Priscilla also had lunch once in Atlanta with Dr. King and drew on her experience during our speaking tour to ask him how he coped with so much attention. “When we were first released from jail, they put us on a pedestal,” she told him. “How do you handle it, because you have it a thousand times more than I do—about how you’re so great and so wonderful, blah blah blah?” He thought and told her, “I do not know the answer to that. That is a very difficult thing.”13
Walter, too, remembers an encounter with Dr. King not long after the 1960 workshop. At the time, Walter was enrolled at Morehouse College. “I was in the library one day and I met him. I reminded him I had met him previously, and my sisters were Pat and Priscilla Stephens. And he said, ‘Oh, yeah, I know them!’ I’ll never forget how he stopped to say he remembered. The fact that he would do that for me as a freshman at Morehouse was awesome,” Walter says.14
Walter took the lessons he’d learned in Miami to heart. He got involved with SNCC, participating in sit-ins and demonstrations in Atlanta. Although he was never arrested, he had embarked on a lifetime of community service in his own way. Forty years later, Walter would take thirty young black men from Boy Scout Troop #141, a troop he calls the “Buffalo Soldiers,” on an unforgettable trip to Ghana.
In our family, activism was contagious.
FAMU President George W. Gore Jr. was “constantly” under external pressure to “expel all students and terminate any faculty members who were actively involved in the sit-in demonstration,” according to Dr. Leedell W. Neyland, who wrote a book about FAMU at its centennial.15 Dr. Gore and the rest of FAMU’s faculty were Negroes, but they were expected to follow rules set by the state’s white power structure. Still, despite resistance from Florida’s Board of Control—the body that governed the state’s colleges—Priscilla and I were permitted to register in the fall of 1960. We were officially college students again.
We received a wonderful boost of confidence from our fellow students. On November 20, 1960, Priscilla and I, John and Barbara Broxton, William Larkins, and FSU students Jefferson Poland, Richard Parker, and Robert Armstrong were awarded “Social Action Awards” from FAMU’s Phi Beta Sigma fraternity chapter during its Annual National Social Action Program at an on-campus Vespers service. The campus administration had resisted, but the students had insisted on giving us the award. That made us all very proud.
I was ready to throw myself into my studies, which had suffered so much at the end of the spring term. But based on my newfound activism, I made a very difficult decision: I changed my major from music to sociology, where I thought I could do more good. I had been a serious musician, and I missed it, though, as I do today. I never have gone back to music, and I still consider it a great personal loss.
During the summer, while the students were away, the FAMU community suffered another great loss: Richard Haley, a faculty member and one of Tallahassee CORE’s most ardent supporters, had lost his job. Haley’s dismissal came as a surprise to the student body, since the student congress had voted him FAMU’s Teacher of the Year only in May for “outstanding leadership of civil rights … and for general interest in the student as a citizen of the university community and his surrounding society”16—only a week before he was let go. Even the student activists had no true idea what had been going on behind the scenes with FAMU’s staff, but Daisy Young and Richard Haley, who had become fast friends as well as CORE activists, were in the thick of it. They knew they were targets.
Daisy Young worked in the FAMU registrar’s office, so she had seen Richard Haley turning in his grades over the years, but they had never gotten to know each other well until they were both drawn to CORE the previous fall. From the establishment viewpoint, the sit-ins, student teargassing, and jail-in had been an avalanche of bad publicity for FAMU and Florida. Although neither Miss Young nor Mr. Haley had participated directly in any of those events—except in assisting and observing—Dr. Gore was under pressure from the Board of Control to regain “control” of his campus. Gladys Harrington, a FAMU librarian, who was the secretary for the Inter-Civic Council and had been part of the Tallahassee bus boycott, eventually left Tallahassee because she felt the pressure from the FAMU administration, Miss Young recalled. (Harrington rose to prominence in CORE after she left Tallahassee, becoming chairman of New York CORE and the Northeast Regional Representative.)17
A spy from the university would drive past Miss Young’s home to take note of who was leaving and arriving. License plate numbers of the cars parked outside mass meetings were routinely recorded. Miss Young once left an Inter-Civic Council mass meeting only to find a representative of the Board of Control actually standing outside to see for himself who was leaving, and she remembers one big-talking FAMU faculty member in particular who never attended another meeting after that night.
Miss Young says Dr. Gore called a meeting of everyone on the university’s payroll at eight o’clock one Sunday night—the exact time the Inter-Civic Council held its mass meetings. Everyone convened in the Lee Hall auditorium, she says, filling it to capacity. After making a series of minor university announcements, Dr. Gore said the words Miss Young believed had been his reason for convening the meeting all along: “You know, we are like a ship. And I would advise everybody that’s on the ship, if you want to stay on this ship, you stay on this ship. If you get off the ship, you may not be able to get back on. Because the times we are living in, the times are just not right to be doing some of the things some of you are doing. So, since you’re on the ship, I advise you to stay on the ship.”18
Miss Young interpreted his words as a direct threat, and she says it worked on a lot of faculty members who might have been considering more involvement. But not her. “That night, a whole group of us went right on to the mass meeting. As soon as the doors opened and he let us out, we went right on the way.”
Miss Young remembers when the storm clouds arrived. It was her day off, shortly before the end of the 1959–60 school term, and she received a phone call from her boss. That day, she was busy at a task at the Inter-Civic Council office beside Rev. Dan Speed’s grocery store. “I don’t know what we were working on, but we were always working on something. And I got this telephone call, and it was [the registrar] Mr. Thorpe. And I said, ‘Inter-Civic Council office.’ And he said, ‘Oh, Miss Young, don’t say that.’ He recognized my voice. ‘Don’t say that. Just answer the telephone. Don’t give your name out.’ And I said, ‘What is it, Mr. Thorpe?’
“And I don’t know, but I felt something. You know how you feel different? He said, ‘I need to talk with you. Get here as soon as you can. I need to talk to you,’ ” she recalls. Dressed casually in jeans with a cap pulled over her head, she walked to the campus. When she got there, her boss had a warning for her: “You know, you’re number one on the list. Mr. Haley is number two. Someone from the Board of Control has called Dr. Gore and wanted to know how in the world could we people be out protesting when we had full-time jobs.”
Miss Young says that they weren’t protesting—and even if they had been, what they did in their free time was their own business—but she wasn’t surprised at the summons. After the large-scale arrests in Tallahassee on March 12, she and Mr. Haley had discussed the possible repercussions to them. Mr. Haley had told her and Gordon Carey, of national CORE, that he wasn’t concerned about himself, but he was concerned about her because she had family and deeper ties in the community. Miss Young told him, “The Lord will take care of me. Don’t you worry about me, now.” They even laughed about it, she recalled.
Soon after the school term ended, Mr. Haley told her again how concerned he was about her. She again assured him she would be fine. That same day, he got the notice of his dismissal in the mail. “What Dr. Gore did, he waited until school was out,” Miss Young said.
Of course, the dismissal mentioned nothing about Mr. Haley’s civil rights activities, and some observers attributed it to personality conflicts and other problems. When even the American Associati
on of University Professors weighed in to question why Mr. Haley’s contract had not been renewed, Dr. Gore explained that it simply was “in keeping with the university policy dealing with non-tenured members of the instructional staff.”19
After he was dismissed, Mr. Haley released an angry statement through Tallahassee CORE: “I have been employed at Florida A&M University for five years, and have maintained the most amicable relations with my department head. It’s obvious that my work with CORE is the bone of contention. This is an arbitrary, unwarranted invasion of my personal freedom, and a clear threat to any other teacher—whether employed by public or private agency.”20
Miss Young continued to hear warnings, too, both from her immediate boss and from other staff members who felt free enough to talk to her; all of whom said that if she didn’t stop her activities, Dr. Gore would fire her. When I interviewed Miss Young in 1993 at her home on Pinellas Street in Tallahassee, her lively manner changed and her voice grew reflective as she recalled how harassed she felt. “Pat, it got so bad, nobody knew how the pressure did hurt me. It really did hurt me,” she said.
And she wasn’t afraid to speak her mind even back in the 1960s. As she once told her boss in the registrar’s office, “Everything I do is after five o’clock. Now, if I’m not free to use my own time, then I know I need to stop fighting crackers and start fighting niggers.” She told him she was never late to work, that she was up at 6:00 each morning even if she’d just gone to bed at 5:00 A.M. Much to her boss’s horror, Miss Young made an appointment to talk to Dr. Gore. During the meeting with the university’s president, she said, Dr. Gore was nervous, pacing his office, and he denied that he had been sending her any messages. After that, the warnings stopped, but Miss Young didn’t receive any of her expected pay raises for two years, and she believes it was because of her civil rights involvement. To my mind, people like Mr. Haley and Miss Young, who were willing to sacrifice their livelihoods for their belief in the Movement, are every bit as heroic as anyone who faced physical harm. Without them, those of us on the front lines would surely have languished.
Although Mr. Haley remained active with national CORE and lived in Tallahassee, on and off, after his dismissal, our CORE chapter’s morale was a little low at the start of the new school year. Clearly, we were fighting an uphill battle in Tallahassee. The city’s lunch counters were still firmly segregated in the fall of 1960. By contrast, lunch counters had been integrated by July in Greensboro, the city that had sparked the national sit-in movement. Ninety cities in eleven Southern states were reporting changes as a result of the sit-ins, including North Carolina, Texas, Virginia, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Florida.21 Change was visible in Miami, but in Tallahassee it was slow, slow, slow. It was such a great effort to push against the status quo, and we had to spend half our time fighting the white establishment and the other half, it seemed, fighting our own.
Despite our frustration, CORE did keep pushing for changes. On Tuesday, December 6, CORE organized a small, specially selected group of Negro students to picket Woolworth on Monroe Street, myself and Priscilla included. To prevent problems on the scale of what we’d experienced earlier in the year, William Larkins, president of the FAMU student body and one of our fellow jail-in students, passed out leaflets at FAMU discouraging other students from going downtown and to avoid violence or arrest. Those of us picketing were peaceful, of course, but during our three days on the line, white hoodlums shouted at and pushed us while police stood by and did nothing. In fact, according to the newsletter published in her home by Lorraine Calhoun—a white woman in Port Orange, Florida—to keep civil rights activists informed of developments around the state, an observer reported “flagrant fraternization and camaraderie between the police and the hoodlum element.”22 By the third day, the hoodlums felt bold enough to simply grab our signs and tear them up, but we continued picketing anyway.
At school, pressure was growing. On the morning our picketing began, I was summoned out of class to Dr. Gore’s office. I expected him to lecture me about my involvement, but when I got there, much to my surprise, two no-nonsense white men in suits were waiting there for me. The men identified themselves as FBI agents and said they had questions for me. One of them tried to convince me that he was trustworthy by telling me that he wasn’t from the South, that he was from Detroit. Then they proceeded to grill me about what activities our CORE group was planning. (This was only the first of many times I would find that I was once again being summoned to Dr. Gore’s office to be questioned by the FBI.) I still have a souvenir from that day: the December 6 letter on FAMU stationery from Dr. Gore asking a professor to excuse me for being late that morning. She was detained by me, he wrote. But he didn’t say why.
During that school term, I could feel that I wasn’t at my best. Something was wrong. I often found myself rushing to the bathroom because my stomach was upset, and I had a bald patch on my head the size of a half dollar. A dermatologist told me it was caused by stress. Two weeks before the school term ended, I woke up and felt as if I couldn’t think or move or speak. I’d had enough. “What do you mean you’re going home?” Priscilla said, shocked. “Pat, you only have two weeks left! You can last two weeks.”
I knew myself then as well as I know myself now. I could not go on. After nearly two months in jail and more months traveling to repeat the tale, I was emotionally spent.
I withdrew from school, feeling I had no choice but to waste all the effort I had put into my classes if I wanted to save my sanity. I packed my bags and went home. I needed to be with my mother.
Ten
TANANARIVE DUE
“Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.”
—James Baldwin
I went to Northwestern University as a freshman in the fall of 1983 with dreams of becoming a student activist. I didn’t intend to sacrifice as much of my schoolwork or social life as my parents had, but I was eager to add my voice to the thronging masses on a college campus, with its bevy of student causes and the tide of youthful idealism.
That wasn’t exactly the way it turned out.
Northwestern is built at the edge of Lake Michigan in the peaceful suburban reaches of Evanston, Illinois. I saw no thronging masses of activists. When I arrived on campus, the only fever was from Rush Week, when students vied for invitations from soroities and fraternities. Unbeknownst to me, this was not very different from the way life had been on campus when my mother first arrived at Florida A&M University, but after a lifetime of admiring photos of the 1960s student civil rights and peace movements, I had expected more single-minded seriousness from the students.
Even before I set foot on the campus, I was out of the loop. Many of the other black freshmen had come to the campus early for various orientation programs like MEOP, the Minority Engineering Opportunity Program, but I had received no such invitation. By the time I arrived, those students had already formed fast friendships with other blacks they had met.
Soon after the start of the school year, a racial incident occurred on campus. Apparently, a black woman had been harassed by white members of a fraternity, but I heard only bits and pieces of the story. I also had no idea that black leadership had decided to hold a secret meeting to plan a protest march. Years later, I contacted my freshman-year roommate, a cheerful and graceful black girl named Charlie Jordan, and heard for the first time about her night of political intrigue surrounding that incident. While we were students, Charlie had heard about a meeting announced through a very secretive grapevine, but by a strange fluke, I hadn’t—not even from her.
The black students met in a gym in near darkness, Charlie told me eighteen years later, with the older black students waiting for them like tribal elders. “Welcome to the family,” someone told Charlie, squeezing her hand. At that gathering, Charlie learned about For Members Only, Northwestern’s black organization, the history of black activism on the campus, and details of the fraternity har
assment incident that had taken place about twenty-four hours previously: A group of white frat guys had jumped out and encircled a black woman passing their house, taunting and trying to frighten her. After hearing what had happened, the black students present mobilized for a silent march to the homecoming parade. When the float from the fraternity passed, a hundred black students raised their fists in solidarity while a frat member on the float shouted racial epithets at them. “What amazed me was the power of the network and how quickly all those people were galvanized together,” says Charlie, who is today an independent film director living in Los Angeles.1
Where was I during all this racial unity? I have no idea.
I would have loved an initiation like that, but I received none. Meanwhile, I was searching blindly for familiar touchstones at Northwestern. There was no college chapter of the NAACP on the campus. I was thrilled when I saw a meeting announcement for the International Committee Against Racism, and I attended the meeting with Charlie—but that group turned out to be a Marxist revolutionary organization. We were neither Marxists nor revolutionaries, and the only other students in attendance, as far as I can recall, were white. Charlie and I took one look at each other and knew we wouldn’t be going back there—although Charlie’s name ended up published in the Daily Northwestern as a new member, much to her embarrassment.
Freedom in the Family Page 14