Daddy King could say nothing to that.
His son slowly replied, “L.C., what time do you want me to meet you?”
“Ten o’clock on the bridge.” This was the sky bridge over Forsyth Street that led into Rich’s. They all knew it well.
“Okay,” King said. “I’ll be there.”
* * *
That same day, on the other side of town, the Atlanta Baptist Ministers Union was staging another public endorsement of Nixon. This would be one of two big stories readers of the Atlanta Daily World would confront the next morning, October 19. The Republican endorsement appeared on the front page, along with a news item stating that hundreds of students would be heading downtown sometime that day to protest Rich’s segregationist policies. There was no mention of the fact that Daddy King’s son would be joining them.
The Nixon and Kennedy campaigns were unaware of events in Atlanta. Unusually, both men were appearing in Florida on the same day. October 19 was slated to be another long slog, with a stop for Nixon in Wilmington, Delaware, and speeches for Kennedy in New York City, culminating in their joint evening appearance at the ritual Al Smith Dinner at the Waldorf Astoria hotel.
If all went as planned the next day, Lonnie’s friend Otis Moss Jr. would be ready to telegram both Kennedy and Nixon that the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. had gone to jail in support of desegregation. Lonnie predicted to friends that Nixon was the presidential candidate who would respond.
DAY 1: WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 19
“Chain Gang” by Sam Cooke and “Georgia on My Mind” by Ray Charles were on the radio. Movie theaters showed Inherit the Wind and Ben-Hur. Charges against three white men planning to dynamite the historically Black Philander Smith College in Little Rock were dropped. New Yorkers sought tickets for the new musical Camelot, opening in a few weeks. Nina Simone wrapped up a two-night appearance in Atlanta’s Vine City, King’s neighborhood, and University of Georgia fans around the state wondered what the star quarterback Fran Tarkenton had in store for Saturday. Gallup’s most recent poll had Kennedy taking the lead at 49–46 percent, with 5 percent undecided. In Atlanta, the fall morning was clear and cool.
The students chose Trevor Arnett Library as their meeting point, well situated between all the campuses of the Atlanta University Center, the consortium of historically Black colleges in the city. From the rounded portico of the ivy-covered brick building, Lonnie King surveyed an empty lawn stretching from Clark all the way to Morehouse. After working a night shift at his post office job, followed by a nap of only a few hours, Lonnie was impatient and on edge, eager for the sit-in to begin. The city was tense, too. Promises had been made, threats ignored, months spent on planning, and now the day had arrived. This was the students’ first large demonstration since the spring. How many people would actually show? The few who had already arrived milled about, looking nervous.
Then, as happened during their first sit-in that spring, a trickle turned to a steady stream of students arriving from different campuses. In a few minutes, the quiet collegiate quadrangle was filled with a crowd of nearly two hundred. Lonnie gathered the students and told them that this day would be “the most rewarding experience of their lives.” Because all wondered if they would be ending the day in jail, many had textbooks tucked under their arms and toothbrushes in their pockets. After the best speech he could summon, Lonnie instructed them to break into the eleven groups to which they had been assigned. Just before 10:00 a.m., these groups walked to waiting cars to head downtown. Drivers had been given maps, and group leaders made sure their watches were coordinated. Lonnie led them in a final prayer to steady them, but as they walked to their cars, someone broke the silence by calling out, “We’re not going to a funeral.” The students laughed, and someone started singing “We Shall Overcome” until all the voices around them lifted up the song.
Martin Luther King was right where he said he would be. He waited on the Rich’s sky bridge, dressed in his usual dark suit and tie, a Bible under his arm. Lonnie met him there; with his massive chest and athletic physique, he loomed over King. They looked impressive side by side, with Lonnie attired in a gleaming gray suit.
The Crystal Bridge had been built so that shoppers could flow seamlessly between floors two through five of Rich’s flagship department store and the newer Rich’s furniture emporium across the street. Every Atlantan could picture these gleaming elevated walkways as the Christmas season began on Thanksgiving night. Thousands assembled in the street below to see the great Christmas tree lit on top of the bridge, with choirs singing carols on each level, while the iconic department store clock presided over the intersection of Broad and Alabama Streets.
The students and the two Kings, united on the sky bridge, began, at eleven sharp, “a sit-in exercise as coordinated as a military maneuver on a drill field,” according to The Atlanta Journal. In the second-floor snack bar, about a dozen students took seats at the lunch counter and stood in the cafe’s line to request service. Lonnie instructed the group to ask to be “served or be arrested.”
Picking up a ham and cheese sandwich on whole wheat from the silver counter, King stepped forward to purchase it, to no avail. A Rich’s staffer immediately sized up the scope of the demonstration and tried to hurriedly close the luncheon space. As he started shutting down the lunch counter, he hurriedly explained, “We don’t serve colored.”
“We aren’t here to buy colored, we are here to have lunch,” Lonnie replied.
The student leadership team had called The Atlanta Constitution the day before to tell them something big would be happening downtown, so reporters roved through the store hoping to capture any disputes, cameras at the ready. This suited the students, for without coverage the sit-ins would be, as Herschelle Sullivan put it, “a tree falling in the forest.” A reporter asked King why he was here today, and he replied, “Because the students asked me to come, and I felt a moral responsibility to join them in this worthwhile movement.” He then added, “I am not the leader. It was student planned and student originated and student sustained.” Still, it was hard for King not to be seen as the center of the action unfolding all over the city. Another reporter asked how long he would be joining the students in the sit-in, and King identified the Clark College student Carolyn Long as the group’s spokesperson: “The decision as to when we leave is up to her.”
She took the cue and repeated the day’s mantra: “Until we get arrested or served.” Long’s father was an Atlanta school principal whose job had been threatened because of her protest activities, yet her father still supported his two daughters’ involvement in the civil rights movement. Like the other women present, she stood in the cafeteria dressed in high heels and a pressed dress.
As everything shut down around them, the sit-in group started to feel anxious. The problem was not that they weren’t being served but that they were not being arrested. In momentary limbo, some of them sat down at the tables and benches around the snack bar. Cars flowed past below on Forsyth Street.
They needed a better leverage point, and high above them, on the sixth floor, the crown jewel of Dick Rich’s empire beckoned.
* * *
Across the city, student teams hit other sites. Four national chain stores, Woolworth’s, Grant’s, Kress, and McCrory and McLellan dime stores, had announced that they were integrating lunch counters in more than a hundred cities, but Atlanta had not been on their list. Demonstrators found “Closed” signs posted up and down Broad Street. A middle-aged man kicked a female student in the shins near Kress, but she relied on her training and did not respond. As the women working the lunch counters left, the students filled the emptying restaurants and waited for the police to arrive.
When eighteen students arrived at the seventy-five-yard-long counter of Woolworth’s on Broad Street, the manager muttered, “The fountain is closed,” and proceeded to rope it off. The Morris Brown College student Bernard Lee, later to become King’s body man, announced, “We’re going to sit here until th
ey serve us.” The students’ lawyer, Donald Hollowell, walked through Woolworth’s to observe how the students were doing before moving on to the other stores. Earlier in the year, the NAACP chose Hollowell to represent all of those involved in civil rights protests in his state, so he seemed to be everywhere that long day, his military demeanor reassuring and steadying.
At site after site, once a student observer saw that a group had been refused service, he or she sent word back to headquarters by way of a shortwave radio operation set up in the nursery of the Rush Church. Dozens of cars filled with student picketers waited to be sent out. Soon, there were many more sign-carrying picketers outside the lunch counters than sit-in participants inside. At one restaurant, white counterprotesters gathered around the marching students, loudly playing a recording of a recent Stone Mountain Ku Klux Klan rally. One white person yelled that the morning’s action was “a beautiful black mess” and proceeded to spin a student so hard that he was thrown off his stool. Another white man waved his KKK card at them, and a white woman knocked down a student by the Rich’s subbasement Barbeque Grill. The Atlanta Journal described the faces of white witnesses around downtown as displaying “astonishment, uneasiness, or dislike.”
Yet a few white people also called out encouragement; students heard, “More power to you,” and, “Stick with it, we’re behind you.” Despite isolated attacks and insults, widespread violence had not yet broken out. How long the peace would last was an open question; tensions rose throughout downtown. Someone called state troopers to the capitol after spotting a long line of Black women, but it turned out they had arrived to take a nurse’s exam.
Back at Rich’s, Benjamin Brown, president of the student body at Clark College, and his student group waited at the entrance to the Magnolia Room, along with white-gloved ladies lined up for its 11:30 a.m. opening. The first time Lonnie had observed the Magnolia Room, he was appalled at the antebellum-style uniforms Rich’s insisted Black waiters wear. The sixth-floor Magnolia Room, the plushest gathering spot in Atlanta, conjured up the old South, so for the student leaders it felt right that this place of elegant insult would be the site of the final, climactic confrontation. The glow of the crackling fireplace; gold-framed oil paintings depicting colonial tableaux; formal soft yellow tablecloths and green walls—all this luxury cosseted diners enjoying chicken salad amandine, the “Plantation Salad,” and, as a final indulgence, Rich’s famous coconut cake. From the standpoint of the movement, no place could have been more evocative.
The chairman of Rich’s board, Frank Neely, arrived with security to confront Ben Brown, waving a paper listing twelve “Atlanta Mixing Organizations,” asking, “Which of these organizations do you belong to?”
A student responded, “We don’t belong to any organization.”
Neely said it would help him better understand exactly what they wanted. The students repeated that they represented themselves. After a few minutes, Captain R. E. Little from the city police arrived and asked the anxious manager, “Have you asked these people to leave?”
Neely replied they would not admit to belonging to one of the “mixing” groups. Captain Little asked if he wanted them to leave, and Neely said of course. Little turned to the students, “An official of this store has asked you to leave the premises, which is his right. Do you refuse to leave?”
They nodded. A curious crowd gathered. Captain Little informed the students he was taking them to the station. As he led them out, they saw a growing crowd of picketers gathering around Rich’s. Protesters, most of them women, held light-blue cardboard signs: “1–2–3–4 don’t shop at this store” and “Don’t spend cash where you can’t drink coffee.” The arrested students, the first of many that day, were taken to a waiting red arrest wagon, and then the officers reentered the store to see where else sit-ins were happening. The tearoom momentarily returned to business as usual.
A young local minister, the Reverend Otis Blackshear, and Bobby Schley of Morris Brown College went to the Cockerel Grill. A waiter told them there was a restaurant for Black people elsewhere, and if they persisted, they would be arrested. Captain Little arrived, quieting white onlookers, saying, “Now I’m handling this.” He placed the two under arrest. Officers took them out to join those arrested from the Magnolia Room.
This first wave of arrested students was taken to the Atlanta Police Station before noon, to wait on benches in the station captain’s office for fingerprinting and booking. Donald Hollowell observed everything, preparing to take charge of the legal battle to come.
* * *
Growing restless, Lonnie decided he should escort King straight to the Magnolia Room. Looking over his team, he chose two Spelman students, Agnes “Blondean” Orbert and Marilyn Pryce, to go up with them. He thought the two elegant roommates embodied exactly what a lady entering the Magnolia Room should look like. It should be absurd to deny them service.
The night before, Orbert and Pryce had attended a meeting at Spelman’s Giles Hall, where a sit-in instructor announced, “If you’re going to participate, go right. And if you want to be part of the movement, but you don’t think you can go to jail, go to the left.” They went to the right. One of their other roommates went left, explaining, “My mother has a weak heart; I can’t go.” They joked with her that she might be talking about herself. For Pryce, the decision to challenge Rich’s was easy: “It was time for Jim Crow to go.” For years, Pryce’s family had taken a 4:00 a.m. train from their home in Tuskegee, Alabama, to shop at the glamorous Rich’s, though it meant eating in the basement, where they would “sit at a little old nasty counter right near the toilet.” She would return to change that. Orbert, a North Carolina native, had a Rich’s card for college friends’ Saturday visits to the store.
Lonnie, along with Orbert, Pryce, and King himself, walked up to the great white columns framing the front of the restaurant. Pryce could observe ladies being served on fine china plates. Seeing Martin Luther King approach, a staff member raced to find Mr. Rich in his office, informing the owner that King was not only now on the premises but literally at the gates of the citadel. When informed that King was there for today’s sit-in, Rich started to cry. He wanted to work with the older Black leaders, but now he felt trapped, squeezed between a white customer base demanding segregation and the students, who he believed were out-of-town agitators. Rich foresaw disaster now that Martin Luther King was involved.
Rich’s general superintendent, Bennett Tuck, emerged from the restaurant and stepped forward to block the group from going any farther. He said, “We are sorry, we cannot serve you here. We have facilities for you in the basement.”
Lonnie said, “Why can’t you serve us here?”
“We have facilities for you in the basement.”
The minister stared at Tuck, his expression passive and patient. “Well, we would like to eat here.” More pressingly, he then asked, “Why can’t you serve us here?”
“We are very sorry we cannot serve you here, and we ask you to leave the store. You know that one group has already been up here and made their point.” Tuck added, “You realize it is unlawful not to leave a store when asked to do so?”
“Yes,” answered King, “but I would like to point out to you that I have spent, in the last year, over two thousand dollars in your store. I feel it is my moral right to stay here.”
Unsure how to respond, Tuck walked away. The students and King stood for about fifteen minutes near the restaurant entrance and the elevator lobby. Never did they actually sit in. Cecil Semple, Rich’s vice president of operations, informed the police that they needed their services again up on the sixth floor. Soon Captain Little returned with two other Atlanta police officers. He asked who spoke for the group, and Lonnie jumped in to say he did. Captain Little looked to King to confirm this was true, and the minister slowly nodded yes.
More of Rich’s staff had now gathered to block the entrance to the center aisle of the tearoom. Semple spoke up, telling the police that they had
asked the group “to leave the store, and they have refused to do so.” The police officer informed Lonnie that he was now breaking the law. They had no choice but to arrest him and the other sit-in participants. One last time, Captain Little asked them to exit, because if they did not, he said, “I would have to take them away from the premises.”
Lonnie said, “I came here to eat, and prefer to be arrested than not be served.” With that, Captain Little declared all four now under arrest.
As Little led them out without handcuffs, Lonnie’s friend Constance “Connie” Curry, one of the few white participants in the sit-in movement, had a moment of panic. Standing in the lobby in front of the sixth-floor elevators, she had volunteered to serve as an official observer. As a white woman, she would not be suspected of taking part in the sit-in and could tell Donald Hollowell and sympathetic reporters what she had observed. A graduate of Agnes Scott College in Decatur, she had been part of SNCC’s inaugural meeting. Inspired by her beloved mentor Ella Baker, she was elected an adviser of SNCC, though, like King, she was a few years older than the students. She tried to get more white students from local universities involved but got little response.
Suddenly, in terror, she noticed the head of the local Ku Klux Klan chapter, Calvin Craig, just across from her as Lonnie and Dr. King were being escorted out. Seconds before they passed, she feared Lonnie and King would instinctively greet her, thus marking her to the Klan as a white collaborator. She said a silent prayer: “Dear God, please don’t let any of the students look at me, speak, or show recognition, because this man will surely do me harm.”
Nine Days Page 6