Turning Up the Heat in Birmingham
WHEN WE returned home late in the summer of 1962, tensions were rising in Birmingham. Slowly but surely, the firewall separating the races was crumbling. Segregation was being challenged—and challenged hard—by the growing momentum of the civil rights movement, creating an atmosphere in Birmingham that was increasingly charged.
Over the years, officials in Birmingham had flagrantly ignored a series of landmark federal-level decisions. In 1957 Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, had been integrated with the help of federal forces. In Birmingham, however, Brown v. Board of Education had had little effect: the schools remained segregated. Similarly, the law requiring blacks to sit in the back of the bus had been declared unconstitutional after Rosa Parks raised national awareness with her refusal to give up her seat to a white man in 1955 in Montgomery. Still, Birmingham officials dragged their feet in desegregating the buses.
Several citizens’ committees had tried to promote racial justice over the years. As far back as 1951, there had even been an Interracial Division of the Jefferson County Coordinating Council of Social Forces that was funded by the Birmingham Community Chest. But in 1956 the Division was disbanded in the face of increasing hostility and violence. Several other efforts emerged during that period but quickly lost steam. When Alabama outlawed the NAACP that same year, the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth formed the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights. Segregationists responded by bombing his house on Christmas night.
Throughout the late 1950s and early 1960s challenges to the system were met with growing violence. Nat King Cole was attacked during his performance at Birmingham’s Municipal Auditorium in 1956. In 1958 the Ku Klux Klan lit eighteen crosses throughout Jefferson County, and the next year they paraded through black neighborhoods. The Klan burned eleven schools the year after that.
There were decent people, many of them white, who were trying to do the right thing. In 1997 I was very proud to accept an honorary degree at the University of Alabama alongside Mrs. Virginia Durr, who, with her husband, had publicly challenged Bull Connor and other segregationists. The Russakoffs were among the many Jewish families who tried to cross color lines. And of course Judge Frank Johnson was a pioneering figure whose rulings started to bring change but also drew sharp criticism and put him and his family in danger.
In the face of these challenges, Birmingham’s authorities remained steadfast in their insistence on segregation. Bull Connor became the fist of Jim Crow in the city and Governor George Wallace its soul in the statehouse in Montgomery. We watched on television as Wallace stood in the doorway of the University of Alabama to prevent its integration. I’ll also never forget his infamous words during his inaugural address: “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.”
To be fair, around that time, my family had begun to experience small cracks in the walls separating the races. When I was about seven my mother developed a very bad bronchial infection. Nothing seemed to make her better. Desperate to find her proper care, my father asked Dr. Clay Sheffield, a white colleague who was director of guidance counseling and had taken a personal interest in my father’s career, to recommend a physician.
And so on Saturday afternoon my parents and I went to visit Dr. Carmichael, an ear, nose, and throat specialist. We were escorted into the Negro waiting room, located up the back stairs above the pharmacy. The paint was peeling, the benches were pretty hard, and the wait was very long.
After Dr. Carmichael finally saw my mother, he called my father aside. “When you bring Angelena next week,” he said, “come after five p.m.” The next Saturday we arrived after five o’clock and were escorted into the now empty white waiting room with large leather chairs and plenty of magazines to look at. Dr. Carmichael broke the rules because he respected my father as a human being. He was ready for change. Over time, the two waiting rooms merged and more black families joined us “up front.”
I can remember too another act of “white kindness” that occurred when, at age seven, I wanted desperately to go to the circus. Again, Dr. Sheffield came through, somehow wangling tickets and a pass to get in. My family made its way past the ticket taker without incident. Unfortunately, I hated the circus and wanted to go home after a few minutes. My father, who’d moved heaven and earth to get the tickets, was furious. We stayed until the end.
Then there was the white saleslady who also found a way around the rules. One day Mother and I went to buy me an Easter dress. We often shopped in Mountain Brook, a very exclusive white enclave outside of the city. At the Canterbury Shop for Children they didn’t seem to care what color you were as long as you were willing to pay the exorbitant prices they charged. But on this day, we were downtown at Burger-Phillips and a clerk whom Mother did not know said that I would have to try the dresses on in the storeroom. Blacks were not permitted in the fitting rooms. I remember it as if it were yesterday. Mother looked her dead in the eye. “Either she tries them on in the fitting room or we won’t buy a dress here,” she sternly replied. “Make your choice.” The poor woman shooed us into the dressing room and stood guard outside, hoping that no one would see us.
But of course these breaks in segregation were isolated incidents. They were small cracks in the façade of a relentlessly unequal and demeaning system of racial separation. Parents in Birmingham made their children’s opportunities as equal as possible and their worlds as pleasant as they could. Segregation did not intrude every day and people lived good lives. We found a way to live normally in highly abnormal circumstances. But there was no denying that Birmingham eclipsed every other big American city in the ugliness of its racism.
The history of the civil rights movement has been chronicled many times, no more movingly than in Taylor Branch’s extraordinary studies. As a student of politics, I’m able to read these accounts with some measure of detachment. But I lived in Birmingham, and by 1962 my parents’ attempts to shield me from the hostility of the place in which we lived were no longer succeeding. Birmingham would shortly become “Bombingham”; it was a very scary place.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
1963
IT’S FUNNY what impresses you as a child. For me, the first salvo, the first shock of recognition, was learning of the boycott of the downtown stores in 1962. The action was organized to bring pressure on the stores to hire black clerks and to take down racial signage. Because an Alabama state law effectively prohibited boycotts, organizers called it a “selective buying campaign” and provided buyers with a list of black-friendly merchants and those stores who hired and provided good working environments for black employees. The idea was that people should buy from those stores rather than be prohibited from shopping elsewhere. That Easter everyone made sure to wear old clothes just to demonstrate that they were supporting the campaign.
But it was Christmas when I realized that something truly serious was under way. It had been our tradition to go downtown to see the elaborately decorated store windows at Pizitz and Loveman’s. Much like Macy’s in New York, the stores had animated mannequins in beautifully staged Christmas scenes. After viewing the windows, we’d always go into the stores and buy gifts for family, teachers, and friends.
But in 1962, my parents explained that we couldn’t go to the stores because of something called a boycott. Black people were standing up for what was right, and we would too. I was terribly disappointed but old enough to understand the larger issues at stake. Strangely, we did go to visit Santa that year, though we didn’t buy anything in the store.
Clearly, the boycott was succeeding. Sales declined 11 percent that year, leading the city of Birmingham to threaten to cut off a surplus food program servicing about nineteen thousand poor black families if the boycott didn’t stop. The churches, including Westminster, responded by conducting a food drive to make certain that those families wouldn’t be hurt.
Though they supported the boycott, my parents didn’t want me to go without toys that Christmas, so they arra
nged for Aunt Gee to bring them from her home in Norfolk, Virginia. Santa Claus, therefore, showed up as expected with a Charmin’ Chatty doll that spoke multiple languages. Like the iconic Chatty Cathy, the doll spoke when you pulled the string in her back. You could insert records in the side of this doll, however, and she would speak French, Spanish, and German. I loved her and got an early lesson in the fun of being multilingual.
Then came the crucible year of 1963 with its escalating challenges and violence. Throughout the winter and early spring, voting rights actions, sit-ins, and large protests removed any sense of normalcy in the city. In March two black candidates competed for spots on the Birmingham city council, and one of them received so many votes that he forced his opponent into a runoff election. And in April, Albert Boutwell won the mayor’s race, handing a defeat to Bull Connor as the city switched to a mayoral form of government. Connor refused to step down, and for almost two months Birmingham had two governments. I’d never heard my father speak about any other human being the way he spoke about Bull Connor. He was, according to my father, the personification of evil. I hated him too and remember him as really ugly with a scowling, wrinkled face. I recoiled every time I heard him talking on television about the “negras” who needed to be separated from honest white folk.
That same month, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) launched demonstrations to end segregation. George Wallace sent a hundred state troopers into Birmingham to reinforce the police. And on April 12, Good Friday, Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested in downtown Birmingham. From there he wrote his famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”
In the midst of this turmoil, people had to make decisions about what role they would play. The epicenter of the civil rights movement became the black Baptist church, and the working classes served as its foot soldiers. The Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, who had led the local chapter of the NAACP and eventually served as president of the national SCLC, left for Cincinnati in 1961 but returned frequently to Birmingham during the tumultuous days of 1963. Reverend Shuttlesworth has not, to my mind, received his due in the stories of these turbulent years. People in Birmingham know that it was he who was the heart and soul of the civil rights movement. The great national leaders, Martin Luther King and Ralph Abernathy, built on what Fred Shuttlesworth began.
My father and Reverend Shuttlesworth would sit on the front porch at our house and talk late into the evening. I can remember bouncing over to them and climbing on Daddy’s lap. He would shoo me off since they were often deep in conversation. We visited Reverend Shuttlesworth in Cincinnati in 1972, and the two men again spent long hours revisiting old times.
Nevertheless, I had always wondered if Reverend Shuttlesworth harbored any resentment toward my father for refusing to march with him. The Reverend has said that he thought that my father would not march because he feared his church would be bombed. While that doesn’t really sound like Daddy, perhaps concern for his parishioners was indeed a consideration. And Reverend Shuttlesworth has always said that he knew that Reverend Rice was “there for him.”
I gained a deeper appreciation for the respect the two men had for each other during a recent visit with Reverend Shuttlesworth, who, due to a stroke, can barely speak. He nodded when his wife asked if he remembered my father. “Were you good friends?” she asked. He nodded again. Then, when I handed him a picture of my father, he smiled broadly and kept running his hand across my father’s face. “Oh, Condoleezza,” he said. I cried because it spoke volumes about how he felt about my dad. They might have disagreed about tactics, but they cared for each other as friends.
Today there is a narrative that the middle classes who would eventually benefit disproportionately from desegregation did little to actually bring it about. It is true that few adults in my community marched with Martin Luther King. But the story of the choices that people made is far more complex than the caricature that neatly separates those who marched from those who didn’t.
First, if you were black in Birmingham in 1963, there was no escaping the violence and no place to hide. What I remember most from this time is the sound of bombs going off in neighborhoods, including our own. Clearly, leaders of the movement such as attorney Arthur Shores were singled out. His home was bombed twice in 1963, and his neighborhood became known as “Dynamite Hill.” But the white “night riders” and the KKK cared little about the role you played in the struggle; they were content to terrify any black family they could.
I can remember coming home from my grandparents’ one night. We’d just gotten out of the car when we heard a loud blast down the street. In Birmingham that spring, no one had to think twice: a bomb had exploded in the neighborhood. In fact, it had been a gas bomb, hurled into the window of a house about a block or so away. My father hurried my mother and me back into the car and started to drive off. Mother asked where he was going. “To the police,” he said. “Are you crazy?” she asked. “They probably set off the thing in the first place.” Daddy didn’t say anything but drove to the Rays’ house in Hooper City instead.
Several hours later we returned home and learned that a second bomb had gone off. As terrorists still do today, bombers exploded the first device in hopes that a crowd would gather. They detonated the second bomb—filled with shrapnel and nails—in order to injure as many innocent onlookers as possible. Fortunately, people knew better, and no one went out into the streets after the first explosion. Still, no one slept that night. When we got home, Daddy didn’t say anything more about the bomb. He just went outside and sat on the porch in the springtime heat with his gun on his lap. He sat there all night looking for white night riders.
Eventually Daddy and the men of the neighborhood formed a watch. They would take shifts at the head of the two entrances to our streets. There was a formal schedule, and Daddy would move among them to pray with them and keep their spirits up. Occasionally they would fire a gun into the air to scare off intruders, but they never actually shot anyone. Really light-skinned blacks were told to identify themselves loudly upon approach to the neighborhoods so that there wouldn’t be any “accidents.”
Because of this experience, I’m a fierce defender of the Second Amendment and the right to bear arms. Had my father and his neighbors registered their weapons, Bull Connor surely would have confiscated them or worse. The Constitution speaks of the right to a well-regulated militia. The inspiration for this was the Founding Fathers’ fear of the government. They insisted that citizens had the right to protect themselves when the authorities would not and, if necessary, resist the authorities themselves. What better example of responsible gun ownership is there than what the men of my neighborhood did in response to the KKK and Bull Connor?
A second point worth making about the Birmingham movement was that Dr. King’s strategy was hardly uncontroversial. Daddy sometimes derided those who later said they’d marched even though many had not. “If everyone who says he marched with King actually did,” he once told me, “there wouldn’t have been any room on the streets of Birmingham.”
My father had his own reasons for refusing to join King in his acts of civil disobedience. I can remember as if it were yesterday a conversation between my parents about how to react to the call to take to the streets and behave nonviolently. I stood in the hallway of our house, listening as my parents conferred in the living room. “Ann, I’m not going out there because if some redneck comes after me with a billy club or a dog, I’m going to try to kill him,” he said. “Then they’ll kill me, and my daughter will be an orphan.”
Years later I asked my dad if I had heard him correctly. He wasn’t defensive about his refusal to march with Dr. King; in fact, he told me definitively that he didn’t believe in being nonviolent in the face of violence.
He also hated the use of children and teenagers in the march. Out of frustration with the slow response to the protests, Martin Luther King and the movement preachers called children into the streets on May 2 for what became known as the “Children’
s Crusade.” Some of my friends were involved. James Stewart, George Hunter III (called “Third”), Raymond Goolsby, and Ricky Hall, all students of my father, were told to go out first and distract the police. Others were to follow and get as close to city hall as they could before being stopped. As they approached city hall from Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, Bull Connor yelled over the bullhorn, “Do you have a permit?” When they said that they didn’t, he opened paddy wagons filled with police who arrested the kids. When the kids kept coming and Connor could not stem the tide of protesters, he called in police dogs and turned fire hoses on the marchers. These young kids had been led straight into the teeth of Bull Connor’s henchmen. The rightness of their cause aside, my father was appalled at what he saw as endangering innocent children.
Daddy nonetheless did what he could to support his students. On that day and several to follow, large numbers of high school students left school and joined the marchers. My father, their teachers, and for the most part their parents tried to dissuade them, saying they should fight racism with their minds, not their bodies. But when the Birmingham Board of Education demanded that the teachers report “absences” so that the kids could be disqualified for graduation, they refused. Students were encouraged to come to school, be marked present, and then leave for the protests. The teachers would turn their heads while the students left.
By the afternoon of May 2, policemen had arrested hundreds of students, and when the jails couldn’t hold the protesters, the police shipped them off to the fairgrounds. My father received permission to go and walk among the kids so that he could report to their parents that they were safe. I went with him and walked among the throngs of students. After a couple of days of crowded conditions—so crowded that the students had to sleep in shifts because there was no room to lie down—the adults had had enough. They mobilized lawyers to get the kids released.
Extraordinary, Ordinary People Page 8