The A G Gaston Motel in Birmingham

by Marie A Sutton

  He would recruit children to march for freedom and fill up the jails. The youngsters were not at risk of losing jobs for participating in the movement. They had the energy and were ready to go. Though apprehensive, King greenlighted the recruitment of youngsters for what would be called D-Day. The plan would be to get the children to fill the jails.

  “The children’s crusade was a big thing,” Stephanie said. “Any parent would want to shelter their kids, but the crusade was a game changer.”

  Stephanie was anxious about it and wanted to participate.

  “Dad, I am going to march,” Gibson remembered her saying.

  “OK, but I am going to march beside you with my gun,” he told her.

  “Daddy, you cannot do that,” she told him.

  On Thursday, May 2, the children’s marches began. Excited youngsters gladly stood in line to march for freedom, and Shelley Stewart, who had learned from King how to rouse a crowd toward action, was on the radio giving code language to eager listeners.

  “Bring your toothbrush,” he would tell them. “You ought to brush your teeth.”

  That was code that they should expect to spend the night in jail.

  Thousands of excited youngsters packed the streets and readied themselves for a nonviolent fight for freedom. Connor used dogs and water hoses to try to deter them, and images of this reached around the world. Viewers were horrified to see how people in Birmingham attacked and arrested children who simply wanted freedom.

  The jails began to fill, and still more and more children came out each day. On Monday, May 6, comedian and activist Dick Gregory led about eight hundred marchers who had to be bused to the Alabama State Fairgrounds because there was no availability in the jam-packed jails.

  The next day, Clarence B. Hanson Jr., publisher of the Birmingham News, sent a telegram to President John F. Kennedy. It was published on the front page of the newspaper. The headline spliced across the top was “A Telegram to the President”:

  Dear Mr. President,

  …Demonstrations have been unleashed in Birmingham by an organization which seems deliberately intent, having created open turmoil, on continuing it indefinitely.

  Mr. President, if these were white marches, demonstrations, open defiances of uniformed law officers, we believe your Administration would have taken vigorous action to discourage them.

  …The way to eliminate such threat of violence is to prevent large crowds gathering.

  …It would grieve you deeply if injury or death should result—particularly to Negro school children who are being cynically used in this needless day-after-day provocation.

  But, Mr. President, Negroes are gathered, are excited by speeches, and then are sent boldly into the streets where they openly taunt police and provoke not only the white community but the very law itself.

  …We ask you, Sir, to use the influence of your office to end this open law violation and provocation.

  …White respect for law, however, is assuredly damaged when Negroes seem with relative impunity to be able to foster open law defiance.

  …I now call on Dr. [Martin Luther] King again, in the name of properly, peacefully achieved civil rights for all citizens, Negro and white, to do his part to bring about an end to disorder in the streets and give Birmingham citizens, Negro and white, their opportunity to achieve the ends that Mr. Kennedy has set forth.

  That is the “picture” today, Mr. President. But apparently if there is to be order, and respect for the law, and proper procedure through the courts as well as sincere white effort to meet this problem cooperatively, you, Sir, must be the one to bring it.

  Later, Kennedy’s associate press secretary, Andrew Hatcher, said there would be no comment to the telegram: “It has become part of our study of this thing. We are not sitting idly by. We just can’t say anything.”

  That same day, Shuttlesworth was injured during a protest. He was knocked to the ground and had to be hospitalized. King wrote that Connor was heard saying that he wished Shuttlesworth had been carried away in a hearse. On that Wednesday, May 8, the black leaders negotiated a truce to end the demonstrations. Shuttlesworth was not involved in that discussion, so he checked himself out of the hospital to demand more than what was agreed upon.

  A press conference held at the Gaston Motel. Courtesy of Birmingham Civil Rights Institute.

  Press conference. Courtesy of Birmingham Civil Rights Institute.

  Seated, left to right: Martin Luther King Jr., Ralph Abernathy and Andrew Young. Photo by Chris McNair of Chris McNair Studios.

  With Shuttlesworth’s input, a new agreement was made, and he announced it from the Gaston courtyard. A pact of peace had been reached, and the business community agreed to desegregate its lunch counters, restrooms, etc.; to hire Negroes as clerks and salespeople within sixty days; to work on the release of jailed protestors; and to establish communications between whites and Negroes. After making his speech, Shuttlesworth, still weary from his injuries, got up to leave and fainted.

  Chapter 8

  THE LAST STRAW

  Dr. King was on a plane headed to Birmingham and didn’t have a ride from the airport. Wyatt Tee Walker, who was out of town, called the Gibsons for help, and Carolyn was dispatched to pick him up. She had a petite 1963 white Thunderbird sports car at the time. King was amused by the ride, Carolyn remembered, and said that every time he was at the airport he would like Mrs. Gibson to pick him up.

  And she did.

  “That ended up not being a good thing for me,” she said. “It became a marked car.”

  During that time, the Gibsons lived on Dynamite Hill near Arthur Shores and his family. One particular night, Carolyn headed home to relieve her babysitter, a high school student who lived nearby. She went home, picked up the girl and drove her four blocks down the hill. While driving back home, Carolyn noticed that a police vehicle was following and tailed her right into the driveway.

  When Carolyn parked, Stephanie watched out the window as the officers took her mother from her car and put her in a paddy wagon. Carolyn yelled to Stephanie to call her dad and tell him what was happening.

  “We got the bitch, King’s wife,” she heard an officer say into the radio. Carolyn said they must have assumed she was Coretta Scott King because she and the woman looked similar and also because she was often riding in the car with King, as she was his designated driver from the airport.

  For the next three or four hours, Carolyn was transferred from one paddy wagon to the next as they picked up drunkards, pickpockets, you name it. By the time she got to the jail, her husband and his attorney were there. The supposed charge was speeding, she said, and the policemen fingerprinted her and prepared her to be put in a cell.

  She did not go to jail that night but did have to appear in court. Since there was no foundation to the charge, she said, the judge dismissed the case.

  That was not the end of the terror, according to Carolyn.

  “We got threats at our home,” Ernest remembered. “We received threats every single day at the motel and where we lived. We received so many that we sold our home and converted two of the motel suites into a home. If we are going to die, we are going to all die together.”

  For Stephanie, living in the motel put them at the center of all the action. “All I had to do was stand on the corner and watch,” she recalled. The images of children being sprayed in Kelly Ingram Park and police clubbing protestors with Billy clubs being shown on the nightly news were nothing new to her; she was an eyewitness to it all.

  “Things were going so fast and so furious; things were happening every day,” Carolyn said. The motel adjusted its hours to accommodate the movement in many ways, she said. “We were open late at night. One of our main purposes after a while of being open late was to accept all the leaders and movement people who had been jailed.”

  Normally, the Birmingham police would release jailed protesters in the early hours of morning or late at night, she said. Once released, the folks would usua
lly gravitate to the motel and be hungry. “We would feed the whole group,” Carolyn said. “Martin would meet with them and conduct kind of a session to figure out what they were going to do next.”

  Late night meetings were commonplace for King and his group, Ernest said, and as the motel manager, on many occasions, he had a front-row seat. “I was the only one allowed in to serve them,” he said of the men’s evening work sessions. “I did not allow anyone because we didn’t want information to get out, but it was getting out; not from my people. It was getting out from some of the people in the movement.”

  The custom was that they would come into the restaurant from a mass meeting at one of the churches in the city or the suburbs and Gibson would serve them food. In case they needed anything, Gibson would stay, sit off to the side doing bookkeeping. He overheard a lot, he said. “All of the movement and all of the schedules and everything.”

  “The meetings were very tense, argumentative,” he said. “They had different points of view. When it all was said and done, when they all came out, they would have a unified front. Martin wanted certain things. Shuttlesworth wanted certain things. There were always good discussions; some were arguments.

  Typically, the meetings would end with the group linking arms and singing “We Shall Overcome.” In between verses of the chorus, someone in the circle would chime in a prayer request or make a statement.

  “Martin, one night, called me,” Gibson said. “The meeting was over. He said, ‘Gip, get on down here and get in this circle.’ He said, ‘Get next to me. You are in this movement.’”

  The group began to sing, and one by one, members took turns saying something in between the chorus.

  Gibson was standing beside King when he began to speak. “There is a Judas among us,” King said, “and I want that person to get out of the movement.” Gibson was stunned by the words coming out of King’s mouth. “I want all of you to know that things are not going so well. And if you are not ready to die for this movement, I want you to get out of this circle. Get out and don’t come back.”

  “If I had hair on my body, it would be standing up,” Gibson said. “I was actually shaking. I realized the man, the dynamics of this man called Martin. Although I had worked at Tuskegee and helped with marches, etc., I joined the movement that night.”

  “I think I got religion,” Gibson continued. “I cannot even explain it today. I got to the point, I am ready to die and I believed in him so much.”

  As the days went on, it seemed Gibson would be faced with that possibility. With so much going on, Ernest decided to send his family on a trip to visit relatives in Little Rock while he stayed behind. Mother’s Day weekend was coming up, and Carolyn wanted to see her mom.

  The Saturday night before Mother’s Day, Gibson was swamped. “I was operating the telephones that night; we were short on everybody,” he said.

  He got a bomb threat that evening, which wasn’t unusual, he said. “We had a standard procedure for when we got a call. We were supposed to call the county, the state troopers, the FBI. We did this all day.”

  Usually the perpetrator would call and say, “We are going to bomb you and shoot the place up,” Gibson remembered, but it was always just a threat.

  Just before midnight on May 11, though, across town someone threw a bomb at the home of King’s brother, the Reverend A.D. King. It blew off part of the house. A.D.’s wife was sitting in the living room when she heard a car speeding by. The younger King, who was pastor of First Baptist Church of Ensley, and their five children were in the back of the house in bed. The front walls of the home were blown down and the interior walls badly damaged. The bomb also left a four-by five-foot-wide hole in the Kings’ yard.

  The aftermath of the Gaston Motel Bombing. Courtesy of Birmingham Civil Rights Institute.

  No one was hurt because of the house’s structure, King later told the New York Times: “It’s brick,” he said of his home at 721 Twelfth Avenue. “That’s the only thing that saved us.”

  Minutes after the bomb at King’s home, around 11:58 p.m., sticks of dynamite were thrown at the Gaston Motel. Folks in the restaurant began to scream, Gibson remembered. “Some started to run into the street,” he told the Times. “Before the dust from the explosion had settled, Negroes began streaming into the street from taverns, night spots and small groceries.”

  Witnesses said the perpetrators were four men and were believed to be in a 1962 automobile. Three women were injured: Lola May Harris, Ruth Sawyer and Annie Maxton.

  The bomb was “placed as to kill or seriously wound anyone who might have been in Room 30—my room,” Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote.113 “Evidently the would-be assassins did not know I was in Atlanta that night.”

  Not only was Gibson glad that King was out of town, but he was relieved his wife was, too. “I would have lost my wife had she been there,” Gibson said. “At that time of day she normally did the bookkeeping and payroll.” She would have been sitting in the office just beneath Room 30, right where the bomb was thrown.

  George Washington remembers that night. He was in Liberty Supermarket with his best friend, Leon Brown. While stocking their grocery cart with various fruit juices for alcoholic drinks, Brown told Washington he was getting married. “I told him he had to be crazy,” Washington said. “We were eighteen, nineteen years old.”

  Liberty was the grocery store where “Lay” worked; he was a security guard who had tried for years to get on the police force. “They never would let him on,” Washington said. Blacks were given every excuse in the book why they weren’t allowed, Washington said, and joked that if you were black, “you had to be a Harvard graduate to be a police officer.”

  But that night’s bombing was no joke.

  “We all felt the bomb go off,” Washington said. “That was Fifth Avenue and Thirteenth Street, two blocks away.”

  Rand Jimerson, who was a white boy living in Homewood just outside Birmingham at the time, remembered that when he heard the news, he thought about how he and his dad had just visited the motel two days before. His preacher/activist dad, Norman C. Jimerson, had driven him to the motel the Friday before Mother’s Day to drop off a package. His father was the director of the Alabama Council on Human Relations. His role was to provide education about race relations.

  “He talked about the motel as the gathering place,” Jimerson remembered of his father’s talks.

  His dad stopped at the Gaston, and young Jimerson stayed in the car but remembered seeing people dressed in “African-type clothing—long white robes and colorful dashikis. It seemed to be exotic,” he remembered. “Then, two days later, it was bombed. I had just been there.”

  “The bombing had been well timed,” King wrote.114 “The bars in the Negro district close at midnight, and the bombs exploded just as some of Birmingham’s Saturday night drinkers came out of the bars. Thousands of Negroes poured into the streets.”115

  This time, though, they weren’t as long-suffering as they had been in the past. They were mad. Local musician John Springer noticed that a crowd started to gather. “I saw what I never thought I’d see in my life,” he said. “A man took his hand, pulled a brick out the wall and threw it into the window of a white business.”

  The bombings were the last straw, he said. “It’s like this: if you are already mad at your husband and he comes up to you and slaps you, you are ready to do him in. We were already mad.”

  About 1,500 people gathered on this Mother’s Day early morning. Some began taking knives to the tires of the police vehicles. Sticks were thrown. Cars were overturned. King wrote that he believed the bombers wanted the people to riot.116

  The crowd began to shout, “Kill ’em! Kill ’em!” according to Claude Sitton, a reporter for the New York Times.

  Alabama state troopers, who had been in town earlier for the children’s march, were called back to the city after news of the bombing.

  The crowd began to swell to 2,500. Law enforcement fought back, including h
urting innocent Negroes. Their acts included “the clubbing of the diminutive Anne Walker, Wyatt’s wife, as she was about to enter her husband’s quarters at the partially bombed out Gaston Motel.”117

  Wyatt took his wife to the hospital, and when he returned, he tried to encourage peace. He wrapped a white handkerchief around his wrist and waved it to the crowd. He pleaded with them to stop the violence but was hit by a brick.

  “They started it,” the crowd was reported as yelling.

  King’s brother A.D. arrived and tried to help calm the crowd. “We’re not mad anymore,” he told them. “We’re saying, ‘Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.’”

  Twenty-eight blocks were sealed off, and no one was allowed in or out. When all was said and done, about fifty people were injured, including a taxi driver and policeman who were stabbed, according to Sitton’s report.

  Birmingham commissioner Art Hanes was venomous: “The nigger King ought to be investigated by the Attorney General and the White House,” he said but offered no faith in Attorney General Robert Kennedy. “I hope every drop of blood that’s spilled he tastes in his throat, and I hope he chokes on it.”

  Sitton also reported that someone came out of the entranceway of the motel and shouted across the street to the law enforcement, “We don’t have guns. Why do you have guns?”

  To no avail, shortly thereafter, state troopers charged the motel. “Negroes fled in terror as they were clubbed with gun butts and nightsticks,” Sitton wrote. “The ‘thonk’ of clubs striking heads could be heard across the street.”

  When the sun finally rose, a young Dale Long had no idea what had happened overnight. All he knew was that it was Sunday morning, which meant he and his brother would usually awaken to the smell of coffee and pancakes. On this day, however, people were in the house—white people, he said.

  When he opened his eyes, a white man with a plaid shirt and jeans and a pistol on his hip was in his room. His brother jumped into the bed with him. “We knew something was wrong,” he said. “The gun set things off for us. We were afraid to get out of bed.”