Dad’s schedule in recent months had been too trying. He had worked at the post office during the day, attended law classes at night, and spent his free time volunteering in civil rights activities and socializing. By the end of his first year of law school, his grades were plummeting. “I don’t say I failed—I didn’t succeed. There’s a big difference,” Dad says with his characteristic good humor. By the time he was twenty-five, Dad had flunked out of law school.
Afterward, he worked as one of the first Negro counselors at the Indiana State Farm, a correctional institution in Greencastle, Indiana. But the Monday after he took part in the Monument Circle demonstrations, his boss asked him to resign. “Why?” Dad asked. “You were seen making a spectacle of yourself picketing, and that reflects poorly on us,” his boss said, and he began writing up termination papers, where he stated the reason for Dad’s dismissal.
That was his boss’s mistake, Dad says. Since all new employees were probationary for the first six months anyway, his boss needn’t have bothered offering an explanation, and it was an explanation that seemed clearly discriminatory. When Dad went to John Ward to ask advice, Ward said he would help him sue.
“I pictured myself going all over the state of Indiana speaking in relation to this issue, when I was called by the supervisor to come to work,” Dad says. “I knew that although I was called back to work and everything allegedly was forgiven, they would find some other reason to get rid of me.”
Besides, Dad was ready for a change. He had been displeased with his law school’s highly conservative leanings, and since the civil rights struggle didn’t really seem to be catching fire in Indianapolis, Dad began thinking about going South. He felt that Indianapolis’s Negro leaders had sold out. He wanted to go where the action was, like the demonstrations he had read about in Florida. He wanted to become part of the direct action of CORE.
Coincidentally, a lot of Negro students from Florida were enrolled at Indiana University during that time. As Dad tells it, the state of Florida was trying to dodge the United States Supreme Court’s order to desegregate its graduate schools by paying the tuition of its Negro college graduates to attend graduate schools outside of Florida. One of those students was George King, who taught history at Florida A&M University in Tallahassee and happened to be working on his doctorate at Indiana when Dad was there. Through him, Dad learned about FAMU’s law school, which the state had created to avoid desegregating the University of Florida’s law school. There were not many students at FAMU, Dad was told, and the school would be happy to admit him. Dad wrote to the dean, Thomas Miller Jenkins.
“He advised me, ‘Get prepared, and don’t make the mistake you made at Indiana University College of Law. Learn as much as you can, and just don’t get involved with civil rights activities until you get your law degree and become admitted to a bar. If you get involved before you pass and take the bar, you won’t be able to be successful,’ ” Dad recalls. “So, I told him, ‘Yes, you’re right, Dean Jenkins. I’ll just study and I won’t get involved.’ ”
He believed that. He also believed he would get his law degree in Florida, then return to Indiana to make changes in the state of his birth.
In life, things rarely go as planned.
My mother was never allowed to have any illusions about my father, because he told her on many occasions exactly how he felt: He wasn’t the marrying kind. He didn’t want a family. All he wanted was to fight for his people’s rights.
My parents didn’t “date” in any real sense. He didn’t court her or buy her roses, and she never put on special dresses or had her hair done when she was going to see him. In many ways, they were just friends. But they spent countless hours in conversation and strategy sessions, envisioning the world they wanted to help build, and they glimpsed each other’s souls. It became more and more clear to my father that this attractive firebrand had feelings for him, and he couldn’t ignore his feelings for her. Those feelings were problematic. He had blurted out a proposal the night they’d been sitting on Daisy Young’s porch as summer approached in 1961, and her laughter had hurt his pride. He’d decided maybe he’d dodged a bullet. Maybe it was all for the best. Maybe she deserved someone else, someone with broader interests than his.
But when Patricia Stephens announced that she was going to leave FAMU and go to New York at the end of 1962, Dad knew his life was at a crossroads. As it turned out, it wasn’t his soul or his heart that made the decision to marry Patricia Stephens. Once again, to boil it down, he relied on his intellect and his powers of observation.
Dad had seen a few things that stuck with him during his days in Indiana with John Ward. Ward had been a mentor beyond his dedication to the struggle; Ward was also a mentor in his handling of his personal life, as a cautionary tale if nothing else. Ward had been married briefly while Dad knew him in Indianapolis, and it had not been a pretty union to witness.
“John Ward sacrificed his life, his family, his marriage,” Dad says, explaining that Ward had not paid enough attention to his wife, spending too much time away from her with other women, and the marriage had lasted only a few years. On the one hand, Dad thought, he could look at Ward’s example and avoid marriage entirely. After all, the kind of energy and focus it would take to make a real impact on American society would not leave much time for a home life.
On the other hand.…
Ever the voracious reader, Dad had read The Rebel by Albert Camus, in which the French existentialist writer discussed how all revolutions eventually become corrupt. Since Dad saw himself at the forefront of a social revolution, he knew those lessons would apply to him. “You know, the Russian Revolution turned out Stalin, who just killed millions of people. He purged so many of his officers in the Russian Army that he almost lost Russia to Hitler’s invasion in World War II. Fortunately, he didn’t kill the officers that were fighting the Japanese, so he just had to bring them back to Moscow to save Moscow. And of course we know about Castro—complete idiocy. There’s so much arrogance in feeling the righteousness of your cause,” he says.
What did that have to do with marrying Patricia Stephens?
“I said to myself, ‘If I let Patricia go, I’m going to be my worst enemy. People will be looking for me. I’ll be in prison somewhere.’ ”
In marrying Mom, Dad believed he could safeguard both his future and his soul. She would help keep him anchored to the world of practicality so he would not lose course and fly off completely into the world of ideals and beliefs. And because their shared belief in the cause ran so deeply, he thought they could avoid some of the pitfalls he had seen plague John Ward.
He almost calculated wrong.
In 1972, when my parents had been married for nine years, had three children to care for, and had more bills than money, my father simply vanished one day. He had been suspended from the Florida bar as a result of a trap laid for him in response to his civil rights activities, and the rebel in him was burning strong, as it had throughout the 1960s. In the earlier days of their marriage, my parents had considered prolonged separation a fact of life. My father was used to traveling on a shoestring, sleeping in his car, on people’s sofas, on the floor if he had to, and my mother had often done the same. Dad was used to losing himself in the Struggle.
Life was different by 1972. My parents had children now, mouths to feed. My mother had no idea where he was, and after two weeks she was frantic and beyond furious.
While my mother was wringing her hands in Miami, Dad was organizing a statewide welfare rights organization, traveling throughout northern Florida. He’d gone to St. Petersburg first, and Joe Waller, a client and activist with J.O.M.O. (the Junta of Militant Organizations), a Florida black militant organization, had given him enough money to travel from St. Petersburg to Jacksonville to talk to welfare mothers about what their rights and expectations should be. My father’s family was in Miami, but his mind was on making changes for other families and other children.
Then, my father says, he h
ad an epiphany. He was about to sit in on a meeting for his people called by a professional organizer who had been brought in from New Orleans, but he was stopped at the door. “No, Mr. Due, this is just for the welfare mothers,” a woman told him.
Dad went back to his hotel room and let it sink in. He didn’t belong there.
“That’s when I came on back to Miami, and I said, ‘Look, I need to rearrange my priorities somehow,’ ” Dad recalls. “I remembered how John Ward’s life was all messed up, so I said, ‘No, I need to try and stay home. I need to stay home and see what I can do.’ ”
In 1973, he was offered a job with the Metropolitan Dade County Community Relations Board. The director, Robert Simms, asked him, “Do you believe you can carry out your mission in life by working within the system?” Dad knew the CRB was comprised of movers and shakers who wanted to know what should be done to keep the peace without the police violence of St. Augustine or Birmingham. Dad also knew that his grandmother’s concern was coming to a head. Finally, he also remembered the conclusion he’d come to in the sixth grade when doing research on why it was a good idea to hire the handicapped: It was “good business” to hire the handicapped. Taking the job at CRB would give him access to movers and shakers, to show them that it was good business to do the right thing. He took the job.
As it had on my mother, J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI had been keeping a dossier on my father since the early 1960s. His affiliation with more radical groups in the later 1960s earned him FBI categorization as a “subversive,” citing “prior acts or conduct or statements indicating a propensity for violence and antipathy toward good order and government.”2 (My father had never committed a single act of political violence, but the Black Power groups of the late 1960s scared the government.) When he’d worked for Legal Services of Greater Miami, the FBI regularly called his director and clients to tell them Dad was attending meetings to “overthrow the government.” We discovered after reading his files years later that people he worked with and considered his allies were informing on him to the FBI. The agency kept tabs on him, constantly noting his whereabouts. He was considered outside of the mainstream.
At the Community Relations Board, Dad would be inside mainstream life again, and it was an adjustment for him. He was afraid he was selling out. Father Theodore Gibson, a longtime Miami civil rights activist, was very upset with him for taking the position for precisely that reason. He wanted Dad to be independent of the county in reorganizing the Miami branch of the NAACP. But Dad’s new job paid the bills. It provided for his family. By 1974, the FBI finally stopped monitoring my father’s activities, no longer considering him a threat. Over the years, my father made peace with his choice while doing all he could as a volunteer.
But making peace is never easy.
As of this book’s publication, my parents have been married forty years. In a society where divorce runs rampant, I see my parents as a shining example of partnership that truly can last a lifetime. At least, as their child, that is my hope. I heard on 60 Minutes recently that not a single one of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s four children has ever married. Hearing that, I couldn’t help speculating that those four children of the Struggle probably didn’t emerge from their traumatic childhoods with a notion of marriage they wanted to emulate. Those kids had not really had a father, even before his assassination. Their father lost his life, and Dr. King was so often absent that Coretta Scott King, in many ways, was a widow long before her husband died.
There are probably many times when my mother feels like a widow, too.
My sisters and I have all married, and we are building our own families. I have a teenage stepdaughter, Nicki, and my husband and I intend to have more children, both biologically and through adoption. Lydia has two young sons, Justin and Jordan. Johnita, too, plans to have children soon. To me, more than for anyone else, this book is for our children.
My sisters and I all know my parents’ marriage has not been easy on my mother in particular. That was never a secret in our home. But we love both our parents, even if Dad is sometimes still a mystery to us, and if Mom is the one we’re used to hanging out with and sharing our joys and anxieties with first. We talk to her almost every day about anything and everything. When we talk to Dad, the conversation is almost always rooted somehow to the Struggle.
But my sisters and I believe in the dream of soul mates and family as fervently as we believe in Dr. King’s dream. The quest for racial equality that brought my parents together also nearly tore them apart, but somehow it never did.
The home my parents built for us wobbled and groaned from time to time, but when the storms blew over, it always stood tall.
Fifteen
PATRICIA STEPHENS DUE
“In every human breast, God has implanted a principle which we call love of freedom; it is impatient of oppression and pants for deliverance.”
—Phillis Wheatley
John Due and I didn’t have a honeymoon, even for a weekend. In fact, although I didn’t know it, I would be going to jail again less than three weeks after our wedding. The Movement was picking up momentum in Tallahassee, and as two newlywed civil rights activists, there was nothing more important to us.
It had been a busy time. On January 15, after years of negotiations with CORE and other organizations—and without rallies or marches or celebrations—Tallahassee’s lunch counters were finally integrated in 1963.1 It had seemed like a very long wait to those of us who were first arrested at Woolworth in 1960, but in retrospect it was the year before the 1964 Civil Rights Act, so our work was paving the way for others.
Only three days after my wedding, I’d been selected as one of the local Negroes who would take part in a quiet test of city restaurants and lunch counters, sanctioned by the city. Throughout the day, we sat and asked for service, and city officials and police stood by, ready for reports of white mobs getting upset. Since we were all Americans, it always annoyed me that city officials were so concerned about the emotional reactions of racists rather than the rights of Negroes, but that was the way it was. We were treated like the last priority, as if the fear and hurt feelings of a white crowd were more important than democratic principles. That time, however, nothing happened. Much to our relief, we ate in peace, and Tallahassee’s city fathers decided the city was finally ready to open its lunch counters and accept that, at least on that basic level, Negroes were people, too.
I suppose city officials might have hoped they were rid of CORE after that. But as soon as they were probably congratulating themselves on getting rid of that pesky “Negro” problem at the city’s restaurants, CORE began picketing the city’s segregated movie theaters. Believe it or not, every battle was separate. We had to try to gain our humanity one small step at a time.
We moved on methodically, following CORE guidelines: We couldn’t assume we would not be given entrance at the theaters, so we had to conduct tests. In the testing, I tried to purchase a ticket at the Florida Theatre at 118 N. Monroe Street, and I was refused. The next step was to try to negotiate with the management, but as usual the management was not interested in talking to us. When negotiation didn’t work, it was time to have direct action demonstrations. Although I was married to John and he was just as determined to win equal rights, he had only four months left of law school, and we were both very concerned that if he got more directly involved, the state would not allow him to become a lawyer. In fact, a police official threatened him directly during that time: I’ll see to it you won’t ever pass the Florida bar. So, John was ready to work behind the scenes, explaining legal ramifications to protesters and helping them if they got arrested, but he could not afford to get arrested himself.
On January 23, FAMU student Julius Hamilton and I, armed with movie tickets that had been purchased for us by a white activist, tried to enter the Florida Theatre. We were stopped, and management called police when we refused to leave. We were charged with criminal trespass, and we spent a night in jail before being arraigned. Th
e case was dropped within days, however. Our lawyer, ACLU attorney Tobias Simon, was told by Tallahassee’s city attorney that they were “tired of suits and litigations.” Maybe they thought they could avoid more bad publicity, but sue is exactly what we did. We filed a $1 million discrimination suit against city officials. Rev. Steele counseled us to try to use our suit as a bargaining chip, which we did: We offered to drop the suit if the city would desegregate its courtroom. The judge agreed, but later reneged. When Julius, Rubin Kenon, and I came to the courtroom, we were removed from the side reserved for whites.2
It seemed that officials wanted to play games with us, but we were in no mood for that. We began scheduling regular pickets at the Florida Theatre and State Theatre. We picketed after classes and on Saturdays, careful to try to preserve our academic schedules. As usual, we had only two or three people in the beginning, but over the course of more than a week, our pickets grew from a few people to a dozen people, and then from a dozen to two dozen, and so on. The more of us there were, the more we were noticed.
During this time, civil rights activists had cause to celebrate. I wrote about the momentous turn in a May 21, 1963, letter to my former professor, Richard Haley, who was now based in Louisiana and still very involved with CORE: Yesterday, the United States Supreme Court overruled laws against sit-ins. That is, they said it is unconstitutional to arrest demonstrators to enforce local segregation laws, which are, in themselves, unconstitutional.
Freedom in the Family Page 22