Freedom in the Family

by Tananarive Due

  “That had a very profound effect on me. It scared me,” Judy said, recalling how she spent that night in New Orleans staring at the back and side of Mickey Schwerner’s head, not realizing how soon he would be murdered. “He was a very real person to me, and to think he was dead. He might have been the first person I ever knew who died.”

  Many years later, I interviewed Marvin Rich, a longtime member of CORE who served as the organization’s publicity director for many years and, by many accounts, was the man who really kept CORE functioning during trying times. Marvin was in constant contact with me during that era. “When Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner were killed, that was very, very hard on me, because I had been in Meridian, Mississippi, the week before, with Chaney and Schwerner,” recalls seventy-one-year-old Marvin, who is now the program director for the National Coalition Against Censorship in New York. “I remember sitting on the street curb, eating half a sandwich with Jim Chaney—in the black section of town, obviously. The following week I was back in New York, and on Sunday morning I picked up the New York Times, and there’s a little paragraph about a church being burned in Philadelphia, Mississippi. And I picked up the phone, I called the office in Meridian, and I suggested they go over there. For my sanity, they told me they were already there. Well, that’s where they got killed, you know. And I was going to ask them to do something which I would have had to live with the rest of my life.”4

  I remember feeling saddened by their disappearance, but I was not surprised. After hearing so many threats myself, it was not difficult to believe that the hatred ran so deeply that civil rights workers would be killed. Not only were the men’s deaths disturbing because we were in the same organization, but also because all civil rights activists were still in the thick of the violent resistance to our cause. Mickey Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman disappeared in June, when Freedom Summer was barely underway. In Mississippi, training sessions for the new college-age summer volunteers from all over the country were still being held, hanging under the cloud of missing workers while horrified parents called and begged their children to come home.

  We all knew, without a doubt, it would be a long, hot summer indeed.

  Not only had I met Mickey Schwerner myself, but John had represented James Chaney as one of seventy civil rights workers arrested in Meridian, doing petitions of removal for them. In early June, John had also driven Mickey’s wife, Rita Schwerner, from Meridian to a Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) office in Jackson, Mississippi. She needed a ride with John because, John says, at the moment her husband was driving to Ohio to pick up new summer recruits, including a white college student named Andrew Goodman, who had taken part in demonstrations at the World’s Fair. After John left Rita Schwerner in Jackson, he headed to Atlanta to meet me so we could enjoy one of those rare occasions when we could actually spend time together. I had brought Scout with me to John’s apartment in Atlanta, where I was waiting for him with anticipation. John and I hadn’t seen each other in two weeks, and we planned to spend a few quiet days with no interruptions.

  Of course, that didn’t last long. It never did. Right away, John got a telephone call from Wiley Branton and was asked to go to St. Augustine because civil rights workers there were in dire need of a lawyer. John was needed to assist the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Dr. Martin Luther King, and 200 other protesters arrested in demonstrations. Dr. King was flying in and out of St. Augustine to help spur ongoing protests, and the tiny Florida tourist town was boiling over with racial problems.

  We decided to take Scout with us to St. Augustine in John’s car, and I planned to go back to my base in Gadsden County from there. Soon, the new CORE workers would arrive for our own voter registration campaign, and I needed to prepare.

  The saga of the missing civil rights workers in Mississippi has always overshadowed events in St. Augustine during that summer, which were among some of the most violent in the civil rights movement. The crises in Mississippi and St. Augustine developed nearly simultaneously, and everyone from President Johnson to Attorney General Robert Kennedy to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to Dr. Martin Luther King had their hands full trying to juggle responses to both problems. John was there on behalf of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund in St. Augustine at ground zero, so to speak, working with a Jacksonville attorney named Earl Johnson to free protesters, between visits from lawyers from New York and elsewhere. (In an auxiliary capacity, John helped the NAACP Legal Defense Fund win a case without precedent, Andrew Young v. Farris Bryant, where the United States District Court ordered the state to protect nonviolent protestors. Young later went on to have a career as a statesman; he became a U.S. representative, the ambassador to the United Nations under President Carter, and then the mayor of Atlanta.)

  They had their hands full. St. Augustine was ready to explode.

  In 1963, there already had been several racially motivated bombings and shootings. Segregationists’ terror campaign had resulted in the self-defense shooting death of an armed white night rider trying to terrorize a Negro neighborhood. Although they had only been trying to defend their homes, four Negro activists were convicted of murder. John had represented those men, but unfortunately they were found guilty, which had been a major disappointment to him. In the wake of that, Dr. Robert Hayling’s house had been riddled with shotgun blasts, and terrorists had set one Negro family’s home afire and another Negro family’s car afire.5 Meanwhile, for months, Dr. Hayling and others had been begging for more support and protection from the NAACP, the SCLC, and state and federal authorities. Instead of helping Dr. Hayling, the NAACP had deemed him too radical and cut him loose. (The NAACP Legal Defense Fund, which was under separate leadership, continued to provide legal aid to Dr. Hayling and others.)

  Dr. King’s SCLC stepped in instead. The SCLC was looking for its next big front after the mass marches in Birmingham and the March on Washington, and Dr. King and his forces believed the city held symbolic value. After all, founded in 1565, St. Augustine was the oldest European settlement in the country, and it was planning a widely publicized celebration of its 400th birthday the next year, in 1965.

  On the surface, St. Augustine didn’t seem like the sort of place you would expect to erupt in racial violence, but King would later complain to city officials that his organization had never worked in a city “as lawless” as St. Augustine.6 The oceanfront resort town relied heavily on the spending of Northern tourists, who walked the streets in shorts and casual beach clothes, seemingly without a care in the world. Many whites who lived there, as in countless small Southern towns, believed the Negroes in St. Augustine were happy, even though Negroes were segregated, shut out of city jobs, and without government allies or a biracial commission to take their concerns seriously. A central tourist spot and gathering place in St. Augustine’s historic district was the old slave market.

  Thanks to Dr. Hayling and his colleagues, who had sought out the SCLC, the city’s segregated policies came under the national spotlight in 1964. In March, answering the SCLC’s call, 200 protesters, including visiting activists like Mrs. Malcolm Peabody (a well-known socialite who was the mother of the governor of Massachussetts), were arrested in various demonstrations. Because of Mrs. Peabody’s presence, the events in St. Augustine received coverage on the Today Show. By May, Dr. Martin Luther King appeared at a mass meeting to give notice that large-scale demonstrations were about to begin in the city, which he called a “small Birmingham.”7

  The presence of Dr. King and the out-of-town demonstrators not only enraged the local segregationists in St. Augustine, but they also drew Klan leader J. B. Stoner and other racists from cities outside of Florida. Both sides were gathering troops, and St. Augustine was the battleground. St. Augustine was a miniature stage for the momentum of the national civil rights movement and the violent tactics of its opponents, who were more and more desperate, especially with the imminent passage of the Public Accommodations Act, which would make the integration of restaurants
, hotels, and other public facilities the law of the land. Desperation breeds danger.

  Because the Klan influence reached so deep in St. Augustine, the city was in turmoil. There were brutal attacks there. By the end of the summer, police officers would attack other police officers they believed were being too hard on white toughs attacking peaceful Negro swimmers at a beach protest; Klan members would riot with the police; a motel proprietor would pour acidic pool solution into his swimming pool to drive away Negro swimmers trying to integrate it; more bombs would be set off; reporters from national news media would be chased and beaten by racist mobs. The sheriff himself, through his bullhorn, would encourage unruly whites to take part in a “march through niggertown.” Even the Florida governor, C. Farris Bryant, would dare a U.S. District Court judge to send him to jail after the governor banned Negroes’ peaceful night marches in St. Augustine, despite the judge’s ruling that Negroes had the right to march and deserved police protection. (In the end, the judge chose not to exercise his right to jail the governor for contempt.) Governor Bryant would also lie outright to Negro leadership and President Johnson, claiming he had formed a biracial commission in St. Augustine when he not only had not done it, but had no intention of doing it.8

  Yes, St. Augustine was terrible. The only consolation, as Ralph Abernathy pointed out in his autobiography, And the Walls Came Tumbling Down, is that the timing of the violence in St. Augustine probably helped change the minds of some U.S. congressmen who had been on the fence about the Public Accommodations Act. Even so, businessmen in St. Augustine who agreed to abide by the new integration law soon buckled because of Klan threats and violence.

  John gave St. Augustine almost constant attention throughout June and July, living in Jacksonville and driving the thirty miles back and forth each day. Even if he had found acceptable accommodations in St. Augustine, he did not believe it would be safe for him to live there.

  It was not safe for Dr. King, either.

  In St. Augustine that June, while John and I both happened to be there, Dr. King had a moment of truth. Although he rarely spent the night in the tense city, one day he learned that a Negro hotel had been bombed, and that the bomb had been intended for him. Shakily, Dr. King assembled his SCLC colleagues around him for a press conference in reaction to the assassination attempt. We were standing in the blazing summer sun under the shade of a tree outside Dr. Hayling’s office, all of our faces grim.

  Recently, when Tananarive asked John to remember that day, his voice became thin and he had to pause several times because of his tears. “All of the lieutenants were there, Andrew Young and C.T. Vivian, and Hosea Williams, and they were in a protective circle around Dr. King,” John said. “And I could look at Dr. King’s eyes. It was different from being scared. It was like his eyes were saying I’m a dead man. It wasn’t just him; the rest of the people, too. They seemed to say, You’re dead, King. We love you. We all knew he was going to the hill with the cross. You could feel that his destiny was clear, and that he might as well be dead.”

  At that same press conference, I was standing behind Dr. King with Scout on a very short leash, and Dr. King made a sudden movement backward. Scout had always been a mean dog, which is why I kept his leash so short, but Scout was in an especially bad mood that day because of the heat, and Dr. King had come too close. Suddenly, Scout lunged and snapped his sharp teeth, missing Dr. King by an inch. A few people gasped as Dr. King jerked out of Scout’s reach.

  To Dr. King, I’m sure, my German shepherd looked exactly like countless other vicious police dogs he and other marchers had faced in Birmingham. After Scout lunged at him, Dr. King did not laugh it off. He hardly composed himself.

  I’ll always remember that look on his face.

  At the beginning of July, I rushed off to attend a conference in Kansas City. Once again, luckily, I had the chance to see John, who was there on behalf of the Voter Education Project of the Southern Regional Council. By then, it had been a month since we had seen each other in St. Augustine. Believe it or not, because our finances were so limited, for the first nights we stayed in Kansas City I slept in the room with other women activists while John stayed in a room with male activists. After the conference ended, John and I spent an extra day there and shared a room so we could be together on July 5, 1964. We knew it would be a long time before we would be together again, so we enjoyed at least one night as man and wife. Later, our night together would take on much greater significance.

  As soon as the meeting ended in Kansas City, I was back in Gadsden County to begin the arduous task of welcoming and training new workers we had hired from around the country to help us with the expanded voter project, which we now called the North Florida Citizen Education Project. The newcomers were all college students, half of them were white, and most of them had at least some previous civil rights experience. These were idealistic college students answering the call for civil rights workers in the massive voter registration campaigns underway in the South, and they had applied to work with CORE. The arrival of new workers brought my staff to fifteen, and between them they would cover ten counties that summer. For pay, each of them would earn $25 a week. As project director, I was paid all of $70 a week.

  As difficult a time as I’d had finding a place to stay when I was virtually alone in Gadsden County, I now had a much larger challenge ahead of me: Workers would need families to house them in every single county we had targeted, and the workers were to be assigned in interracial pairs, which would make people more reluctant to accept them as house-guests. We also needed a larger space for our regular staff meetings, to prepare meals, and to house the workers. I’d been at my wits’ end trying to locate a space for us.

  As luck would have it, I had met Vivian Kelly, an elementary-school teacher in Quincy, who came to hear me speak about voter registration during one of my early appearances at Arnett Chapel AME Church. One of her neighbors had complained that the church was involved in “some mess,” vowing not to go. But Mrs. Kelly wanted to know what “mess” her friend was talking about, so she went to hear me speak, and she says she was struck by my sense of resolve. She also liked the fact that I was from Gadsden County and had come home to make a difference in my own community. Mrs. Kelly is a tall, queenly woman with rich, mahogany-colored skin, and although I did not know her at the time, she knew of me; she’d been one of Mother’s classmates as a child, and my biological father was her cousin, so we were related.

  Like many people who had grown up in Gadsden County, Mrs. Kelly had worked in the tobacco fields as a child, making fifty cents a day toting and stringing tobacco leaves. She’d attended school in Midway through the ninth grade, then come to Quincy to finish her high school education, scrubbing floors to earn her room and board at a woman’s home because her parents were too poor to pay for it. Her father borrowed fifty dollars from a farmer, enabling her to go to Florida A&M, and she didn’t stop there. She completed her master’s degree when she was in her late twenties, even though she was the mother of four sons and had been widowed in 1955 when her husband was killed in a car accident.

  Despite being a single mother, and despite the pervasive fear that drove many Negroes away from activism, Mrs. Kelly decided to get involved. Her personal problems with whites had been limited to having white children in school buses throw orange peels at her and the other Negro students who were forced to walk to school when she was a girl, but she’d grown up hearing many of the same horrific stories my mother had heard in Gadsden County. She knew about the physician, Dr. W. S. Stevens, who had been beaten and tied to a tree in the 1940s because he tried to register people to vote. (He was the same physician who’d built a small hospital for Negroes, although the white establishment never allowed it to operate. His son, Charles Stevens, also became a physician.) When she was eleven or twelve, Mrs. Kelly had met a woman named Miss Bowie, who traveled from home to home to demonstrate how to preserve vegetables and meat. Miss Bowie had also found a man willing to donate an acre
of his land to build a sorely needed park for Negro children. Miss Bowie had also talked about voter registration, and when word of that spread, racists burned the woman’s house down. After constant harassment, Miss Bowie left town, like so many other Negroes who tried to make a difference. In fact, Mrs. Kelly remembers a succession of Negro physicians who tried to set up practices in Gadsden County, but always left after four or five months. “They told me that the white people would tell them that they had to leave. They never could stay here,” she says.9

  By the time our voter registration drive came to Quincy, Mrs. Kelly was fed up. She was ready to help us despite her friends’ warnings, no matter what the consequences. She’d bought her house in 1956, a few years earlier, Mrs. Kelly recalled at the age of seventy-seven during an interview in 1996, and a friend told her, “ ‘Child, you going to be bothered with that mess? And then how’re you going to pay for your house?’ But something within me said, ‘How can they take your house or your job?’ ”

  Although Mrs. Kelly didn’t have much room in her home because of her sons, she offered space to civil rights workers when it was needed. She also suggested we should speak to another educator, Witt Campbell, who was part of the Good Shepherds, a civic organization that originally had been founded as a group of pallbearers right after the turn of the century. Mrs. Kelly was the group’s secretary.

  Witt Campbell, too, was a godsend. He was the principal at Stevens Elementary School, and he shared Mrs. Kelly’s bold sensibility. He was eager to assist us. As it happened, the Good Shepherds had recently purchased a property that had formerly been a little store, which they used as their meeting hall. Nestled right behind it, only visible at a certain angle from the street, was a tiny house that was not currently in use. With a kitchen and several bedrooms, the house was perfect for us. A few members of the Good Shepherds objected when Mr. Campbell suggested allowing us to use the house, much to his disappointment, but he stood his ground.