Dan Harmeling sounded hopeful, mentioning that one of his white middle-school students had expressed her admiration for a poster he’d put up in his classroom quoting Frederick Douglass’s words, the same words about power and struggle my mother had excerpted on her invitations for The Gathering. “My feeling is that young people are ready to hear these things,” Harmeling said. “It’s up to us. Part of our work now is just to get the younger generation ready to go on. But they’re ready to know this stuff. I just think we have to be there to teach it to them.”
But others in the room sounded less hopeful. Clarence Edwards reminded the group that black children were being lost inside the traps of poverty and violence at an alarming rate. He said he’s run out of patience for the song-singing, nonviolent tactics of the past in the fight against racism. Instead, he said, he’s making sure all of his grandchildren get target practice with BB guns.
Greenup, a friend of Mr. Edwards since the 1960s, admonished him. “I hear what you’re saying, Clarence, but I’ve known you long enough to know guns are not your thing. You have made some of your greatest contributions through the power of the vote and getting the people out there to vote. Don’t lose sight of the contributions you’ve made. That’s why I’m glad you’re here, and that’s why I say you’ve got to tell your story to the youngsters. I know you’re tired.”
Yes, Mr. Edwards was tired, and he sounded like it. In fact, at given moments, I couldn’t ignore the deep weariness that enveloped the people in the room. What they seemed to be saying, at times, was that they had suffered all they had and there still was a lot to be done. Although no one in the room regretted their actions or would not do it all again, they were disheartened because they didn’t think enough young people were sensitive or involved enough to carry the work into the next century.
I knew what they meant, of course. The black community is still plagued by disproportionate representation in poverty, drug abuse, poor educational systems, the criminal justice system, and AIDS statistics. Too many young blacks have ended up in prison as our national incarceration statistics have grown obscene, shaking black neighborhoods at their foundations. There are still hate crimes. There is still police brutality. The word “nigger” is still ugly, despite attempts by the hip-hop generation to reclaim and redefine it. All over this country, communities are still as segregated as ever, and white children and black children never even meet to form opinions about each other for themselves, strangers for yet another generation.
In some ways, as Mom often says, the clock is turning back. According to a study published by Harvard University’s Civil Rights Project in 2001, schools today are resegregating, with 70 percent of black children nationwide attending predominantly minority schools in the 1998–99 school year, when that was true of only 63 percent of black children during the 1980–81 school year.2 Many schools in my home county of Miami-Dade are still in ethnically isolated pockets; in 1999, thirty-nine schools had a black enrollment of more than 85 percent. Meanwhile, the thirty-four-year-old desegregation suit my father has been spearheading against Miami-Dade County’s school system was dismissed by a federal judge in 2001 after he insisted that enough had already been done.
Still, at The Gathering, time and again, all I could think was how vastly different life for blacks is now compared to the world my parents and their fellow activists described. They had literally fought a war in their own homeland, with no weapon except determination. I have never been forced to fight for my own survival and humanity in that way. I was called names and experienced feelings of inferiority as a child, but my sisters and I have always believed we could do almost anything we chose, that it was our responsibility to thrive. No one told us we could not attend the colleges of our choosing, that we could not apply for the jobs of our choosing, that we could not live where we chose. Some roads have been more difficult than others—as is always the case—but my dreams have run unfettered. My parents, and the others at The Gathering, dreamed the future I now live day by day. They dreamed the future my unborn children, Johnita’s unborn children, and my younger sister Lydia’s two sons will enjoy.
But could they really see life through my eyes any more than I could see it through theirs?
My mother had hoped Johnita and I might be able to have our own say at The Gathering, to describe how growing up as the children of activists had affected us, but we ran out of time before we had that chance. As dusk approached, everyone was tired of talking, tired to death of remembering, and it was time for The Gathering to end. My cold had gotten worse, and I only wanted to sleep. Even if I hadn’t been sick that day, I don’t know how clearly I could have expressed my wordless feelings of pride and more than a little anguish roiling deep in my chest as I heard the activists’ disappointment:
But don’t you all know? Can’t you see how much better you’ve made the world?
Twenty-Five
PATRICIA STEPHENS DUE
“I had reasoned this out in my mind, there was two things I had a right to: Liberty and death. If I could not have one, I would have the other, for no man should take me alive.”
—Harriet Tubman
Life was not kind to many of the people I knew from the Movement, and it wasn’t long after we scattered and began to fall out of touch that many of us met harsh times. I’ve come to think that when we were all together we had given each other a kind of strength that we did not possess as much on our own. Whatever the reason, the end of the 1960s was a bitter, unhappy time for many of us.
In January 1967, James “Jim” Harmeling a white activist whose twin brother Dan had been arrested with me in Tallahassee, shot himself to death at a Florida mental institution. Jim had worked with John doing voter registration and community organizing in Gainesville, and was a very close friend of Judy’s. He’d had a nervous breakdown, and while he was being treated for depression, he somehow had smuggled a gun into his room in the psychiatric ward. One day, he turned it on himself and pulled the trigger. Two days earlier, he had tried to commit suicide with pills, and his stomach had been pumped. John and I were still living in Quincy and still in touch with our civil rights friends, but somehow we did not hear about Jim’s death until long after it happened. When I heard, I was shocked.
Jim Harmeling’s family blamed his death on the civil rights movement. Dan, Jim’s identical twin brother, had to suffer the loss of his twin alone because his father forbade him to invite any of the friends he and Jim had made in the civil rights movement to the funeral. Hundreds of Movement supporters had planned a caravan in Jim’s honor, but his father told them he wanted the funeral to be private. Like me, almost everyone Dan knew was from the Movement. It had consumed us, and we didn’t have time for friendships with people who weren’t consumed in the same way. Because of his father’s anger at the Movement, Dan could not reach out to us, and he was left to wrestle with all those questions of “why” without the comfort of friends who understood the ordeals that Dan and Jim had faced together. Threats. Violence. Lies. Betrayals.
I had never been “buddies” with the Harmeling twins in the 1960s because we were all so busy, yet we were more than mere friends. All of us cared about each other deeply, and the civil rights cause bonded us. Even though we were not overly involved in each other’s personal lives, the news of Jim’s suicide hit me hard. We had fought in a war together. What had happened to make him believe he could no longer face life? (Today Dan is a very good friend, and my heart went out to him when his adult son, Lance, died suddenly in 2002, another horrible loss.)
In many ways, it feels to me that the impact of the civil rights movement was psychologically more difficult on some of the whites involved than on the Negroes. There were many exceptions to this, of course, because whites could choose to walk away from the Movement at any time and blend into the larger society, whereas Negroes would always be Negro. But for those whites who were truly committed and very sensitive, the agony of their disillusionment was sometimes too much to handle. Most
Negroes had a better idea of how things really were, and some of the whites had been too sheltered from reality. I think that’s what happened to Jim Harmeling.
Dan and Jim were two of five children who’d been born in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, to the late Carl and Ruth Harmeling. In Wisconsin, of course, their encounters with Negroes were limited, although Dan remembers incidents when he and Jim were very young, not yet ten years old, when their father offered a ride to two Negro professional baseball players when he saw them walking along the street. Grateful, the men climbed into their car—real baseball players! To the boys, these were the two most important people in the world. At the time, the boys didn’t realize that even though the Negro men played baseball for their city’s team, they were walking because they were not permitted to ride the city’s buses. They learned that only later.
When the twins were fourteen, their family moved from Wisconsin to Florida. There, in Winter Park, a Negro woman cleaned their house, and Dan recalls that his mother felt uncomfortable because the woman always insisted on sitting in the backseat, saving the front seat for the children. “My mother felt very bad about that, that this lady should be in the front seat and the children should sit in the back—and she didn’t want to do that. To us, it meant that there was something wrong with that,” Dan said when Tananarive and I interviewed him in 1997. “And yet, her grandson would come, and he was a little younger than we were, but we’d play with him during the day—and then it started to occur to me that black people were living in a separate part of town, and there was something going on that was wrong. But I really didn’t have my parents sitting down and saying, ‘There’s racial segregation, and there are laws. There are organizations working to change it, like the NAACP.’ I knew none of that,” he said.
The turning point for Dan and Jim came through involvement with a youth group at their Methodist church, which happened to be headed by a man named Rev. Caxton Doggett, who served on the Florida Civil Rights Commission. Rev. Doggett and his wife, Becky, arranged for members of their youth group to meet with a group of Negro students, then Jewish students, to expose them to other kinds of people. That was where he got his first seeds of consciousness, Dan says. He first began to see through those walls of separation.
Although they were twins, Dan and Jim were very different. Jim was more academically oriented, whereas Dan was more drawn to athletics. Originally, the boys chose two separate colleges because they wanted to learn who they were apart from each other. Jim went to the University of Florida, and Dan started his college education at Hope College in Michigan. Independently, without consulting with each other, they both declared psychology as their majors.
In 1962, Dan was ready to return to Florida and be closer to Jim. He transferred to the University of Florida, and within a year, they met Judy Benninger and began to get active in civil rights, primarily through CORE and the NAACP. They also both joined the Student Group for Equal Rights, an on-campus organization, where they first picketed a segregated restaurant in Gainesville, the College Inn. They didn’t hide their involvement from their parents, Dan says. Their father, noting the danger, vowed he would take revenge on anyone who might harm his sons, but aside from that his main concern was that they would get so caught up in civil rights that they wouldn’t be able to finish their degrees or begin their careers; which was not a foolish concern, as I knew well. Their mother was worried that the work was dangerous, but not so much that she tried to convince them to stop. “My mother told me later—and I always had the feeling—that she was very proud we were doing this. I don’t think my mother in any way wanted to discourage us. She’d worry, but she also knew what we were doing was right.”1
Mrs. Harmeling only understood enough to worry about the physical harm that might come to her sons if they got involved. As it turned out, in Jim’s case, her son died without ever sustaining a serious physical injury from another person. Instead, he’d lost his mental health, drifting away from himself. His mind and heart had not been prepared to face the things he had seen and experienced in the Movement.
Rubin Kenon had already been through it when he committed himself for a short time. In 1969, Judy Benninger would also feel a need to commit herself for two months. She wrote me that she had been afraid she might commit suicide. Part of it, I know, is that I found that none of the dreams of youth were coming true, she wrote.2 I never thought less of anyone who felt they couldn’t cope, because sometimes I felt so much like that myself. I understood what they had been through. At one point, my friend Nancy Adams referred me to a psychiatrist because I felt so overwhelmed.
Dan believes his brother’s depression was fanned by his role as a behind-the-scenes negotiator in the civil rights movement, trying to work with whites to bring about change through dialogue and persistence. Jim, unlike Dan, believed people in the establishment could change without being forced to. Jim believed in the power of reasoning.
“It bothered him a lot that people weren’t responding. I didn’t see that because I wasn’t looking for a change of heart by the whites. I was more a part of the group that said, ‘We’re going to make trouble for you unless you drop your racist policies, your segregation,’ ” Dan says. “I think what he experienced was a lot of promises that were broken, a lot of sweet talk that essentially was poison, a lot of administrators at the University of Florida who could say, ‘Jim, you’re going to have an outstanding career’ at the same time they were plotting to do him in. While he was running for president of the student body, part of our platform was sharp criticisms of the administration. And after the election was over, he was arbitrarily dropped from a master’s degree in psychology that he had been a part of at the University of Florida, and had to fight very hard to be reinstated in that program.”
Jim wasn’t the only one punished for his activism. Marshall Jones, a University of Florida professor who worked closely with student civil rights activists, became a professional casualty of the Movement. Shortly before Dan’s mother died in 1996, she told him something he’d never known: About a year after Jim’s death, a high-ranking university administrator came to see his parents in Orlando and asked his father to meet him in a motel. There, the administrator coaxed Dan’s father to draft a letter claiming that University of Florida professor Marshall Jones had caused their family enormous harm because one son, Dan, had married a Negro woman; their other son, Jim, had committed suicide; and their daughter, Jane, had married a white campus radical. That letter helped fuel the professor’s firing in 1968, when his tenure was denied. (Another active professor, Ed Richer, had been fired earlier.) When Marshall Jones was denied tenure, Dan was furious. In retrospect, he is even more furious about how his father was manipulated during his time of grief. That bitterness has not left him. “In terms of the people you would call the decision makers, I have absolutely no respect, no sense of trust, no sense that they act on behalf of people,” he says. “[University officials] had absolutely no remorse over my brother’s death.”
I knew about none of this at the time. Nor did I know about John Parrott, a former Florida State University student who’d been a friend in Tallahassee in the 1960s. I remember how he was always so concerned about my safety when I was walking between the FAMU and FSU campuses, mostly at night. I was told that John, too, committed suicide after he became involved in civil rights. Again, I did not hear about his death until much later.
One reason I didn’t learn about Jim Harmeling’s death was that I was pregnant again, and once again my pregnancy had been a difficult one. John and I were living in Quincy. I struggled, doing what I could to remain active. Mary-Booney was a children’s clothing store in Quincy whose employees treated Negroes badly, ignoring them to wait on white customers who came in after them, refusing to address Negroes with the same courtesy titles used for whites, and disrespecting Negroes in other ways. After I’d heard a number of complaints, I typed up a notice that I copied to distribute to as many people as I could: URGENT!!! REFUSE TO SHOP AT MARY-B
OONEY, INC. UNTIL NEGRO CUSTOMERS ARE TREATED WITH DIGNITY AND RESPECT! REFUSE TO SUPPORT BIGOTRY AND DISCRIMINATION!
Even if I couldn’t get around as I once had, I could still have a voice.
On March 1, 1967, I was admitted to FAMU’s hospital and gave birth to a full-term baby. Again, I’d had a cesarean section, so I was not conscious during the birth. I woke up groggy, expecting the nurse to bring my baby girl to me so I could see Tananarive’s new little sibling. If it was another girl, I had already decided to name the baby Lydia Johnita Due—Lydia after John’s grandmother, and Johnita after John.
When I opened my eyes the morning after the baby was born, I was alone in my hospital room. Nurses were coming in and out of my room, so I asked to see the baby. I was told time and again that I had to wait until the doctor arrived.
“But why? Just bring me my baby.”
“The doctor will be here soon, Mrs. Due,” the nurse said.
Soon the doctor arrived and told me that my baby had died. I was not prepared to hear such shocking news. “What do you mean, the baby died?”
Dr. Brickler explained that the baby had been born alive but suffered from a disorder in which the lungs had not fully developed. He tried to comfort me by telling me that the same disorder had killed President Kennedy’s baby, as if that would somehow make me feel better. But I was inconsolable, and I could not be comforted by anything as meaningless as that. This had been our child. “Bring me my baby,” I said through my tears.
“But the baby is dead,” the nurse said.
I kept insisting, and finally Dr. Brickler relented. “Let her see the baby.”
She was a little girl. She looked exactly like John, just as Tananarive had. She looked much more well-developed than even Tananarive had been at birth, so how could she be dead? She was flawless. She was beautiful. Somehow, although I didn’t understand it, she had died only twenty-four hours after her birth.
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