be in black Miami. Overtown had its own tempo and rhythm back then, and I was excited to be part of it.
One of the people I met that summer was a piano player named Billy H., who entertained guests in the hotels. He was a good musician, and he was called “The Man with the Golden Hands.” The Third Avenue Dining Room was very close to the Carver Hotel, and I met him because he came in to have quick meals between his sets. I loved hearing Billy H. tell stories about his gigs, and he was taken with me right away. I was only seventeen, but I was very interested in music, and a professional musician intrigued me. In high school, I’d had a “boyfriend” in name only—the most we’d ever done was hold hands. And here was Billy H., a worldly musician with two children from a previous marriage, who was much older than I was. He was twenty-nine, and his daughter was about nine, only eight years younger than I was. After only a few conversations about music at the Dining Room, he actually asked me to marry him. I don’t remember going to so much as a movie with him, and he wanted to get engaged!
Well, I knew there was no way I was ready to marry anyone, much less a man I hardly knew, but I didn’t want to hurt Billy’s feelings, either. So, feeling shocked and shy, I must have murmured “Well, okay.” But I told him I couldn’t possibly get married without my parents’ consent, and he readily agreed. At that, I exhaled a huge sigh of relief. Mother and Daddy Marion would never let me marry such an old man, especially when I was supposed to be going to college. I thought I could wiggle out of my engagement without the responsibility of rejecting Billy myself.
At his first opportunity, Billy dressed up in his Sunday finest and drove out to Belle Glade to meet my parents. I accompanied him, feeling like a bundle of nerves. I could only imagine the look my mother would give me when this musician told her we were engaged. I hoped she would let him down easy, without being too insulting. After all, he had been nice to me. My mother sat and listened, very tight-lipped, as Billy H. laid out his plans for our future as man and wife. Then, after he’d said his piece, she sat back in her chair and astounded me with her response: “Well, sure,” my mother said in a chipper tone, “if that’s what she really wants to do.” Her eyes were on me, and I could see a twinkle of amusement there, along with her annoyance. My mouth dropped open, and I thought I was going to faint. I couldn’t believe my ears! Then, I realized my mother was only trying to teach me a lesson, and I felt my face grow hot. It was one of the most embarrassing episodes of my young adult life. I don’t think I ever truly had the nerve to tell Billy H. that I didn’t want to get married. Once I went to college, we grew apart, and that was the end of my engagement.
A Different World—the Cosby Show spinoff about life on a black college campus—provides the perfect description of what college life felt like for me. I had done some traveling with my family as a young person, but it was refreshing to meet so many serious-minded students from all over the state of Florida, the nation, and even the world. FAMU had (and still has) a nationally recognized music program, especially its Marching 100 Band, which is known for its lively dance routines. In my earliest days, I spent most of my time in the music practice rooms preparing for my audition for the concert and symphonic bands. Regrettably, girls were not permitted at that time to play in the famous Marching 100 Band. Another female band member—Avalon Darby, a percussionist from Jacksonville—worked with me to try to break down the gender barrier in the marching band. Dr. William Foster, the band director, gave us all kinds of delaying tactics and excuses—Oh, it’s too rough for girls, or Well, learn the music and we’ll see—but as soon as we overcame one obstacle, he thought of something else. (Eventually, of course, I would have much larger battles than this on my hands.) But Dr. Foster did give me encouragement as a musician. Thanks to the preparation I did with Daddy Marion, I won a spot in the symphonic band as a bassoonist, and Dr. Foster had enough confidence in me to ask me to play a form of the instrument unfamiliar to me, the contrabassoon. With more trumpet players, I had a better chance to secure a spot in the symphonic band as a bassoon player. The hours I spent lost in a world of sound in the music practice rooms at FAMU, whether I was practicing the trumpet or the bassoon, are among my most precious memories from college. They are among my last memories of my days as a “normal” student.
Priscilla and I were very, very close during that time. We were roommates in the freshman dorm, McGuinn Hall, even though Priscilla had graduated high school a year earlier than I had. She had spent a year in Washington, D.C., in post-high-school courses, believing she had not been properly prepared for college in the segregated school system. Priscilla always kept her side of the room very neat, and my side left a lot to be desired—but other than that, we got along very well. In fact, we had begun to earn ourselves a bit of a reputation on campus by the time we were sophomores, but not because of civil rights.
I have no idea how we met this man—Priscilla has always said we met him on a bus, although I don’t remember riding the buses very often—but one day we came across an exotically dressed Negro man who introduced himself as Mujuba Cetawayo, a prince from French West Africa. He was heir to the throne recently vacated by his father’s death, he told us. Believe me, it wasn’t every day that you encountered African royalty in the sleepy college town of Tallahassee, so naturally we were both very excited, and he asked us to introduce him to Dr. George W. Gore, the president of FAMU. With his genteel ways and his ability to speak several languages, this man instantly charmed everyone who met him, and Dr. Gore was no exception. Soon Dr. Gore was parading our prince around the campus, proclaiming, “Thanks to the Stephens sisters, we have Mujuba Cetawayo!” The prince was lavished with gifts and favors. Even the Florida governor was taken with him, as I recall.
The only person who wasn’t charmed, however, was Mother. He offered me a sports car for my birthday, and I got on the telephone right away to ask Mother if I could accept it. “It’s this prince. He says he’s in love with me and he wants to give me a sports car for my birthday,” I told her, excitedly. Mother said, “Are you crazy?” It was unthinkable to her that a young lady would accept a gift like that, so I told the prince no. Soon afterward, the prince moved on. Later, we read about our famous visitor in Jet magazine: He was a complete fraud! He wasn’t a prince at all, just a Florida con man with an elementary-school education who had been traveling the region, accepting gifts and royal treatment as a “prince.” Even the white folks at the University of Miami had been falling over themselves to host him, we heard. Eventually, he was arrested for fraud.
Unfortunately, this was how the “Stephens sisters” first became known to Dr. Gore and most of the FAMU community. Still, our inauspicious beginnings couldn’t begin to foretell the impact we would soon have on the campus, the city, and even the nation as a whole. We went from being virtual children to inspired adults in a blink of an eye.
The summer of 1959 changed everything. The turning point was cloaked in normalcy, giving us no warning of what was to come.
Our biological father lived in Miami, and that year Priscilla and I spent part of our summer break living with him. While Priscilla and I did not know Daddy well and certainly did not have much of a relationship with him, Mother encouraged us to spend time with him. What I remember most about Daddy is that he was strict, strict, strict. He also had beautiful, thick, prematurely gray hair as long as I’d known him, and the contrast against his very dark skin was always striking. His nickname in Gadsden County was “Snow.” Naturally, we were not allowed to have male visitors, and we lived with a very early curfew. Being typical young people, we tried to find ways to circumvent Daddy’s authority. For example, he worked nights as a restaurateur and cook, and often he wouldn’t return until early dawn—so Priscilla and I stayed out late and snuck over to the “colored only” beach, Virginia Key Beach, where there was a basketball court and a jukebox for evening dances. I loved dancing! I loved all the old favorites, like “Dance with Me” by The Drifters, “Don’t Let Go” by Roy Hamilton, and “Please, Please, Please” by James Brown. Priscilla and I stayed out all hours, sometimes not getting home until three or four in the morning, always rushing to get in bed before Daddy got home from work.
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 Mason-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.
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
Yet more than a year after the boycott’s end, Negroes were still riding in the back of the city buses in Tallahassee. Our CORE group decided to see what would happen to Negroes who tried to ride up front. We were somewhat surprised by what we found: None of the bus drivers or passengers bothered the Negro students when we sat at the front of the bus—except for funny looks, and we got plenty of those. While the desegregation order had held, our people were still segregating themselves. Most Negroes still rode at the back of the bus from fear or habit, or both. I guess no one wanted to be the only Negro sitting at the front of the bus because a shyness, a subservience, was so branded into us. Thinking back on it, that was a sad state of affairs, but at least Tallahassee CORE had conducted its first official activity.
To be truthful, we had hoped to have more of an impact.
Be careful what you wish for.
I’m still amazed all these years later how the actions of a very few people can have such wide-ranging repercussions. Rosa Parks, Wilhelmina Jakes, and Carrie Patterson were ordinary people who refused to give up their seats on the bus. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his voice to a newborn Movement. And in 1960, the entire South was ignited by the actions of four college freshmen in Greensboro, North Carolina: North Carolina A&T College students Ezell Blair Jr., Franklin McCain, Joseph McNeil, and David Richmond.
At 4:30 P.M. on February 1, 1960, those four neatly dressed boys sat at a lunch counter at a Greensboro Woolworth. They were told they could not be served unless they moved over to the stand-up counter reserved for Negroes, but they wouldn’t. A Negro woman who worked at the restaurant became exasperated and reportedly told them, “You’re acting stupid, ignorant. That’s why we can’t get anywhere today. You know you’re supposed to eat at the other end.”9 Eventually, the store closed without further incident. About fifteen minutes after closing time, the boys left, saying they would return the next day with other students from their school. And they did. The Greensboro sit-in—the action of four boys—stoked a fever that raced through other Southern cities in the days, weeks, and months to come. The student sit-in movement had begun.
I heard about the Greensboro sit-in through the CORE grapevine, and I was very excited! Marvin Rich, who was the public relations person for CORE, sent out press releases describing the situation in Greensboro, encouraging all CORE groups around the country to focus on picketing Woolworth to pressure them to change their policies in the South. We had a Woolworth right in Tallahassee, which also did not serve Negroes at the lunch counter, and we felt we could give these students support by sitting-in, too. After our CORE group had spent several months simply documenting discrimination policies throughout Tallahassee, this sounded like exactly the sort of nonviolent direction action we had trained for—and we were ready.
A regional “sympathy sit-in” day was scheduled for Saturday, February 13, and Tallahassee CORE took part.10 About ten of us—students from FAMU and two Negro high school students—dressed in neat school attire—carried our schoolbooks and calmly walked inside the Woolworth store on Monroe Street. In 1960, signs above the lunch counter at Woolworth advertised sundaes for a quarter and an entire roast turkey dinner for sixty-five cents. We sat at the cushioned, straight-back counter stools and asked for slices of cake. The surprised waitress refused, but we remained at the counter. The whites around us, realizing what was happening, soon began to disappear. One white man remained to eat his food—and the waitress thanked him for tolerating that day’s “indecency.” The entire time, we sat quietly and stoically on our stools, our heads in our books. One white onlooker congratulated FAMU student William Carpenter, telling him, “I think you’re doing a fine job. Just sit there.” Afterward, a young white hoodlum tried to bait Carpenter into an argument, but Carpenter wouldn’t respond. “I bet if I disjoint him, he’ll talk,” the hoodlum said. When Carpenter didn’t respond, the hoodlum moved on. For a time, it was quiet.
“What are you niggers doing in here?”
One voice ignited the next, and suddenly shoppers at the store who had gathered around us began to taunt us, making threats. “Ya’ll niggers want a whuppin’? You’re stinking this whole place up. You better get the hell out of here.” The waitress tried to ask the troublemakers to leave, saying, “You can see they aren’t here to start anything.”11
It’s a strange experience to incite such negative emotion through such a simple, peaceful act. The longer we sat there reading in silence, the more incensed the crowd around us became, calling us hateful names, chiefly “niggers.” The situation felt surreal. None of us could pay real attention to the words on our books’ pages. I even saw someone holding a small handgun—which was shocking—and no one said a word to him about putting the gun away, even inside a public store. Was he going to shoot at us? We had entered new, dangerous territory.
As the threats intensified, the store manager panicked and closed the counter. We stayed for a total of two hours. Curious reporters came to see what the excitement was about, and then we all left. Someone eventually called the police, but we were gone by then. That was our first sit-in. Although we didn’t realize it, the second would catapult us into national headlines.
Most of us were students, so we were careful to schedule protests around our classes. We decided we would go back on the following Saturday. We’d been lucky to avoid serious incident in our first sit-in, but we knew we couldn’t take that luck for granted.
Using our experience from the first sit-in, as well as the tactics I’d learned at the CORE workshop in Miami, Mr. Haley and I spoke to potential sit-in volunteers about how to react in the face of taunts or violence that might ensue in the next sit-in. We designated two white students from Florida State University to act as observers. They would be seated before our arrival, and they would have an important function: By remaining seated alongside the Negro students after we arrived, we hoped they would demonstrate through example that there was nothing earth-shattering about Negroes and whites sitting next to each other. They would also report what was said about us after we left. This is just one of the many ways interracial cooperation was so important to the Movement.
Finally, the day arrived: Saturday, February 20, 1960.
Seventeen of us—mostly FAMU students, with two high-school students and a local forty-three-year-old resident, Mary Ola Gaines—arrived at Woolworth at approximately 2:00 P.M. None of us knew Mrs. Gaines, who was the only legal-age adult in our group that day. She’d heard about the planned sit-in through the Inter-Civic Council and had decided to join us after work. I was very glad, and surprised, to see her arrive. Although two of the participants were local high school students, Mrs. Gaines’s arrival gave us even more legitimacy, since she was an established member of the Tallahassee community. A Georgia native, she had lived in Tallahassee since 1939 and worked for a white family as a housekeeper. She did not know anything about CORE, but she knew what she believed was right. “I was not afraid,” she told me thirty years later, when I finally had the chance to ask her why she had come that day. “I was doing something I thought would help.”12
Now, no one would be able to dismiss us as so-called “outside agitators.” I heard the waitress say, “Oh, Lord, here they come again.” We sat at the counter and ordered food, and the waitress seemed astonished. “Niggers eat in the back,” someone told us, referring to a counter in the rear. The other white patrons got out of the way, leaving only the sit-in participants and our two white observers.
In no time, it seemed, a large crowd grew behind us. Maybe they had been waiting for us this time. Again, we sat and tried to read our books while people shouted threats at us. I was trying to make my way through The Blue Book of Crime, a criminology book I’d borrowed from another student, and Barbara Broxton was reading How to Tell the Different Kind of Fingerprints, which would become quite ironic later. “I thought I smelled niggers,” someone called out. “You niggers sit in back!” someone else shouted angrily. We could feel the rage swelling behind us. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed a man holding a baseball bat. The hoodlums who gathered around us were mostly younger men with upturned shirt collars, many of them wearing their hair slicked back in the style of the day. The crowd had become very big, very fast. I felt someone tug sharply on my clothing, but I sat stoically, not moving. The hoodlums were trying to pull us from our stools, trying to provoke us, but every single one of us held ourselves in check. We sat and read, all the while knowing that no one was likely to step forward to stop it if we were attacked.
Tananarive might ask, “Do you remember your heart pounding, your hands shaking?” Honestly, the answer is no. I can’t speak for everyone there—and I know we all processed our fears in different ways—but I wasn’t aware of the normal symptoms of fright. I was simply resigned, as if my feeling was “What else can you do to hurt me? I have to be free.” That feeling was my bedrock.
About forty-five tense minutes went by, and after our two white observers decided to leave, the mayor of Tallahassee came into the store with other members of the city commission to ask us to leave. Some people might think, “Well, weren’t you young people impressed that the mayor himself made the request?” To me, the answer was no. As long as he led a city with segregated policies, he had not won my respect. Most of us remained, except six students who changed their minds and decided to go back to campus. That left eleven, including me and Priscilla, Mrs. Gaines, six other FAMU students, and high-school students Charles and Henry Steele, who were sons of local minister Rev. C. K. Steele, pastor of Bethel Missionary Baptist Church and a charter member of Tallahassee CORE.
Four or five police officers arrived at 3:30 P.M. The mayor also came back and tried to direct questions to me, but Priscilla was our designated spokesperson, so she was the only one who could address authorities. She calmly told them that we would not leave until we were served. So that was that: All eleven us were arrested for disturbing the peace by “engaging in riotous conduct.” Can you imagine? Simply for sitting at a lunch counter! We were walked a couple of blocks to the jail as a crowd of white Tallahassee residents watched us on the sidelines, applauding the police and making catcalls, but all of us held our heads up high. We may have been nervous, but though we had been raised as law-abiding citizens and had never been arrested, we certainly were not ashamed.
At the police station, we were fingerprinted and processed. The jail on Park Avenue in Tallahassee was in a building that had been a savings and loan, so the jail cell was nothing more than an old bank vault. In addition to the others I mentioned, there were several FAMU students: a brother and sister named John and Barbara Broxton, who were from South Florida; William Larkins, who was also from South Florida and was the incoming president of FAMU’s student government association; Angelina Nance, from Greenwood, South Carolina; Merritt Spaulding from Alabama; and Clement Carney from New Jersey. Once we were inside the police station, officers continued to taunt and try to intimidate us. After some time, we were permitted to notify persons in the community of what had happened, so we called Rev. C. K. Steele and Rev. Dan Speed. To avoid publicity, police tried to sneak us out the back door when we were bailed out, but reporters circled the building to meet us.13
Our bail was set at $500 per person, which was very expensive in the 1960s. I do not remember how we paid our bail. We couldn’t find any local attorneys willing to represent us, so CORE asked the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in Miami to provide attorneys. Tobias Simon and Howard Dixon, who were both white, defended us, and the NAACP also assigned a Negro attorney in Miami, Grattan “G. E.” Graves Jr. We were arraigned February 22, and we pleaded not guilty. Meanwhile, despite the fact that there was very little press coverage of the sit-ins in the Tallahassee Democrat (I think the editors intended to have a news blackout to keep word of our activities from spreading), both Negroes and whites in Tallahassee were growing more aware of what had happened. FAMU students voted not to go to classes so the entire student body could attend our March 3 trial. When word of that spread, our trial was postponed for two weeks.
Mother and Daddy Marion heard about what had happened even before we could call them, and we did our best to reassure Mother on the telephone that we would try to keep safe. But Daddy Marion wrote us a letter on February 21 that conveyed not only his fears as a parent, but his cynicism about the potential success of the blossoming civil rights movement:
I wonder if either of you has counted the cost. I know that you feel that you are doing a grand and noble thing, and looking at it from one point of view, you are making some headway.
Remember this, if either of you get into trouble, the very people you are trying to help would never lend you a hand.
The facts are really this: About 10% or 15% of our race are just about ready for what you are trying to accomplish; the other 85% or 90% don’t care, are not at all interested, and would do nothing to aid the cause. They had just as soon walk all over you and even curse you for trying to help him. The great majority of them don’t want help and wouldn’t know how to appreciate anything you will have to suffer to accomplish.
Yes, I know it looks big and you feel like you are doing something, but stop and take stock and put the matter in balance. Right now you stand chances of being expelled from school, as FAMU is a State School, run with State Funds, and dictated to from the State’s governing powers. This might lead to your not being able to get employment anywhere in the State, unless you have money enough to open your own business, but right now all of us are living day to day with no preparation for tomorrow—financially nor for business. This thing could even come to the point of me losing my job—I do work for the County and State, you know—and I am too old to look for any type job now, nor would anyone employ me at my age. You may come out all right, but on the other hand you stand a great deal to lose and nothing to gain but short-lived satisfaction.
The thing both of you should consider is to get through College, or get an education, make a place in life for yourself where you can be self-sustaining. You have this great opportunity now, so take advantage of it. Stop leaving too much to chance.
I know both of you are going to do what you want to do. I think I know you that well. All I can say is to weigh the matter, consider all that might be affected, and then do what you are going to do. I know neither of you think Daddy Marion has any sense, but he has lived in this world a long time and what you are now doing is nothing new to him.
Love,
Daddy Marion
Daddy Marion’s conservatism was a bit of a surprise to us, considering how much he had influenced our thinking in terms of the rights and responsibilities of citizens, but he was a parent first. No one wants his children to be on the front lines. No one wants his own family to suffer. As much as it hurt us to realize that even the parents who had shaped our views were pessimistic at the time, we knew we had to press on. There was too much work left to do.
Robert Armstrong, a white Florida State University student, was arrested at a sit-in at McCrory’s on March 5 that received prominent coverage in the Democrat,14 and there were reportedly more than 200 people at the next Tallahassee CORE meeting, including many more whites who, I suppose, were beginning to realize that they could not be free, either, if all of us were not free. I was not in Tallahassee that day because several of us, including Priscilla and FAMU students, Merritt Spaulding and Charles Wilkerson, had driven to New York, where we participated in a press conference at the headquarters of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters on West 125th Street. Seven other Southern Negro students were with us, and we were all there to bring attention to the student sit-in movement. By then, about 200 Negro students in thirty-eight cities had been arrested in demonstrations in the South. Later that day, hundreds of demonstrators in Harlem picketed the Woolworth on 125th Street.15
My attention was still focused on Tallahassee, and soon I was back. With momentum building, the seeds for CORE’s largest Tallahassee sit-ins were sown. After failed negotiations with the management of both Woolworth and McCrory’s, we decided to stage sit-ins at both counters on March 12, a day that would be scalded into my memory for the rest of my life.
By March 12, the growing fervor on the FAMU campus was a far cry from the quiet, early days when we struggled to encourage thirty people to attend a meeting. Students were angry that other students had actually been arrested for simply trying to order food, and since negotiations with the store managers had failed, dozens had volunteered to take part in the sit-ins scheduled that day. (Those of us who were already facing charges decided not to subject ourselves to further arrest, at least for a while.) I did not fault those students who felt, for whatever reason, that they could not take part; I had a good friend, for example, who told me he couldn’t be a demonstrator because he might not be able to adhere to our philosophy of nonviolence, and he didn’t want to damage our efforts. Others shied away because of fears for their personal safety, which I also understood. But the rest of us had to participate. That need was simply in our souls.
I witnessed twelve other FAMU and FSU students arrested that day at the Woolworth lunch counter and taken to jail. They were marched down the street in interracial pairs, escorted by police on all sides, with police and onlookers branding the whites as “nigger lovers.” “Hold hands with your nigger buddies you love so much,” police taunted white FSU student Oscar “Bob” Brock.16 A photographer captured the image of Brock walking alongside George Carter, a Negro student from FAMU. The solidarity between whites and Negroes was a very striking sight, but it was painful to see so many other young people’s lives being disrupted for so simple an act. We had to try to show the powers that be that we would not be intimidated by arrest, or our cause would be lost. On FAMU’s campus, our CORE group dispatched fifty more students to take over for those arrested at Woolworth, and fifty to sit-in at the lunch counter with white students at McCrory’s. In accordance with CORE protocol, we also tried desperately to reach city authorities to negotiate a way to end the arrests and protests. No one would talk to us.
The students sent to McCrory’s were arrested as soon as they arrived. At Woolworth, the president of the White Citizens Council (which, as far as I’m concerned, was a racist group no different from the Ku Klux Klan), Homer Barrs, was leading a mob of armed whites who had assembled to prevent more students from entering the store. The students had been stopped in their tracks, so they stood and shouted, “No violence! No violence! No violence!” Their voices rang against the other downtown storefronts, but all the while the specter of violence was gazing into their faces. The police officers on the scene refused to do anything about the knives, baseball bats, and axe handles being brandished by the angry whites. It looked like a recipe for a free-for-all.
We went back to campus to inform the students about what was going on. We got the word out to everyone who would listen and made placards in support of our arrested students: NO VIOLENCE. WE WILL NOT FIGHT MOBS. WE ARE AMERICANS, TOO. GIVE US BACK OUR STUDENTS. Standing on the steps between the stately columns of Jackson Davis Hall on FAMU’s campus, I bared my heart and soul to my fellow students as I described the arrest of our classmates, and the students responded. Before long, our number had swelled to one thousand strong. With our placards painted and our spirits buoyed, we began a peaceful march, walking in pairs that stretched in a seemingly endless line.
I was proud of my fellow students. The feeling of impending change was so obvious on that day. With so many unified Negro students full of energy and determination, we could almost feel victory in the air. We were going to help bring about change. Finally, we were no longer going to sit and be intimidated. We began the two-mile walk from FAMU’s campus, intending to reach downtown.
We never made it.
In Tallahassee, as in many cities, the railroad tracks serve as the line dividing the white town from the colored town. Near the Tallahassee railroad tracks dozens of police officers were waiting for us, forming a barrier all along Adams and Monroe Streets. The very people we had tried to reach to negotiate with had, apparently, prepared instead for a different sort of confrontation.
The teargas bombs began to fly. Officials later maintained that we had a three-minute warning,17 but I remember no such warning. All I remember is that what had begun as a peaceful march turned to havoc.
I will never forget how one police officer, who apparently recognized me as one of the student leaders, stood directly in front of me and said, “I want you,” before lobbing a tear gas canister into my face, point-blank. The thick, bitter chemicals filled my eyes, nose, and mouth. I coughed and choked, flailing and blinded, as other students around me screamed and fled. For a terrifying instant, I could not breathe at all. My eyes were afire.
They say all of us meet a guardian angel sometime. Most times, we never know who it is. I certainly met my guardian angel that day. A man grabbed my arm and pressed a handkerchief against my burning eyes. He began to lead me. “Don’t touch your eyes. Don’t rub them, or you’ll just rub it in more. I was in the Army,” the man told me.
The world was all darkness, but I could hear screams, shouts, and the pounding of running feet around me. “I can’t see!” I told the stranger.
“I know. Your sight will come back. Just don’t rub. Give it time to wear off.”
With those reassuring words, he led me to a nearby church—I don’t even know which one—and sat me in one of the pews. To this day, I do not know who he was, but I truly hope he will read this book and make himself known to me. His kindness still means a great deal to me.
The inhumane event, captured on film by local Negro freelance photographer Steve Beasley, appeared in Ebony magazine. It was also recorded by Virginia Delavan, editor of FSU’s Florida Flambeau, who was later jailed herself for simply talking to Negroes involved in the protest.18 Most of the students involved had not been civil rights activists before that day. They had never been to a CORE workshop to learn to deal with harassment, or attacks, or violence. They had never made the inner vow that they would risk their lives in this battle. Even with all my training and resolve, I had not expected what happened that day. How could they?
All around me, as I sat blinded in that church, I heard my schoolmates straggling in, sobbing. Their clothes reeked of tear gas. Many were treated for burns and other injuries at the FAMU hospital, rescued from the scene by faculty members. Later, I heard reports that the police had actually blocked the path of students trying to run back toward the campus during the tear gas attack. Thirty-five demonstrators were arrested, although the police did nothing to punish the armed whites who began using violence against the students. Clearly, the Tallahassee authorities considered it their job only to protect the interests of segregationist whites, not the interest of peace. Our own nation, it seemed, was at war against us.
All I could do was keep that handkerchief pressed to my face and grit my teeth against the stinging of my watering eyes. Though more than forty years have passed since that tear gas incident, I have felt so much sensitivity to light ever since that I have to wear darkened glasses even in a movie theater. The condition has only worsened with age. It is rare that I will drive at night, because even streetlights bother me, but dark glasses make it nearly impossible to see at all. All these years later, just as I did in March 1960, I have been forced to keep my eyes covered.
But I didn’t know my future then. As I tried to recover in the church that day, I sat in silence with a pounding heart, feeling stunned, waiting until I could once again see the light.