“In every human breast, God has implanted a principle which we call love of freedom; it is impatient of oppression and pants for deliverance.”
—Phillis Wheatley
John Due and I didn’t have a honeymoon, even for a weekend. In fact, although I didn’t know it, I would be going to jail again less than three weeks after our wedding. The Movement was picking up momentum in Tallahassee, and as two newlywed civil rights activists, there was nothing more important to us.
It had been a busy time. On January 15, after years of negotiations with CORE and other organizations—and without rallies or marches or celebrations—Tallahassee’s lunch counters were finally integrated in 1963.1 It had seemed like a very long wait to those of us who were first arrested at Woolworth in 1960, but in retrospect it was the year before the 1964 Civil Rights Act, so our work was paving the way for others.
Only three days after my wedding, I’d been selected as one of the local Negroes who would take part in a quiet test of city restaurants and lunch counters, sanctioned by the city. Throughout the day, we sat and asked for service, and city officials and police stood by, ready for reports of white mobs getting upset. Since we were all Americans, it always annoyed me that city officials were so concerned about the emotional reactions of racists rather than the rights of Negroes, but that was the way it was. We were treated like the last priority, as if the fear and hurt feelings of a white crowd were more important than democratic principles. That time, however, nothing happened. Much to our relief, we ate in peace, and Tallahassee’s city fathers decided the city was finally ready to open its lunch counters and accept that, at least on that basic level, Negroes were people, too.
I suppose city officials might have hoped they were rid of CORE after that. But as soon as they were probably congratulating themselves on getting rid of that pesky “Negro” problem at the city’s restaurants, CORE began picketing the city’s segregated movie theaters. Believe it or not, every battle was separate. We had to try to gain our humanity one small step at a time.
We moved on methodically, following CORE guidelines: We couldn’t assume we would not be given entrance at the theaters, so we had to conduct tests. In the testing, I tried to purchase a ticket at the Florida Theatre at 118 N. Monroe Street, and I was refused. The next step was to try to negotiate with the management, but as usual the management was not interested in talking to us. When negotiation didn’t work, it was time to have direct action demonstrations. Although I was married to John and he was just as determined to win equal rights, he had only four months left of law school, and we were both very concerned that if he got more directly involved, the state would not allow him to become a lawyer. In fact, a police official threatened him directly during that time: I’ll see to it you won’t ever pass the Florida bar. So, John was ready to work behind the scenes, explaining legal ramifications to protesters and helping them if they got arrested, but he could not afford to get arrested himself.
On January 23, FAMU student Julius Hamilton and I, armed with movie tickets that had been purchased for us by a white activist, tried to enter the Florida Theatre. We were stopped, and management called police when we refused to leave. We were charged with criminal trespass, and we spent a night in jail before being arraigned. The case was dropped within days, however. Our lawyer, ACLU attorney Tobias Simon, was told by Tallahassee’s city attorney that they were “tired of suits and litigations.” Maybe they thought they could avoid more bad publicity, but sue is exactly what we did. We filed a $1 million discrimination suit against city officials. Rev. Steele counseled us to try to use our suit as a bargaining chip, which we did: We offered to drop the suit if the city would desegregate its courtroom. The judge agreed, but later reneged. When Julius, Rubin Kenon, and I came to the courtroom, we were removed from the side reserved for whites.2
It seemed that officials wanted to play games with us, but we were in no mood for that. We began scheduling regular pickets at the Florida Theatre and State Theatre. We picketed after classes and on Saturdays, careful to try to preserve our academic schedules. As usual, we had only two or three people in the beginning, but over the course of more than a week, our pickets grew from a few people to a dozen people, and then from a dozen to two dozen, and so on. The more of us there were, the more we were noticed.
During this time, civil rights activists had cause to celebrate. I wrote about the momentous turn in a May 21, 1963, letter to my former professor, Richard Haley, who was now based in Louisiana and still very involved with CORE: Yesterday, the United States Supreme Court overruled laws against sit-ins. That is, they said it is unconstitutional to arrest demonstrators to enforce local segregation laws, which are, in themselves, unconstitutional.
Could the tide be turning in our favor? Would the courts finally be our friend?
A May 29 theater demonstration drew about 400 students, with all of us singing, clapping, and chanting for freedom while hundreds of white onlookers stood by and watched. We definitely were an intimidating sight to anyone hoping to purchase a ticket for a movie. An editorial in the Tallahassee Democrat the next day characterized our peaceful protest as “very much like a football pep rally, or an old fashioned camp meeting, or a college sing.… The words this time didn’t praise the old-time religion, nor the old Fam-U spirit, but something we across the street didn’t quite make out about freedom to go where they want and do what they want to do.”3 The article noted that the white street toughs on the scene were kept away from protesters by police.
Still, after several days of protests, the panicked theater owners were successful in convincing Judge Ben C. Willis to issue a temporary restraining order against me specifically, as well as other members of CORE. The order also officially banned protesters from using derogatory signs, or signs that urged a boycott of the theaters.4 But we were determined to keep protesting, especially since the film The Ugly American was now playing at the Florida Theatre on Monroe Street. What better backdrop for a civil rights demonstration?
As I learned later, by May 30 Tallahassee Mayor Sam Teague considered Tallahassee to be in a state of emergency. He took control of the police department, calling the sixty-eight-member force to a meeting at 5:00 A.M. Despite ridiculous warnings from the FBI that infiltrators at FAMU with plans “printed in Cuba” were going to try to disrupt his city, Teague said in a 1978 interview for an oral histories collection, “I realized as mayor that 99.9 percent of the students out here were well-meaning American citizens trying to improve their lot in life.” His biggest worry was for public safety, he said, so he told his officers to leave their cattle prods at the station, and he forbid them to use their nightsticks. Many of the officers were reportedly enraged, but Teague told them, “I want you to uphold the law, I want you to be dignified, but I don’t want anybody getting rapped on the head with a nightstick.” He had also asked city ministers to try to prevent confrontations at the demonstration between whites and Negroes.5
The Florida Theatre demonstration drew hundreds of FAMU students, Negro high school students, and a white student from Florida State University. Again, we came with hand-painted placards, of which my favorite read, ARE YOU AN UGLY AMERICAN? We picketed and sang in front of the theater while crowds gawked at us, some of them with curiosity and some with anger. Again, as in previous demonstrations, there were so many students there that I did not know many of them personally. While I did know the students in the inner circle—students such as Rubin Kenon and FAMU student Arthenia Joyner, who were two of the real lieutenants in the Movement—we still did not share many parts of our lives with each other during that time. We had a single focus: freedom.
For example, it was almost forty years before Rubin Kenon admitted to me that his fear was so great he became sick to his stomach and often had to vomit before he set out for protests. Or how he would survey his dormitory room before each demonstration, always believing he might be seeing it for the very last time, careful to leave specific items out where friends or relatives could find them later. Then he joined us on the front lines, despite his nausea and despite his fear.
Rubin came to Florida A&M University in 1960 after growing up in Lake City, Florida, which he had always heard was the state’s lynching capital. When Tananarive and I interviewed him in a Lake City restaurant in 1997, he surveyed the room with awe as we sat at a table undisturbed, surrounded by both whites and blacks. “If someone would have told me that one day I’d be sitting next to these white boys over here in this place, I would have never believed it,” Rubin said. He told us a story about how the University of Florida moved its campus from Lake City to Gainesville in 1906 because there were simply too many dead black men swinging from Lake City’s trees. “I don’t think the administrators were so concerned about black people getting lynched,” Rubin said. “It just offends their sensibilities as they walk to class that they look up in a tree and see a black man hanging.”
When he was thirteen or fourteen, Rubin was beaten up by Ku Klux Klan members. As a result of that incident—and the countless stories he’d heard of how Negroes were treated by his town’s whites, including how a white man had impregnated a Negro woman and then simply shot her to be rid of the problem—Rubin was afraid of white people. The fear he learned for police officers lingers to this day, he says. His mother, a schoolteacher he called “T. K.,” tried to teach him to stand up for himself, both through words and by her example. If she felt she was treated differently than a white customer at a shop, she took her money elsewhere. Once, at the icehouse, the iceman gave the block of ice to six-year-old Rubin to carry to his mother’s car instead of taking it himself, as would have been customary. Furious, his mother bought her own refrigerator two weeks later. “She never went back to that icehouse again,” Rubin said.
When Rubin stumbled into FAMU’s civil rights activities in the 1960s, the two sides of his personality were at war. On one hand, he did believe in standing up for his rights, but on the other hand, he was downright terrified, and there was good reason to be afraid. Rubin, like me, could tell that the May 30 Ugly American demonstration was going to attract attention. Experience had taught us that racist mobs might form and try to harm us, but that was the risk we were all willing to take.
Sure enough, across the street from the theater, a group of angry whites began to grow, and some of them were quite close to us. We picketed and sang, and they shouted and threatened. Some onlookers were waving Confederate flags, a reminder of the slaveholding mentality that was still flourishing in the South nearly a century after the end of the Civil War, a symbol that is still incorporated into some state flags, and people wonder why blacks find it so offensive! A good number of young white men flanking the protest were wearing their hair slicked back and their shirttails out: in those days, sure signs of hoodlums looking for trouble. “The air was so electrically charged at times that just the flick of an eyebrow was enough to set off an explosion,” Rubin recalled about that protest and others like it. “It was a time when we just didn’t know if we were going to survive.” After a few hours, the city decided to try to shut the protest down. Circuit Court Judge Ben Willis issued an injunction order informing us that we could not block entrances, we could not attempt to enter the theaters, we could not display signs pertaining to the policy of the theater, and so on.
The students chose not to obey the order. We assembled to march from FAMU up the boulevard toward the capitol, where the State Theatre was located. I was in front of the march with Scout, the beautiful German shepherd I had bought to celebrate John’s graduation from law school. We have always had dogs. I couldn’t leave Scout in the apartment because John was studying at the library and then would go to work, and Scout’s stomach was upset because he had just been wormed. It wasn’t long before I began to realize that bringing Scout might have been a mistake. When the capitol press corps saw us approaching with Scout at the head of the march, they began pointing and yelling, “Reverse Birmingham!” (In Birmingham, Bull Connor’s police had turned German shepherds on child demonstrators.) Seeing a situation that could be damaging politically, a FAMU student named Arthur Teele—who would later become a high-level Reagan appointee to the Department of Transportation, a state NAACP official, and executive chair of the Miami-Dade County Commission—did some quick thinking. He drove up in his car, took Scout’s leash, and carried our dog away.
That day, 220 of us were arrested, including me, Rubin, Doris Rutledge, and a freshman from Miami named Betty Jean Tucker, who later became a Miami-Dade County Commissioner under her married name, Betty Ferguson. But even arrest didn’t dampen our spirit of protest. While the police walked us down the street to the jailhouse, we shouted, “Free-dom! Free-dom! Free-dom!” Again, as in 1960, word got back to the FAMU campus that students had been arrested, so a sympathy march formed. This time, about 200 students were in the march, compared to 1,000 in 1960, but Mayor Teague decided nonetheless to disperse it with tear gas when students would not turn back. Thirty-seven more students were arrested and joined us at the jail.6
Once again, much to the city’s dismay, I’m sure, Tallahassee was making national headlines because of civil rights arrests. The protest and arrests were described in the New York Times, and a photograph of me being lifted from a passive crouch by three police officers outside of the theater appeared in Time magazine and the Miami Herald. I was wearing dark glasses and a neat dress and pumps, hardly the picture of someone who posed a threat to the community. The Herald’s photo of my arrest accompanied a story about how Negro agitation was making civil rights a more important part of the national agenda, how President John F. Kennedy planned to push for new civil rights legislation in Congress, and how Secretary of State Dean Rusk had stated that the civil rights problem was putting our nation’s “leg in a cast” in the race against communism. “Our voice is muted, our friends are embarrassed, our enemies are gleeful because we have not put our hands fully … to this problem,” Rusk said.7
Meanwhile, John had graduated from FAMU’s law school and was studying for the bar and working part-time at a steakhouse, the Silver Slipper, a gathering hole for local politicians. John had not been arrested with us, but he did go to the courthouse to try to get an appointment with Judge Ben Willis to get a clarification of his arrest order. John thought that would be the end of his involvement, but he was wrong. When he arrived back at our apartment, a deputy sheriff was waiting to serve him with a summons. He had been named a codefendant! Someone was making trouble for him.
The next day, when John reported to work, his boss called him aside. “What you do on your own time is your business,” his boss said, “but when your business affects my business, you have to go. My customers saw you leading a march downtown with a German shepherd dog!” John was barely making any money as it was, but now he had been fired on the basis of a lie.
At the contempt-of-court hearing before Judge Willis the next day, the charges were dropped against all 257 of us. Judge Willis told us he didn’t believe most of us had purposely ignored his injunction, and he clarified that the signs we’d carried had not defamed the theater. “They said ‘Segregation is unconstitutional,’ which is an expression of opinion, not derogatory or defamatory. Another said, ‘Are you an ugly American?’ and that was not defamatory. I’m glad no one asked me that. I’d have had to say ‘yes,’ ” the judge said, which sounded like his effort to make a joke. “Another sign said ‘Freedom,’ and there is nothing objectionable about that.”8
But he also slowed our effectiveness by instituting rules to govern our protests, limiting the number of participants and outlining very specific guidelines for where we could stand and what we could say. For example, only eighteen students would be permitted to protest at one time at the Florida Theatre, and only ten at the State Theatre, which was only symbolic. At the time, one of our attorneys, Tobias Simon, proclaimed to gathered Negro onlookers in the courthouse that the ruling was a “tremendous victory. This is the first and only time in a Southern state has the right of a Negro to picket a white establishment been recognized and put into an order. I predict [the protests] will be effective and the day of segregated theaters in Tallahassee will come to end very shortly.”9 I always saw the ruling as an attempt to silence us to the point of ineffectiveness. Protests continued under the new guidelines, but they were definitely more lackluster.
Besides, the end of the spring school term meant that many students who might participate were leaving Tallahassee for the summer. John and I remained behind, and Rubin Kenon was there that summer, too. We were also once again joined by Priscilla, who came to Tallahassee to visit me after she had surgery. This was a rare opportunity for us to spend time together again, but it’s a decision I believe my sister came to regret, and one that would make her vow to never again be involved in the Movement, at least for a time. She has described her visit to Tallahassee that summer as a turning point of her life, and not in the positive sense.
Priscilla is one of the most open and warmhearted people I have ever known. She is certainly not without faults, as none of us is, but to me her big strength is that she has always enjoyed people very much. As someone who was not nearly as sociable, I was likely to be labeled as cold by people who did not know me well. Someone in the Movement once told me I was “as cold as an icicle,” but that has never been true of Priscilla. She has a radiant smile, and she is generous with it. Especially when we were younger, she always seemed to believe that people operated under the best of motives, and Mother worried that she was too naive. Despite everything she and I had witnessed in the past few years, Priscilla brought that same optimism back with her to Tallahassee in the summer of 1963.
After her arrival, Priscilla and I visited with each other and probably had some fun, although, to be honest, I don’t remember much in the way of fun during those years. It wasn’t long before she became involved in civil rights again. Since the movie theater demonstrations had petered out for the summer, she and Rubin took part in small demonstrations to protest Tallahassee’s segregated so-called “public” swimming pools.
On May 30, the same day of all the arrests at the Florida Theatre, three white Florida State University students had quietly waged a protest of their own by trying to purchase tickets to swim at Tallahassee’s “Negro-only” swimming pool. Saying they were not a part of CORE, students Anne Hamilton, James Walker, and John Parrott told police and reporters they only wanted to patronize the municipal pool closest to where they lived, which happened to be the pool designated for Negroes. “We thought the municipal pools were open to everybody and we wanted to go swimming,” Hamilton said. They were fingerprinted and released.10
In June, Priscilla and Rubin decided to try the opposite tactic: They would try to swim at the “whites-only” Meyers Park swimming pool, something they called a “wade-in.” They tried to gain admission for three days, but were unsuccessful. On the third day, already wearing her swimming suit, Priscilla managed to slip past the gate and made her way toward the water. Police stopped her before she made it.
In the beginning, at least, there was nothing noteworthy about Priscilla’s arrest. She allowed herself to be handcuffed, and the officer pulled her toward his parked police cruiser. He opened the door, and she began to climb inside. For some reason, Priscilla recalls, the officer thought she wasn’t moving fast enough. In front of a crowd of dozens of white onlookers, the officer kicked her in the stomach.
Priscilla was almost too shocked to feel the pain right away. She had never before been physically abused by a police officer, and she could hardly believe that a man would strike a woman, especially a woman in handcuffs. Sitting in the police car, Priscilla looked out at the witnesses. “I looked at the crowd, and I said, ‘My god, you allow this? I’m doing nothing,’ ” she recalls. No one was cheering, but the faces that stared back at her in the bright sunshine that day seemed completely indifferent, except for one woman she noticed. That woman was staring at Priscilla with what looked like a sympathetic smile. “Oh, this lady is going to come forth,” Priscilla says she remembers thinking. “She’s going to tell what happened!”
At her trial, exactly as she’d believed, Priscilla was excited to see the very same woman in the courtroom. Priscilla was not allowed to speak on her own behalf, as was always the case in these arrests, so as much as she wanted to complain about the officer’s behavior, the judge gave her no venue to do so. Instead, Priscilla kept looking at the white woman in the audience, expecting her to declare why she had come, what she had seen. The woman simply sat and watched, wearing the exact same smile. She never spoke.
“The whole thing was over, and I had been sentenced, and this woman had said nothing. So my conclusion was the smile was just a smile,” Priscilla says. Had it always been a different kind of smile altogether, and Priscilla just hadn’t seen it? Had the woman come to gloat instead of defending her? To Priscilla, the woman’s lack of sympathy was even more troubling than the police officer’s kick because it meant she no longer trusted her own judgment of people. It was a disillusioning moment that Priscilla says she has never forgotten.
Priscilla doesn’t know exactly how much time she spent in jail as a result of her “wade-in” experience, but she remembers that she was thrown into the isolation cell because she wouldn’t stop singing. Instead of having me and other students in jail with her this time, she was by herself, and the loneliness she felt was keen. To keep her spirits up, she sang “Oh, Freedom” and the song we’d made up during the 1960 jail-in to the tune of “Old Black Joe,” but the guards didn’t like her singing and put her in the tiny isolation cell. Her incarceration (and, no doubt, the kick) had aggravated her surgery, and she felt herself becoming inflamed. But she lay on the cold concrete floor, she says, singing and singing.11
I was outraged about what had happened, of course. Priscilla, Rubin, and I went to a city commission meeting to file a police brutality complaint, but we never had the chance to speak because two city commissioners left the meeting, shutting it down. Instead of rebuking the police department at the meeting, the mayor offered praise.12
The city closed the white pool rather than face more protests. After that, for five long years, no one could go swimming to escape the hot Tallahassee sun.13
In July 1963, the Tallahassee CORE office got word that a crisis had arisen: A friend and CORE colleague named Zev Aelony had been arrested in Ocala, 182 miles southeast of Tallahassee. We had to go to Ocala right away to check on Zev’s welfare. As Priscilla’s recent police experience had only reinforced, a lone activist in police custody was not in safe hands. Rubin came with me in our worn 1952 Plymouth to see about Zev. That car was in such bad shape that the floor was missing, and you could see the road passing beneath your feet, but we were students, and it was the only car we had.
During the three-hour drive, we worried about Zev. The Movement was heating up around the country, and it was looking more and more like a domestic war. In May, Birmingham police, led by notorious segregationist Bull Connor, had turned high-powered fire hoses and set dogs on children as young as six; 600 Negro children had been arrested and jailed in one day during those demonstrations, which Dr. King had spearheaded. President Kennedy, after seeing a photograph of a police dog attack, had said it made him “sick.”14 During that time, the home of Dr. Martin Luther King’s brother, Birmingham minister Rev. A. D. King, had been bombed, although he and his family had not been injured. Later, in the same city and on the same night, Dr. Martin Luther King’s hotel was bombed, but he too had been lucky enough to escape injury. It’s ironic to me: With all of today’s worry about terrorists, many people in this country forget that civil rights demonstrators were subjected to terrorist acts by American racists on a regular basis, and as far as I’m concerned, they were often encouraged by police and government officials. On June 11, 1963, President Kennedy had been forced to dispatch National Guardsmen to the University of Alabama because of Gov. George Wallace’s attempt to block the enrollment of two Negro students, Vivian Malone and James Hood. Governor Wallace set the tone from above, and the terrorists only took his hate-filled rhetoric to the next level.
That night, President Kennedy made a historic televised speech celebrating the Alabama students’ enrollment, urging Americans to understand that Negroes could no longer be treated as second-class citizens. But just after midnight on June 12, 1963, only hours after President Kennedy’s speech, the Movement suffered a horrible blow that was only a precursor to the very tough and violent times ahead for all of us: An NAACP field secretary named Medgar Evers, who had been leading demonstrations in Jackson, Mississippi, died after being gunned down in the driveway of his home.15 He died surrounded by his wife and three young children, who were hysterical.16 Even if President Kennedy was finally beginning to set a tone from above, who was going to protect us in the meantime?
So much was happening so quickly, and all of these developments were on our minds as Rubin and I drove along Highway 27 toward Ocala from Tallahassee, wondering what had become of Zev Aelony. We thought he might be in particular trouble because of the special animosity racists reserved for other whites. Zev was a Jewish pacifist I’d first met at the CORE Miami Action Institute in 1959, and we had corresponded over the years; he had tried to convince me to visit the peace-oriented kibbutz in Israel where he had lived for a time. In truth, I really had hoped I could see it one day, but I never did. Rubin thought of Zev as the most “Godlike person” he had ever known because of his very gentle spirit and righteousness; to Rubin, a Christian, Zev was living according to the example of Christ. Zev’s social awakening had come when he was very young because his parents had worked with refugees from Nazi concentration camps who moved to the United States in the mid-1940s, and during that time Zev also met Japanese-American kids who were emerging from America’s internment camps. “The camps came as quite a shock,” Zev told me. “I was kind of brought up listening to the radio and reading comic books and so on, with good guys and bad guys, and we were supposed to be the good guys.” As a teenager, he’d become involved in an interracial folk-singing group, and he remained socially active throughout college. Later, he was a conscientious objector and very active in civil rights, especially in CORE.17
By 1963, when the call came about his arrest, Zev was twenty-five years old and based in Americus, Georgia. He had come to Florida at my request, to help where he was needed, and then he’d heard that a sister chapter of CORE in Dunnellon, a tiny, isolated Florida town, needed help trying to desegregate a restaurant. He’d readily agreed to go.
That Dunnellon call came from a young Negro activist named Bettie Wright, who had heard me speak at FAMU during the school term and had participated in theater demonstrations, and then had gone home for the summer to Dunnellon, the town where she’d grown up, to try to make changes there. She started a fledgling CORE chapter in Dunnellon, only the third CORE chapter in the state. “When it started, it was me alone,” Bettie said in an interview. Bettie, who was then a nutrition major between her junior and senior years in college, went to church after church to recruit young people for CORE. (Today, Bettie Wright Blakely is an assistant professor in the Department of Human Ecology at the University of Maryland Eastern Shore. Her specialty is still nutrition.)18
When she expanded, she’d invited Zev to Dunnellon because he was a more experienced CORE worker who could conduct training in nonviolence, but Zev ran into problems as soon as he stepped off the bus, he recalled in a later interview with me. The police were watching the bus station, and a cruiser immediately followed Zev and Bettie as they crossed a bridge over the famed Suwannee River. Still, not allowing himself to be intimidated, Zev went to a meeting and agreed to take part at a protest at the restaurant. Someone from the Movement was taking photographs to illustrate that the protest was peaceful, just in case someone tried to accuse them later of rowdiness or violence. A police squad car pulled up while the photographer was asking for Zev’s assistance with his camera. The police immediately approached Zev, who stood out because he was white. The officer asked if Zev was a newspaper reporter, and Zev said no. Then the officer asked, “Do you know what the vagrancy statute is in this county?” The next thing Zev knew, despite his insistence that he wasn’t a vagrant (and he had pay stubs to prove it), Zev was arrested for vagrancy. He was told to get into the police car, and the police drove him away. That was when Bettie called me.
Zev was eventually transferred to the car of another officer, this one from the Ocala Police. “I remember him because he had a very angry attitude and snarling kind of personality,” Zev said. Much to Zev’s relief, at the police station, the officer asked permission to turn on a tape recorder. A recorder meant some measure of protection, Zev thought, but after a brief interview, the officer turned off the tape recorder and said, “We operate according to the law, but if it was up to me, I’d slit your throat.” Then, he took Zev back to the cell where about four or five other white men were locked up. Before he left, the officer announced to the other inmates, “He’s a Freedom Rider. He’s the one.” Then, he left Zev at their mercy.
The next thing Zev remembers is being attacked by the other prisoners, who kicked him and began smashing his head against the porcelain toilet. Zev tried to protect himself by curling into fetal position, but he could not have fought the men off even if he hadn’t been a pacifist. No one can say how long the beating would have continued, or how much worse it would have been, if a visiting white woman had not called for help. “They’re killing somebody in there!” she screamed. Without treating his injuries, the jailer first put Zev in a large, empty cell, then moved him to a very small all-steel isolation cell with no windows or light switch on the inside, and only a small steel hatch on the door that his jailers could open or close. When Zev tried to curl on the floor to sleep, jailers turned on the bright light to wake him up. After he was awake, the light would be turned off again and the steel hatch door closed to leave him in darkness. The cell was very narrow, he recalls, only about seven feet high and three feet across.
Rubin recalls arriving on the grounds of the Marion County jail, and being allowed to see Zev the next morning. The police really must have had no shame, because Rubin was very upset by Zev’s appearance. “When he walked out, both of his eyes were blackened. I mean, you could see the blood had settled under his eyes. They whupped him. They beat him badly. And when I saw that, I got scared, because, I mean, they might kill this white boy because he’s in there by himself,” Rubin said.
We needed to bring attention to Zev’s incarceration quickly. We met with Rev. Frank Pinkston, the NAACP branch president, and with members of Ocala’s NAACP Youth Council, including the president, twenty-year-old Charles Washington, and a twenty-year-old Clark College student, David Rackard.19 They were very courageous and serious-minded young people. Most were teenagers, but some were as young as eleven or twelve, and they were eager to go to Zev’s assistance. Rubin and I, leading nearly forty young people, set out for the Marion County jail, where we sang freedom songs as we walked on the vast grounds. “We shall overcoooommme.… We shall overcoooommmme.… We shall overcome soooomme dayyyyyyy.…”
Zev, in his cramped cell, heard our singing. “I wasn’t sure if I was hallucinating, but I heard the singing of freedom songs, and I started listening and I realized that it wasn’t a hallucination because if I put my ear up against one wall, it was louder,” Zev recalled. The singing lifted his spirits, he said. “It was such a spectacular change from what it had been.”
We had hardly set foot on the grounds—and we were nowhere near the jail building—when police arrested us for trespassing and unlawful assembly. We were later charged with interfering with county prisoners, and I was charged with resisting arrest without violence. Rubin and I, along with eight others in the group who were not minors, were held at the jail. The others were sent home to the custody of their parents, with police muttering about how the adults were leading them astray. (Which is exactly what police thought of the children’s marches in Birmingham, when, in fact, young people are often more militant than their elders.)
Because Rubin and I were in no position to provide for our own defense, the NAACP assigned a team of Negro attorneys to defend us, including Tampa-based attorney Francisco Rodriguez and Daytona Beach attorneys Horace Hill and Joseph W. Hatchett. Authorities had investigated my previous civil rights arrests, so despite our very competent team, Rubin and I were both sentenced to two years in the county jail. We appealed that conviction, of course—and you could pay to stay out of jail pending the outcome of your appeal—and the case eventually made it all the way to the United States Supreme Court. The court eventually ruled that we did not have the right to picket the jail. We lost that case so, technically speaking, I suppose there’s still a warrant out for me in Ocala, Florida. For years, John has teased me about that whenever we drive through the town.
Our demonstration in Ocala accomplished our goal, though, which was to ensure Zev’s safety. Stories about our arrest appeared in several Florida newspapers, probably because so many children had been arrested. Two weeks after his initial arrest on July 26, Zev was finally released.
Zev’s brushes with the law didn’t end there. He returned to Americus, Georgia, and in August he and three other civil rights workers were arrested for an archaic charge of “attempted insurrection” against the state of Georgia, based on a local 1930s-era law that made sedition a capital crime. They were actually under threat of the death penalty! The outrageous charge made international headlines, causing the nation embarrassment. It was brought to the attention of Attorney General Robert Kennedy, but he did not intervene. Zev and the others had to spend three months in jail until their lawyers convinced a federal court that the charge against them was unconstitutional police abuse.20 In 1964, Zev was badly beaten after another arrest in Americus. He certainly collected his share of physical bruises in the 1960s.21
But bruises were not going to stop us.
By August 1963, every activist we knew was talking about the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom scheduled at the end of the month, when thousands of civil rights activists from all over the country would gather at the base of the Lincoln Memorial. It would be the first march of its kind in my experience, and we hoped it would put pressure on Washington, especially President Kennedy, to push through legislation to protect the rights of Negroes. Everyone wanted to go, of course, but if there was one similarity that characterized civil rights activists, it was that we were usually broke. John could not work as an attorney because he had not yet received his bar results and since he had been fired from the Silver Slipper for the false claim that he had led a demonstration, he was excluded from getting work elsewhere in town, too. His GI bill had expired, and my scholarship from CORE and the Southern Education Defense Fund barely covered our living expenses. While we fantasized about how wonderful it would feel to be part of that historic march, we didn’t think it would be possible.
A week or so before the march, John and I went to Miami so he could scout for potential work, since he was considering moving there after he passed the bar. We were invited to a meeting at the residence of Thalia Stern, whom we had met earlier through CORE. Jack Gordon, another CORE veteran, was also there. After hearing our financial plight as John and I talked about the March on Washington, someone in the group suddenly exclaimed, “We can’t go, but we can send you two!” They all helped us go to the march, as well as some supporters from northern Florida, and we were thrilled. The meager help was really only enough to cover the train trip, but what a trip it was! Some of the others who left with us from Miami were Miami CORE President A. D. Moore, Rev. Edward Graham, Rev. H. E. Green, Miami Times columnist Blanche Calloway (bandleader Cab Calloway’s sister), and Weldon Rougeau, a CORE field secretary.
The trip was one of the greatest experiences of my life. Our train left Miami and made its way north, stopping in West Palm Beach, near the town where I grew up. We changed trains in Jacksonville to a train dubbed the “Freedom Train,” then we went on to Waycross, Georgia; Savannah, Georgia; and Charleston, South Carolina, with marchers pouring in at each stop. Charleston alone sent 218 delegates. They were young and old, men and women, people from all walks of life. Some of them had fresh bruises from police brutality during protests or jail stays. Some young men even boarded dressed as women to try to elude police.22 As people boarded, they marched up and down the aisles singing freedom songs: “Woke up this morning with my mind set on Free-dom!” The rest of us clapped and joined in, excited to feel the growing momentum as the train cars filled. In fact, I was so worn out by the excitement of the ride on the Freedom Train that by the time we got to Union Station in Washington, D.C., on August 28, I was exhausted. But we were still singing when we climbed off.
I was told that there had been some discussion that Priscilla and I, and some of the others who had spent forty-nine days in jail, should be permitted to speak at the march. In the end, though, we were not given a spotlighted role, as were John Lewis and Dr. King, not to mention Hollywood celebrities like Marlon Brando and Charlton Heston. Still, John and I received VIP seating passes, so we had very good seats where we would not miss a moment of the program.
Nowadays, of course, almost all anyone seems to remember about that day is Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. It’s a lovely speech, but it isn’t what I remember most. Rather, I remember National Urban League director Whitney Young’s speech on unity, education, voter registration, and economic development. But all the speeches were wonderful. Even though I dozed off a few times because I was so tired, it was a truly marvelous experience to see the hundreds of thousands of people who came that day. It was a refreshing change, really, to feel that there were no responsibilities on my shoulders. I was in a happy, half-waking state for much of the time, listening to speeches, feeling contented, and thinking, over and again, “Well done!” I was so proud of all of us.
When I look back on what I most enjoyed about the fellowship of that day, it wasn’t really the march itself. The spirit of brotherhood and sisterhood continued after all of the songs had been sung and the speakers had all had their say. John and I made our way through the crowd, having decided we would find a way to New York instead of heading straight back to Florida. (John thought he might want to pass the bar in two states, New York and Florida, so he would be a more effective civil rights attorney.) In those days, the best form of transportation for people without money was hitchhiking, and no sooner had we positioned ourselves by the road than a white couple pulled over to pick us up. They had just attended the march, too. Not only did they give us a ride, but they gave us food to eat. We were all filled with love for each other. It was just a beautiful, beautiful time—the kind of event that really helps you feel there is hope for a better tomorrow.
Only two weeks later, a bomb blast rocked through the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, killing four Negro girls: Denise McNair, Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, and Carole Robertson. Governor Wallace had embroiled the city in yet another battle with the federal government over school integration, and that church had become a target because it was the headquarters for the city’s civil rights movement. In the aftermath of the bombing, two white Eagle Scouts—young men who had reached the highest, most coveted rank of Boy Scouting—were leaving a segregationist rally when they shot at two Negro boys on a bicycle, killing a thirteen-year-old. Police also shot and killed a young Negro man who was running away from them.23
Bobby Frank Cherry, a former Klansman, became the third man convicted of the church bombing thirty-nine years later. But if the March on Washington had given us a glimpse of the nation we were trying to build, the terrorist bombing of that church and the senseless killing of those four little girls was a horrifying reminder of the nation we still lived in. In 1963, Dr. King’s dream was just a dream. I still don’t believe we live in the nation we all dreamed about the day of the March on Washington, when we felt our combined love and strength, but we were definitely much farther from that dream on September 15, 1963.
And the killings were not over. The killings were just getting started.
I’ll be the first to admit that over the years, many of the faces have blurred when I think about the 1960s. Tananarive is always pressing me for details about the people I knew, asking about their mannerisms, their dress, their personalities; and I can remember some of those things, but mostly I remember the work we did. I remember our trials together and our common goal.
One person I wish I’d had the opportunity to know better was only a high school student when I met him, about seventeen years old, much younger than I was, but old enough to stand up for what he believed in. His name was Calvin Bess.
I met Calvin in the most unlikely of places: I was teaching Sunday school at Rev. Steele’s church, Bethel Missionary Baptist Church. During the time I had lived with the Steeles, Rev. Steele had always tried in vain to coax me to come to his services each week, despite my argument that I overheard him rehearsing his sermons each Sunday morning anyway. I had been raised African Methodist Episcopal, not Baptist, but that wasn’t the reason I stayed away. Rather, Sunday was one of the few days I could sleep in, and I cherished my peace. Rev. Steele’s coaxing hadn’t stopped when I moved out of his house, but he figured out how to intrigue me when he offered me a chance to teach. He wanted to baptize me, but I adamantly refused. I simply could not see myself being submerged in water when I had already been sprinkled with water in the AME church.
So there I was, an AME girl teaching Sunday school in a Baptist church. I always felt tickled when I imagined what the other members of his church would think if they knew. Not only did I teach Sunday school, but I took particular pleasure in leading a youth group of older students who met at my apartment once a week to socialize and to discuss current events. We called it the Young People’s Progressive Club, and our first meeting was held in January 1963. Naturally, with the prominence of the local and national civil rights struggle, our conversation often turned to Jim Crow and the Movement. I was only a few years older than these young people, and I was invigorated by their energy and idealism. These youngsters truly believed they could have a part in helping to change life in America forever.
Of course, some students were more interested in civil rights than others. As I look back at the minutes of those meetings, the young people voted to host a party just like any other young people would. But one thoughtful, bright, and serious-minded young man stood out to me. He was a bookish seventeen-year-old with a slightly reddish complexion and a shy smile, the son of a long-haul trucker and a schoolteacher. His full name was George Calvin Bess, but everyone called him Calvin. He had very careful diction and carried himself with dignity. Like many Negroes in Tallahassee, this young man came from a struggling family, but he was dedicated to his studies, and became just as dedicated to civil rights. After learning more about CORE through the Young People’s Progressive Club, he took an interest in Tallahassee’s theater demonstrations and decided, on his own, to take part. I never put pressure on anyone, no matter how old or young, to participate in demonstrations if they were uncomfortable about it. But even though I could not acknowledge his presence in the midst of the hectic protests, I was happy to see Calvin. At one point, he was arrested at a theater demonstration.
His involvement didn’t end with the theater demonstrations, either. Rubin says he remembers that Calvin was hesitant to leap headfirst into activism the way Rubin himself had, but despite what Rubin recalls as some reticence on Calvin’s part, they spent a lot of time talking about civil rights. Calvin was willing to accompany Rubin to meetings. At one meeting in Lake City, Rubin says, Calvin came to an AME church where Rubin was waiting to make a civil rights announcement. Rubin had already appeared at the church and pleaded with the membership to be supportive, even if it was in terms of donations, but so far the church hadn’t responded. He had come to give it another try, awaiting his turn to speak. When it was time for announcements, Rubin raised his hand and waited to be acknowledged. The preacher ignored him, he says. So, being assertive, Rubin stood up and began speaking anyway. The preacher went on, ignoring Rubin, trying to drown out his words. At this, even the congregation felt sympathetic to Rubin. “Let the man talk!” some members complained. But the preacher persisted, grabbing Rubin’s hand to forcibly remove him from the sanctuary. If not for the presence of a bishop that day, Rubin says, that preacher looked mad enough to hit him.
Suddenly, Calvin stood up and began to speak in Rubin’s place, his voice filling the room, and all eyes turned to him. “To me, that was an act of bravery on his part, because Calvin was not bodacious like me,” Rubin says. “Calvin stood up. And he really gave me the impression that he didn’t want to be part of the group. Yet, on the other hand, he was irresistibly drawn to it. I think after that night, Calvin became a radical.”24
In addition to being socially active, Calvin was so brilliant that he eventually won a graduate scholarship to Harvard University, but he never had the chance to take advantage of it. I couldn’t have known it in 1963, but four years later, Calvin and another young man would be found dead in a car in a Mississippi swamp. They had been trying to register people to vote with the SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Calvin died at the age of twenty-two, leaving behind a son he had never known he conceived, and leaving his family, especially his mother, in emotional shambles. Ironically, Calvin’s family lived on Liberty Street.
Even many years later, his mother couldn’t find joy in her heart when Dr. King’s birthday finally became a national holiday, recalls Calvin’s sister, Cherrye. “I don’t want to celebrate Martin Luther King’s birthday,” their mother told her. “Nobody celebrated my child’s birthday. He worked just as hard as Martin.” A few years after Calvin’s death, when Cherrye was twelve, she walked into the kitchen and found her mother standing with a knife, poised to hurt herself. “She’d be talking to Jesus, I reckon,” Cherrye says.25 Mrs. Bess’s grief over her only son’s death remained with her until she died in 1997, the year after we found Cherrye and her father and interviewed them. Mrs. Bess was too ill for me to interview her that day, and I think it’s best I didn’t force her to dredge up bad memories. I’ve learned the hard way, in researching and writing this book, that old hurts can overwhelm when you dig them up. Mrs. Bess was so angry after Calvin’s death, as John reminded me not long ago, she came to our house after it happened to tell me to my face that it was my fault. And I’ve asked myself since: Was it?
When I first met Calvin Bess in 1963, and those young people in the club were busy planning their party, Medgar Evers was still alive and those four little girls at Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham thought they had their whole lives ahead of them. Most of the civil rights casualties had not yet begun to mount, so Calvin understood even less than I did how dangerous his activism might be. Perhaps, as so many young people do, he thought he was invincible. Or perhaps, like me, he did not feel truly alive because his people were not free.
I’ve often felt guilty about what happened to Calvin, as if those meetings with an impressionable young man eventually led to his death in the Mississippi swamp. But I have a feeling that even if I could have sat Calvin down and told him his future, he still would have wanted to fight. His father, like my parents, had taught him to stand up for his rights. He’d grown up on Liberty Street, after all. And as Rubin said, Calvin stood up in church that day.
He stood up.