“Tomorrow is now.”
—Eleanor Roosevelt
There was no time for rest once we got out of jail in 1960.
We were released on May 5 to a hero’s welcome among Tallahassee’s Negroes, who staged a rally in our support. “Jail was an opportunity for us,” I said to reporters as we were leaving the jail. “We had the time to think, to renew our faith in America and the power of nonviolence, to rededicate ourselves to the task of ending discrimination.”1
As William Larkins explained to a Jet magazine reporter less than two hours after he was free, “All of us felt we were doing the right thing. We had a feeling of righteousness which didn’t make us feel bad about going to jail. Some people—our parents—were very concerned, but staying in jail was the easiest thing for us to do. We didn’t mind being cut off from society for a principle. We just wanted to get out and participate in more sit-ins,” he said.2 Even John Broxton’s first haircut was considered newsworthy after our release, because the Pittsburgh Courier ran a photograph showing him sitting thoughtfully in a barber’s chair, sporting a moustache and goatee in addition to his ample head of hair. The bespectacled barber, a Tallahassee man named Parker Hollis, had formerly been convicted on charges stemming from the Tallahassee bus boycott in the late-1950s, so they were two brothers in our struggle.3
Much to our disappointment, however, our jailing had not brought about real changes in Tallahassee. The city’s lunch counters were still segregated, and Negroes were still second-class citizens. To further set back the clock, Gov. Collins’s term had ended, and C. Farris Bryant, a firm segregationist, was the new governor of Florida. None of the jailed students were technically students at FAMU any longer because we had missed forty-nine days of classes, so we had all been asked to withdraw from school and re-enroll for the fall term. We were also on university probation. CORE leaders and FAMU students had retreated from further direct action, deciding to concentrate on the boycott instead.
Around the nation, the civil rights movement was taking root, especially the student movement. In April, while we were in jail, several delegations of student leaders had met in Raleigh, North Carolina, and formed the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC. The group was an outgrowth of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, influenced by Nashville sit-in veterans such as Jim Lawson, a Vanderbilt Divinity School student and pacifist well-schooled in the philosophies of Gandhi, and Fisk University undergraduates Diane Nash and Marion Barry (who was elected SNCC’s first president).4 During this time, many students, myself included, believed that the court-oriented tactics of the older NAACP were not the entire answer; we needed more direct action. We were tired of waiting for change. And the Tallahassee students were ready to take our story to the nation.
Despite Mother’s earlier nervousness about the time we had spent in jail, she allowed me and Priscilla to take part in a national publicity tour scheduled by CORE to bring attention to what had happened in Tallahassee—but only if she could chaperone us. We went home to Belle Glade for only a few days of rest, then began a tour that lasted most of the summer.
“It’s like being in the oven and then going into the ice,” Priscilla later said, describing how it felt to travel throughout the North relating our story to sympathetic audiences. Instead of being “niggers,” we were now treated like young dignitaries from a backward, foreign place. And I suppose that was true, in some ways, since people outside the South seemed so uninformed. We were welcomed and celebrated.
Reading comments from other Tallahassee CORE activists in history books today, I now understand that there was some jealousy about the attention Priscilla and I got that summer, since we spent more time touring than the others. I think some observers may have misunderstood our enthusiasm during that tour, believing we’d been diverted by the so-called “glamorous” life in the public eye. I never saw it that way. I saw myself as a witness to injustice and a storyteller, trying hard to get the word out. I truly believed—as I believe today—that information is powerful and that events should be documented. That’s why I was able to tolerate such a hectic pace: Some days we had a breakfast speech in one state, a luncheon speech in another, and then an evening church meeting in a third. “What city is this?” I remember asking before a speech in Chicago. We never saw much of any of the cities except the airport and perhaps a hotel. Mother stayed with us a month, but then she couldn’t take the pace anymore, and we were on our own.
Originally, all of the jail-in participants were divided up, sent to different regions. Barbara Broxton went to Watertown, New York, where she made an emotional address to the annual meeting of Woolworth stockholders, including the company president, after leading a picket line outside of the building. “We will fight because we are right,” Barbara, in her prim dress, told the meeting. She was a striking presence. “I’ve been to jail, and I’m willing to go back if necessary.”5 Based on Barbara’s presence, several stockholders introduced a resolution supporting the desegregation of all Woolworth counters, both in the North and South. (Apparently, Woolworth’s sales had already dropped 9 percent since the February sit-ins throughout the South).6 William Larkins went to the Midwest, appearing on Chicago television and addressing various civic groups.
Priscilla and I went to Chicago, Washington, D.C., St. Louis, Philadelphia, New York, Ann Arbor, and probably a dozen or more other cities during our tour, garnering much needed press coverage almost wherever we went. We weren’t only telling our story to the people who actually came to see us speak—which, in most cases, was preaching to the choir—but countless others who read about our appearances in newspapers. “We might be expelled from school and we might not be able to find jobs in Florida, but they can’t stop us,” I told the Washington Post during one stop.7 Naturally, our appearances also served as a fund-raising mechanism for CORE, which was a cash-strapped organization struggling to find its own place among better-known civil rights organizations such as the NAACP and Dr. Martin Luther King’s SCLC. Despite their similar goals, we came to learn that these organizations had rivalries. At one point, a high SCLC official took me and Priscilla aside and told us that CORE was only using us and that we should join his organization instead. But Priscilla and I never got caught up in that kind of thinking. We wanted to be effective, period, and CORE had been the first organization to present a plan of action we believed would enable us to carry out our goals. In the years to follow, I would work with several other groups, including the SCLC, SNCC, and NAACP. Affiliation wasn’t nearly as important to me as commitment.
I will never forget several moments during that publicity tour, especially the warmth and interest of the people we came in contact with. We spoke in Harlem at the great Rev. Adam Clayton Powell’s Abyssinian Baptist Church, the oldest Negro Baptist church in New York City, and Rev. Powell gave us scholarships to help us defray school costs. We had the pleasure of taking part in programs with Ezell Blair Jr., the very polite young man who had been one of the original Greensboro sit-in participants. I met John H. Johnson, the president of the Newspaper Publishers Association (and the publisher of Ebony magazine) when I addressed the publishers’ banquet in Chicago. I met a New York attorney, Jeff Greenup, who helped present a $1,000 check on behalf of the social action committee of Grace Congregational Church; I could not know it then, but Attorney Greenup would come to Florida to volunteer his legal expertise and represent arrested activists in years to come. We were invited to a reception hosted by Harry Belafonte at his New York City apartment; I was told Belafonte had once been denied the opportunity to rent an apartment in the building because of his interracial marriage, so he had bought the building instead. At that party, I met the writer James Baldwin, who was very quiet and unimposing. A. Philip Randolph, the great labor organizer, was also there. I have never been one to feel starstruck after meeting celebrities, but I was very proud to see how involved they were. We had a unifying cause.
On June 20, we attended a fund-raising luncheon hosted by Eleanor Roosevelt at the Plaza Hotel in New York; Mrs. Roosevelt had sent out a letter encouraging patrons to attend by describing our jail-in: Such courage deserves our admiration and respect, she wrote. More than that, it gives every one of us confidence in the future of our country. Her example tells us that nothing will stop the winning of full equality for all our citizens so long as girls like Patricia are prepared to make such a sacrifice.8 The former First Lady was elegant and very friendly toward us. Priscilla and I appeared at the luncheon with a white Florida State University student, Robert Armstrong, and the three of us reenacted the sit-in and the ridiculous trial, playing different characters such as hecklers, judge, and prosecutor. As always, our audience was very surprised to hear how freely the word “nigger” had been used during a legal proceeding. Daisy Bates, who had coordinated the integration of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, and Jackie Robinson also attended that luncheon. I’m certain a lot of money was raised that day. I remember people asking me at that luncheon, “My goodness, aren’t you nervous?” I kept saying, “Oh, no, I’m not nervous,” but sure enough, I suffered an upset stomach and ended up in the bathroom.
That was a whirlwind summer, and it was very trying. I’m grateful to this day for a young man named Phaon Goldman, who was on the executive committee of the District of Columbia branch of the NAACP and was charged with our care for the evening we were in Washington. He was one of the few people, at the time, who seemed to view us simply as people and not larger-than-life figures. He had a much needed party for the visiting activists and told us, “Let’s just pause for a while,” because he knew how tired we were. At the time, it meant a lot to us.
It also meant a lot to us that CORE awarded the five jail-in students, including me and Priscilla, its Gandhi Award. Presented by activist Rev. Wyatt Tee Walker at CORE’s annual convention in St. Louis on June 29, 1960, the award read, “The five leaders have borne abuse and contumely with restraint and dignity. They have maintained a spirit of goodwill and understanding. They have not swerved from the objective of equal rights for all.”9
But our work was far from over. Only a few months after my release from a jail cell in Leon County, I was on my way to jail again—this time in Miami.
In April, Miami’s biracial committee had brokered an agreement among major department stores and five-and-dimes—Woolworth, Kress, McCrory’s, Grant, Burdines, Richard’s, Jordan Marsh, and Sears Roebuck—to allow integrated seating at food counters. That group included Rev. Theodore Gibson, president of the Miami branch of the NAACP, Miami CORE Project Director Dr. John O. Brown, and Rev. Edward Graham, president of the Ministerial Alliance.10
But by the end of that summer, Miami was still far from integrated. When Priscilla and I returned to Miami for CORE’s Interracial Action Institute, we were no longer curious young newcomers but tested veterans. The three-week workshop met in August, again at the Sir John Hotel, and although most of us there were college students, participants were as young as seventeen and as old as seventy-five. Even my younger brother, Walter, attended the workshop, encouraged by his big sisters’ example. That workshop really opened his eyes, he told me later.
The first phase of the institute was the testing of lunch counters. We tested forty eating places and were served in only twenty-three.11 One place that steadfastly refused to serve Negroes in its dining room despite a high number of Negro patrons was Shell’s City Supermarket, billed as the “World’s Largest Supermarket.” It was right on Seventh Avenue in Liberty City, in the heart of one of Miami’s ironically named Negro neighborhoods, so it became a focal point for picketing and sit-in demonstrations. Priscilla and I, of course, were eager to take part in more demonstrations, but I remember that I did not want Walter to participate with us because I thought he would be too protective of us, which might lead to a confrontation.
Priscilla and I were among eighteen demonstrators who sat-in at Shell’s City on a Wednesday afternoon, August 17, and waited for service. When our interracial group first sat down, the manager said, “Can’t you see the waitresses are busy?” A half hour passed with no service, and then the police came. We were all escorted out of the restaurant, our names and addresses were recorded, and we were informed that we had been placed under arrest.
I honestly don’t remember how much time we spent in jail in Miami. The CORE newsletter listed our trial date as August 26, so if we stayed in jail until then, we spent nearly ten days there. However, in 1963 I told a St. Petersburg Times reporter that I had spent five days in jail before the trial. Either way, Priscilla and I were once again in a jail cell for trying to be served food just like any other paying customer. I’m sure Mother was worried again about us, but our second jailing was not nearly as surprising as the first for her. She understood our dedication much better by then. In fact, I remember her telling me how irritated she was that she had a friend who continued to buy her liquor from Shell’s City despite our arrest there.
At our trial, the judge told me and Priscilla that we were on probation for one year, and as long as we didn’t get into any more trouble, the arrest would not remain on our records. I’m sure I was thinking, Well, as long as discrimination exists in Florida, I’m sure this won’t be the last time I get in trouble. But I didn’t say so then.
Days after the trial, at the Interracial Action Institute, I had the opportunity to meet Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who came to give talks during the August 31 and September 1 sessions.12 Dr. King was a slender, unassuming man dressed in a casual white short-sleeved shirt and dark slacks. While he spoke with great assuredness, we were told he had a cold, and consequently he was not able to attend all of the workshop sessions. The most lasting impression he made on me after my first encounter with him was that he seemed very tired, as I am sure he was.
Priscilla recalls another incident involving Dr. King some time later, when she was attending a gathering of activists in Pennsylvania. “I went to Mahalia Jackson’s room and Dr. King was lying on the sofa sleeping. She said, ‘Don’t wake him.’ She called him ‘Black Jesus,’ or ‘Black Moses’ or something. I remember how they would put him on a pedestal,” she told me. To her, it seemed strange, because she was accustomed to relating to Dr. King as a person, a fellow soldier—yes, I had Dr. King’s personal telephone number in those days, and I called him from time to time when I was in Atlanta—and the way others treated him bothered us. Priscilla was very aware of the idea that if she was not careful, the adulation of others might change her idea of who she believed she was. She did not want to lose sight of her goals, and we certainly never did anything because we hoped to see ourselves in the newspapers or so that people would treat us differently.
Priscilla also had lunch once in Atlanta with Dr. King and drew on her experience during our speaking tour to ask him how he coped with so much attention. “When we were first released from jail, they put us on a pedestal,” she told him. “How do you handle it, because you have it a thousand times more than I do—about how you’re so great and so wonderful, blah blah blah?” He thought and told her, “I do not know the answer to that. That is a very difficult thing.”13
Walter, too, remembers an encounter with Dr. King not long after the 1960 workshop. At the time, Walter was enrolled at Morehouse College. “I was in the library one day and I met him. I reminded him I had met him previously, and my sisters were Pat and Priscilla Stephens. And he said, ‘Oh, yeah, I know them!’ I’ll never forget how he stopped to say he remembered. The fact that he would do that for me as a freshman at Morehouse was awesome,” Walter says.14
Walter took the lessons he’d learned in Miami to heart. He got involved with SNCC, participating in sit-ins and demonstrations in Atlanta. Although he was never arrested, he had embarked on a lifetime of community service in his own way. Forty years later, Walter would take thirty young black men from Boy Scout Troop #141, a troop he calls the “Buffalo Soldiers,” on an unforgettable trip to Ghana.
In our family, activism was contagious.
FAMU President George W. Gore Jr. was “constantly” under external pressure to “expel all students and terminate any faculty members who were actively involved in the sit-in demonstration,” according to Dr. Leedell W. Neyland, who wrote a book about FAMU at its centennial.15 Dr. Gore and the rest of FAMU’s faculty were Negroes, but they were expected to follow rules set by the state’s white power structure. Still, despite resistance from Florida’s Board of Control—the body that governed the state’s colleges—Priscilla and I were permitted to register in the fall of 1960. We were officially college students again.
We received a wonderful boost of confidence from our fellow students. On November 20, 1960, Priscilla and I, John and Barbara Broxton, William Larkins, and FSU students Jefferson Poland, Richard Parker, and Robert Armstrong were awarded “Social Action Awards” from FAMU’s Phi Beta Sigma fraternity chapter during its Annual National Social Action Program at an on-campus Vespers service. The campus administration had resisted, but the students had insisted on giving us the award. That made us all very proud.
I was ready to throw myself into my studies, which had suffered so much at the end of the spring term. But based on my newfound activism, I made a very difficult decision: I changed my major from music to sociology, where I thought I could do more good. I had been a serious musician, and I missed it, though, as I do today. I never have gone back to music, and I still consider it a great personal loss.
During the summer, while the students were away, the FAMU community suffered another great loss: Richard Haley, a faculty member and one of Tallahassee CORE’s most ardent supporters, had lost his job. Haley’s dismissal came as a surprise to the student body, since the student congress had voted him FAMU’s Teacher of the Year only in May for “outstanding leadership of civil rights … and for general interest in the student as a citizen of the university community and his surrounding society”16—only a week before he was let go. Even the student activists had no true idea what had been going on behind the scenes with FAMU’s staff, but Daisy Young and Richard Haley, who had become fast friends as well as CORE activists, were in the thick of it. They knew they were targets.
Daisy Young worked in the FAMU registrar’s office, so she had seen Richard Haley turning in his grades over the years, but they had never gotten to know each other well until they were both drawn to CORE the previous fall. From the establishment viewpoint, the sit-ins, student teargassing, and jail-in had been an avalanche of bad publicity for FAMU and Florida. Although neither Miss Young nor Mr. Haley had participated directly in any of those events—except in assisting and observing—Dr. Gore was under pressure from the Board of Control to regain “control” of his campus. Gladys Harrington, a FAMU librarian, who was the secretary for the Inter-Civic Council and had been part of the Tallahassee bus boycott, eventually left Tallahassee because she felt the pressure from the FAMU administration, Miss Young recalled. (Harrington rose to prominence in CORE after she left Tallahassee, becoming chairman of New York CORE and the Northeast Regional Representative.)17
A spy from the university would drive past Miss Young’s home to take note of who was leaving and arriving. License plate numbers of the cars parked outside mass meetings were routinely recorded. Miss Young once left an Inter-Civic Council mass meeting only to find a representative of the Board of Control actually standing outside to see for himself who was leaving, and she remembers one big-talking FAMU faculty member in particular who never attended another meeting after that night.
Miss Young says Dr. Gore called a meeting of everyone on the university’s payroll at eight o’clock one Sunday night—the exact time the Inter-Civic Council held its mass meetings. Everyone convened in the Lee Hall auditorium, she says, filling it to capacity. After making a series of minor university announcements, Dr. Gore said the words Miss Young believed had been his reason for convening the meeting all along: “You know, we are like a ship. And I would advise everybody that’s on the ship, if you want to stay on this ship, you stay on this ship. If you get off the ship, you may not be able to get back on. Because the times we are living in, the times are just not right to be doing some of the things some of you are doing. So, since you’re on the ship, I advise you to stay on the ship.”18
Miss Young interpreted his words as a direct threat, and she says it worked on a lot of faculty members who might have been considering more involvement. But not her. “That night, a whole group of us went right on to the mass meeting. As soon as the doors opened and he let us out, we went right on the way.”
Miss Young remembers when the storm clouds arrived. It was her day off, shortly before the end of the 1959–60 school term, and she received a phone call from her boss. That day, she was busy at a task at the Inter-Civic Council office beside Rev. Dan Speed’s grocery store. “I don’t know what we were working on, but we were always working on something. And I got this telephone call, and it was [the registrar] Mr. Thorpe. And I said, ‘Inter-Civic Council office.’ And he said, ‘Oh, Miss Young, don’t say that.’ He recognized my voice. ‘Don’t say that. Just answer the telephone. Don’t give your name out.’ And I said, ‘What is it, Mr. Thorpe?’
“And I don’t know, but I felt something. You know how you feel different? He said, ‘I need to talk with you. Get here as soon as you can. I need to talk to you,’ ” she recalls. Dressed casually in jeans with a cap pulled over her head, she walked to the campus. When she got there, her boss had a warning for her: “You know, you’re number one on the list. Mr. Haley is number two. Someone from the Board of Control has called Dr. Gore and wanted to know how in the world could we people be out protesting when we had full-time jobs.”
Miss Young says that they weren’t protesting—and even if they had been, what they did in their free time was their own business—but she wasn’t surprised at the summons. After the large-scale arrests in Tallahassee on March 12, she and Mr. Haley had discussed the possible repercussions to them. Mr. Haley had told her and Gordon Carey, of national CORE, that he wasn’t concerned about himself, but he was concerned about her because she had family and deeper ties in the community. Miss Young told him, “The Lord will take care of me. Don’t you worry about me, now.” They even laughed about it, she recalled.
Soon after the school term ended, Mr. Haley told her again how concerned he was about her. She again assured him she would be fine. That same day, he got the notice of his dismissal in the mail. “What Dr. Gore did, he waited until school was out,” Miss Young said.
Of course, the dismissal mentioned nothing about Mr. Haley’s civil rights activities, and some observers attributed it to personality conflicts and other problems. When even the American Association of University Professors weighed in to question why Mr. Haley’s contract had not been renewed, Dr. Gore explained that it simply was “in keeping with the university policy dealing with non-tenured members of the instructional staff.”19
After he was dismissed, Mr. Haley released an angry statement through Tallahassee CORE: “I have been employed at Florida A&M University for five years, and have maintained the most amicable relations with my department head. It’s obvious that my work with CORE is the bone of contention. This is an arbitrary, unwarranted invasion of my personal freedom, and a clear threat to any other teacher—whether employed by public or private agency.”20
Miss Young continued to hear warnings, too, both from her immediate boss and from other staff members who felt free enough to talk to her; all of whom said that if she didn’t stop her activities, Dr. Gore would fire her. When I interviewed Miss Young in 1993 at her home on Pinellas Street in Tallahassee, her lively manner changed and her voice grew reflective as she recalled how harassed she felt. “Pat, it got so bad, nobody knew how the pressure did hurt me. It really did hurt me,” she said.
And she wasn’t afraid to speak her mind even back in the 1960s. As she once told her boss in the registrar’s office, “Everything I do is after five o’clock. Now, if I’m not free to use my own time, then I know I need to stop fighting crackers and start fighting niggers.” She told him she was never late to work, that she was up at 6:00 each morning even if she’d just gone to bed at 5:00 A.M. Much to her boss’s horror, Miss Young made an appointment to talk to Dr. Gore. During the meeting with the university’s president, she said, Dr. Gore was nervous, pacing his office, and he denied that he had been sending her any messages. After that, the warnings stopped, but Miss Young didn’t receive any of her expected pay raises for two years, and she believes it was because of her civil rights involvement. To my mind, people like Mr. Haley and Miss Young, who were willing to sacrifice their livelihoods for their belief in the Movement, are every bit as heroic as anyone who faced physical harm. Without them, those of us on the front lines would surely have languished.
Although Mr. Haley remained active with national CORE and lived in Tallahassee, on and off, after his dismissal, our CORE chapter’s morale was a little low at the start of the new school year. Clearly, we were fighting an uphill battle in Tallahassee. The city’s lunch counters were still firmly segregated in the fall of 1960. By contrast, lunch counters had been integrated by July in Greensboro, the city that had sparked the national sit-in movement. Ninety cities in eleven Southern states were reporting changes as a result of the sit-ins, including North Carolina, Texas, Virginia, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Florida.21 Change was visible in Miami, but in Tallahassee it was slow, slow, slow. It was such a great effort to push against the status quo, and we had to spend half our time fighting the white establishment and the other half, it seemed, fighting our own.
Despite our frustration, CORE did keep pushing for changes. On Tuesday, December 6, CORE organized a small, specially selected group of Negro students to picket Woolworth on Monroe Street, myself and Priscilla included. To prevent problems on the scale of what we’d experienced earlier in the year, William Larkins, president of the FAMU student body and one of our fellow jail-in students, passed out leaflets at FAMU discouraging other students from going downtown and to avoid violence or arrest. Those of us picketing were peaceful, of course, but during our three days on the line, white hoodlums shouted at and pushed us while police stood by and did nothing. In fact, according to the newsletter published in her home by Lorraine Calhoun—a white woman in Port Orange, Florida—to keep civil rights activists informed of developments around the state, an observer reported “flagrant fraternization and camaraderie between the police and the hoodlum element.”22 By the third day, the hoodlums felt bold enough to simply grab our signs and tear them up, but we continued picketing anyway.
At school, pressure was growing. On the morning our picketing began, I was summoned out of class to Dr. Gore’s office. I expected him to lecture me about my involvement, but when I got there, much to my surprise, two no-nonsense white men in suits were waiting there for me. The men identified themselves as FBI agents and said they had questions for me. One of them tried to convince me that he was trustworthy by telling me that he wasn’t from the South, that he was from Detroit. Then they proceeded to grill me about what activities our CORE group was planning. (This was only the first of many times I would find that I was once again being summoned to Dr. Gore’s office to be questioned by the FBI.) I still have a souvenir from that day: the December 6 letter on FAMU stationery from Dr. Gore asking a professor to excuse me for being late that morning. She was detained by me, he wrote. But he didn’t say why.
During that school term, I could feel that I wasn’t at my best. Something was wrong. I often found myself rushing to the bathroom because my stomach was upset, and I had a bald patch on my head the size of a half dollar. A dermatologist told me it was caused by stress. Two weeks before the school term ended, I woke up and felt as if I couldn’t think or move or speak. I’d had enough. “What do you mean you’re going home?” Priscilla said, shocked. “Pat, you only have two weeks left! You can last two weeks.”
I knew myself then as well as I know myself now. I could not go on. After nearly two months in jail and more months traveling to repeat the tale, I was emotionally spent.
I withdrew from school, feeling I had no choice but to waste all the effort I had put into my classes if I wanted to save my sanity. I packed my bags and went home. I needed to be with my mother.