Where is the Jim Crow section
On this merry-go-round,
Mister, ’cause I want to ride?
Down South where I come from
White and colored
Can’t sit side by side.
Down South on the train
There’s a Jim Crow car.
On the bus we’re put in back—
But there ain’t no back
To a merry-go-round!
Where’s the horse
For a kid that’s black?
—Langstom Hughes
“Merry Go Round”
I left FAMU’s campus and went back to Fort Myers to be with Mother in early 1961, and there was more stress waiting for me because she and Mr. Sears, her new husband, were already having problems. Mr. Sears was a very respected businessman in the local community and shared Mother’s belief in the importance of civic involvement, but they also had serious conflicts, and I was not happy with her new situation. I felt that Mr. Sears was an intruder in Mother’s life, and in turn in mine, especially since she had left Daddy Marion for him. After staying with them for a short time and seeing how often they argued, I resented their marriage even more. Mother had sacrificed a great deal to raise her children, and I wanted her to be happy in her own life now that we were adults. But one thing I appreciated was the way Mother talked to me like a confidante instead of a daughter while I was there, and our relationship began to shift into the cherished friendship it would remain for the next forty years, until she died. Despite Mother’s anxious state regarding Mr. Sears, I enjoyed being with her, away from school and the civil rights movement.
My respite from Tallahassee didn’t last long. One day in March, I got a call from Priscilla, who had taken the lead of Tallahassee CORE. During that time, for whatever reason, Tallahassee CORE’s membership had become more limited to students, with less input from the adults in the community. “Pat,” my sister said in her breathless, enthusiastic way, “you just have to come back here. We need you for demonstrations.”
I flatly told her no. “I need a break from all that,” I said.
“But we need you!” she said. Because she was my sister, Priscilla probably was the only person who could have persuaded me to come, and that did take some persuading. Finally, I agreed to go back to the battlefront.
I arrived in Tallahassee expecting to find Priscilla ready to direct me, but she was nowhere to be found. She had a class she didn’t want to miss, which annoyed me, but I learned there were to be lunch counter demonstrations at Sears & Roebuck, McCrory’s, and Neisner’s. Only five of us had volunteered to take part. This was a far cry from the days when we’d had dozens of protesters, but we decided to press on. On March 4, our small group visited the stores one by one. We arrived at McCrory’s at 11:45 A.M., and after we sat down we were asked to leave, which we did in an orderly way. At Sears, the management had a much more hostile attitude to our presence; instead of asking us to leave the snack bar, management emptied it by sending both employees and diners away, then they locked us inside—but not before turning up the heat as high as they could. It was March, which is technically winter, but Tallahassee’s weather is mild, so it wasn’t long before all of us felt like we were suffocating in that stifling heat. We were trapped inside for nearly three hours, until police finally brought us out at about 3:00 P.M. We were held for a time, but we were not arrested and were soon released.
That left one more store: Neisner’s. By then it was late in the day, and the only other student remaining with me was a FAMU political science major named Benjamin Cowins, a thin, energetic young man in black-rimmed eyeglasses who had grown up in a Negro neighborhood in Miami known as Bunche Park. Ben had first come to the campus in the wake of the FAMU student’s rape in the late 1950s, so he had become politicized right away. At his home neighborhood in Miami, he recalls, he had everything he needed at his fingertips: a movie theater, a shopping center, everything. There was no need to venture into white neighborhoods to be subjected to the insult of a WHITE ONLY sign, so he’d been very sheltered, except he’d noticed how his grandmother corrected anyone, Negro or white, who tried to call her “girl.”
Tallahassee was different, he says. Negroes had to patronize the white downtown area because Frenchtown, the hub of Negro life in Tallahassee, did not offer nearly the same range of goods and services. Also, he says, because he studied political science, he was that much more aware of the unconstitutional oppressiveness of Jim Crow. “Those of us who had the strength, who had the guts, simply volunteered to become a part of all of that,” he says, although he admits he’d “probably think twice today, because I remember being in churches at CORE meetings and at CORE functions when white folks were riding around the church. I recall being downtown participating in sit-ins when there were whites standing around with sticks and with guns and rifles, you know, on their trucks, in their cars, and we were just nonviolent. We had been taught to be nonviolent.”1
At the time, he recalls, he was particularly annoyed with the Negro student athletes who had so much power to raise excitement on the football field and other sports venues, but who refused to get involved with civil rights activities. Their coach discouraged it, he says. And it really irritated him that women were so enamored of those athletes. “I didn’t think very much of the kind of relationships they had with some of those guys who would not even come down and stand around to provide somewhat of a protective atmosphere,” says Cowins, who is today an educator with a doctorate who still lives in Miami. “The young ladies who were participating in the demonstrations at that time sometimes would be spat upon, sometimes would be pushed, sometimes would be hit by the hecklers who were always there. And I felt that the least those guys could do was come and observe.”
That Saturday in Tallahassee, Ben and I were alone, without the protection of athletes or anyone else, as we walked into Neisner’s for the last attempt of the day. The lunch counter was empty, and we sat down to be served. I’m sure we were wondering what was in store for us next, and we didn’t have to wait long to find out. Just like in the earliest sit-ins at Woolworth, a crowd began to gather. “What are you niggers doing in here?” whites shouted at us, mostly young men. “Niggers can’t eat here!”
Two police officers arrived quickly and stood behind us for a while, but they left. Ben and I decided to leave, too. Suddenly the hecklers, who had been tugging on our clothing, got more violent, probably because the police had already come and gone. Hands grabbed at us and pulled us from the stools. One man challenged Ben to a fight, and he was thrown roughly to the ground by two men, who began punching him, knocking off his glasses. Ben, of course, had been through CORE’s workshop on nonviolence, but apparently he’d succumbed to his anger and self-protective instincts, because he began punching back in the face of the uneven attack. The police returned and stopped the fight right away.
Ben was arrested for fighting. I was arrested because there was a broken glass at the scene of the skirmish and I was “in a position to have thrown a glass,” a charge that was pure fabrication. A very large crowd, perhaps 200 people, had gathered outside of Neisner’s by then, and they all jeered at me and Ben as we were led away by the police. Apparently, one of the white assailants and his two sisters also attacked one of the police officers.2 I know of no whites who were arrested, however.
Once again, I would spend the night in jail. Since I hadn’t eaten in several hours, I called John Due right away and asked him to bring me a sandwich. “Patricia, what are you doing here? I didn’t even know you were in town,” he said, and I told him what had happened. He was concerned I was in jail, but he sounded happy to hear from me.
On the men’s side of the jail, Ben says he was determined not to be locked up even overnight. “I remember stating to a jailer or policeman that I thought I had glass in my eye, and I was elated because I thought I would be taken to the doctor and I would get out of jail that night,” he says. “The policeman took me out back to a water fountain and said, ‘Nigger, wash your eye.’ Then I went back to jail.”3
Ben was arrested on a Saturday and apparently spent three days in jail. The entire time, he was still wearing the neat suit he had worn during the demonstration. On Monday morning, he says, he was rounded up with the other Negro prisoners and led to a truck to be taken to the rock quarry to work. “I was not going to participate in any foolishness like that, carrying rocks or busting rocks, and this made the driver very, very angry,” Cowins says. “He had a lot of things to say to me about what he was going to do to me if I did not participate. He [said] was going to beat me upside the head with a stick. Anyway, he ended up having to drive me back to jail, and he didn’t like that. But he took me back to jail, and I’m almost sure I was placed in a very, very small cell, in isolation. But I was not about to get my suit dirty on that particular day.” He spent only about a day in that isolation cell before his court date.
In court, Ben and I were found guilty of disorderly conduct and fighting. Because of my previous record, I suppose, I was sentenced to 120 days in jail, while Ben was sentenced to thirty. We both stayed out of jail on appeal, but in October the court upheld Ben’s conviction. (Mine was thrown out for lack of evidence). Ben was ordered to begin serving his jail sentence, and he was immediately suspended from school.
Ben’s misfortune helped galvanize Tallahassee’s Negro community again. Although he had been dismissed from FAMU’s faculty, Richard Haley continued to be active on behalf of Tallahassee CORE. Mr. Haley wrote letters complaining about Ben’s treatment to both FAMU President George W. Gore and the national CORE leadership. Eventually, Mr. Haley’s efforts resulted in an article about Ben in the St. Petersburg Times. On November 12, Rev. R. N. Gooden and St. Mary’s Primitive Baptist Church hosted a community-wide “Ben Cowins Day” to raise money for Ben’s expenses and court fines. Several organizations also joined their voices: CORE, the NAACP, the Inter-Civic Council, and a new organization called the Non-Partisan Voter’s Crusade sent an open letter rallying teachers to stop being called “gutless invertebrates” and join the Movement.4 Because so many middle-class Negroes were educators, their absence on the civil rights front was marked and critical.
Daisy Young and former professor Richard Haley were stalwart supporters, as was Dr. James Hudson, the college chaplain and a professor of philosophy. Make no mistake, we were visited and supported by FAMU faculty during our forty-nine days in jail, too.
For example, a FAMU physical education instructor and long-time family friend, Carrie “Tot” Meek, was one of our most faithful visitors with her mother, Mrs. Carrie Pittman. They often came to see how we were, bringing books and gifts. I also received a very kind letter from Anita P. Stewart, an instructor who assured us that we were in her prayers each night. Dr. William Howard, who taught a course on contemporary Africa, was very understanding when I had to miss classes because of my civil rights activities; Priscilla tells me that he also assured her she shouldn’t worry about the school time she missed during the 1960 jail-in. Dr. Howard recalls sending William Larkins schoolwork to help him keep up with his studies in 1960. Priscilla reminds me that art professor Herman Bailey was also very supportive. And sociology professor Victoria Warner was active in another interracial organization to which I belonged, the Tallahassee Committee, which was also dedicated to change.
Some FAMU faculty members seemed to resent our push for civil rights. Those professors went so far as to ridicule us in class, which was very painful. It was one thing to hear insults from outsiders, but from your own?
Ben Cowins remembers Professor Bonds, the political science department head, who told students involved in the demonstrations, “Whatever those white hecklers are doing to you out there, you deserve that and more.” Imagine! These students were risking their lives and safety in the demonstrations, and they had to hear that. Ben dreaded going to Professor Bonds’s class because of the verbal abuse he would suffer, but those classes were impossible to avoid because they were germane to Ben’s major.
Yes, Professor Bonds had a very sharp tongue. I know male students always rushed from the demonstrations to get to his classes because he seemed to delight in embarrassing the young men if they came in late. But when it came to me, Professor Bonds always said, “Good afternoon, Miss Stephens,” and that was the end of it. Meanwhile, if a male activist came in with me, Professor Bonds would roar at him, “And where have you been?” To this day, I’m puzzled by the disparity.
Sociological studies show that oppressed people will often take on the characteristics of their oppressors, a phenomenon evident in this country during the days of slavery, with Negro overseers behaving as badly as, or worse than, the white ones. I definitely believe some of that was at work during my days at Florida A&M, but as I’ve gotten older, I’ve also learned to appreciate that the Negroes in “authority” were in a very delicate position in the 1960s, because there was truly no such thing as Negroes in authority. They were beholden to the white power structure—the white power structure giveth, and the white power structure taketh away. In the course of researching this book and interviewing former students, I have heard surprising stories of generosity and support involving faculty members who did not seem supportive on the surface.
Ben Cowins told me one such story about FAMU’s director of student activities, a minister named Rev. Moses G. Miles, who had a reputation for being very conservative and trying to dissuade students from getting involved in the Movement. After Ben served his jail sentence, the university apparently began receiving telephone calls from the all-white Board of Control, inquiring whether or not Ben was still enrolled at FAMU, which he was. Then the word came down: Cowins must be suspended, the Board of Control said. Rev. Miles was the one who called Ben into his office, and he looked grieved. “The white folks have called to see if you’re in school, and you’re being suspended for the rest of the semester,” Rev. Miles told him. “I regret being the bearer of bad news, but I promise I will assist you in returning.”
When Ben was ready to return to classes for the new semester, Rev. Miles’s church congregation took up a collection. “They paid the tuition,” Cowins says.
Yes, it was frustrating to have to fight so many of your own. But it was also that much more gratifying when help came from unexpected places.
I remember sitting with John Due on the porch of Daisy Young’s house at 1314 Pinellas Street in Tallahassee, not long after my arrest with Ben Cowins at Neisner’s. Miss Young’s home had become a gathering place for student activists, a place to plan strategies, socialize, or simply rest. Miss Young was folksy and warmhearted, and she was also fiercely intelligent, with a sharp memory. I had met her when we first began organizing the Tallahassee CORE chapter, and we had become very close.
It was nearly summer, and I had decided I was not going to Mother’s house in Fort Myers because of the ongoing stress between her and her husband. I decided to attend summer classes at Howard University, so I accepted an invitation from good friends, Wendolyn Johnson and her husband, former FAMU professor Dr. Randy Johnson, to stay with them and their three children in the Washington, D.C., area. I was going to leave Tallahassee soon, and I was telling Black John all about my plans for the future with White John. Black John had already written me little notes about how he wasn’t the marrying type and how he wanted to dedicate his life to the freedom struggle, but I think I wanted him to try to stop me from leaving. I wanted a sign that he cared about me the way John B. did.
John Due was sitting on a chair on the porch, and I was sitting on his lap. “We’re moving to England for at least three years,” I told him. “John is going to be teaching there.”
“That’s great,” he said in a very dull tone. “It’s good to travel.”
“And John is such a planner, he’s already planning our entire family. He says he’d like to have two-and-a-half children. That’s how he puts it, you know. We’re both trying to imagine what they’ll be like.”
“Don’t go.”
The words came so suddenly, so unexpectedly, that I thought I had heard wrong at first. I gave him a very confused look. “Don’t go,” he said again, gazing into my eyes in a way he never had. He definitely did not look like we were just friends anymore. “We can make it here at school. We both have scholarship money. We could live in Polkinghorne Village together. Marry me, Patricia.”
Marry me, Patricia. Those were the words I’d secretly prayed to hear, so I’ll never know why I did what I did next. I guess I was just so shocked, and probably I was also feeling shy and embarrassed at such an unusual outpouring from John Due. I couldn’t make a sound for a moment. Then I laughed hysterically. I was mortified, but I couldn’t help myself.
To poor John, it was like a slap in the face. He stood up and dumped me out of his lap and went back into the house. For all I knew, I had just missed my chance to marry the man I thought I might really be in love with.
I stayed with the Johnsons and went to Howard University’s sociology department that summer, where I was awarded a scholarship to pay for my tuition and travel expenses. I was only a couple hours’ train ride away from John B., but somehow, with my shifting priorities and a new man in my life, John B. and I just drifted apart.
Summer at Howard was busy. I became involved with NAG, the Nonviolent Action Group, an affiliate of SNCC chaired by Marion Berry, who later became the mayor of Washington, D.C. NAG conducted sit-ins and demonstrations in the Washington area. It seemed like I was on a different picket line every day.
By fall, I needed a change. I had been offered a job in New York as a girls’ group worker for the Lower East Side Mission of Trinity Parish, so I decided to take that opportunity. The job called for a college degree, and although I had not yet graduated, I was hired based on my civil rights experience. As a group worker, I was part of a contingent that lobbied in Washington, D.C., for better benefits for the residents of the Lower East Side and New York City, but for the most part, my life was suddenly removed from the civil rights arena completely. Instead, I concentrated on the young people who were serviced by this large organization. The Lower East Side Mission of Trinity Parish was reportedly one of the richest church organizations in the country and had a huge staff serving the New York area. I also had a very busy social life, meeting young African dignitaries from emerging independent nations at the U.N. I swear, sometimes it seemed I had one date for breakfast, one for lunch, and one for dinner. During this time, I even considered going to Africa to serve in the Peace Corps.
Back in Tallahassee, the civil rights movement was still marching forward while I was away. White activist Jeff Poland, who’d been arrested during the 1960 sit-ins, returned to Tallahassee voluntarily to serve out his sentence in May 1961, after the U.S. Supreme Court appeal failed. (He had transferred to another college after his suspension from Florida State University.) In jail, Jeff staged a hunger strike lasting nearly a month to protest segregated lunch counters. Sixty-eight ministers, including Rev. Steele and Rev. Alexander Sherman, fasted on Fridays in sympathy and encouraged others in Tallahassee to do the same.5
Priscilla was still in Tallahassee, too, although she had graduated from FAMU. She became involved in CORE’s next phase of the civil rights struggle: the Freedom Rides. In the South, Negroes had to ride in the “colored” section at the back of the bus or in segregated train cars. In response to a December Supreme Court ruling, Boynton v. Virginia (which banned segregation during interstate travel in buses, trains, and terminal accommodations), CORE and other organizations launched an ambitious Freedom Ride throughout the South. White and Negro riders volunteered to ride buses and, if arrested, remain in jail rather than pay their bail. The Freedom Ride gained a great deal of publicity, but it also brought reprisals: The buses were often met by angry mobs, and a Greyhound bus riding toward Birmingham, Alabama, was set afire. On a Birmingham-bound Trailways bus, eight white men boarded the bus and beat two of the Freedom Riders with metal pipes. (James Peck, who later wrote the book Freedom Ride about his horrible experience, was knocked unconscious and needed fifty stitches as a result of his beating.) Other Freedom Riders were arrested and jailed, more than 360 by the end of the summer. Even the new CORE national director, James Farmer, was jailed in Mississippi.6
Tallahassee was one of the designated stops during the Freedom Rides, and a bus carrying ten participating ministers and rabbis rolled into town in June. The morning after their arrival, the Freedom Riders sat at the municipal airport restaurant to order food, but they were all arrested for “unlawful assembly.” Priscilla, Jeff Poland, and another Negro activist were waiting to greet them, and all three were arrested, too. Additionally, Priscilla was charged with interfering with a police officer and resisting arrest. Judge John Rudd, who had tried Priscilla before, gave her a mandatory five-day jail sentence and an additional thirty-day sentence stemming from a probation violation.7 (The clergymen were sentenced with fines of $500 apiece or sixty days in jail. Although they chose jail, when they came back to serve their terms in 1964 after losing their appeal, the clergymen were freed after only a few days in a surprise court action.) In November, when the Interstate Commerce Commission prohibited all segregation in travel terminals, Richard Haley came back to Tallahassee and worked with Priscilla, Ben Cowins, John Due, and Robert Armstrong from FSU to test how communities were complying.8
I was away while this was going on in Tallahassee, and I’m sure some of my fellow civil rights activists believed I had dropped out of the scene completely. But it wasn’t that simple. Sometimes when you’re a soldier—and I saw myself as such—you’re on the front lines all the time. You burn yourself out. Sometimes you’re so weary that you aren’t as effective as you could be, and you can be more effective if you just step aside for a little while. So that’s exactly what I did. During my year in New York, I never went to a CORE or NAACP meeting. I concentrated on my job, and in a way that was an extension of what I was trying to do, what I was fighting for. I wanted young people to have the opportunity to do things they had not done before. Those young people who lived on the Lower East Side had never even been to Carnegie Hall! It was only a couple of subway stops from where we were. So I made it my business to try to expose the young people—and I say “young people” even though some of them were almost as old as I was—to things they needed to be exposed to.
Sometimes civil rights includes those quieter battles, too.
By 1962, John Due was in Washington working as an intern for the U.S. Department of Labor, and I was ready to visit him to see if his feelings about me had changed since our disastrous night at Daisy Young’s house. Even though several young men had expressed interest in me at that time, I still felt unresolved. Once I got to Washington, John told me he was in love with someone else, and I said, “Okay, that’s fine. I just needed to know how you felt.” Although it wasn’t what I wanted to hear, I was relieved when I went back on the train. I had been dating a Nigerian physician on and off, and now I felt more free to open my heart to him.
I had met my Nigerian beau, a physician from Lagos, when I attended a party with Priscilla. Like many of the Africans we met, he was surprised to see American Negroes attending an African party—many Africans thought American Negroes were ignorant about them, that we had learned everything we knew about Africans from Tarzan movies. He was not very political, but he was proud of our involvement. During this time, many African nations were fighting for and gaining their independence from colonial rule, so they were happy to see American Negroes fighting for freedom, too. My Nigerian friend was a graduate of Harvard Medical School, and I enjoyed his company though I had not been dating him long.
A couple of weeks later, my telephone rang, and it was John Due telling me he was in New York and wanted to see me. We went out for spaghetti and meatballs at a little restaurant right near my apartment. John was in New York on his way to a friend’s wedding in Boston, but we talked so long that he missed his connection and got to Boston late. After that visit, I started wondering “Why is he coming to see me?” It was weird. But I let it go. I didn’t pursue it.
I had other things on my mind. I had gotten an offer from the Henry Street Settlement to work with pre-delinquent children, who today we would call “at-risk” children. While I was pondering that, I received word that I would be permitted to go back to school at FAMU. I was excited about that for two reasons: First, I thought it was important for me to demonstrate that activists could be involved and finish their studies at state-supported institutions. Secondly, I was excited because I assumed John Due also would be back at FAMU.
In more ways than one, our school year at FAMU at the beginning of the fall of 1962 was going to get off to an explosive start. Much had changed in parts of Florida, but not in Tallahassee. In a state where larger cities had desegregated public facilities and lunch counters, Tallahassee was refusing even to appoint a biracial commission, as other cities had, to tackle the race problem, choosing instead to live with its head in the sand.9 Two years after the jail-in, Tallahassee’s facilities were still segregated. This was the situation facing us in the fall when we went back to school, and some of the most significant demonstrations of Tallahassee’s civil rights movement were going to take place during the upcoming school year. Many students’ lives were about to change forever, including mine.
I went back to campus to register in Lee Auditorium, where the registrar’s office was. While going upstairs, I ran into John Due. He casually said, “Hi, how are you?” No big deal on his part. He seemed to be going his separate way, and I felt my stomach sink. For the next month or two, it really seemed he wasn’t interested in me. He was in the graduate department because he was in law school, and he was dating other women in the graduate school. We didn’t even seem to have a close friendship anymore. Priscilla decided to go to New York to do graduate study at Banks Street College, so for the first time I didn’t have my sister’s company at school, either.
As disappointed as I was, I didn’t have much time to mourn the apparent end of my bond with John Due. The school year was barely underway when I was arrested again on September 25. This time, in an effort to make sure public travel facilities were truly desegregated, we’d targeted the Trailways station in Tallahassee and the Carousel restaurant inside.
Aside from the Freedom Rides, Tallahassee CORE had been very quiet in the previous months. I think many other activists were truly afraid of CORE because our tactics always led to confrontations, and usually to arrest, but we believed this was the most effective method for change. So again, just as it had been at Neisner’s, there were only a handful of us at the protest. We had a core group of activists working to revitalize the Tallahassee chapter, and all of us were Florida A&M students. Besides myself, the group included a political science major from Lake City with a boyish sense of humor, Rubin Kenon; a smooth-faced student named Julius Hamilton (“Ol’ Prettyboy,” Rubin called Julius); a student from New Jersey named James Hamilton; and a FAMU political science club member named Ira Simmons. We became a very close group over time, although our relationship had almost nothing to do with socializing. We gave each other strength and emotional support, and we shared a purpose.
Our CORE group decided to test the new travel desegregation rules at Carousel, a privately owned restaurant inside Tallahassee’s Trailways bus station. Neatly dressed, as always, the four of us went to Carousel at about 9:00 P.M., sat down at a table, and tried to order food. I was the spokesperson, so I put in the food order, but the manager told us to move to the other side because we were in the “white” section. When we didn’t move, the manager called the police. We were charged with “disobeying a police officer” and had to spend the night in jail. Once again, we were brought before Judge Rudd, who set our trial for October. Our bond was set at $100 apiece, and payment was arranged by Rev. Dan Speed.10
This time, we thought, how could we possibly lose? The law was on our side, and even the president of the restaurant chain had sent a letter to the Interstate Commerce Commission, insisting that he had warned its Tallahassee operators to stop discriminating on the basis of race.11 When Judge Rudd convicted us anyway, we filed a $1 million lawsuit in U.S. District Court. We charged that Tallahassee operated under “apartheid principles, policies, and practices.” Our brief also quoted the Langston Hughes poem “Merry-Go-Round.” We asked for $100,000 for actual damages and $900,000 in punitive damages. Even though we didn’t win our lawsuit, we never had to serve our sentences.
Each and every victory was so hard fought. And the real battles were only beginning.
When I returned to FAMU in the fall of 1962, I lived in Tallahassee with Rev. C. K. Steele and his family, which gave me a rare chance to be part of a civil rights family and draw conclusions about what hardships and challenges related to the Movement I might expect when I had my own family. I feel so very fortunate to have gotten to know the Steeles. As crowded as their house was—with Rev. and Mrs. Steele, four of their five sons, and one daughter—the Steeles took me in when I needed a place to live. The Steele children at home were Henry, Clifford, Darryl, Derek, and Rochelle, whom we called “Pat,” and they lived downstairs while I lived upstairs, paying $45 a month for my room and board.
I cannot say enough good things about Rev. Charles Kenzie Steele, who died in 1980. He was very courageous, a man of principles and tireless dedication who would not back down under pressure. To me, he was also a perfect example of a man who was not nurtured and appreciated enough by his own community while he was still alive. In truth, I think Rev. Steele received much more respect outside of Tallahassee than he did in his own city. He was the pastor of Bethel Missionary Baptist Church, and as the president of the Inter-Civic Council, he had been one of the main organizers of the Tallahassee bus boycott of the late 1950s. He was a friend of Dr. King’s, had hosted Dr. King and his wife, Coretta, at his home, and was also the founding first vice president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. His home was a beehive of activity during the height of the bus boycott, his son Henry recalls. Henry remembers seeing an “ugly little man”—who later turned out to be James Baldwin—hanging around his family’s front yard. Scores of reporters and other out-of-town activists also camped out at the Steeles’ home as part of an open-door policy. As a boy, Henry loved the excitement and was too young to be daunted by the potential dangers that came hand in hand with his father’s activism.
Henry, who was about thirteen during the boycott, considered all of the commotion at home part of what was necessary to fight injustice. “I was too excited about it to be really scared about anything,” says Rev. Henry Steele, who is today a minister himself. He recalls how, as a youngster, during his annual summer visit with his grandparents in Montgomery, he’d witnessed the height of the Montgomery bus boycott and attended the mass meetings of thousands led by Dr. Martin Luther King and Rev. Ralph Abernathy. He felt change in the air, and he wasn’t too concerned about the consequences. In that way, perhaps, Henry was his father’s son. (Henry’s first job, in fact, was as an assistant to Rev. Abernathy at West Hunter Street Baptist Church in Atlanta, in the wake of Dr. King’s assassination in 1968.)12
But life was very hard for the Steeles as a result of Rev. Steele’s activism.
If a brick came crashing through the family’s window in the middle of the night, it was no big deal to Henry. In the event of such attacks, the family had a plan. They ran into the hallway, where there were no windows, and crouched there together until the crisis had passed. And there were many crises. About six months into the Tallahassee bus boycott, he says, his family was forced to move out of the church parsonage because of so many rock-throwing attacks, threatening phone calls, and shooting incidents. Appearances by the Klan were regular. Klan members drove past their house on Tennessee Street, or Highway 90, on their way to Klan rallies, and long lines of hooded Klansmen gathered outside the house to harass them. Once, the Klan burned a cross on their lawn, right in front of the church. As a precaution, some deacons stood guard at the Steeles’ house at night. Henry recalls that bullet-riddled venetian blinds hung in their window for years after the boycott, lingering evidence of the price his family had paid. Henry also remembers his father sitting by the window with a Smith & Wesson in his lap to do what he would have to do to protect his family, preacher or no preacher.
That aside, though, Rev. Steele was also known for his lack of malice toward his tormentors. In The Pain and the Promise: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Tallahassee, Florida, Glenda Rabby writes that when there were threatening phone calls, “instead of hanging up, Steele would often preach to the callers over the phone, telling them about nonviolence, redemptive love, and the life of Christ, even inviting them to call back after he finished his meal.”13
It’s not surprising that Henry’s mother had a nervous breakdown during this time. It’s so unfortunate that Mrs. Lois Steele died in 1983, before she could share her trials and tribulations in her own words. She was only fifty-nine when she died, and she was one of the Movement’s quiet heroines. I do believe the stressful circumstances of her life probably cut her years short; she became a wife and mother very young, got swept into the civil rights movement, and then had to nurse her husband through a long illness before he finally died. And she outlived her eldest son, Charles, making her burden all the greater.
The youngest Steele son, Derek, fell into a life of drug abuse for several years as an adult, spending time in jail before he went clean and became a chaplain, counseling addicts in Tallahassee. He told the Tallahassee Democrat in 1998 that he certainly didn’t blame his father’s notoriety for his troubles, but he felt the weight of his father’s achievements on his shoulders.14
Besides the emotional toll, which was especially high on Lois Steele, there was also a financial toll. Mrs. Steele was trained as a teacher, and she’d worked hard to complete her schooling, despite several pregnancies after her marriage at the age of sixteen. When she appeared for job interview after job interview, principals refused to hire her. Negro principals at Negro schools had to follow the orders of their superiors and the white power structure. One day a principal took her aside and confided, “Mrs. Steele, actually, we have been told not to hire you.” His family went without a lot of things, Henry says. He feels that the church, rather than rallying behind their pastor to see that his family was cared for, instead put pressure on Rev. Steele to curtail his activities. Members were afraid they might lose their jobs for belonging to his church. One church member, ironically, was FAMU’s president, Dr. George W. Gore.
Because the church deacons wanted to curtail Rev. Steele’s civil rights involvement both inside and outside of Tallahassee, they attempted to restrict so-called “outside groups” from holding meetings at the church. They also tried to limit the number of times Rev. Steele could ask a guest minister to take his place on Sundays. When Rev. Steele had disagreements with the deacons, he took up the matter with the congregation, and the parishioners supported him, but the deacons controlled the church finances and punished Rev. Steele’s disobedience by refusing to give him raises and by not providing monies to make repairs to the parsonage.15 The penalties were not put in place by whites, but by other Negroes. This is the other side of the civil rights movement many young people are unaware of today. Even on the threshold of so many important changes, often some of our most difficult battles were with our own.
When I moved in with the Steeles in the fall of 1962, I believe the money I paid them, however little, helped ease some of their financial burden. I got up and hitchhiked to my 8:00 A.M. class on FAMU’s campus, which was several miles away. Mother and Daddy Marion had divorced, and Mother’s relationship with Mr. Sears had already ended (she had bought a house in Miami), so it was comforting to spend time in a family situation during that time, eating at the dinner table together and such. Although Henry was four years younger than I was, we had both spent time in jail after the Woolworth sit-in. We both had a playful streak, and we’d sit outside overlooking accident-prone Highway 90, guessing which cars would crash.
Most memorable of all, I think, were the long conversations I had with Mrs. Lois Steele, often while she cooked in the kitchen. She enjoyed having another woman to talk to, and she confided many of her frustrations to me—frustrations that, in time, I would learn on a more personal basis. One thing I loved about Mrs. Steele was that she wasn’t a traditional minister’s wife, nor was she traditional in any way. She was a free thinker, which meant that she didn’t even always go to Sunday services to hear her husband preach! And she said what was on her mind.
Mrs. Steele told me how frustrating it was to have a husband who was often traveling, and how when he was at home, he was swept into the needs of his church and community. Mrs. Steele thought the community was largely ungrateful for the sacrifices Rev. Steele and his family had to make. “You know, Patricia,” she told me many times, “family has to come first.” She impressed the point upon me further, but I already knew that I wanted life to be different for my family. When my time came, I would have to find a way to balance both activism and being a wife and mother.
That became my vow, and it was a vow I never forgot.
By December 1962, I’d had enough of John Due’s aloofness. I wanted to pay attention to my studies and the Movement, but I was too distracted, in emotional limbo. I decided I would leave FAMU. As much as I hate to go, I thought, if I want to get my education and do other things, I need to get away from here.
I told John I was going to New York. I had already arranged a ride with a male student I did not know. “Oh, no, you can’t do that, Patricia,” John said.
“Well, I’m going,” I said adamantly.
“Okay, I’ll drive you,” he said. “But first, we’ll have to stop in Indiana.”
Naively, I agreed. I should have looked at a map, because Indiana is nowhere near New York. Indiana was where his mother lived, and that was where he wanted to take me. While we drove, he suddenly looked at me and said, “Patricia, let’s get married.” This time, I did not laugh. I had been waiting more than a year to hear those words again! But I was still surprised. I asked him why he’d been treating me so nonchalantly.
He sighed, staring at the roadway. “Well, I hadn’t wanted to get involved with you because I want to finish law school and carry out my civil rights work. I didn’t want a wife, a family. I’m not the marrying kind. But when you said you were leaving, I knew that meant I’d never see you again. Well, I didn’t want that to happen.”
John took me to Indianapolis, Indiana, to meet his mother, Lucille Graham, a very tall and fair-skinned woman who had been certified by the Madam C. J. Walker School of Beauty Culture in 1941. She had studied at Indiana State Teachers’ College for eighteen months, but she left college because she needed to make a living to support her baby boy. She had later worked for a company that made supplies for the United States Navy. Mother was fair, but John’s mother was even lighter.
“Well, Mother, we’re getting hitched,” John announced, hooking his arm around me.
Getting hitched? That term sounded so funny and country to me. I noticed his mother’s gaze upon me, and I could nearly read her mind: She thought I was too dark. John B.’s parents had not wanted to accept me because of my race, and now another Negro woman did not approve of my complexion. She did not want to say anything to offend her son, but her reception was cool. (As the years passed, my relationship with John’s mother was just fine, and she apologized to me for her earlier coolness. She even lived with us for a short time toward the end of her life. She died in 1992.)
I was thrilled about our engagement. John Due and I would be married! I would have a partner in the civil rights struggle, someone who would understand my dedication. I would never have to worry that my husband might disapprove of what I was doing and try to convince me to stop. To me, we seemed like the perfect match.
I called Mother and told her we would get married in April. She had met John once, so she knew a bit about him even if she didn’t yet know him well. She trusted me, telling me that I should get married if that was what I wanted, but she wanted our wedding ceremony to be a Baha’i wedding, within the Baha’i faith she had adopted.
Mother never completely abandoned her Christian roots, but she adopted the Baha’i faith after some friends introduced it to her and she studied it. Founded in the Middle East in the 1800s, the basic tenet of Baha’i is that humanity is a single race, and that God has ordained that it is time to eliminate prejudice and build a peaceful global society.16 Mother took the best of the religions’ offerings and molded them to fit her life. I did not understand the Baha’i religion, but Mother introduced me to a white couple who hosted many meetings at their home on Star Island, and I thought they were very good people. Their religion seemed to embrace many of the same ideas I believed in. I never thought about becoming Baha’i myself, but I didn’t have any objections to being married according to their customs.
John stayed in Indianapolis for a while to visit his relatives. I went to New York, where I stayed with William Larkins (a former Tallahassee activist who was an aspiring actor) for a time because Priscilla was out of town and had forgotten to leave me the key to her apartment, but I took ill with tonsillitis and Larkins called John to come retrieve me. In late December of 1962, during our entire drive back to Florida, we talked about our wedding plans. Once we got back to campus, we told the FAMU housing authority that we would need married housing for April, but things weren’t done that way. “When you show me that piece of paper, that’s when you can reserve an apartment,” said Mr. Matthews, who was in charge. He was actually a family friend, but that made no difference. Rules were rules.
“Well, gosh,” we thought, “if that’s the case, if we’re not certain we’re even going to have a place to stay, we might as well go and get married now.”
That was on a Friday. We called Thomasville, Georgia, which was about thirty minutes away from Tallahassee, to find out if we could get married. We’d heard you could get married there without a waiting period. The woman on the phone asked, “Well, is it an emergency?” In my mind it was, although I guess she was asking if I were pregnant. So I said, “Yes, it’s an emergency. We need to get married. Is it possible to get married there?” She said, “Yeah, well you can come tomorrow.”
Needless to say, we did not have a very traditional or a Baha’i wedding. I called my mother that Friday night and said, “Mother, John and I are getting married tomorrow. Can you get here?” Of course, Mother couldn’t get there. I said, “Well, we’re going to do it anyway, and then maybe we can have another ceremony later.” John’s mother couldn’t come, either. Since we didn’t have family members there, we brought our friends in their stead. Three men from the law school stood up for John. One was Edward Rodgers, who is Judge Rodgers now, another was Ike Williams, and one was John Moss, a law professor. With Priscilla in New York, I didn’t have anybody there for me. It was January 5, 1963.
I tell you, the woman conducting the ceremony spoke so rapidly, I don’t remember anything she said except “I now pronounce you man and wife.” And I told John, “It doesn’t feel like we’re married yet.” Right after we left Thomasville, we went back to Tallahassee and asked Rev. Steele to marry us in his church. Again, none of our own family members were there because of the sudden timing, but at least he spoke slowly enough that we could feel that something was different. I just wanted to feel as if it were official. (Derek Steele, about eighteen months old, was the Steeles’s youngest child and kept chanting “Spook, spook!” at our wedding ceremony. I guess he had heard the word so often, leveled against his father and the other activists, that he’d adopted it into his vocabulary.)
That was how John and I began our lives together. We had joined not only as man and wife, but as a combined force for change. The fact that we had such a scaled-down wedding ceremony, that we had no honeymoon—even that we’d had very little of a traditional “courtship”—demonstrated our mind-set at the time: The civil rights movement came first. In time, that way of thinking would become very trying for me.
But in the beginning, John Due and I both had only freedom on our minds.