The A G Gaston Motel in Birmingham

by Marie A Sutton

  That same year, Autherine Lucy, a young woman from Shiloh, Alabama, along with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, won a court order that allowed her and other African American applicants to enroll in the all-white University of Alabama. While engaged in the legal battle, money was tight, so Gaston gave Lucy a job as a secretary at the business college to help with her finances. He was praised as one of her “chief financial backers.”52

  On February 3, 1956, Lucy was able to register at the university. Gaston provided her with “a fine car” from his funeral business.53 She was scoffed at in the media. They wrote that she was “high-handed”54 and reported that she appeared for registration well dressed, came in a Cadillac and paid for her tuition in $100 bills.

  When she showed up for class, Lucy was mobbed. Her car was pelted with rocks and eggs, which smashed the windows. The crowd yelled, “Let’s kill her!” The university suspended Lucy, citing that they could not guarantee her a safe environment.

  After that stressful day, Lucy “was whisked to a room in the [Gaston] motel for a little privacy.”55

  But that wasn’t the last of the turmoil for Alabama blacks. Later that year, on May 20, 1956, officers padlocked the doors to the local office of the NAACP, Eskew wrote.56 The state had previously demanded that the organization give over a list of its members, but the group refused. At the time, the national organization had fifty-six branches and fourteen thousand members.57

  “A state of ‘helplessness and hopelessness’ descended upon black Birmingham as NAACP members wondered what to do,” Eskew wrote.

  Shuttlesworth had had enough. He called a mass meeting at Sixteenth Street Baptist Church to discuss the injunction. According to Eskew, one thousand people showed up. At that meeting, the declaration of principles for the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights (ACMHR) was announced.58 Its mission would be to break segregation with boycotts and lawsuits, and Shuttlesworth would be president.

  “While Shuttlesworth had expected oppression from white supremacists, he had not anticipated the out and out rejection he and ACMHR received from the black middle class,” Eskew wrote.59 Local perception was that the NAACP members were the “professional people” while the ACMHR “set about organizing the black ‘lower class.’”60

  Shuttlesworth was relatable because he had “played near the ore mines in Oxmoor and whose stepfather was disabled by silicosis.”61 The ACMHR became a network of nearly fifty churches from across the industrial district. They rotated Monday Mass Meetings, growing the ministry from about three hundred to the thousands.62 And as they grew, so did the need to have something to meet (and pray) about.

  The next year, in September 1957, in retaliation for the desegregation order, the Ku Klux Klan castrated Judge Edward Aaron, a local black man, and poured gasoline on his wounds.63 During the trial, Theodore Sparks, a Negro, testified on behalf of Klansman Jesse Mabry’s character. Sparks said Mabry had a “reputation for truth and veracity.” It was thought locally that this had been the first time a black man had testified for the Klan.

  By 1959, the ACMHR had about one thousand members.64 There were mass meetings every Monday at various churches, which included Bethel, New Pilgrim, St. James Baptist, St. John AME and Thirgood CME.65 With the numbers growing, Shuttlesworth and his ACMHR were assembling an army and bracing themselves for imminent war.

  SAFETY IN NUMBERS

  With everything that was going on, the Gastons, whose home would later be bombed more than once, were shaken by the times. Whenever one of them would be out of town, they would invite one of Minnie’s young nieces or nephews to stay over for companionship and maybe even protection, Washington said. “I don’t know what we could have done,” he said with a laugh.

  When Minnie was out of town, Gaston would occasionally pick up Washington to be his escort during her absence. On their way to Gaston’s home in the Tarrant-Huffman area, the two would make several stops along the way. They would swing by a little convenience store in what was considered the Stockham area because it was near Stockham Valves and Fittings, Washington remembered.

  “Go in there and get me a paper and a cigar,” Gaston would tell him.

  “I’d say, ‘OK. Where’s the money?’”

  “You ain’t got no money?” the wealthy Gaston would ask the young boy at the time. “Well, me either,” Gaston would say and then drive away rather than crack open his wallet.

  The two would often stop by the motel, Washington said, and Gaston would tell him, “Run in there and get us a couple of steaks.”

  Washington would get a couple of raw T-bones, and then when they got home, he had to make a fire outside on the grill. “He’d throw the two steaks on and three or four pieces of toast,” Washington said. “The toast was burnt, and the meat was raw. That’s how he liked it.”

  Gaston would also take a blender and throw in oranges, apples and lemons, churn it all up and pour it into a big glass. He’d devour a dinner of bloody raw steak, burnt toast and a fruit drink concoction. Washington would usually be starving, he said, and would wait to eat until the cook arrived in the morning.

  Meanwhile, before heading out of town, Minnie would have given Washington strict instructions not to let her husband go swimming alone. Gaston would get up at 5:00 a.m. and take a dip in the pool.

  “He didn’t learn to swim until he was about seventy years old,” Washington said. “It was cold water. He had a dog paddle he did.”

  After that, they’d eat breakfast and leave for town around 7:00 a.m. Gaston would stop at his insurance offices around 7:30 a.m. “He would pull up in Fountain Heights, and they’d better be there,” Washington said of the staff, “even though the office didn’t open to the public until 8:00 or 9:00.”

  “He might stop at another office and then would get me to school about 8:15,” Washington remembered.

  Staying with Minnie was a different experience than with A.G., Washington said. Minnie was as sweet as she could be, and totally opposite of the gruff Gaston, he said.

  “She would fix dinner and would snack off of everything,” according to Washington. “She was always watching her weight. She would eat off of little saucers. She figured the smaller the plate…”

  “On Sunday nights, we’d watch TV,” he said. “Loretta Young was on. She had a TV show.” Young would appear on the TV screen wearing her evening gown, and Minnie would say, “Wait a minute, let me see that gown.”

  She was sweet but firm, Washington said, and would always caution him, “Don’t spend all your time at that motel.”

  That advice he didn’t heed.

  Chapter 4

  WHERE TROUBLE SLEEPS

  Years had passed since the motel’s opening, and in 1957, Paul R. Jones, a handsome, peanut butter brown Alabama native who was working as a probation officer with the Jefferson County Juvenile and Domestic Relations Court, found himself riding in a car with A.G. Gaston. The men were part of a group of leaders who had agreed to raise funds for historically black Miles College. After the obligatory pleasantries and chitchat, Gaston approached Jones about managing the restaurant and lounge.

  “I’ve got the motel and the restaurant over here and lounge, and everybody expects me to pay top salaries because of who I am, and I am not over there to run it, and if you are not there, they’ll steal you blind,” Jones said of Gaston’s conversation.

  Gaston offered him a job running the motel restaurant, but Jones declined. “A.G., I could never work for you,” Jones told him. He then explained that he would want to own the place, not be a worker.

  “So he thought about it,” Jones said of Gaston. “He and his team got together with me and said, ‘OK.’” They picked the date, and Jones put in his thirty-day notice down at the court.66

  But Jones couldn’t have imagined the fallout from his decision, he said. Businessmen from around town who had run-ins with Gaston began to give him warnings.67 “Do not go into business with A.G. Gaston,” Jones was told. “We’ve al
l been in business with him…he always wins. He has to win. He needs to win.”

  Jones felt that his experience would be different because he did not have much to lose. He didn’t have to put up any money to go into business with Gaston, and the restaurant was fully equipped and was operating when he got there, he said.

  In a public relations move, the Gaston team announced that it was relinquishing ownership of the restaurant to Jones. Then, Jones stepped up and began to decide what staff would stay and who would have to leave. Soon after, Jones opened the doors under his ownership and called the place Paul’s.

  Now, those business leaders who had warned him saw the move as a “David and Goliath situation,” Jones said. Everyone likes to support the underdog, “so here comes the crowd,” Jones said.

  On the first day, Jones presented a menu with the restaurant’s past staple dishes of southern cuisines but also with additions like chitlins, or small pig intestines. “So on there, instead of just ‘chitlins,’ I said, put ‘Perry County Chitlins’ on there [the menu], so all of them could identify with Perry County. Half of them had roots that came from down that way or something.”68

  OPEN DOOR POLICY

  Jones had an open door policy to his restaurant. “You got people coming from north, east and south, west, whites,” he said. “I told my folks, I said, ‘Serve them.’”

  Even some of the officers Jones had known when working at the courts would come in to eat. These were officers who had arrested some of the black customers in the past, he said. “Local people who would come in and see this would half the time order something to go and take it out rather than stay,” he said.

  Shelley Stewart, the local rock-and-roll deejay who had devoted black and white listeners and also hosted a popular weekly record hop at Don’s Teen Town in Bessemer, remembers those days. “The Gaston was where human beings could be accommodated and eat,” he said. “Blacks and whites would stay and dine there and enjoy music there. All citizens. We would meet friends there who happened to be white.”

  Folks would say, “We will meet you at the ‘motel,’” Stewart said. “Everyone knew when we said that—whether they be black or white—it meant at the Gaston’s. That was the notable thing.”

  Stewart recalled a time when Patty, a young woman who worked at the radio station with him, inquired about his lunch plans at “the motel.”

  She was a slim, white woman with long brunette hair, Stewart recalled. He was friends with her father and husband. As a matter of fact, according to Stewart, he had helped her get her job at the station.

  “After I would get off the air, I would say, ‘I am going down to the motel to have lunch,’” Stewart said. “In time, she said, ‘Where are you going?’”

  “I said, ‘The Gaston Motel.’”

  Wanting to experience the Gaston for herself, Patty said, “You wouldn’t take me down there. You take my husband, but you won’t take me.”

  Stewart, who drove a 1959 gray Chevy Impala convertible with a black top and red interior, told her to hop in. “The top was down,” he said of his automobile. “I drove down Twentieth Street. Patty was sitting in the front seat. She had her shades on, and her hair was blowing in the wind. I had defied Bull Connor, and everyone knew who I was.

  “I had gotten down by University Hospital,” Stewart recalled. “Now, during that period, the police would be stationed on the corner. I had gotten down by the viaduct and got on First Avenue, and the policeman saw me and started blowing his whistle. Blllll…

  “I paid him no attention,” Stewart said. “Next light, Second Avenue, the policeman was flagging and blowing his whistle. I get down to Fourth Avenue and Twentieth Street, and this policeman got out in front of the car, stopped and had his hands up.”

  “‘What are you doing? Are you Shelley?’ he asked.

  “‘Yes.’

  “‘Who is this lady?’

  “She said, ‘I’m Patty. You can ask me.’

  “‘Shelley, what the…You trying to start a riot?’ the officer asked. ‘Where y’all going?’

  “Patty said, ‘We’re going to the motel.’

  “That’s when they called Eugene ‘Bull’ Connor,” Stewart recalled. “I said, ‘Follow me to the motel. I am going to have lunch.’

  “When I walked in and they saw me with Patty, the folks started to get up and leave,” he said. “It would have been OK if it had been a white man.”

  The staff served Stewart and his guest “right quick,” he said. Then they called Gaston and told him all about Stewart’s lunch guest. Later on, Gaston said, “Shelley, what you trying to do, get me bombed out here?”

  It was common for blacks and whites to eat together at the Gaston, Stewart said, but when the combination was a black man and a white woman, it was scandalous.

  HELP IS ON THE WAY

  Although some blacks and whites were able to break bread together at the Gaston, the racial climate in the city continued to take a nosedive.

  Certain local whites still refused to obey the desegregation order, preferring instead to shut down public facilities rather than allow blacks and whites to be together. Seventy-seven parks, thirty-eight playgrounds, eight swimming pools, four golf courses, the zoo, the art museum and the state fair, as well as the municipal auditorium and Legion Field stadium, were shut down instead of opening their doors to all.69

  But that couldn’t last forever. In October 1961, Birmingham judge H.H. Grooms ordered that city pools and parks be desegregated by January 1962 or else.70

  Sid Smyer, a white man and president of the Birmingham Chamber of Commerce, hoped that there could be a sensible resolution to Groom’s order, so the Committee 100 was formed and included every major white business owner and leader in the city. Gaston led Committee 14, a biracial subcommittee of the group. Art Haynes, who succeeded commission chairman James Morgan, thought Gaston would be able to keep the blacks at bay and convince them to accept the Jim Crow way, but he could not and would not.

  By then, local college students were preparing to make a statement. From March to June 1962, students from Miles College launched a selective buying campaign. They refused to patronize retailers that adhered to segregation ordinances. The students were joined by peers at Daniel Payne, Birmingham-Southern and Booker T. Washington Business Colleges.

  “We would put on our Miles sweaters—purple and gold,” remembered Shelley Millender, who was a student at the time. He and his peers would go into the stores, walk around, ride up and down the escalators and make their presence known. All the while, they would hold on to their funds, refusing to patronize the businesses. “We would also go to intimidate black shoppers from buying.”

  The city did not take lightly to the boycott. On April 3, it cut the surplus food program, which affected mostly poor blacks who depended on that appropriation to eat.

  Shuttlesworth wanted to fight back, and he needed backup. He began a campaign to invite Martin Luther King Jr. and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to Birmingham.

  Smyer heard that King was planning to come to town and was not comfortable with that. He formed the Senior Citizens Committee with leading white men who could help solve the race problem before King did it for them.71 While all the business leaders were meeting regularly to talk about the unrest in the city, Gaston told the committee that they were spinning their wheels if they didn’t talk to Shuttlesworth. “I got some money, but that’s all,” he told them.72 “Money don’t run this thing now. He’s the man with the marbles. You have to talk to the marbles.”

  Days before the planned SCLC convention in Birmingham, Smyer; Roper Dial of Sears, Roebuck & Co.; and Isadore Pizitz of Pizitz met with Gaston, Shuttlesworth and Lucius Pitts, president of Miles College.

  Smyer told Shuttlesworth that he did not think the merchants could meet his demands, which included hiring blacks and rejecting racist ordinances. That’s all Shuttlesworth needed to hear. He said, “Well, I’m talking to the wrong crowd then. Let’s go, gent
lemen. Y’all wasting my time. I’m busy. I’m fighting segregation.” He left.73

  On August 22, 1962, almost a month before the planned visit, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference sent out a press release with the heading “SCLC Sets Annual Meet ‘In Birmingham’”: “We have chosen Birmingham as the site of our annual meeting because it represents the hardcore South, and our affiliate group here has carried on a relentless and sometimes lonely battle for freedom from segregation. We are grateful that some breakthroughs are beginning.”

  According to the release, the Birmingham convention was expected to be the largest in the SCLC’s six-year history. Eight days later, another press statement announced that Dr. W.G. Anderson would receive the inaugural Freedom Award at the forthcoming convention. Anderson, a thirty-four-year-old, led the Albany Movement and had “made the most significant contribution to the nonviolent struggle in the South.”

  It was also noted that minister and SCLC executive director Wyatt Tee Walker “declined to confirm reports that a major project has been planned for Birmingham, commonly known in civil rights circles as the ‘Johannesburg of the South.’”

  Walker was then quoted as saying, “I can say that Dr. King has made intensive plans for Alabama during our next program year and Birmingham is in Alabama.”

  The sixth annual SCLC convention converged in Birmingham on September 25–28, 1962. Three hundred attendees came, including Jackie Robinson and Adam Clayton Powell, with performances by Sammy Davis Jr. Many, if not all, stayed at the Gaston Motel.74 Shuttlesworth and his ACMHR was the host, and Reverend W. Edmund Gardner, a minister at the local St. John Baptist Church, was the general chairman.

  Dr. King and Coretta Scott King at an SCLC event. Photo by Chris McNair of Chris McNair Studios.

  A.G. Gaston with Roy Wilkins and Minnie Gaston. Photo by Chris McNair of Chris McNair Studios.