During the three-hour drive, we worried about Zev. The Movement was heating up around the country, and it was looking more and more like a domestic war. In May, Birmingham police, led by notorious segregationist Bull Connor, had turned high-powered fire hoses and set dogs on children as young as six; 600 Negro children had been arrested and jailed in one day during those demonstrations, which Dr. King had spearheaded. President Kennedy, after seeing a photograph of a police dog attack, had said it made him “sick.”14 During that time, the home of Dr. Martin Luther King’s brother, Birmingham minister Rev. A. D. King, had been bombed, although he and his family had not been injured. Later, in the same city and on the same night, Dr. Martin Luther King’s hotel was bombed, but he too had been lucky enough to escape injury. It’s ironic to me: With all of today’s worry about terrorists, many people in this country forget that civil rights demonstrators were subjected to terrorist acts by American racists on a regular basis, and as far as I’m concerned, they were often encouraged by police and government officials. On June 11, 1963, President Kennedy had been forced to dispatch National Guardsmen to the University of Alabama because of Gov. George Wallace’s attempt to block the enrollment of two Negro students, Vivian Malone and James Hood. Governor Wallace set the tone from above, and the terrorists only took his hate-filled rhetoric to the next level.
That night, President Kennedy made a historic televised speech celebrating the Alabama students’ enrollment, urging Americans to understand that Negroes could no longer be treated as second-class citizens. But just after midnight on June 12, 1963, only hours after President Kennedy’s speech, the Movement suffered a horrible blow that was only a precursor to the very tough and violent times ahead for all of us: An NAACP field secretary named Medgar Evers, who had been leading demonstrations in Jackson, Mississippi, died after being gunned down in the driveway of his home.15 He died surrounded by his wife and three young children, who were hysterical.16 Even if President Kennedy was finally beginning to set a tone from above, who was going to protect us in the meantime?
So much was happening so quickly, and all of these developments were on our minds as Rubin and I drove along Highway 27 toward Ocala from Tallahassee, wondering what had become of Zev Aelony. We thought he might be in particular trouble because of the special animosity racists reserved for other whites. Zev was a Jewish pacifist I’d first met at the CORE Miami Action Institute in 1959, and we had corresponded over the years; he had tried to convince me to visit the peace-oriented kibbutz in Israel where he had lived for a time. In truth, I really had hoped I could see it one day, but I never did. Rubin thought of Zev as the most “Godlike person” he had ever known because of his very gentle spirit and righteousness; to Rubin, a Christian, Zev was living according to the example of Christ. Zev’s social awakening had come when he was very young because his parents had worked with refugees from Nazi concentration camps who moved to the United States in the mid-1940s, and during that time Zev also met Japanese-American kids who were emerging from America’s internment camps. “The camps came as quite a shock,” Zev told me. “I was kind of brought up listening to the radio and reading comic books and so on, with good guys and bad guys, and we were supposed to be the good guys.” As a teenager, he’d become involved in an interracial folk-singing group, and he remained socially active throughout college. Later, he was a conscientious objector and very active in civil rights, especially in CORE.17
By 1963, when the call came about his arrest, Zev was twenty-five years old and based in Americus, Georgia. He had come to Florida at my request, to help where he was needed, and then he’d heard that a sister chapter of CORE in Dunnellon, a tiny, isolated Florida town, needed help trying to desegregate a restaurant. He’d readily agreed to go.
That Dunnellon call came from a young Negro activist named Bettie Wright, who had heard me speak at FAMU during the school term and had participated in theater demonstrations, and then had gone home for the summer to Dunnellon, the town where she’d grown up, to try to make changes there. She started a fledgling CORE chapter in Dunnellon, only the third CORE chapter in the state. “When it started, it was me alone,” Bettie said in an interview. Bettie, who was then a nutrition major between her junior and senior years in college, went to church after church to recruit young people for CORE. (Today, Bettie Wright Blakely is an assistant professor in the Department of Human Ecology at the University of Maryland Eastern Shore. Her specialty is still nutrition.)18
When she expanded, she’d invited Zev to Dunnellon because he was a more experienced CORE worker who could conduct training in nonviolence, but Zev ran into problems as soon as he stepped off the bus, he recalled in a later interview with me. The police were watching the bus station, and a cruiser immediately followed Zev and Bettie as they crossed a bridge over the famed Suwannee River. Still, not allowing himself to be intimidated, Zev went to a meeting and agreed to take part at a protest at the restaurant. Someone from the Movement was taking photographs to illustrate that the protest was peaceful, just in case someone tried to accuse them later of rowdiness or violence. A police squad car pulled up while the photographer was asking for Zev’s assistance with his camera. The police immediately approached Zev, who stood out because he was white. The officer asked if Zev was a newspaper reporter, and Zev said no. Then the officer asked, “Do you know what the vagrancy statute is in this county?” The next thing Zev knew, despite his insistence that he wasn’t a vagrant (and he had pay stubs to prove it), Zev was arrested for vagrancy. He was told to get into the police car, and the police drove him away. That was when Bettie called me.
Zev was eventually transferred to the car of another officer, this one from the Ocala Police. “I remember him because he had a very angry attitude and snarling kind of personality,” Zev said. Much to Zev’s relief, at the police station, the officer asked permission to turn on a tape recorder. A recorder meant some measure of protection, Zev thought, but after a brief interview, the officer turned off the tape recorder and said, “We operate according to the law, but if it was up to me, I’d slit your throat.” Then, he took Zev back to the cell where about four or five other white men were locked up. Before he left, the officer announced to the other inmates, “He’s a Freedom Rider. He’s the one.” Then, he left Zev at their mercy.
The next thing Zev remembers is being attacked by the other prisoners, who kicked him and began smashing his head against the porcelain toilet. Zev tried to protect himself by curling into fetal position, but he could not have fought the men off even if he hadn’t been a pacifist. No one can say how long the beating would have continued, or how much worse it would have been, if a visiting white woman had not called for help. “They’re killing somebody in there!” she screamed. Without treating his injuries, the jailer first put Zev in a large, empty cell, then moved him to a very small all-steel isolation cell with no windows or light switch on the inside, and only a small steel hatch on the door that his jailers could open or close. When Zev tried to curl on the floor to sleep, jailers turned on the bright light to wake him up. After he was awake, the light would be turned off again and the steel hatch door closed to leave him in darkness. The cell was very narrow, he recalls, only about seven feet high and three feet across.
Rubin recalls arriving on the grounds of the Marion County jail, and being allowed to see Zev the next morning. The police really must have had no shame, because Rubin was very upset by Zev’s appearance. “When he walked out, both of his eyes were blackened. I mean, you could see the blood had settled under his eyes. They whupped him. They beat him badly. And when I saw that, I got scared, because, I mean, they might kill this white boy because he’s in there by himself,” Rubin said.
We needed to bring attention to Zev’s incarceration quickly. We met with Rev. Frank Pinkston, the NAACP branch president, and with members of Ocala’s NAACP Youth Council, including the president, twenty-year-old Charles Washington, and a twenty-year-old Clark College student, David Rackard.19 They were very courageous
and serious-minded young people. Most were teenagers, but some were as young as eleven or twelve, and they were eager to go to Zev’s assistance. Rubin and I, leading nearly forty young people, set out for the Marion County jail, where we sang freedom songs as we walked on the vast grounds. “We shall overcoooommme.… We shall overcoooommmme.… We shall overcome soooomme dayyyyyyy.…”
Zev, in his cramped cell, heard our singing. “I wasn’t sure if I was hallucinating, but I heard the singing of freedom songs, and I started listening and I realized that it wasn’t a hallucination because if I put my ear up against one wall, it was louder,” Zev recalled. The singing lifted his spirits, he said. “It was such a spectacular change from what it had been.”
We had hardly set foot on the grounds—and we were nowhere near the jail building—when police arrested us for trespassing and unlawful assembly. We were later charged with interfering with county prisoners, and I was charged with resisting arrest without violence. Rubin and I, along with eight others in the group who were not minors, were held at the jail. The others were sent home to the custody of their parents, with police muttering about how the adults were leading them astray. (Which is exactly what police thought of the children’s marches in Birmingham, when, in fact, young people are often more militant than their elders.)
Because Rubin and I were in no position to provide for our own defense, the NAACP assigned a team of Negro attorneys to defend us, including Tampa-based attorney Francisco Rodriguez and Daytona Beach attorneys Horace Hill and Joseph W. Hatchett. Authorities had investigated my previous civil rights arrests, so despite our very competent team, Rubin and I were both sentenced to two years in the county jail. We appealed that conviction, of course—and you could pay to stay out of jail pending the outcome of your appeal—and the case eventually made it all the way to the United States Supreme Court. The court eventually ruled that we did not have the right to picket the jail. We lost that case so, technically speaking, I suppose there’s still a warrant out for me in Ocala, Florida. For years, John has teased me about that whenever we drive through the town.
Our demonstration in Ocala accomplished our goal, though, which was to ensure Zev’s safety. Stories about our arrest appeared in several Florida newspapers, probably because so many children had been arrested. Two weeks after his initial arrest on July 26, Zev was finally released.
Zev’s brushes with the law didn’t end there. He returned to Americus, Georgia, and in August he and three other civil rights workers were arrested for an archaic charge of “attempted insurrection” against the state of Georgia, based on a local 1930s-era law that made sedition a capital crime. They were actually under threat of the death penalty! The outrageous charge made international headlines, causing the nation embarrassment. It was brought to the attention of Attorney General Robert Kennedy, but he did not intervene. Zev and the others had to spend three months in jail until their lawyers convinced a federal court that the charge against them was unconstitutional police abuse.20 In 1964, Zev was badly beaten after another arrest in Americus. He certainly collected his share of physical bruises in the 1960s.21
But bruises were not going to stop us.
By August 1963, every activist we knew was talking about the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom scheduled at the end of the month, when thousands of civil rights activists from all over the country would gather at the base of the Lincoln Memorial. It would be the first march of its kind in my experience, and we hoped it would put pressure on Washington, especially President Kennedy, to push through legislation to protect the rights of Negroes. Everyone wanted to go, of course, but if there was one similarity that characterized civil rights activists, it was that we were usually broke. John could not work as an attorney because he had not yet received his bar results and since he had been fired from the Silver Slipper for the false claim that he had led a demonstration, he was excluded from getting work elsewhere in town, too. His GI bill had expired, and my scholarship from CORE and the Southern Education Defense Fund barely covered our living expenses. While we fantasized about how wonderful it would feel to be part of that historic march, we didn’t think it would be possible.
A week or so before the march, John and I went to Miami so he could scout for potential work, since he was considering moving there after he passed the bar. We were invited to a meeting at the residence of Thalia Stern, whom we had met earlier through CORE. Jack Gordon, another CORE veteran, was also there. After hearing our financial plight as John and I talked about the March on Washington, someone in the group suddenly exclaimed, “We can’t go, but we can send you two!” They all helped us go to the march, as well as some supporters from northern Florida, and we were thrilled. The meager help was really only enough to cover the train trip, but what a trip it was! Some of the others who left with us from Miami were Miami CORE President A. D. Moore, Rev. Edward Graham, Rev. H. E. Green, Miami Times columnist Blanche Calloway (bandleader Cab Calloway’s sister), and Weldon Rougeau, a CORE field secretary.
The trip was one of the greatest experiences of my life. Our train left Miami and made its way north, stopping in West Palm Beach, near the town where I grew up. We changed trains in Jacksonville to a train dubbed the “Freedom Train,” then we went on to Waycross, Georgia; Savannah, Georgia; and Charleston, South Carolina, with marchers pouring in at each stop. Charleston alone sent 218 delegates. They were young and old, men and women, people from all walks of life. Some of them had fresh bruises from police brutality during protests or jail stays. Some young men even boarded dressed as women to try to elude police.22 As people boarded, they marched up and down the aisles singing freedom songs: “Woke up this morning with my mind set on Free-dom!” The rest of us clapped and joined in, excited to feel the growing momentum as the train cars filled. In fact, I was so worn out by the excitement of the ride on the Freedom Train that by the time we got to Union Station in Washington, D.C., on August 28, I was exhausted. But we were still singing when we climbed off.
I was told that there had been some discussion that Priscilla and I, and some of the others who had spent forty-nine days in jail, should be permitted to speak at the march. In the end, though, we were not given a spotlighted role, as were John Lewis and Dr. King, not to mention Hollywood celebrities like Marlon Brando and Charlton Heston. Still, John and I received VIP seating passes, so we had very good seats where we would not miss a moment of the program.
Nowadays, of course, almost all anyone seems to remember about that day is Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. It’s a lovely speech, but it isn’t what I remember most. Rather, I remember National Urban League director Whitney Young’s speech on unity, education, voter registration, and economic development. But all the speeches were wonderful. Even though I dozed off a few times because I was so tired, it was a truly marvelous experience to see the hundreds of thousands of people who came that day. It was a refreshing change, really, to feel that there were no responsibilities on my shoulders. I was in a happy, half-waking state for much of the time, listening to speeches, feeling contented, and thinking, over and again, “Well done!” I was so proud of all of us.
When I look back on what I most enjoyed about the fellowship of that day, it wasn’t really the march itself. The spirit of brotherhood and sisterhood continued after all of the songs had been sung and the speakers had all had their say. John and I made our way through the crowd, having decided we would find a way to New York instead of heading straight back to Florida. (John thought he might want to pass the bar in two states, New York and Florida, so he would be a more effective civil rights attorney.) In those days, the best form of transportation for people without money was hitchhiking, and no sooner had we positioned ourselves by the road than a white couple pulled over to pick us up. They had just attended the march, too. Not only did they give us a ride, but they gave us food to eat. We were all filled with love for each other. It was just a beautiful, beautiful time—the kind of event that really helps you feel there is hope for a bet
ter tomorrow.
Only two weeks later, a bomb blast rocked through the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, killing four Negro girls: Denise McNair, Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, and Carole Robertson. Governor Wallace had embroiled the city in yet another battle with the federal government over school integration, and that church had become a target because it was the headquarters for the city’s civil rights movement. In the aftermath of the bombing, two white Eagle Scouts—young men who had reached the highest, most coveted rank of Boy Scouting—were leaving a segregationist rally when they shot at two Negro boys on a bicycle, killing a thirteen-year-old. Police also shot and killed a young Negro man who was running away from them.23
Bobby Frank Cherry, a former Klansman, became the third man convicted of the church bombing thirty-nine years later. But if the March on Washington had given us a glimpse of the nation we were trying to build, the terrorist bombing of that church and the senseless killing of those four little girls was a horrifying reminder of the nation we still lived in. In 1963, Dr. King’s dream was just a dream. I still don’t believe we live in the nation we all dreamed about the day of the March on Washington, when we felt our combined love and strength, but we were definitely much farther from that dream on September 15, 1963.
And the killings were not over. The killings were just getting started.
I’ll be the first to admit that over the years, many of the faces have blurred when I think about the 1960s. Tananarive is always pressing me for details about the people I knew, asking about their mannerisms, their dress, their personalities; and I can remember some of those things, but mostly I remember the work we did. I remember our trials together and our common goal.
Freedom in the Family Page 24