I don’t think I had ever seen my father shed a tear before, unless it was at his mother’s funeral; and, in any case, I don’t remember it. But that night, he shed tears. We asked him to recall any situations in which he’d believed his life was in danger, and he began discussing his field work not in Tallahassee or other points in Florida, but in Mississippi during Freedom Summer in 1964. “I can remember today like it was yesterday when I was picked up by the field secretary for SNCC, by the name of Bob Moses,” Dad said. “I had read about him, and I knew all about him. I thought he was one of these courageous soldiers. He was older than most young kids. He was about twenty-nine years old. That was old for an SNCC worker. He picked me up, and I remember going to Mississippi after leaving New Orleans, and I could see his eyes in the rearview mirror. He was not looking ahead, but just looking behind to see if he was being followed. And I began to realize This is dangerous, what we’re doing. Until then, I just thought of the excitement. Then I began to realize This man is afraid. He’s afraid for his life. And I began to think If he’s afraid, I’d better be afraid. Then I began to realize we had young people working here in these dangerous situations, not for the excitement, because they were afraid, but somehow they felt they had to do what they had to do.”
But that wasn’t what made him cry. Rather, it was recalling the people who did not have the notoriety of Bob Moses or James Farmer, those who were the residents of Mississippi towns who were sacrificing their jobs and risking their lives. “They didn’t have anything to gain from it,” he said. “It was so hopeless.”
His meaning, of course, was that these people, in the short term, could expect no personal gain from what they were doing. And it was “hopeless” because there would be no overnight changes, no changes that any of them might reasonably expect to see within their lifetimes. And yet they still worked, they still dreamed, they still sacrificed.
And for them I saw my father cry for the first time.
In my mind, that interview set the tone for our trip to Quincy. Mom and I left about 9:00 P.M., and I drove straight until four in the morning. We slept four and a half hours, ate a hurried fast-food breakfast, and made it to Quincy shortly before the funeral.
I didn’t know Witt Campbell at all except what I’d seen of him in an interview Mom taped with him in 1989, when he sat with her and matter-of-factly discussed how he allowed her to set up a CORE office in the house he rented to her in Quincy, the Freedom House. He did this, of course, above the objections of some members of the Good Shepherds, the organization he led at the time. Mom had a warm spot for him, and she’d promised the last time she’d seen him, about a year before his death, that we were going to write a book about what had happened.
Blacks in Gadsden County had considered Mr. Campbell the unofficial “school superintendent” because of the breadth of his knowledge, and he later became one of the county’s first black school board members. When he was demoted from his position as a principal in the wake of integration—like every black principal in Florida—he and fellow educators Vivian Kelly and James Palmer sued for promotions in the school system, citing discrimination. They joined dozens of other educators in two successful suits filed by white civil rights lawyer Kent Spriggs, who still practices in Tallahassee. Afterward, Mr. Campbell was again named a principal, and Mrs. Kelly became the first black woman in the county to gain that position. Mr. Campbell and Mrs. Kelly both retired after serving as school principals in a county that was mostly black, but which had few black principals.1
Mom had told me from the start that she planned to distance herself emotionally from the funeral, but it was difficult at the beginning. Gospel music, spirituals, and hymns almost always have the power to make me cry under any circumstances, but especially at an occasion as somber as a funeral. This one was particularly solemn, since the faces of the clergy and elders at the front of the church were as glum as those seated in the pews. Witt Campbell was a man who would be sorely missed, I could see, probably the kind of man no one believed would ever die.
The choir sang “Soon and Very Soon” during the processional: Soon and very soon / I am going to see my King. The sentiment was one intended as celebration, but it sounded more like resignation. The family members filed by, with a couple of girls (grandchildren, I’d presumed) walking with the physical support of older family members. One in particular was crying, and I believe it was her wretched face that made Mom start tearing up, too. There’s something especially moving about watching a young person grieve for a much older person, since so many of us end up far removed from our elders, barely knowing them. But these girls knew Mr. Campbell, loved him, and grieved for him, and the fact that he’d lived a full life, to the age of eighty-five, serving on the school board until he died, was of little comfort to them.
“This is going to be hard,” Mom said.
She was the first person on the program to give reflections.
“I’m so proud to be from Quincy,” she began in her striking timbre. I believe Mom was the one who first began to awaken the church from its stupor.
She talked about how he supported her presence in Quincy, gave her a place to stay, didn’t buckle even after the White Citizens’ Council fired gunshots into the Freedom House. Some people in the room, I’m sure, knew nothing of that time. Mom was the chronicler.
The eulogy, delivered by Tallahassee’s presiding elder, Rev. Ralph L. Wilson, was very stirring to me because it painted an accurate picture of this man. He went just a little bit further, Rev. Wilson said, comparing Mr. Campbell’s actions to those of Jesus as he slowly left his disciples, even his closest ones, behind. In the eulogy, he discussed Mr. Campbell’s courage during the civil rights era, and his dogged tenacity throughout the rest of his life. Mr. Campbell personified the kind of person Dad was talking about when he was moved to tears Thursday night: the people who sacrifice for change, and who are often little remembered for what they do.
Not long afterward, Mom told me that she heard from a friend that Mr. Campbell’s obituary in the newspaper was so spare that there was no indication of how important he had been in his community. “If I hadn’t known him,” her friend said, “I wouldn’t have even known who they were talking about.”
The forgetting begins as soon as we die.
After the funeral was over, a common remark could be heard outside in the blazing afternoon sun as school board candidates mingled with friends and devotees: Who will take his place? As for the school board, the question was left for the ballot. But an election only ensures a seat, not a voice. As Mr. Campbell himself said in that interview with Mom, he’d learned that a black face is no guarantee of a righteous voice. “The problem we are having is the very same—it is us,” he said.
Who will take his place? The question was almost wholly rhetorical. The mourners seemed to take for granted, wistfully but with certainty, that there was, in fact, no one to take his place. Instead of bolstering itself to fight on, the community seemed to be preparing for its permanent losses.
Of course, these were only the impressions of an outsider visiting on a very sad day. It was heartening, I suppose, that so many people took comfort in the idea that Mom and I were writing a book to remember Witt Campbell and others like him. But knowing history, as imperative as it is, it is only the beginning of the process: The most important thing is to use it.
Sitting in the church basement, as we ate roasted chicken, collard greens, potato salad, and pound cake with the family members and closest mourners, one woman recalled how Thurgood Marshall came quietly into town during the 1950s on a fact-finding mission and stayed in the home of a woman she knew. Few people knew he’d been there until he was gone.
I imagined Thurgood Marshall as the young man, full of fire for change, about to spearhead one of the most important court cases in this nation’s history. Then I thought of Marshall as I’d seen him when I was a young person: the staid, wise voice on the Supreme Court.
It’s impossible for me to th
ink about Thurgood Marshall without being stung by the biggest irony of all, that the Supreme Court’s “black seat”—which was a foreign concept at the time he visited Quincy for that fact-finding mission—was so immediately filled by Clarence Thomas, one of the beneficiaries of the civil rights movement and yet a man whose conservative views are painful to so many of the very people who hoisted him upon their tired, sagging shoulders. How likely are we to have another black voice on the Supreme Court so long as Justice Thomas sits there? To understand the most recent history of blacks in America, one must look no further than this.
“Who will take his place?” they asked of Witt Campbell.
Who, indeed?
Twenty-Three
PATRICIA STEPHENS DUE
I swear to the Lord,
I still can’t see
Why Democracy means
Everybody but me.
—Langston Hughes
By August 1964, I had not seen my husband for a full month. This was nothing new to me. Soon after he’d passed the bar in November 1963, even before he began monitoring voter registration, John had actually moved to Miami for a while to find work, accepting a job at the state’s first integrated law firm, Heiken & Marger, on Miami Beach. We both thought his career was on its way, but the experience had been very disappointing. John could not attract Negro clients because Negroes were not welcome on Miami Beach. John was tailed by Miami Beach police wherever he went. Because he had trouble building a client base, John couldn’t produce an income and was forced to live with Mother during that time. As you can imagine, John felt very uncomfortable being forced to live with his mother-in-law. Our only earnings were the meager $70 a week I made as the voting project director, and John did not like being supported by his wife.
John’s circumstances really worked against him as a Negro. Even people who professed to be “liberal” did not want to hire him. When he sought a new job at the American Civil Liberties Union in Miami, he was told he wasn’t a good candidate because the ACLU was not a civil rights organization—then they hired a white civil rights activist, one who didn’t even have a law degree! Both white and Negro students took the same bar examination, and although John had passed it, his degree from FAMU was considered inferior because it was from a Negro school that received inferior state support. In fact, in 1963, ACLU attorney Tobias Simon—who had been subjected to a malicious campaign to disbar him because of his activism—recruited one of our civil rights allies, Dr. John O. Brown, to file a lawsuit to close FAMU’s law school by arguing that a low percentage of FAMU’s graduates passed the Florida bar. John challenged the suit in a letter to the St. Petersburg Times, arguing that admissions tests for the University of Florida’s law school were culturally biased and had excluded Negroes who later successfully practiced law, and that FAMU’s law school should instead be opened to students of all races. Simon’s case was dismissed, but within a few years, state funding for FAMU’s law school stopped and Florida State University was awarded a law school. (Fights to reinstate FAMU’s law school continued for years; a law school for FAMU finally reopened in Orlando in 2002, a hard-fought compromise that still leaves the law school isolated from the Tallahassee campus and community.)
In early 1964, we had been very relieved when John won his position as an Eleanor Roosevelt Fellow, but the separations were difficult for us. The only bright side was that we were always so happy to see each other when we had been apart for a long time.
When John finally came to see me in August of 1964, I was so excited! After weeks of tension, some intimate time with my husband was exactly what I craved. But when John and I were alone, making love, I felt the sharpest pain I’ve ever experienced in my life. I cried out. For thirty minutes, I was paralyzed with pain.
“What’s wrong, Patricia?” John kept asking me, concerned. I had to tell him I didn’t know. Maybe I thought the pain in my insides had been brought on by stress. I have always had a very strong pain threshold, so I hoped the wave would soon pass. I told John I just wanted to lie still. After a half hour, I very carefully made my way toward the bathroom.
That’s the last thing I remember. On my way to the bathroom, I fainted.
My regular doctor was out of town, so John and I visited another doctor. He examined me and told me I had lost a lot of blood, so he ordered a blood transfusion for me, but he did not speculate why or how I might be bleeding internally. Sure enough, after the transfusion, I felt much better, so I decided to carry on with my life. Since everything seemed fine, John left to go back to his work and I went back to my old pace. It may seem silly now, but I didn’t follow up on that doctor’s visit to find out why I had been bleeding internally, even though Judy begged me to. “I feel fine, I feel fine,” I kept telling her. “I have too much to do, and it has to get done.”
One day, I finally had no choice. I found my panties covered in blood. Alarmed when I told her, Judy insisted that I see my doctor this time. Grudgingly, I agreed.
I visited my regular doctor, a Negro doctor named Alexander Brickler II who had been very supportive during my forty-nine days in jail in 1960, visiting me often with his wife. I got a thorough exam at his office. “Mrs. Due, you’re pregnant,” he told me. Before I could rejoice or react in any way, he said in a very grave tone, while staring me in the eye, “But I’m afraid it’s not a normal pregnancy. You have an ectopic pregnancy, which means that the embryo was growing outside of your womb, in the fallopian tube. Now that fallopian tube has burst inside your body. I’m not trying to alarm you unnecessarily, but you are literally dying. You need to have surgery right away. I have to admit you to the hospital now.”
I cut him off right there. His words had not completely sunk in, but I felt an immediate reaction to his last instructions. “I can’t go to a hospital now.”
Dr. Brickler gave me a questioning look, then he added patiently, “If you don’t have the surgery right away, you’ll hemorrhage, and the bleeding will be much more severe. You will bleed to death, Mrs. Due.”
Looking back on it now, I must not have been completely in my right mind during this time. I listened to everything the doctor said, and I understood it all. I had a serious problem. I needed surgery. I was dying. Perhaps I thought he was only exaggerating, since his language was so dramatic. All I could think about was a voter registration campaign and the endless details I felt I needed to supervise. I was the project director, and Judy and I couldn’t simply disappear for the rest of the day. We had to talk to the workers in various counties who might call the Freedom House, whose lives might be in jeopardy. On August 7, seven more workers had been arrested in Mount Pleasant, a small town in Gadsden County: Betty Green, Cleola Goodson, Jesse McMillan, and Miles McCray, who were all minors; and Stu Wechsler, Scott McVoy, and Barbara Preston.1 The workers needed us. Our staff was small, so our absence would be marked.
“I can’t go to a hospital now,” I said again.
Imagine the look he gave me. The poor man was exasperated! Thank goodness he told me I needed to stay somewhere close to a hospital. If I stayed in Quincy, which was more remote, he said I would be dead before I could get help. (Dr. Brickler, incidentally, later became the first Negro doctor admitted to practice at formerly segregated Tallahassee Memorial Hospital.)2
After the visit, Judy begged me to admit myself to the hospital as Dr. Brickler had advised. Again, I refused. But Judy won one concession from me, and it no doubt saved my life: Instead of staying in Quincy that night, we would bring our work with us, tell people where to reach us, and get a room in a Tallahassee hotel. The Public Accommodations Act had just passed, so legally I was now permitted to stay wherever I chose. In Tallahassee, a Holiday Inn gave us a room, and we took a room together. Perhaps registering at the hotel that had recently been integrated should have felt like a victorious moment, but to me it was an inconvenience. My mind was still on the CORE workers.
I barely made it to the hotel room. As I climbed the stairs, I felt weaker and weaker. Something
really was terribly wrong, I realized. As my doctor’s words came back to me, I began to feel concerned. All I remember is that I wanted to get to the bathroom.
There I discovered yet more blood. Much more. Again, I fainted. Medically, I was in a state of shock. Judy called for an ambulance. I drifted in and out of consciousness, but I was lucid enough to try to keep my dress positioned modestly over me while they brought me down the stairs. After that, I lost consciousness again.
Since John was away and I was unconscious, I really believe Judy forged my name on the medical papers to authorize the surgery that saved my life. The next thing I realized, it was all over, and John was standing over my hospital bed with a worried look on his face.
“How did you …” I mumbled. “What happened?”
“I got brought in by the Florida Highway Patrol,” John said.
Sure enough, when word of my dire illness had reached the police radios, the Highway Patrol had sent troopers to find John after being told he was on his way to Gadsden County, and they escorted him all the way to FAMU’s hospital. The police had given us nothing but grief all summer, but they brought my husband to me when it really mattered. Usually civil rights workers and the police felt as if they were on opposing sides, and some police officers, particularly in St. Augustine, were Klan sympathizers who would have cheered to see a troublemaker like me die. Yet sometimes life’s circumstances can bring both sides together. Sometimes we are just people after all. I am grateful to those officers.
Freedom in the Family Page 34