“An elephant doesn’t die because of one broken rib.”
—Tsonga proverb
A month after our baby died in 1967, while I was still recovering both emotionally and physically, I was contacted by a white woman in Miami, Nancy Adams. She asked me to get involved with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, which was at the forefront of the school desegregation movement in Leon County, under a plan called “Freedom of Choice.” It was just the thing I needed to help pull myself out of my grief after such a sudden, unexpected loss. Under the new Freedom of Choice plan, Negro students could choose to attend white schools that had formerly been segregated, and we wanted to get the word out. Thirteen years after the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court ruling, students in northern Florida could finally attend integrated schools. But students had only thirty days to submit their choices to their school system.
I volunteered to help, but I had a great deal of difficulty setting up any kind of organized movement. In some ways, what happened during that period was a microcosm of what was going on in the civil rights movement around the country by 1967. The problems were clear in a frustrated letter I wrote to the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund on May 16, 1967:
The Leon County Community is very difficult to organize for several reasons. The major reason is that many potential leaders are employed by the state and others are dependent on whites in one way or another. Secondly, there is and has been for the past ten years a lack of communication among Negro groups in the community. Also, there is considerable rivalry and jealousy within groups, making it difficult for them to function effectively.… The lack of cooperation between the NAACP and the Educational Improvement Committee of the NAACP made it twice as difficult to operate; one would think they were separate groups.1
I did my best. Working out of John’s office because I had trouble obtaining an office of my own, I contacted volunteers and we scheduled meetings in twenty sections of Leon County. We handed out kits with fact sheets, leaders’ guides, booklets, and extra Freedom of Choice forms. After the meetings, we canvassed door to door. Most of our volunteers were high school and junior high school students. We were effective, but I hated the feeling that we were working against ourselves. All over the country, to tell the truth, the Movement seemed to be falling apart.
The strings that had bound us together in the first place had not always been strong. I thought too many leaders were blinded by their allegiance to their organizations instead of really keeping their “eyes on the prize.” I met the great NAACP leader Ruby Hurley once. I’d heard rumors that she couldn’t stand me, and that she had said so to others. When I met her in person, however, much to her apparent amazement, we liked each other. Hurley represented the NAACP and I represented CORE, so I guess she had considered me an upstart and a rival. I never felt that kind of rivalry.
I was an NAACP Youth Council adviser myself in Tallahassee at one point, and I had to try to learn to maneuver around organizational politics. I remember being involved in an activity that was not very successful once—I honestly can’t remember what it was—and I was quoted in the newspaper as an NAACP Youth Council Advisor. Soon afterward, the NAACP national director, who was very irate, contacted me. Roy Wilkins told me that there were very specific guidelines on approval for any event to be sanctioned by the NAACP, and I should never use that organization’s name without prior approval. Okay, I said. Perhaps I’ve never been very good at following rules, and I could understand his concern. So the next time I was involved in a big event, since I didn’t have time to go through all of the NAACP channels, I said I was representing CORE. This time, the event was a huge success, and once again I was contacted by Roy Wilkins. This time he wanted to know why I hadn’t given the NAACP credit.
As for me, I didn’t care who got credit, as long as the job got done. But more and more, it seemed to me it did not.
CORE had been in disarray since the departure of James Farmer in 1966, with much of the membership drifting away because of budget problems and infighting over racial and political ideology.2 The Black Panther Party had also been founded in 1966 by Huey Newton in Oakland, California, and there was growing strife among Negroes—or “blacks,” as we had begun calling ourselves—in the civil rights movement. By 1968, the Movement had firmly splintered off behind the “Black Power” slogan popularized by Stokely Carmichael in 1966, espousing black nationalism. Whites had held prominent positions in earlier stages of the Movement, and many Negro leaders had grown to resent white involvement. By 1968, CORE’s new director, Roy Innis, announced that black separatism was his organization’s goal. “Separatism is a necessary and pragmatic way of organizing two distinct and separate races of people,” Innis said in a press release. “When we have control of our self-destiny, then we can talk about integration.”3
I didn’t realize everything that was going on inside CORE until after the fact. I met Roy Innis only once or twice, so I never got to know him or his ideology very well. Personally, I thought it was about time for blacks to begin to love themselves more, and I liked the idea of “Black is Beautiful.” Some people may have misunderstood what the “Black Power” cry was all about. It had to be dramatized that way for black people to finally like themselves for who they were. We did not like ourselves, so “Black Power” and “Black is Beautiful” were a natural progression to raising our consciousness. On the other hand, I didn’t feel the need to reject any whites who were working with me. “Black is Beautiful” did not mean white was bad, and “Black Power” meant it was time for us to take charge of our own destiny. I thought it was a good thing.
Some whites did not agree and felt threatened, and some whites were ousted, just as Jim Robinson had been ousted from CORE years earlier. I think because they were feeling rejected, a lot of white activists began to desert the Movement to protest the Vietnam War and to support the Women’s Movement. I resented this, believing that if whites were truly dedicated to our cause, they should be willing to remain, even if there was some hostility toward them, just as blacks had been forced to tolerate hostility from white society for so long.
Now that the heyday of CORE and SNCC had passed, and black nationalism was gathering momentum, Dr. King and those in the more moderate SCLC found themselves pushed more and more to the side. Dr. King did not believe in black separatism, and he still firmly espoused nonviolence. He had also grown more committed to opposing the Vietnam War, even though some civil rights allies warned him that it would alienate him and the SCLC from President Johnson and the organization’s donors.4 Because of that war, Dr. King eventually opposed President Johnson’s 1968 presidential candidacy, despite everything President Johnson had done for the cause of civil rights.5 I thought Dr. King was putting too much emphasis on the Vietnam War. We had so much to worry about at home, I couldn’t understand why Dr. King would focus so much of his energy on the war. I know many other activists at the time felt the same way.
On the surface, despite many changes, so much remained the same. There can be a big difference between laws on paper and laws in practice. Priscilla and I had already learned that the hard way—when we tried to order food in 1966 and the waitress threatened to hit us with a chair—but it was an ongoing lesson for me and John in the late 1960s.
We had a favorite seafood restaurant in Leon County near Tallahassee, St. Mark’s, which had very good food. We would have eaten there often, except that we never knew how we would be treated and John decided he didn’t want to bring his family there anymore. He couldn’t feel relaxed with all of the stares and angry muttered comments from racist customers. It’s one thing to face that kind of stress without a family, but it’s different when a child is present. If someone had tried to act crazy then—either by trying to hurt me or Tananarive in John’s presence—John knew he might not stay in control of himself. So we stayed away.
Despite our new civil rights laws, discrimination and violence against blacks was still very much a part of life.
For me, 1968 began with yet another trying pregnancy, very soon after losing my day-old daughter—perhaps too soon. We lived in Quincy, where John was a labor union organizer and had a law practice, although he was still traveling a great deal. I spent much of my time alone with two-year-old Tananarive, which was becoming an all-too-familiar story.
In late February of 1968, I left Quincy so that Tananarive and I could stay with Mother for a month in Miami. John was traveling so often that my doctor in Tallahassee worried about my isolation in Quincy, believing that if I went into labor when I was alone, I might not survive childbirth. The baby was scheduled to be born in April.
I was being treated by a new doctor in Miami, and he was not an honest man. Although I had a checkup the day before and the doctor told me everything was fine, this doctor lied to the hospital on Sunday, March 17, saying I had gone into premature labor. It may sound silly, but because my previous births had been through cesarean section and I was so involved in other things, I had no idea what labor was like. After I was admitted to the hospital, nurses kept coming into my room, asking “Did you have another one?” They wanted to time my contractions, but I really did not know what they were talking about. “Oh, you just missed it,” I kept saying, feeling afraid and foolish.
My hospitalization was so sudden that I had a hard time contacting John. The Miami doctor suggested that I have my tubes tied in light of my difficult pregnancies, and my husband needed to sign papers for this to happen. I also wanted him with me during our child’s birth. John arrived in Miami just as I was being taken into the operating room. Fortunately, we decided against having my tubes tied.
I had an emergency cesarean section at Baptist Hospital, and Johnita Patricia Due was born. This time, the baby was fine, despite the fact that the doctor had delivered her a month early! My blood pressure was very high before the surgery, and I experienced terrible vomiting, so after such a hard time, I was incredibly grateful to see my new baby girl, healthy and alive. I was told Johnita looked more like me than John, unlike our two previous children, but it was hard for me to tell. I was just happy she was alive.
As soon as I was well enough to leave Miami, Tananarive and I flew back home with two-week-old Johnita, where other family members were waiting to help take care of the baby. My aunt on my biological father’s side, Hattie Martin, sent her nineteen-year-old daughter, Shilda, to stay at the house and help me, as she had with Tananarive in 1966. My great-aunt Amy, my father’s aunt, also came from time to time to do my laundry and iron. Aunt Amy, like many other relatives, did not offer me much conversation, but in her own way she showed me she cared. I think my biological father’s family saw me as an oddity, the way many people in my home county did in the 1960s, but many of them were there for me when it mattered. I was recovering slowly, but I was happy to be back in my own home.
Finally, I thought, life was turning brighter.
Johnita, the new baby, had more than one godmother: Hers were Mrs. Susan Ausley and Mrs. Vivian Kelly, both of whom had been helpful during the voter registration campaign.
While John and I were celebrating the new addition to our family, the world outside took some terrible turns that did not give us much faith in what the future might hold for our children. On April 4, only the day after one of Dr. King’s most famous speeches—where he spoke of going to the “mountaintop” and seeing the “Promised Land”—one of our greatest fears was realized: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was shot to death on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. A white man named James Earl Ray was charged with his murder.
“Oh, my God. Oh, no. Oh, no,” I kept saying, hardly believing my eyes as I watched the television reports. President Kennedy’s assassination had been a shock in 1963, but Dr. King’s senseless death in 1968 hit me and John on a much deeper level. His death was not only the death of one man, in my mind, but the death of the dream all of us had shared.
Our phone began ringing off the hook as activists I had worked with during the Movement began to call. All of them sounded so angry: Is there any hope for this country? In major cities, as blacks tried to grapple with their feelings of rage and grief, riots broke out and buildings burned. On the nightly news, the whole country appeared to be in flames. The riots went on for ten days in more than a hundred cities, costing forty-six people their lives.6 I won’t mention his name, but I remember one young man I’d worked with calling me from Detroit, where looting was rampant. “Do you want some jewelry?” he asked me.
“No. You get out of there,” I told him quickly. “Just take care of yourself.”
I understood why people were rioting. After so much frustration and so many sacrifices, sometimes you feel as if you’re about to lose your mind, and it only takes one event to trigger violence. But I am not a believer in riots. As anguished as I felt, I knew that was not the answer.
What really made Dr. King’s death so hard on me was feeling helpless. I’d just had a major operation two weeks earlier, when Johnita was born, and there was nothing I could do. Atlanta was a five-hour drive from Quincy, and Dr. King’s funeral was going to be held there. I really wanted to attend the funeral out of respect for his family, to show them that I cared. I really agonized, because I wanted so much to be among the thousands of blacks I knew would be there to bury the great civil rights leader who had sacrificed his life trying to make the world better for others. But I was still too weak, and I could not go. John went to the funeral march and walked behind the mule-drawn casket in the endless sea of people that filled Atlanta’s streets. He could not get inside the doors of Ebenezer Baptist Church for the service because the church overflowed with mourners.
To this day, I regret that I could not be there.
Dr. King’s assassination made many activists feel more determined than ever to show this country’s racists that the murder of one leader would not stop our people’s fight for freedom. Even though I now had two young children, I was no exception.
The civil rights movement had taken many forms since I first got involved as a college student, from sit-ins to the jail-in to the Freedom Rides to voter registration to political empowerment, and now my focus was on economic empowerment. At the time of Dr. King’s death, he’d been in Memphis trying to resolve an ongoing sanitation workers’ strike and planning a Poor People’s Campaign. He was in a pessimistic mood at the end of his life. He had announced to his church in Atlanta that his Sunday sermon would be entitled “Why America May Go to Hell.”7 He never got the chance to preach that sermon. The assassination of Robert Kennedy exactly two months later, on June 4, was surreal and devastating.
In Memphis, black sanitation workers had staged a strike and launched demonstrations because Mayor Henry Loeb refused to recognize their nearly all-black local. Black workers were tired of white sanitation workers receiving favorable treatment, so 1,300 of them had left the job. A community boycott of downtown stores was also happening.8 Because Dr. King had died trying to help sanitation workers, the spotlight was on the problems of sanitation workers throughout the country.
In Florida, we had our own problem brewing with sanitation workers in St. Petersburg. The custom in St. Petersburg’s sanitation department had been for the blacks to ride on the trucks and physically gather the garbage while whites drove the trucks. Obviously, it was more pleasant to be a driver than a garbage handler—not to mention that driving was less demanding work, but the white drivers were paid more than the black garbage handlers. That was just one of many problems of discrimination the black workers faced.
In addition to his law practice, John was working for the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, which had been supportive of CORE and had Dr. King’s blessing, so they sent him to St. Petersburg to talk to the workers to convince them to join the union. John had been able to get a union representative from AFSCME to help him organize an integrated local union, but the city’s history of racial problems made John’s work an uphill battle. The public employees’ union was all-white, so blacks were suspicious of the union.
I went with John, bringing Tananarive and little Johnita, who was only a few months old. The union put John up in a very nice hotel in nearby Tampa, so our family stayed there at first. My reputation had spread to St. Petersburg, and when blacks heard I was staying with John, they asked me to join their grassroots campaign. They wanted my help in organizing, speaking, and rallying the community for a sanitation workers’ strike—just like in Memphis. I sympathized with their cause, so I agreed.
As a result, John and I ended up on opposing sides of the issue. This was the first time this had happened so dramatically in the course of our marriage.
John and I still chuckle about it today. He was being put up in a fancy hotel, and I was brought to a simpler hotel for Negroes in St. Petersburg that served as a gathering place for community activists. The girls and I traveled back and forth between the accommodations so we could spend time with John, but the people of St. Petersburg made us feel very much at home. I think they felt particularly warmly toward me because I had come with my children, which showed them that I truly believed in what they were doing. All my needs were seen to, especially those that counted most: those of my children.
The only way we could ensure that blacks’ concerns would be listened to during the sanitation workers’ strike was to keep the trucks from completing their routes. We decided that volunteers—me included—would go to the sanitation headquarters before the trucks left early in the morning to block their way. Tananarive was only two, Johnita was practically a newborn, and John was busy on union business, so I needed a baby-sitter.
At 4:00 or 4:30 in the morning on the first day of our protest, I heard a knock at my hotel room door. Someone from the community had volunteered to baby-sit for me, and she was there right on time to do her job. I wish I knew the names of the people who volunteered for babysitting, but I do not. I do know they were just as dedicated as I was, in their own way. No one job was more important to me than another, because to me, there was no job more important than taking care of my two babies.
I was ready to go, trying to be quiet so I wouldn’t wake the children. As usual, I was neatly dressed, and I had already prepared contact numbers for the baby-sitter in case I was either killed or arrested. “Good luck, Mrs. Due,” the baby-sitter whispered in the darkness, and I went on my way to stop the garbage trucks.
Unfortunately, we did not have large crowds of volunteers to block the trucks, so we could not form a human wall. Instead, the handful of us who came before dawn did the only thing we could: We sat down on the hard asphalt in front of the trucks so that the drivers would have to run over us if they wanted to leave. Then we waited to see what would happen next. I knew from experience that blacks were not treated as human beings, so I realized these drivers might feel justified running over us.
Those white drivers were very angry. They were already annoyed about the complaints of the black sanitation workers who, in their minds, were trying to unjustly steal their jobs, but now they had to contend with blacks trying to keep them from working. The drivers started their trucks and began rolling toward us. As the huge trucks came closer to us, instead of slowing down, we heard roars from the engines. They were accelerating.
I sat like a stone. I closed my eyes, accepting that I might be about to die. I had already decided I’m doing this, and I may have to pay the consequences. I never could have done it otherwise. I could not afford to think about the reactions of Mother, or of John, or of the daughters who might never get to know their mother. Just as I’d felt when I was a student, I was ready to give my life.
If the truck drivers weren’t going to stop, I knew there was no way I could move in time. The drivers knew that, too. They wanted us to be certain we were about to be killed, because they raced right up to us—then stopped, their brakes screeching. Then they backed up and did it all over again, always racing and stopping on a dime. Eventually, feeling they had made their point, they drove around us and went to work.
The next day, another knock at my hotel room door came promptly at 4:00 A.M., and another baby-sitter came. Just like the day before, I went to sit in front of the garbage trucks.
This time, the police came, and I was arrested. This was my first arrest since the birth of my children. Although I knew they were in good hands, my thoughts were of them as I was taken to my jail cell. Still, while the other demonstrators were bonding out, I was firm: “No, no, no. I’m not going to bond out,” I said.
The jailers looked at me like I was crazy, but I later heard that a police officer who had worked in Tallahassee was present, and he recognized me. “She’s not joking,” he told his fellow officers. “She’s going to stay in jail.” He must have started rumors about the jail-in in my past, because after only a day, the jailer said, “You’re free to go.”
“But I didn’t pay the fine,” I said.
“Never mind that. Just go.”
At my trial, I was found guilty and charged $25. I guess they thought I wouldn’t refuse to pay such a small fine, but they were wrong. “I’m not going to pay any fine,” I said.
Once again, after I said I wouldn’t pay, I was told I could leave without paying. My attorney was James Sanderlin—a black lawyer who later became a judge—and I think he was as happy to be rid of me as the police and the court were. I believe everyone’s thinking was “Let’s get her out of town.”
No one wanted the publicity of a protestor’s extended jail stay, especially a mother with two small children. That would have been a public relations nightmare. I remained in St. Petersburg a while longer, and I decided to help John. I convinced the residents to talk to him about the union just so they could hear what he had to say. Eventually, the black sanitation workers decided to join AFSCME. To show their gratitude, the sanitation workers sang a song for the civil rights workers to the tune of “How Sweet It Is to Be Loved by You”: Thank you for the sore feet that you have given us, / Thank you for the hours that you have walked with us, / Thank you for singing with us, / Thank you for clapping with us, and thank you for working for freedom with us. 9 It was so good to see people happy. That time, John and I were the perfect team.
Our most difficult ordeals as a married civil rights couple were yet to come.