Published by The History Press
Charleston, SC 29403
www.historypress.net
Copyright © 2014 by Marie A. Sutton
All rights reserved
Front cover image, top: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and others in the Gaston Motel courtyard. Courtesy of the Birmingham Public Library. Bottom: The A.G. Gaston Motel. Courtesy of Chris McNair of Chris McNair Studios.
First published 2014
e-book edition 2014
ISBN 978.1.62585.132.1
Library of Congress Control Number: 2014951890
print edition ISBN 978.1.62619.595.0
Notice: The information in this book is true and complete to the best of our knowledge. It is offered without guarantee on the part of the author or The History Press. The author and The History Press disclaim all liability in connection with the use of this book.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form whatsoever without prior written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
Dedicated to those for whom my heart beats—James, Simone and Stephen.
All my love to Mama, Daddy, Angie and Marcus
CONTENTS
Preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. Locked Out, but Creating a New Way
2. A Feather in Birmingham’s Cap
3. A Place for Us
4. Where Trouble Sleeps
5. First Class All the Way
6. Enough Is Enough
7. And a Child Will Lead Them
8. The Last Straw
9. Music in the Air
10. Out of Place
Timeline
Notes
Bibliography
About the Author
PREFACE
For most of my life, I walked around thinking that I knew all there was to know about black history—my history—but what I knew was only a scratch on the surface. Although I was a voracious reader and writer, wrote countless stories about Birmingham and prided myself on being versed in the tales of black struggle and empowerment, it wasn’t until I was thirty years old that I learned of Birmingham’s full role in the civil rights movement. It wasn’t until then that I awakened from a stupor of ignorance and understood the full impact of the bombing of the historic Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, the Children’s March and public battles.
For that, I am ashamed.
Little did I know that as a native of Birmingham, Alabama, I had walked the same downtown streets and breathed the same sweet southern air as civil rights icons like Reverends Fred Shuttlesworth, Martin Luther King Jr. and others. I didn’t know that my high school alma mater was once for “whites only” and that blacks had to walk past it to attend the one for them, which was farther up the road.
At age thirty, I had the good fortune of working at the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute (BCRI), an educational center devoted to teaching the lessons of the Birmingham movement. When I think about it now, it was divine providence. There, I learned about Birmingham’s role in the movement, the names of preachers and common folk, tales of the battles at Kelly Ingram Park and downtown.
After learning about what took place in my city and about the key players who came from where I come from, and who looked like I look, pride swelled within me. I come from the stock of people who braved the wrath of Birmingham’s vehement racist Eugene “Bull” Connor, who walked into stinging sheets of water used as a weapon, endured threats of death and braced themselves to be bitten by snarling dogs—all for the right to be considered full-fledged citizens.
As a child, I had heard a little about A.G. Gaston, the black millionaire who provided jobs for countless Birmingham blacks, but I never knew anything about his motel. I didn’t know that the A.G. Gaston Motel was the only place blacks could go for first-class accommodations; that iconic black celebrities like Ike and Tina Turner, Ray Charles and the like slept there; and that it was the headquarters for the Birmingham movement. I didn’t even know that my own parents had their wedding reception there. Their 1971 Christmas Eve event was all the talk. My afro-clad father and his groomsmen were dressed in tomato red, crushed velvet tuxedos with sea foam green dress shirts, and my waif-thin mother donned a classic satin gown and was surrounded by her smiling bridesmaids while the Gaston served as the backdrop.
When BCRI archivist Laura Anderson mentioned the place to me and told me about its tales and timelines, the storyteller inside me got excited. I wanted to write a book.
At the time, famous art collector Paul R. Jones, who had managed the motel’s restaurant during the early 1960s, was coming to Birmingham frequently and agreed to let me interview him for a book. He gave me his phone number and said I was free to come spend time at his house in Atlanta. But I didn’t jump on it right away. Then, life happened.
I got married, became pregnant. I got another job and had another baby. Not long after that, Paul Jones died. The idea for the book stalled. Months turned into years. The desire to tell the story, however, never left me. It was like an old debt you know you need to pay; you will not fully rest until it’s taken care of.
As my fortieth birthday approached, I made the personal commitment to do it. And when I said “yes,” it was as if I became a magnet for information. What once was a nameless, lifeless place on the corner of town came alive to me.
Suddenly, I would hear the motel’s name mentioned on television, in lectures and various places. I felt it was confirmation that I am the one who needs to tell the stories.
So I set out on a journey to write about the A.G. Gaston Motel, to venture into the culture and creative spirit of the black race. It became my mission to tell of African Americans who lived, fought and died in Birmingham, Alabama—my home—and how the A.G. Gaston Motel became like a home for activists, celebrities, preachers and common folk when Jim Crow tried to make them homeless.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
For your kind words, swift kicks in the butt, direction, advice, assistance and so much more, I acknowledge you:
Laura Anderson, Dorothy Bailey, Hattie Barnes, Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, Birmingham Public Library, Charles Buchanan, Charla Draper, Andre Elliott, Jimmie Lee Elliott, Marie Elliott, Martez Files, Edna Gardner, Laura Hannah, Tim Hollis, Tamara Harris Johnson, Angela Jones, Marcus Jones, Marlon Jones, Micah Jones, Theresa Jones, Chris McNair, Lisa McNair, Dr. Sarah Parcak, Dr. Robert Smith, Pamela Sterne-King, Amy Sutton, Brenda Sutton, James Sutton Sr. and George A. Washington.
Special thanks to Brenda Jones, who ventured on trips to the library and used her own money to make way too many photocopies for me, who babysat when I needed to write and who constantly offered to help when I did not know what to ask for. I love you.
A big thank you to my dear, sweet daddy: I’ll always, always be your number one fan.
Thank you, Kirsten Schofield, Chad Rhoad, Hilary Parrish and The History Press, for giving me a voice (and several extensions).
My eternal gratitude to James, my love: for your prayers, words of encouragement and so much more, I could not have done it without you.
For my life, my words and my everything, I owe it all to you—Jesus.
INTRODUCTION
How does one go about writing a first-of-its-kind book on a topic that is fascinating but piecemeal—commonly known but rarely spoken of? I did not know the answer, but that was my challenge. Boy, was it a challenge.
Although several historical books reference the A.G. Gaston Motel when describing the tumultuous civil rights era in Birmingham, Alabama, there was no one source to go to for comprehensive infor
mation. There was only a sentence here, a mention there; a paragraph on this page, a reference on that one.
Many people who would have been adults during its heyday are age eighty and older. Some have died, including the motel’s namesake and most of its former staff. The ones who are still living have dim memories. Finding the story seemed to be like looking for a lost penny on an endless, sandy beach.
However, the potential for a story was too good: the parties, the celebrities, the bombing and the tense meetings. The storyteller inside me could not pass it up. So I accepted the challenge with great trepidation.
I had to write about an era that took place before I was born and get information that, I was told, had mostly been destroyed, buried along with the dead or tucked away in some forgotten corner.
The first thing I did was Google the motel’s name. Among the list of links, I spotted a video interview that featured the lovely Tamara Harris Johnson. She was the niece of A.G. and Minnie Gaston and agreed to talk to me. Over pancakes at the local International House of Pancakes (sugar-free syrup for her, please), we chatted for hours. She told about the Gastons’ nieces and nephews, many of whom are in their fifties and sixties and still remember their uncle Gaston’s motel.
Johnson whipped out her cellphone and gave me names and numbers of many folks, a selfless act. One name she gave me was George A. Washington, a suave sixty-something-year-old who had been a regular at the motel almost since it opened back in 1954. He was there to help me narrate its history, the historical and everyday goings-on.
As the story began to come together, another big issue was that no one I had come across had photos of the inside of the motel. I got in touch with Edna Gardner, the matriarch of Minnie Gardner Gaston’s family. She is the one who has all the family’s pictures, who was always at a relative’s event with a camera in tow. She told me that she had several photos of the motel but let someone borrow them and his house had caught fire. I was crushed.
Gardner did come across a gorgeous eight-panel postcard that had artistic renderings of the rooms. It was like striking gold since I had little else. I got a few photos of the motel’s exterior from the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute and the Birmingham Public Library and great photos of Gaston himself from Chris McNair, who photographed much of the movement and whose eldest daughter, Denise, was killed in the 1963 bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. His wonderful daughter and my friend Lisa McNair was a godsend in getting those.
So, although I was writing about a motel with no photos of the inside, I pressed on because the story was worth telling.
Little things came up and tried to become roadblocks.
I thought I would not ever find out who was the motel’s construction company. I called everyone of whom I could think. At the encouragement of Pamela Sterne-King, a dynamic professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, I had one of her students help with the search. While he hunted for the information, I checked with BCRI and Urban Impact, a group that serves the interests of Birmingham’s historic black business district. No luck. Then, one day: Eureka! As I was on the third floor of the Birmingham Public Library, in the deathly quiet microfilm department, scrolling through issues of Birmingham World newspapers, I spotted an article about the grand opening and eyed an ad from the Steel City Construction Company touting that it handled the project.
Then, as I mulled over the list of people I needed to make sure I talk to for the book, a good friend of mine, food writer Charla Draper, mentioned that her friends Ernest and Carolyn Gibson had managed the place. I had never heard of them, so I looked in old issues of Birmingham World and saw pictures of their smiling faces. I had struck gold again. They had managed and lived in the motel during its heyday and its most critical times. And, to my delight, they are still alive.
After talking to the Gibsons, Washington and scores of other people, I had to see if their stories lined up chronologically and historically. It was like putting pieces of a puzzle together. Some things overlapped, and some could not be confirmed. A few things had holes, and others seemed too good to be true. I had to research, ask questions and then trust what they said, which can be hard for a former journalist.
After stepping back and looking at the final story, I can only hope that what I found—and I am sure there was much more to find—has been woven into a patchwork of tales and timelines that will resurrect wonderful memories of the motel and do it the justice it deserves.
Chapter 1
LOCKED OUT, BUT CREATING A NEW WAY
I couldn’t understand why the color of your skin made you better than me. That didn’t make sense.
—Brenda Faush, a native of Birmingham, Alabama
Alabama’s scorching summer days do not discriminate. Beneath the merciless sun, there is neither black nor white, rich nor poor—the warmth oppresses all. From the pristine streets of Mountain Brook to the dusty roads of Acipco-Finley, the thick, humid air can be suffocating and the pavement like hot lava.
If your skin is brown, however, it doesn’t take long for a million little reminders—like needle-thin icicles—to prick you back into reality; not even the indiscriminate Alabama heat can thaw out cold hearts or melt away the blistering, blue knuckle winter of segregation.
During the 1950s—in the sweltering June, July and August months—a Negro child had to still any excitement at the site of Kiddieland Park.1 Riding along the endless stretch of Third Avenue West in Birmingham, the fairgrounds could be spotted from the road. The smell of salty, buttered popcorn and sweet, airy cotton candy was a seductive lure. The bright, colorful Ferris wheel sliced through the skyline, and the grounds danced with spinning boxcars, mock airplane rides and a merry-go-round.
Kiddieland was an annual summer carnival that was created in June 1948 for area children. Described by the Birmingham News2 as a “miniature Fairyland,” it was touted as “welcome to all,” though it was understood that that meant everyone except Negroes. The fair featured Sunday concerts, “hillbilly” shows, a “pint-sized edition of the Southern Railway’s Southerner” train and advertisements that showed rosy-cheeked children drunk with glee. It was not until years later that blacks were allowed to come, but only on the last day when the stuffed toys were usually picked over and nearly gone; the vendors were packing up and the popcorn stale.
Kiddieland. Courtesy of Tim Hollis.
Little Southerner miniature train. Courtesy of Tim Hollis.
Ask a room full of blacks who grew up in Birmingham during that time, and only a scant few won’t mention how their memories were stained by not being allowed to attend the fair.
“I remember looking over there and knowing that I couldn’t go and not quite understanding why,” remembered Samuetta Hill Drew, who was a colored child in Birmingham during the 1950s.
Tamara Harris Johnson’s parents tried to shield her from the Kiddieland discussion, she said. Even though the street on which the fair sat was a main artery to downtown, her parents, and many others, found alternative routes so as not to explain why admission to the fair was more than a dime. It also required that your skin be white.
That was the way it was in Birmingham. If you were black, you were only given access to scraps of the American dream; the torn and tattered pieces, the chewed up and spit out ones. Jim Crow laws made sure of it.
City ordinances3 deemed it illegal for blacks and whites to play cards together or even enjoy movies collectively unless there was separate seating, entrances and exits. And the only way they could eat in the same room was if they were divided by a solid partition that reached at least seven feet from the floor. Signs that read “whites only” hung on doorways and water fountains throughout the city. Even the telephone directories noted whether people or businesses were “C” or “Colored.”4
At downtown department stores, blacks were not allowed to try on clothes. They had to guess their sizes, buy them off the rack and hope they would fit. If black customers needed new shoes, many would trace their feet on piece
s of cardboard at home. Then, at the store, they would hold the board against the bottom soles until they found a match.
Even conventional elevators were off limits. Whites rode the ones in the main area, while the ones in the back were for “niggers and freight.”
At the same time, however, blacks built their own communities that were fortified with pride and sustained by unity in spite of outside forces. Smithfield in central Birmingham was the largest black middle-class community.5 It was populated with affluent and college-educated African Americans. Many were teachers, lawyers, musicians and doctors. They lived in large Colonial Revival–, Georgian-, Craftsman-or Bungalow-style homes, many of which were designed by Wallace Rayfield. He was the second formally educated and practicing African American architect in the nation at the time and was also a Smithfield resident.
Blacks of every profession lived within blocks of one another, said George A. Washington, who grew up in the area. He remembers a laundry list of them within a stone’s throw, including the doctor who lived across the street and did house calls. “We had everything we needed,” he said.
Neighborhood children played on manicured lawns in a part of the city that seemed untouched by the crippling Jim Crow. That is, until the Ku Klux Klan planted the occasional bomb, blowing off sides of residences or leveling abodes to smoldering bits; enjoying the Smithfield community came at a price.
In 1947, acclaimed African American civil rights attorney Arthur Davis Shores helped Samuel Matthews, a drill operator, file suit against the city for its racist zoning laws that restricted blacks in where they could live. Matthews had his sights set on living in the all-white North Smithfield. He became the first African American to purchase a home in that area. On his first night there, however, his home was bombed.
Shores continued his fight against the zoning ordinances and, in 1950, successfully filed suit on behalf of Mary Means Monk. The age-old racist ordinance was declared invalid by Judge Clarence Mullins. It was a victory. That same night, though, Monk’s home was bombed.6 Pretty soon, the area got the nickname “Dynamite Hill.”
The A G Gaston Motel in Birmingham Page 1