A Dream Deferred?

The Long Journey of African-Americans in Search of Civil Rights

What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
Like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore--
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over--
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?

Dream Deferred - Langston Hughes

                                                                      "We free, we free, we free

We free, we free, we free

We free, we free, we free

Oh, Lordy, we free."

from The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, by Ernest Gaines

"Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!"

from the “I Have Dream” speech of Dr. Martin Luther King, Washington D.C., 1965

President Lincoln freed the slaves…

          This is what we teach our grade school children – that President Lincoln fought the Civil War to end slavery and that was that.  If only the story ends like that.  It should have.  In the years after the war Congress ratified the 13^th Amendment, ending slavery, the 14^th Amendment, protecting the rights of all citizens regardless of race, and the 15^th Amendment, extending the right to vote to African-American men.  However, when Dr. Martin  Luther King stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1965 exclaimed “Free at last!,” he was talking of his dream.  Jane Pittman had said almost the same thing as a young girl at the moment she became “free” at the conclusion of the Civil War.

With a little help from my friends…not so fast.

          In the years after the Civil War, during the period referred to as Reconstruction, the federal government worked to protect the newly gained rights of African-Americans.  The Freedman’s Bureau was established to set up schools in the South and help the integration of the newly freed slaves into society.  However, in the words of Scarlet O’Hara in Gone With the Wind, the South wasn’t dead yet.   The KKK was established to use violence such as lynching to intimidate African-Americans and scare them away from the ballot box.   As farmers, the freed slaves looked to purchase their own land and found it all still owned by the plantation owners that had previously been the slave-owners.  Thus, they had to become sharecroppers, where they contributed a potion of the crops to pay for the use of the land, or tenant farmers, where they paid rent for the land.  Either way, they quickly found themselves in debt and unable to leave the land until their debts were paid.  

Jim Crow

By 1876, the Republican Party in the north had tired of the energy it took to force the South to respect the rights of these new citizens and ached to get on with the process of Industrialization.  They agreed to end Reconstruction with the Compromise of 1877.  The South then began to reestablish a two class system where African–Americans were treated as inferior.  Laws forced blacks to eat in the separate rooms, drink from separate fountains, go to separate schools, etc.  These laws were known as Jim Crow Laws.  In 1896, the Supreme Court ruled that it was all right to have separate schools in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson and Jim Crow was firmly entrenched.

                                                                        Minstrel character Jim Crow

Homework Assignment #41

Discuss the following terms.

1.  13^th Amendment

2. 14^th Amendment

3. 15^th Amendment

4.  Freedman’s Bureau

5.  lynching

6.  sharecropping

7.  Jim Crow

8.  Plessy v. Ferguson

9.  KKK

10. Compromise of 1877

from The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, by Ernest Gaines

Freedom

We was in the field chopping cotton when we heard the bell ringing. We was scared to stop work-the sun was too high in the sky for us to go in yet. But the bell went on ringing and ringing; just ringing and ringing. The driver, a great big old black, round, oily-face nigger kept on looking back over his shoulders toward the house. Every time the bell rang he looked back. He told us to keep on working, he was going in to see what all the ringing was about. I watched him go up to the house, then I saw him coming back waving his arm. We swung our hoes on our shoulders and went across the field. The driver told us the master wanted us all at the house. We didn't ask what he wanted us for, we had no idea, we just went up there. The master was standing on the gallery with a sheet of paper.

 "All right, I got news for y'all," the master said. "y'all free. Proclamation papers just come to me and they say y'all free as I am. Y'all can stay and work on shares- because I can't pay you nothing, because I ain't got nothing myself since them Yankees went by here last time.

Old Mistress and Young Mistress was standing in the door crying, and right behind 'them the house niggers crying, too, For a while after the master got through reading the Proclamation the people didn't make a sound. Just standing there looking up at him like they was still listening to his words.

"Well, that's that," he said. 

Then all a sudden somebody hollered, and everybody started singing. Just singing and dancing and clapping.  Old people you didn't think could even walk started hoping round there like game roosters.  This what the people was singing:

"We free, we free, we free

We free, we free, we free

We free, we free, we free

Oh, Lordy, we free."

Just singing and clapping, just singing and clapping.  Just talking to each other, just patting each other on the back.

The driver he never got in the celebration him.  Everybody else singing and clapping, he just standing there looking up at the master. Then he moved closer to the gallery and said: "Master, if we free to go, where is we to go?"

"Y'aIl do like y'aIl want," I said. "I'm headed North.  I turned to leave, but I stopped. "Which way North?

*******************

Heading' North

We didn't know a thing. We didn't know where we was going, we didn't know what we was go'n eat when the apples and potatoes ran out, we didn't know where we was go'n sleep that night. If we reached the North, we didn't know if we was go'n stay together or separate. We had never thought about nothing like that, because we had never thought we was go'n ever be free. Yes, we had heard about freedom, we had even talked about freedom, but we never thought we was go'n ever see that day. Even when we knowed the Yankees had come in the State, even when we saw them marching by the gate we still didn't feel we was go'n ever be free. That's why we hadn't got ourself ready. When the word came down that we was free, we dropped everything and started out.

"We headed toward Ohio?" I asked.

"You got somebody waiting for you in Ohio?" they asked me.

"I want go to Ohio," I said.

"Go on to Ohio," one of them said. "Nobody holding you back."

"I don't know the way," I said.

"Then shut up," one of them said.

"Y'all just sorry y'all ain't got nobody waiting for y'all nowhere," I said.

Nobody said nothing. I was little, and they didn't feel they needed to argue with me.  We was in a thicket of sycamore trees, and it was quiet and clean here, and we had a little breeze, because way up in the top of the trees I could see the limbs sagging just a little. Everybody was tired from the long walk and we just sat there quiet, not saying a thing for a good while.

Then somebody said: "My new name Abe Washington. Don't call me Buck no more."  We must have been two dozens of us there, and now everybody started changing names like you change hats. Nobody was keeping the same name Old Master had gived them. This one would say, "My new name Cam Lincoln." That one would say, "My new name Ace Freeman." Another one, "My new name Sherman S. Sherman." "What that S for?" "My Title." Another one would say, "My new name Job." "Job what?" "Just Job."  "This ain't slavery no more. You got to have two names." "Job Lincoln, then." "You ain't no kin to me. I'm Lincoln." "1 don't care. I'm still Job Lincoln. Want fight?" Another one would say, "My name Neremiah King." Another one standing by a tree would say, "My new name Bill Moses. No more Rufus."

They went on and on like that. We had one slow-wit fellow there who kept on opening his mouth to say his new name, but before he could get it out somebody else had said a name. He was just opening and closing his mouth like a baby. Then all a sudden when he had a little time to speak he said Brown. They had took all the other names from him, so he took Brown. I had been sitting there on the end of a log listening to them squabbling over new names, but I didn't have to get in the squabbling because I already had a new name. I had had mine for over a year now, and I had put up with a lot of trouble to hold on to it. But when I heard the slow-wit say his name was Brown I was ready to fight. I jumped up off that log and went for him.

"No, you don't," I said.

He said, "I, I, I, can be, be, be Brown if I want be, be, be Brown." He was picking on me because I was small and didn't have nobody there to stand up for me.  "You not the on', on', only one ra, ra, round here that can be, be, be Brown," he said. "Me', me', mess round here wi', wi', with me, I ma', ma', make you, you, you change your name back to Ti', Ti', Ticey."

"I'll die first, " I said.

"Go, go, go right on and di', di', die," he said. "Br', Br', Brown my name."

And I tried to crack his head open with that stick. But I didn't bit more hurt that loon than I would hurt that post at the end of my gallery. He came on me and I swung the stick and backed from him. He kept coming on me, and I kept hitting and backing back. Hitting and backing back. Then he jecked the stick out my hand and swung it away. I tried to get the stick, but I fell, and when I looked up, there he was right over me. He didn't look like a man now, he didn't even look like a loon, he looked more like a wild animal. Animal-like greed in his face. He grabbed me and started with me in the bushes. But we hadn't gone more than three, four steps when I started hearing this noise. Whup, whup, whup. I didn't know what the noise was. I was too busy trying to get away from that loon to think this noise had anything to do with me or him. I heard the noise again: whup, whup, whup. Every time it hit now I saw the hurt in the slow-wit's face. He was still heading with me in the bushes, but every time the noise hit I could see the hurt in his face. Then I saw the stick come down on his shoulder, and this time he swung around.  Big Laura had the stick cocked back to hit him again.

"Drop her, you stud-dog," she said. "Drop her or I'll break your neck."

***************************************************************************************

Massacre

We went on till way up in the night before we stopped to sleep.  The next thing I knowed the sun was shining bright and somebody was hollering, "Patrollers."

Everybody jumped up and made it for the bushes.  Big Laura hollered at me to grab Ned and run. I had already passed Ned, but I leaned back and grabbed him and almost jecked him up off the ground. Half the time I was carrying him,, half the time I was dragging him. We crawled under a bush and I pressed his face to the ground and told him to stay quiet quiet. From the bush I could still see the spot where we had been. The big slow-wit was still out there. He didn't know where to turn to or what to do. Like he wanted to go in every direction at the same time, but he didn't know where to go. I wanted to call him-but I was scared the patrollers might see him coming toward us. Then the patrollers came in on horses and mules. Patrollers was poor white trash that used to find the runaway slaves for the masters. Them and the soldiers from the Secesh Army  was the ones who made up the Ku Klux Klans later on.  Even that day they had Secesh soldiers mixed in there with them. I could tell the Secesh from the patroller by the uniforms. The Secesh wore gray; the patroller wore work clothes no better than what the slaves wore.  They came in on horses and mules, and soon as they saw the slow-wit they surrounded him and started beating him with sticks of wood. Some of them had guns, but they would not waste a bullet. More satisfaction beating him with sticks. They beat him, he covered up, but they beat him till he was down. Then one of the patrollers slid off the mule, right cross his tail, and cracked the slow-wit in the head.  I could hear his head crack like you hear dry wood break.

I wanted to jump up from there and run-but what about Ned? I couldn't leave him there-look what Big Laura had done for me just yesterday. I couldn't take him with me, either-they would see us. I stayed there with my heart jumping, jumping, jumping.

The patrollers moved in the bushes to hunt for the rest of the people. They could tell from the camp there must have been lot of us there, and they knowed we was still close around. They moved in with sticks to look for us. I could hear them hitting against the bushes and talking to each other. Then when they spotted somebody, a bunch of them would surround the person and beat him till they had knocked him unconscious or killed him. Then they would move somewhere else. First you would hear them hitting against the  bushes lightly, then after they spotted somebody you would hear them hitting the bushes hard. Now, you heard screaming, begging; screaming, begging; screaming, begging-till it was quiet again.

I kept one hand on my bundle and one on the side of Ned's face holding him down. I was go'n stay there till I thought they had spotted me, then I was getting out of there fast. I told Ned be ready to run, but stay till I gived him the sign. I was pressing so hard on his face I doubt if he even heard me, but all my pressing he never made a sound. Small as he was he knowed death was only a few feet away.

After a while the patrollers left. They went right by us, and I could hear them talking. One was saying, "Goddamn, she was mean. Did you see her? Did you see her? Goddam, she could fight." Another one spit and said: "They ain't human. Gorilla, I say." The first one said: "Lord, did you see Gat's head? Made me sick." Another one: "Gat all right?" Another one:  "Afraid not. Afraid he go'n die on us."

They passed right by us, and my heart jumping, jumping. I kept my hand on my bundle and I kept Ned quiet till the last one had passed. Then I relaxed a little bit. I took me a deep breath and looked up at the sky. It was quiet, quiet, not a sound. I mean you couldn't even hear a bird. Nothing but the sun and the dust the men had raised thrashing in the bushes. I could see the sun streaking through the trees down to the ground like a long slide. Only one time, so they say, it refused to shine: when they nailed the Master to the cross.

I stood up and told Ned come on, and we went back to the place where we had camped. The slow-wit was dead, all right; his skull busted there like a coconut.  One of his shirt sleeves was knocked clean off. I turned to Ned, but he was standing there just as calm as he could be.

Then I saw Big Laura. She was laying on the ground with her baby still clutched in her arms. I made Ned stay back while I went closer. Even before I knelt down I saw that her and the baby was both dead. I took the baby out her arms. I had to pull hard to get her free. I knowed I couldn't bury Big Laura-I didn't have a thing to dig with-but maybe I could bury her child. But when I looked back at Big Laura and saw how empty her arms was, I just laid the little baby right back down. I didn't cry, I couldn't cry. I had seen so much beating and suffering; I had heard about so much cruelty in those 'leven or twelve years of my life I hardly knowed how to cry. I went back to Ned and asked him if he wanted to go to Ohio with me. He nodded.

Before we started out I thought we might as well take some of the grub that was left there. I got enough corn and potatoes to last us a week. I reckoned that in a week I ought to be in Ohio or close there. After I got the food, I got a few pieces of clothes for me and Ned to sleep on at night. After I had covered up Big Laura and the child with some clothes, I put the bundle on my head and we started out. Every now and then I asked Ned if he was tired. If he said no, we went on; if he said yes, we found a good place to sit down. Then I would take something out the bundle for us to eat. Ned would put the rocks on the ground while we ate. But soon as he was through eating he'd pick them up again.

We went on, staying in the bushes all the time. When Ned got tired, we stopped, nibbled on something, then after he had rested we started out again. When the sun went down and the stars came out we traveled by the North Star. We didn't stop that night till we came up to a river. But I could see it was too wide and too deep for us to cross, so we moved back in the swamps for the night. I dug a hole in the ground and built a little fire just like I saw Big Laura do the night before. While me and Ned sat there eating a raw potato, I put two more potatoes and two more ears of corn in the fire. When Ned got through eating, he went to sleep on the little pallet I had made for him on the ground.

I sat there looking at Ned, wondering what I was go'n do next. "I got this child to take care, I got that river to cross-and how many more rivers I got to cross before I reach Ohio?" I said to myself.

The sky was more pretty and bluer than I had ever seen it before. I felt better than I had ever felt in my life. Birds was singing in every tree. I woke up Ned and told him look at the air and listen to the birds. But Ned wasn't much interested in this kind of stuff. He was probably thinking about his mama and his little sister. I was thinking about them, too; thinking about all the people; 'specially the slow-wit I had seen them kill; but I  looked at it this way, we had to keep going.  We  couldn't let what happened yesterday stop us today.

from Beloved – Toni Morrison

I 24 WAS SPITEFUL. Full of a baby's venom. The women in the house knew it and so did the children. For years each put up with the spite in his own way, but by 1873 Sethe and her daughter Denver were its only victims. The grandmother, Baby Suggs, was dead, and the sons, Howard and Buglar, had run away by the time they were thirteen years old-as soon as merely looking in a mirror shattered it {that was the signal for Buglar); as soon as two tiny hand prints appeared in the cake {that was it for Howard). Neither boy waited to see more; another kettleful of chickpeas smoking in a heap on the floor; soda crackers crumbled and strewn in a line next to the door-sill. Nor did they wait for one of the relief periods: the weeks, months even, when nothing was disturbed. No. Each one fled at once-the moment the house committed what was for him the one insult not to be borne or witnessed a second time. Within two months, in the dead of winter, leaving their grandmother, Baby Suggs; Sethe, their mother; and their little sister, Denver, all by themselves in the gray and white house on Bluestone Road. It didn't have a number then, because Cincinnati didn't stretch that far. In fact, Ohio had been calling itself a state only seventy years when first one brother and then the next stuffed quilt packing into his hat, snatched up his shoes, and crept awar from the lively spite the house felt for them.

Baby Suggs didn't even raise her head. From her sickbed she heard them go but that wasn't the reason she lay still. It was a wonder to her that her grandsons had taken so long to realize that every house wasn't like the one on Bluestone Road. Suspended between the

nastiness of life and the meanness of the dead, she couldn't get interested in leaving life or living it, let alone the fright of two creeping-off boys. Her past had been like her present-intolerable-and since she knew death was anything but forgetfulness, she used the little energy left her for pondering color.

"Bring a little lavender in, if you got any. Pink, if you don't."

And Sethe would oblige her with anything from fabric to her own tongue. Winter in Ohio was especially rough if you had an appetite for color. Sky provided the only drama, and counting on a Cincinnati horizon for life's principal joy was reckless indeed. So Sethe and the girl Denver did what they could, and what the house permitted, for her. Together they waged a perfunctory battle against the outrageous behavior of that place; against turned-over slop jars, smacks on the behind, and gusts of sour air. For they understood the source of the outrage as well as they knew the source of light.

Baby Suggs died shortly after the brothers left, with no interest whatsoever in their leave-taking or hers, and right afterward Sethe and Denver decided to end the persecution by calling forth the ghost that tried them so. Perhaps a conversation, they thought, an exchange of views or something would help. So they held hands and said,  "Come on. Come on. You may as well just come on."

The sideboard took a step forward but nothing else did.

"Grandma Baby must be stopping it," said Denver. She was ten and still mad at Baby Suggs for dying.

Sethe opened her eyes. "1 doubt that," she said.

"Then why don't it come?"

"You forgetting how little it is," said her mother. "She wasn't even two years old when she died. Too little to understand. Too little to talk much even."

"Maybe she don't want to understand," said Denver.

"Maybe. But if she'd only come, I could make it clear to her." Sethe released her daughter's hand and together they pushed the sideboard back against the wall. Outside a driver whipped his horse into the gallop local people felt necessary when they passed 124.

"For a baby she throws a powerful spell," said Denver.

"No more powerful than the way I loved her," Sethe answered and there it was again. The welcoming cool of unchiseled headstones; the one she selected to lean against on tiptoe, her knees wide open as any grave. Pink as a fingernail it was, and sprinkled with glittering chips. Ten minutes, he said. You got ten minutes I'll do it for free.

Ten minutes for seven letters. With another ten could she have gotten "Dearly" too? She had not thought to ask him and it bothered her still that it might have been possible-that for twenty minutes, a half hour, say, she could have had the whole thing, every word she heard the preacher say at the funeral (and all there was to say, surely) engraved on her baby's headstone: Dearly Beloved. But what she got, settled for, was the one word that mattered. She thought it would be enough, rutting among the headstones with the engraver, his young son looking on, the anger in his face so old; the appetite in it quite new. That should certainly be enough. Enough to answer one more preacher, one more abolitionist and a town full of disgust.

Counting on the stillness of her own soul, she had forgotten the other one: the soul of her baby girl. Who would have thought that a little old baby could harbor so much rage? Rutting among the stones under the eyes of the engraver's son was not enough. Not only

did she have to live out her years in a house palsied by the baby's fury at having its throat cut, but those ten minutes she spent pressed up against dawn-colored stone studded with star chips, her knees wide open as the grave, were longer than life, more alive, more pulsating than the baby blood that soaked her fingers like oil.

"We could move," she suggested once to her mother-in-law.

"What'd be the point?" asked Baby Suggs. "Not a house in the country ain't packed to its rafters with some dead Negro's grief. We lucky this ghost is a baby. My husband's spirit was to come back in here? or yours? Don't talk to me. You lucky. You got three left.  Three pulling at your skirts and just one raising hell from the other side. Be thankful, why don't you? I had eight. Every one of them gone away from me. Four taken, four chased, and all, I expect, worrying somebody's house into evil." Baby Suggs rubbed her eye- brows. "My first-born. All can remember of her is how she loved the burned bottom of bread. Can you beat that? Eight children and that's all I remember."

"That's all you let yourself remember," Sethe had told her, but she was down to one herself-one alive, that is-the boys chased off by the dead one, and her memory of Buglar was fading fast. Howard at least had a head shape nobody could forget. As for the rest, she

worked hard to remember as close to nothing as was safe. Unfortunately her brain was devious. She might be hurrying across a field running practically, to get to the pump quickly and rinse the chamomile sap from her legs. Nothing else would be in her mind. The picture of the men coming to nurse her was as lifeless as the nerve: in her back where the skin buckled like a washboard. Nor was then the faintest scent of ink or the cherry gum and oak bark from which it was made. Nothing. Just the breeze cooling her face as she rushed toward water. And then sopping the chamomile away with pump water and rags, her mind fixed on getting every last bit of sap off- on her carelessness in taking a shortcut across the field just to save a half mile, and not noticing how high the weeds had grown until the itching was all the way to her knees. Then something. The plash of water, the sight of her shoes and stockings awry on the path where she had flung them; or Here Boy lapping in the puddle near her feet and suddenly there was Sweet Home rolling, rolling, rolling out before her eyes, and although there was not a leaf on that farm that did not make her want to scream, it rolled itself out before her in shameless beauty . It never looked as terrible as it was and it made her wonder if hell was a pretty place too. Fire and brimstone all right, but hidden in lacy groves. Boys hanging from the most beautiful sycamores in the world. It shamed her-remembering the wonderful soughing trees rather than the boys. Try as she might to make it otherwise, the sycamores beat out the children every time and she could not forgive her memory for that.

When the last of the chamomile was gone, she went around to the front of the house, collecting her shoes and stockings on the way.  As if to punish her further for her terrible memory, sitting on the porch not forty feet away was Paul D, the last of the Sweet Horn men. And although she could never mistake his face for another': she said, "Is that you?"

"What's left." He stood up and smiled. "How you been, girl besides barefoot?"

When she laughed it came out loose and young. "Messed up my legs back yonder. Chamomile."

He made a face as though tasting a teaspoon of something bitter. "I don't want to even hear 'bout it. Always did hate that stuff."

Sethe balled up her stockings and jammed them into her pocket.  "Come on in."

"Porch is fine, Sethe. Cool out here." He sat back down and looked at the meadow on the other side of the road, knowing the eagerness he felt would be in his eyes.

"Eighteen years," she said softly.

"Eighteen," he repeated. " And I swear I been walking every one of em. Mind if I join you?" He nodded toward her feet and began unlacing his shoes.

"You want to soak them?  Let me get you a basin of water." She moved closer to him to enter the house.

"No, uh uh. Can't baby feet. A whole lot more tramping they got to do yet."

"You can't leave right away, Paul D. You got to stay awhile."

"Well, long enough to see Baby Suggs, anyway. Where is she?"

"Dead."

"Aw no. When?"

"Eight years now. Almost nine."

"Was it hard? I hope she didn't die hard."

Sethe shook her head. "Soft as cream. Being alive was the hard part. Sorry you missed her though. Is that what you came by for?"

"That's some of what I came for. The rest is you. But if all the truth be known, I go anywhere these days. Anywhere they let me sit down."

"You looking good."

"Devil's confusion. He lets me look good long as I feel bad." He looked at her and the word "bad" took on another meaning.

Sethe smiled. This is the way they were--had been. All of the Sweet Home men, before and after Halle, treated her to a mild brotherly flirtation; so subtle you had to scratch for it.

Except for a heap more hair and some waiting in his eyes, he looked the way he had in Kentucky. Peachstone skin; straight-backed.  For a man with an immobile face it was amazing how ready it was to smile, or blaze or be sorry with you. As though all you had to do was get his attention and right away he produced the feeling you were feeling. With less than a blink, his face seemed to change- underneath it lay the activity.

"I wouldn't have to ask about him, would I? You'd tell me if there was anything to tell, wouldn't you?" Sethe looked down at her feet and saw again the sycamores.

"I'd tell you. Sure I'd tell you. I don't know any more now than I did then." Except for the churn, he thought, and you don't need to know that. "You must think he's still alive."

"No. I think he's dead. It's not being sure that keeps him alive."

"What did Baby Suggs think?"

"Same, but to listen to her, all her children is dead. Claimed she felt each one go the very day and hour."

"When she say Halle went?"

"Eighteen fifty-five. The day my baby was born."

"You had that baby, did you? Never thought you'd make it." He chuckled. "Running off pregnant."

"Had to. Couldn't be no waiting." She lowered her head and thought, as he did, how unlikely it was that she had made it. And if it hadn't been for that girl looking for velvet, she never would have.

" All by yourself too." He was proud of her and annoyed by her.  Proud she had done it; annoyed that she had not needed Halle or him in the doing.

"Almost by myself. Not all by myself. A whitegirl helped me."

"Then she helped herself too, God bless her."

"You could stay the night, Paul D."

"You don't sound too steady in the offer."

Sethe glanced beyond his shoulder toward the closed door. "Oh it's truly meant. I just hope you'll pardon my house. Come on in.  Talk to Denver while I cook you something."

Paul D tied his shoes together, hung them over his shoulder and followed her through the door straight into a pool of red and undulating light that locked him where he stood.

"You got company?" he whispered, frowning.

"Off and on," said Sethe.

"Good God." He backed out the door onto the porch. "What kind of evil you got in here?"  "It's not evil, just sad. Come on. Just step through."

He looked at her then, closely. Closer than he had when she first rounded the house on wet and shining legs, holding her shoes and stockings up in one hand, her skirts in the other. Halle's girl-the one with iron eyes and backbone to match. He had never seen her hair in Kentucky. And though her face was eighteen years older than when last he saw her, it was softer now. Because of the hair. A face too still for comfort; irises the same color as her skin, which, in that still face, used to make him think of a mask with mercifully punched-out eyes. Halle's woman. Pregnant every year including the year she sat by the fire telling him she was going to run. Her three children she had already packed into a wagonload of others in a caravan of Negroes crossing the river. They were to be left with Halle's mother near Cincinnati. Even in that tiny shack, leaning so close to the fire you could smell the heat in her dress, her eyes did not pick up a flicker of light. They were like two wells into which he had trouble gazing. Even punched out they needed to be covered, lidded, marked with some sign to warn folks of what that emptiness held. So he looked instead at the fire while she told him, because her husband was not there for the telling. Mr. Garner was dead and his wife had a lump in her neck the size of a sweet potato and unable to speak to anyone. She leaned as close to the fire as her pregnant belly allowed and told him, Paul D, the last of the Sweet Home men.

There had been six of them who belonged to the farm, Sethe the only female.' Mrs. Garner, crying like a baby, had sold his brother to payoff the debts that surfaced the minute she was widowed. Then schoolteacher arrived to put things in order. But what he did broke

three more Sweet Home men and punched the glittering iron out of Sethe's eyes, leaving two open wells that did not reflect firelight.  Now the iron was back but the face, softened by hair, made him trust her enough to step inside her door smack into a pool of pulsing red light.

She was right. It was sad. Walking through it, a wave of grief soaked him so thoroughly he wanted to cry. It seemed a long way to the normal light surrounding the table, but he made it-dry-eyed and lucky.

"You said she died soft. Soft as cream," he reminded her.

"That's not Baby Suggs," she said.

"Who then?"

"My daughter. The one I sent ahead with the boys."

"She didn't live?"

"No. The one I was carrying when I run away is all I got left.  Boys gone too. Both of em walked off just before Baby Suggs died.

Paul D looked at the spot where the grief had soaked him. The red was gone but a kind of weeping clung to the air where it had been.

Probably best, he thought. If a Negro got legs he ought to use them. Sit down too long, somebody will figure out a way to tie them up. Still…if her boys were gone ...

"No man? You here by yourself?"

"Me and Denver," she said.

"That all right by you?"

"That's all right by me."

She saw his skepticism and went on. "I cook at a restaurant in town. And I sew a little on the sly."

Paul D smiled then, remembering the bedding dress. Sethe was thirteen when she came to Sweet Home and already iron-eyed. She was a timely present for Mrs. Garner who had lost Baby Suggs to her husband's high principles. The five Sweet Home men looked at the new girl and decided to let her be.  Yet they let the iron-eyed girl be, so she could choose in spite of the fact that each one would have beaten the others to mush to have her.

She waited a year. She chose Halle and for their first bedding she sewed herself a dress on the sly.

"Won't you stay on awhile? Can't nobody catch up on eighteen years in a day."

Out of the dimness of the room in which they sat, a white staircase climbed toward the blue-and-white wallpaper of the second floor.  Paul D could see just the beginning of the paper; discreet flecks of yellow sprinkled among a blizzard of snowdrops all backed by blue.  The luminous white of the railing and steps kept him glancing toward it. Every sense he had told him the air above the stairwell was charmed and very thin. But the girl who walked down out of that air was round and brown with the face of an alert doll.

Paul D looked at the girl and then at Sethe who smiled saying, "Here she is my Denver. This is Paul D, honey, from Sweet Home."

"Good morning, Mr. D."

"Garner, baby. Paul D Garner."

"Yes sir."

"Glad to get a look at you. Last time I saw your mama, you were pushing out the front of her dress."

"Still is," Sethe smiled, "provided she can get in it."

Denver stood on the bottom step and was suddenly hot and shy. It had been a long time since anybody (good-willed whitewoman, preacher, speaker or newspaperman) sat at their table, their sympathetic voices called liar by the revulsion in their eyes. For twelve years, long before Grandma Baby died, there had been no visitors of any sort and certainly no friends. No colored people. Certainly no hazelnut man with too long hair and no notebook, no charcoal, no oranges, no questions. Someone her mother wanted to talk to and would even consider talking to while barefoot. Looking, in fact acting, like a girl instead of the quiet, queenly woman Denver had known all her life. The one who never looked away, who when a man got stomped to death by a mare right in front of Sawyer's restaurant did not look away; and when a sow began eating her own litter did not look away then either. And when the baby's spirit picked up Here Boy and slammed him into the wall hard enough to break two of his legs and dislocate his eye, so hard he went into convulsions and chewed up his tongue, still her mother had not looked away. She had taken a hammer, knocked the dog unconscious, wiped away the blood and saliva, pushed his eye back in his head and set his leg bones. He recovered, mute and off-balance, more because of his untrustworthy eye than his bent legs, and winter, summer, drizzle or dry, nothing could persuade him to enter the house again.   Now here was this woman with the presence of mind to repair a dog gone savage with pain rocking her crossed ankles and looking away from her own daughter's body; As though the size of it was more than vision could bear. And neither she nor he had on shoes.  Hot, shy, now Denver was lonely. All that leaving: first her brothers, then her grandmother-serious losses since there were no children willing to circle her in a game or hang by their knees from her porch railing. None of that had mattered as long as her mother did not look away as she was doing now, making Denver long, downright long, for a sign of spite from the baby ghost.

"She's a fine-looking young lady," said Paul D. "Fine-looking.  Got her daddy's sweet face."

"You know my father?"

"Knew him. Knew him well."

"Did he, Ma'am?" Denver fought an urge to realign her affection.

"Of course he knew your daddy. I told you, he's from Sweet Home."

Denver sat down on the bottom step. There was nowhere else gracefully to go. They were a twosome, saying "Your daddy" and "Sweet Home" in a way that made it clear both belonged to them and not to her. That her own father's absence was not hers. Once the absence had belonged to Grandma Baby-a son, deeply mourned because he was the one who had bought her out of there. Then it was her mother's absent husband. Now it was this hazelnut stranger's absent friend. Only those who knew him ("knew him well") could claim his absence for themselves. Just as only those who lived in Sweet Home could remember it, whisper it and glance sideways at one another while they did. Again she wished for the baby ghost- its anger thrilling her now where it used to wear her out. Wear her out.

"We have a ghost in here," she said, and it worked. They were not a twosome anymore. Her mother left off swinging her feet and being girlish. Memory of Sweet Home dropped away from the eyes of the man she was being girlish for. He looked quickly up the

lightning-white stairs behind her.

"So I hear," he said. "But sad, your mama said. Not evil."

"No sir," said Denver, "not evil. But not sad either."

"What then?"

"Rebuked. Lonely and rebuked."

"Is that right?" Paul D turned to Sethe.

"1 don't know about lonely," said Denver's mother. "Mad, maybe, but I don't see how it could be lonely spending every minute with us like it does."

"Must be something you got it wants."

Sethe shrugged. "It's just a baby."

"My sister," said Denver. "She died in this house."

Paul D scratched the hair under his jaw. "Reminds me of that headless bride back behind Sweet Home. Remember that, Sethe? Used to roam them woods regular."

"How could I forget? Worrisome..."

"How come everybody run off from Sweet Home can't stop talking about it? Look like if it was so sweet you would have stayed."

"Girl, who you talking to?"

Paul D laughed. "True, true. She's right, Sethe. It wasn't sweet and it sure wasn't home." He shook his head.

"But it's where we were," said Sethe. " All together. Comes back whether we want it to or not." She shivered a little. A light ripple of skin on her arm, which she caressed back into sleep. "Denver," she said, "start up that stove. Can't have a friend stop by and don't feed him."

"Don't go to any trouble on my account," Paul D said.

"Bread ain't trouble. The rest I brought back from where I work. Least I can do, cooking from dawn to noon, is bring dinner home. You got any objections to pike?"

"If he don't object to me I don't object to him."

At it again, thought Denver. Her back to them, she jostled the kindlin and almost lost the fire. "Why don't you spend the night, Mr. Garner? You and Ma'am can talk about Sweet Home all night long."

Sethe took two swift steps to the stove, but before she could yank Denver's collar, the girl leaned forward and began to cry.

"What is the matter with you? I never knew you to behave this way."

"Leave her be," said Paul D. "I'm a stranger to her."

"That's just it. She got no cause to act up with a stranger. Oh baby, what is it? Did something happen?"

But Denver was shaking now and sobbing so she could not speak. The tears she had not shed for nine years wetting her far too womanly breasts.  "I can't no more. I can't no more."

"Can't what? What can't you?"

"I can't live here. I don't know where to go or what to do, but I can't live here. Nobody speaks to us. Nobody comes by. Boys don't like me. Girls don't either."

"Honey, honey ."

"What's she talking 'bout nobody speaks to you?" asked Paul D.

"It's the house. People don't-".

“It's not! It's not the house. It's us! And it's you!"

"Denver!"

"Leave off, Sethe. It's hard for a young girl living in a haunted house. That can't be easy."

"It's easier than some other things."

"Think, Sethe. I'm a grown man with nothing new left to see or do and I'm telling you it ain't easy. Maybe you all ought to move. Who owns this house?"

Over Denver's shoulder Sethe shot Paul D a look of snow. ",What you care?"

"They won't let you leave?"

"No."

"Sethe."

"No moving. No leaving. It's all right the way it is."

"You going to tell me it's all right with this child half out of her mind?"

Something in the house braced, and in the listening quiet that followed Sethe spoke.

"I got a tree on my back and a haint in my house, and nothing in between but the daughter I am holding in my arms. No more running-from nothing. I will never run from another thing on this earth. I took one journey and I paid for the ticket, but let me tell you something, Paul D Garner: it cost too much! Do you hear me?  It cost too much. Now sit down and eat with us or leave us be."

Paul D fished in his vest for a little pouch of tobacco-concentrating on its contents and the knot of its string while Sethe led Denver into the keeping room that opened off the large room he was sitting in. He had no smoking papers, so he fiddled with the pouch and listened through the open door to Sethe quieting her daughter. When she came back she avoided his look and went straight to a small table next to the stove. Her back was to him and he could see all the hair he wanted without the distraction of her face.

"What tree on your back?"

"Huh." Sethe put a bowl on the table and reached under it for flour.

"What tree on your back? Is something growing on your back?  I don't see nothing growing on your back."

"It's there all the same."

"Who told you that?"

"Whitegirl. That's what she called it. I've never seen it and never will. But that's what she said it looked like. A chokecherry tree.  Trunk, branches, and even leaves. Tiny little chokecherry leaves. But that was eighteen years ago. Could have cherries too now for all know."

Sethe took a little spit from the tip of her tongue with her forefinger. Quickly, lightly she touched the stove. Then she trailed her fingers through the flour, parting, separating small hills and ridges of it, looking for mites. Finding none, she poured soda and salt into the crease of her folded hand and tossed both into the flour. Then she reached into a can and scooped half a handful of lard. Deftly she squeezed the flour through it, then with her left hand sprinkling water, she formed the dough.

I had milk," she said. "I was pregnant with Denver but I had milk for my baby girl. I hadn't stopped nursing her when I sent her on ahead with Howard and Buglar."

Now she rolled the dough out with a wooden pin. " Anybody could smell me long before he saw me. And when he saw me he'd see the drops of it on the front of my dress. Nothing I could do about that. All I knew was I had to get my milk to my baby girl. Nobody was going to nurse her like me. Nobody was going to get it to her fast enough, or take it away when she had enough and didn't know it. Nobody knew that she couldn't pass her air if you held her up on your shoulder, only if she was lying on my knees. Nobody knew that but me and nobody had her milk but me. I told that to the woman in the wagon. Told them to put sugar water in cloth to suck from so when I got there in a few days she wouldn't have forgot me. The milk would be there and I would be there with it."

"Men don't know nothing much," said Paul D, tucking his pouch back into his vest pocket, "but they do know a suckling can't be away from its mother for long."

"Then they know what it's like to send your children off while your breasts are full."

"We was talking 'bout a tree, Sethe."

" After I left you, those boys came in there and took my milk.  That's what they came in there for. Held me down and took it.  I told Mrs. Garner on em. She had that lump and couldn't speak but her eyes rolled out tears. Them boys found out I told on em. Schoolteacher made one open up my back, and when it closed it made a tree. It grows there still."

"They used cowhide on you?"

" And they took my milk."

"They beat you and you was pregnant?"

"And they took my milk!"

The fat white circles of dough lined the pan in rows. Once more Sethe touched a wet forefinger to the stove. She opened the oven door and slid the pan of biscuits in. As she raised up from the heat she felt Paul D behind her and his hands under her breasts. She straightened up and knew, but could not feel, that his cheek was pressing into the branches of her chokecherry tree.

Not even trying, he had become the kind of man who could walk into a house and make the women cry .Because with him, in his presence, they could. There was something blessed in his manner.  Women saw him and wanted to weep-to tell him that their chest hurt and their knees did too. Strong women and wise saw him and told him things they only told each other: that way past the Change of Life, desire in them had suddenly become enormous, greedy, more savage than when they were fifteen, and that it embarrassed them

and made them sad; that secretly they longed to die--to be quit of it-that sleep was more precious to them than any waking day. Young girls sidled up to him to confess or describe how well-dressed the visitations were that had followed them straight from their dreams. Therefore, although he did not understand why this was so, he was not surprised when Denver dripped tears into the stovefire. Nor, fifteen minutes later, after telling him about her stolen milk, her mother wept as well. Behind her, bending down, his body an arc of

kindness, he held her breasts in the palms of his hands. He rubbed his cheek on her back and learned that way her sorrow, the roots of it; its wide trunk and intricate branches. Raising his fingers to the hooks of her dress, he knew without seeing them or hearing any sigh that the tears were coming fast. And when the top of her dress was around her hips and he saw the sculpture her back had become, like the decorative work of an ironsmith too passionate for display, he could think but not say, " Aw, Lord, girl." And he would tolerate no peace until he had touched every ridge and leaf of it with his mouth, none of which Sethe could feel because her back skin had been dead for years. What she knew was that the responsibility for her breasts, at last, was in somebody else's hands.

Would there be a little space, she wondered, a little time, some way to hold off eventfulness, to push busyness into the comers of the room and just stand there a minute or two, naked from shoulder blade to waist, relieved of the weight of her breasts, smelling the stolen milk again and the pleasure of baking bread? Maybe this one time she could stop dead still in the middle of a cooking meal-not even leave the stove-and feel the hurt her back ought to. Trust things and remember things because the last of the Sweet Home men

was there to catch her if she sank?

LYNCHING - Robert L. Zangrando

The NAACP Crusade Against Lynching, 1909-1950 (1980).

Lynching is the practice whereby a mob—usually several dozen or several hundred persons—takes the law into its own hands in order to injure and kill a person accused of some wrongdoing. The alleged offense can range from a serious crime like theft or murder to a mere violation of local customs and sensibilities. The issue of the victim's guilt is usually secondary, since the mob serves as prosecutor, judge, jury, and executioner. Due process yields to momentary passions and expedient objectives.

Vigilantism, or summary justice, has a long history, but the term lynch law originated during the American Revolution with Col. Charles Lynch and his Virginia associates, who responded to unsettled times by making their own rules for confronting Tories and criminal elements. "Lynching" found an easy acceptance as the nation expanded. Raw frontier conditions encouraged swift punishment for real, imagined, or anticipated criminal behavior. Historically, social control has been an essential aspect of mob rule.

Opponents of slavery in pre-Civil War America and cattle rustlers, gamblers, horse thieves, and other "desperadoes" in the South and Old West were nineteenth-century targets. From the 1880s onward, however, mob violence increasingly reflected white America's contempt for various racial, ethnic, and cultural groups. African-Americans especially, and sometimes Native Americans, Latinos, Jews, Asian immigrants, and European newcomers, felt the mob's fury. In an era when racist theories prompted "true Americans" to assert their imagined superiority through imperialist ventures, mob violence became the domestic means of asserting white dominance. Occasionally, this complemented the profit motive, when the lynching of a successful black farmer or immigrant merchant opened new economic opportunities for local whites and simultaneously reaffirmed everyone's "place" in the social hierarchy. Sometimes lynching was aimed at unpopular ideas: labor union organizers, political radicals, critics of America's role in World War I, and civil rights advocates were targets.

African-Americans suffered grievously under lynch law. With the close of Reconstruction in the late 1870s, southern whites were determined to end northern and black participation in the region's affairs, and northerners exhibited a growing indifference toward the civil rights of black Americans. Taking its cue from this intersectional white harmony, the federal government abandoned its oversight of constitutional protections. Southern and border states responded with the Jim Crow laws of the 1890s, and white mobs flourished. With blacks barred from voting, public office, and jury service, officials felt no obligation to respect minority interests or safeguard minority lives. In addition to lynchings of individuals, dozens of race riots—with blacks as victims—scarred the national landscape from Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1898 to Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1921.

Between 1882 (when reliable statistics were first collected) and 1968 (when the classic forms of lynching had disappeared), 4,743 persons died of lynching, 3,446 of them black men and women. Mississippi (539 black victims, 42 white) led this grim parade of death, followed by Georgia (492, 39), Texas (352, 141), Louisiana (335, 56), and Alabama (299, 48). From 1882 to 1901, the annual number nationally usually exceeded 100; 1892 had a record 230 deaths (161 black, 69 white). Although lynchings declined somewhat in the twentieth century, there were still 97 in 1908 (89 black, 8 white), 83 in the racially troubled postwar year of 1919 (76, 7, plus some 25 race riots), 30 in 1926 (23, 7), and 28 in 1933 (24, 4).

Statistics do not tell the entire story, however. These were recorded lynchings; others were never reported beyond the community involved. Furthermore, mobs used especially sadistic tactics when blacks were the prime targets. By the 1890s lynchers increasingly employed burning, torture, and dismemberment to prolong suffering and excite a "festive atmosphere" among the killers and onlookers. White families brought small children to watch, newspapers sometimes carried advance notices, railroad agents sold excursion tickets to announced lynching sites, and mobs cut off black victims' fingers, toes, ears, or genitalia as souvenirs. Nor was it necessarily the handiwork of a local rabble; not infrequently, the mob was encouraged or led by people prominent in the area's political and business circles. Lynching had become a ritual of interracial social control and recreation rather than simply a punishment for crime.

In an expression of racism and sexism, apologists claimed that lynching protected white women from black rapists, but actually, only one-quarter of lynching victims were accused of rape or attempted rape. In the 1890s, black journalist Ida B. Wells-Barnett publicized evidence refuting this rape myth, as did the later Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching, a white organization mobilized on a county-by-county basis throughout the 1930s to put an end to mob violence.

From the 1890s to the early 1930s, sixteen southern and border states had laws dealing with lynching and mob violence, but enforcement was uneven and ineffectual. With race as the issue, officials simply declined to apprehend and prosecute lynchers, even when their identities were no secret. Coroners' inquests regularly found that death had occurred "at the hands of parties unknown." Consequently, from 1918 to the 1960s, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (naacp) sought federal intervention, usually through a statute designed to stiffen local resolve by punishing an officer whose delinquency contributed to a lynching or by fining the county or municipality involved. The bill would also have utilized federal prosecutors and judges relatively immune to local political pressures. The measure passed the House of Representatives three times (1922, 1937, 1940) but failed in the Senate because of real or threatened filibusters by southern Democrats aided by northern conservative Republicans. Nonetheless, this extended lobbying did alert the nation to the need for reform and placed the naacp at the center of an emerging twentieth-century civil rights coalition. Although Congress never passed an antilynching statute, portions of the 1968 Civil Rights Act provided for federal intervention in the event of injury to a person seeking constitutional rights. The last recorded lynching occurred in 1964 with the murder of three civil rights workers, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, in Mississippi.

Modernizing trends in American life helped account for lynching's decline. With steady migration from the rural South, blacks shed their isolation and vulnerability and acquired, instead, a degree of political power and visibility throughout the nation; the results in legislative terms included the passage of five civil rights statutes and the ratification of two constitutional amendments from 1957 to 1968. Worried about its image among third world nations, cold war America sought to resolve its domestic racial tensions. Meanwhile, southern business and political leaders realized that the Sunbelt could not attract industrial investments and a skilled white-collar populace unless it lost its reputation for violence and civil disruptions.

Nonetheless, American culture still exhibits a vigilante spirit and a tendency to impose local conformity, as when, for example, self-appointed guardians invoke extralegal tactics to harass Asian boat people, firebomb abortion clinics, promote gay bashing, prevent "outsiders" from joining the neighborhood, or mobilize Aryan skinheads against social pluralism.

Abel Meeropol,  Billie Holiday and "Strange Fruit"

Abel Meeropol, a white Jewish teacher in a New York City high school, wrote the lyrics and music of "Strange Fruit," and shared the piece with Billie Holiday in 1939 when she was singing at Cafe Society, the leading left-wing, integrated night club in Greenwich Village. "Strange Fruit" soon became the opening song for Holiday's sets and a popular success when she recorded it. The searing lyrics often upset club patrons and it became a weapon in continuing anti-lynching campaigns. Meeropol must have been surprised, but pleased at the song's impact. In an interview in 1971 he commented: "I wrote 'Strange Fruit' because I hate lynching, and I hate injustice, and I hate the people who perpetuate it."

Strange Fruit

Southern trees bear a strange fruit,
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
Black body swinging in the Southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

Pastoral scene of the gallant South,
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,
Scent of magnolia sweet and fresh,
And the sudden smell of burning flesh!

Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck,
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,
For the sun to rot, for a tree to drop,
Here is a strange and bitter crop.

Booker T. and W. E. B.

(Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois)

"It seems to me," said Booker T.,

"It shows a mighty lot of cheek

To study chemistry and Greek

When Mister Charlie needs a hand

To hoe the cotton on his land.

And when Miss Ann looks for a cook,

Why stick your nose inside a book?"

"I don't agree," said W. E. B.

"If I should have the drive to seek

Knowledge of chemistry or Greek,

I'll do it. Charles and Miss can look

Another place for hand or cook.

Some men rejoice in skill of hand,

And some in cultivating land,

But there are others who maintain

The right to cultivate the brain."

"It seems to me," said Booker T.,

"That all you folks have missed the boat

Who shout about the right to vote,

And spend vain days and sleepless nights

In uproar over civil rights.

Just keep your mouths shut, do not grouse,

But work, and save, and buy a house."

"I don't agree:' said W. E. B.,

"For what can property avail

If dignity and justice fail?

Unless you help to make the laws,

They'll steal your house with trumped-up clause.

A rope's as tight, a fire as hot,

No matter how much cash you've got.

Speak soft, and try your little plan,

But as for me, I’ll be a man."

"It seems to me:' said Booker T. –

"1 don't agree:'  Said W. E. B.

The Beginning of the Modern Civil Rights Era

The beginning of the modern era in civil rights can be attributed to A. Philip Randolph , president of the Brotherhood of sleeping Car Porters, an important black union.  In 1941, Randolph began to insist that the government require the integration of American companies and planned a March on Washington to make his point.   Roosevelt, fearing both violence and political embarrassment, FDR convinced Randolph to cancel the march and promised to establish a Fair Employment Practices commission to investigate discrimination in the war industries.   In 1943, James Farmer and others formed the Committee on Racial Equality, CORE, and began to organize sit-ins and demonstrations in segregated theaters and restaurants. 

Brown v. the Board

The event that made civil rights a national issue was the court case, Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka Kansas, in 1954.  NAACP lawyer Thurgood Marshall, the first black to argue successfully in front of the Supreme Court, convinced the court that separate schools were inherently unequal, reversing the 1896 decision in Plessy v. Ferguson.  Brown II in 1955 established the process whereby schools were to begin to desegregate.  Southern resistance to this decision was great, led by more than 100 southern members of Congress who signed the "Southern Manifesto", promising to block the implementation of desegregation.  The first such confrontation occurred with the forced desegregation of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1957.  President Eisenhower was forced to send federal troops to protect the black students from angry mobs.  The troops had to escort those students throughout the year. 

In class journal:  Look at the following Norman Rockwell illustrations.  What feelings do they elicit in you?

The Problem We All Live With                              The New Kids in the Neighborhood

from Warriors Don’t Cry- by Melba Pattillo Beals

JUDGE ORDERS INTEGRATION -Arkansas Gazette, Tuesday, September 3, 1957

Dear Diary,

It's happening today. What I'm afraid of most is that they won't like me and integration won't work and Little Rock won't become like Cincinnati, Ohio.

As we walked down the front steps, Mother paused and turned to look back at Grandma, who was standing at the edge of the porch. In their glance I saw the fear they had never voiced in front of me. Grandma lingered for a moment and then rushed to encircle me in her arms once more. "God is always with you," she whispered as she blinked back tears.

Trailing behind Mother, I made my way down the concrete path as she climbed into the driver's seat behind the wheel of our green Pontiac. I don't know why I veered off the sidewalk, taking the shortcut through the wet grass that would make damp stains on my saddle shoes. Perhaps I wanted some reason not to go to the integration. I knew if Grandma noticed, she would force me to go back and polish my shoes all over again.  But she was so preoccupied she didn't say a word. As I climbed into the passenger's seat, I looked back to see her leaning against the porch column, her face weary , her eyes filled with tears. 

Mother pressed the gas pedal, and we gained speed. I always watched closely because I wanted my license by my sixteenth birthday-only three months away. I knew the process well by now. She had guided me through practice sessions in the parking lot next to the grocery store often enough.

We moved through the streets in silence, listening to the newsman's descriptions of the crowds gathering at Central High. I noticed some of our neighbors standing on the sidewalk, many more than were usually out this time of day.

"That's strange," Mama mumbled as she waved to people who didn't bother waving back. "No matter, maybe they didn't see me." Our neighbors had always been so friendly, but now they peered at us without their usual smiles. Then I saw Kathy and Ronda, two of my school friends, standing with their mothers. Anxious to catch their attention, I waved out the window with a loud "Hi." Their disapproving glances matched those of the adults.

"I didn't do anything to them," I said, not understanding their reason.

"Then you don't have anything to be concerned about." Mother Lois maneuvered through the unusually heavy traffic. "I don't know where all the cars could have come from," she said. We both craned our necks, curious about all the unfamiliar cars and people. Certainly there had never before been so many white people driving down the streets of our quiet, tree-lined neighborhood.

The voice on the radio grew more urgent as the announcer described the ranks of Arkansas National Guardsmen who ringed Central High School. Hearing the news as we drew near our destination, Mother said, "I think I'll park here. The meeting place is quite a ways away, but from the looks of things we won't get any closer."

The announcer said it was 7:55 as Mama squeezed into a parking space, and we settled ourselves quietly for a moment, trying to identify the buzzing noise that seemed as if it were all around us. It resembled the sound of crowds at my high school football games. But how could that be? The announcer said there was a crowd, but surely it couldn't be that big.

"Well, I guess we'd better get going." Mother was squinting, cupping her hands ~over her eyes to protect them against the glare of sunlight. A stream of white people were hurrying past us in the direction of Central High, so many that some had to walk on the grass and in the street. We stepped out of the car and into their strange parade, walking in silence in the midst of their whispers and glares.

Anxious to see the familiar faces of our friends or some of our own people, we hurried up the block lined with wood-frame houses and screened-in porches. I strained to see what lay ahead of us. In the distance, large crowds of white people were lining the curb directly across from the front of Central High. As we approached behind them, we could see only the clusters of white people that stretched for a distance of two blocks along the entire span of the school building. My mind could take in the sights and sounds only one by one: flashing cameras, voices shouting in my ears, men and women jostling each other, old people, young people, people running, uniformed police officers walking, men standing still, men and women waving their fists, and then the long line of uniformed soldiers carrying weapons just like in the war movies I had seen.

Everyone's attention seemed riveted on the center of the line of soldiers where a big commotion was taking place. At first we couldn't see what they were looking at. People were shouting and pointing, and the noise hurt my ears and muffled the words. We couldn't understand what they were saying. As we drew near, the angry outbursts became even more intense, and we began to hear their words more clearly. "Niggers, go home! Niggers, go back where you belong!"

I stood motionless, stunned by the hurtful words. I searched for something to hang on to, something familiar that would comfort me or make sense, but there was nothing.

"Two, four, six, eight, we ain't gonna integrate!" Over and over, the words rang out. The terrifying frenzy of the crowd was building like steam in an erupting volcano.

"We have to find the others," Mama yelled in my ear. "We'll be safer with the group." She grabbed my arm to pull me forward, out of my trance. The look on her face mirrored the terror I felt. Some of the white men and women standing around us seemed to be observing anxiously. Others with angry faces and wide-open mouths were screaming their rage. Their words were becoming increasingly vile, fueled by whatever was happening directly in front of the school.

The sun beat down on our heads as we made our way through the crowd searching for our friends. Most people ignored us, jostling each other and craning their necks to see whatever was at the center of the furor. Finally, we got closer to the hub of activity.  Standing on our toes, we stretched as tall as we could to see what everyone was watching.

"Oh, my Lord," Mother said.

It was my friend Elizabeth they were watching. The anger of that huge crowd was directed toward Elizabeth Eckford as she stood alone, in front of Central High, facing the long line of soldiers, with a huge crowd of white people screeching at her back. Barely five feet tall, Elizabeth cradled her books in her arms as she desperately searched for the right place to enter . Soldiers in uniforms and helmets, cradling their rifles, towered over her. Slowly, she walked first to one and then another opening in their line. Each time she approached, the soldiers closed ranks, shutting her out. As she turned toward us, her eyes hidden by dark glasses, we could see how erect and proud she stood despite the fear she must have been feeling.

As Elizabeth walked along the line of guardsmen, they did nothing to protect her from her stalkers. When a crowd of fifty or more closed in like diving vultures, the soldiers stared straight ahead, as if posing for a photograph. Once more, Elizabeth stood still, stunned, not knowing what to do. The people surrounding us shouted, stomped, and whistled as though her awful predicament were a triumph for them.

I wanted to help her, but the human wall in front of us would not be moved. We could only wedge through partway. Finally, we realized our efforts were futile; we could only pray as we watched her struggle to survive. People began to applaud and shout, "Get her, get the nigger out of there. Hang her black ass!" Not one of those white adults attempted to rescue Elizabeth. The hulking soldiers continued to observe her peril like spectators enjoying a sport.

Under siege, Elizabeth slowly made her way toward the bench at the bus stop. Looking straight ahead as she walked, she did not acknowledge the people yelping at her heels, like mad dogs.  Mother and I looked at one another, suddenly conscious that we, too, were trapped by a violent mob.

Ever so slowly, we eased our way backward through the crowd, being careful not to attract attention. But a white man clawed at me, grabbing my sleeve and yelling, "We got us a

nigger right here!" Just then another man tugged at his arm distracting him. Somehow I managed to scramble away. As a commotion began building around us, Mother took my arm, and we moved fast, sometimes crouching to avoid attracting more attention.

We gained some distance from the center of the crowd and made our way down the block. But when I looked back, I saw a man following us, yelling, "They're getting away! Those niggers are getting away!" Pointing to us, he enlisted others to join him. Now we were being chased by four men, and their number was growing.

We scurried down the sidewalk, bumping into people. Most of the crowd was still preoccupied watching Elizabeth. Panic- stricken, I wanted to shout for help. But I knew it would do no good. Policemen stood by watching Elizabeth being accosted. Why would they help us?

"Melba, ...take these keys," Mother commanded as she tossed them at me. "Get to the car. Leave without me if you

have to."

I plucked the car keys from the air. "No, Mama, I won't go without you." Suddenly I felt the sting of her hand as it struck the side of my face. She had never slapped me before. "Do what I say!" she shouted. Still, I knew I couldn't leave her there. I reached back to take her arm. Her pace was slowing, and I tried to pull her forward. The men were gaining on us. If we yelled for help or made any fuss, others might join our attackers.  Running faster, I felt myself begin to wear out. I didn't have enough breath to keep moving so fast. My knees hurt, my calves were aching, but the car was just around the next corner .

The men chasing us were joined by another carrying a rope. At times, our pursuers were so close I could look back and see the anger in their eyes. Mama's pace slowed, and one man came close enough to touch her. He grabbed for her arm but instead tugged at her blouse. The fabric ripped, and he fell backward. Mama stepped out of her high-heeled shoes, leaving them behind, her pace quickening in stocking feet.

One of the men closest to me swung at me with a large tree branch but missed. I felt even more panic rise up in my throat.  If he hit me hard enough to knock me over, I would be at his mercy .I could hear Grandma India's voice saying, God is always with you, even when things seem awful. I felt a surge of strength and a new wind. As I turned the corner, our car came into sight. I ran hard-faster than ever before-unlocked the door, and jumped in.

Mother was struggling, barely able to keep ahead of her attackers. I could see them turning the corner close on her heels, moving fast toward us. I swung open the passenger door for Mother and revved the engine. Barely waiting for her to shut the door, I shoved the gearshift into reverse and backed down the street with more speed than I'd ever driven forward. I slowed to back around the corner. One of the men caught up and pounded his fists on the hood of our car, while another threw a brick at the windshield.

Turning left, we gained speed as we drove through a hail of shouts and stones and glaring faces. But I knew I would make it because the car was moving fast and Mama was with me.

We sped away from Central High School’s neighborhood and into more familiar streets where we should have felt safe. Mother directed me not to drive straight home but to circle around until we knew for certain that the men from the mob weren't chasing us. Even though I didn't have a license and had only practiced driving in the parking lot, she wouldn't allow me to stop so we could switch places. Her face was drained and her eyes haunted by a kind of fear I had not seen in her before.

Again and again, she urged me to keep moving while she frantically searched the radio dial for word of Elizabeth. We tried desperately to think of whom we could call to rescue her. We couldn't call the police. We couldn't call her parents; they didn't have a telephone. And Mrs. Bates and the NAACP folks were at Central High waiting with my friends.

As I drove, I couldn't help noticing that the streets were clogged with cars and people that did not belong in our neighborhood. There were dust-covered trucks full of tobacco-chewing white men, their naked arms and shoulders sporting tattoos. When we pulled into our backyard, Grandmother India was waiting for us with an anxious expression. "Thank God, you

made it home," she gasped.

"What about Elizabeth and the others? Have you heard anything?"

"Yes, yes, but let's get inside."

"We've got to call the ministers at the church," Mother said, scrambling up the back stairs.

"Morning," hollered our next-door neighbor, Mrs. Convers, over the backyard fence. "Morning, child. I heard about you on the radio. I think you'all better back off them white people and stay home before we all get hurt."

"Hurry, child. Hurry." Grandma India ushered us through the back door. In her face I saw reason to be even more frightened. There were no smiles, only a furrowed brow and terrified eyes. As we entered the house, I saw that she had locked all the doors and windows and pulled all of the shades. As soon as we were safely inside, she piled chairs against the locked back door.

"So what about Elizabeth?" I said.

"I think she's safe. A white woman and man sat with her on the bus bench, protecting her from those awful people clawing at her. Then they got on the bus with her and rode away, so she's okay."

"That's a real miracle," Mother said.

"And the other&-Terry and Ernie and those guys?"

"The soldiers turned them away from that school just like they did Elizabeth. They're safe. They didn't catch as much trouble, because they were in a large group with Mrs. Bates and some of those ministers. But still they didn't have no Sunday picnic; they had to get out of there real fast."

Even though Mother looked exhausted, nothing would do for her but to get dressed and go to work. "We've got to lead as normal a life as possible," she argued as we described to

Grandma what had happened to us.

"One report said those troops were armed with rifles, nightsticks, and bayonets. Did you see any of that, Melba?"

"Uh, yes, ma'am. I think I saw guns."

"Maybe things got mixed up. Perhaps the governor had them there to keep peace, and they mixed up their orders,"

Grandma mused.

"Seems to me they had ample opportunity to keep peace by protecting Elizabeth." Mother Lois sounded very angry ."I think this situation is different than what we bargained for. We'd better let things cool off a bit. You can go back to Horace Mann for now."

Grandma squared her shoulders and said, "I don't see how that will solve anything. Pretty soon, white folks will think it's as okay to enslave us as it is to use soldiers to keep our kids out of school."

Mother stood in silence, pondering Grandma's words for a long moment. Her expression reflected the painful realization that maybe what Grandma said was true. And then suddenly she said, "I had almost forgotten; I have to speak to you, Melba, and I want you to listen closely to every word and obey. Under no circumstances must you ever mention to anyone what happened to us this morning. Even if you have to tell a white lie and say we didn't go to Central, we have to keep this our secret."

Telling a white lie was something she'd never before given me permission to do. She swore me to absolute silence, saying above all else those men must not connect us with their ugly deed. If we told the story and they found out who they were chasing, they might come after us to finish the job. As she spoke, her voice quivered and her hands shook. I had never seen her so uncontrolled. She looked the way I felt, battered and weary .Finally, she instructed, "Melba, don't you dare go outside, girl. I want to know where you are every moment."  She pulled on her jacket, peeked through the glass in the front door, then hurried out onto the porch, almost running around the house to the car .

I resigned myself to the fact that Grandma wouldn't allow me to visit Thelma or Minnijean or any other friends who lived nearby. I wanted to call them for more news of what happened to them, but before I could pick up the receiver, the phone began to ring off the hook.

“Don't you dare answer,” Grandma shouted to me from the kitchen.

I plopped down at the dining room table and watched her hop up and down for what seemed like a thousand times to answer the phone. It didn't stop all morning. First, it was the call from the NAACP 1 then the ministers. There were our frightened neighbors and friends who said they really cared about me but insisted they have answers to a string of their nosy questions. And then there were more hecklers threatening death.  Our family minister called and promised to send menfolk to protect us. Grandma said one of the would-be protectors had already phoned saying he wasn't certain whether he wanted to be seen at our house at the cost of endangering his own family and job.

By noon, I was saturated with all the news reports and anxious to have some word from the others. I felt restless, trapped.  I had helped Grandma with all the chores she'd allow, and I offered to help her with those she insisted she'd do alone. I had played all my Nat King Cole and Johnny Mathis records for romantic daydreaming. I had read through the latest issue of Seventeen magazine and sneaked through the pages of my secret copy of True Romance; I was so bored I thought I'd keel over .

"I think I want to go back to Horace Mann,” I told my grandmother.  “At least I'll have assignments and friends and all sorts of wonderful first school day things to do."

“One little setback-and you want out,” she said. "Naw, you're not a quitter."

In my diary I wrote:

I was disappointed not to see what is inside Central High School.  I don't understand why the governor sent grown-up soldiers to keep us out.  I don't know if I should go back.  But Grandma is right, if I don't go back, they will think they have won. They will think they can use soldiers to frighten us, and we'll always have to obey them. They'll always be in charge if I don't go back to Central and make the integration happen.

By late afternoon the ringing phone, the hot weather, and my confinement were driving me nuts, so when the phone rang, I grabbed for it.

"Where were you?" I could hear annoyance in Minnijean's voice.

"I was there," I said. " Across the street. I saw Elizabeth being chased by those ugly people. Why was she alone?"

"Remember, she doesn't have a phone, so she didn't get that midnight call. She didn't know where or when to meet us."

"Mama and I barely made it out of there!" I said, being cautious not to tell all.

"We got outta there as fast as we could. First we went to the superintendent's office. We waited there for an hour, sitting on those hard benches. Then Mrs. Bates dragged us on to the United States Attorney's office, to see a Mr. Cobb."

"Why?"

"She said since Judge Davies made a federal order, we should go there, but Cobb sent us on to the FBI office. That was kind of secret and fun. Those guys look just the way they do on television, like they know something but they won't tell."

"Yeah, but what did they do?"

" Asked a lot of questions and wrote the answers down."

"Questions?"

"Yeah, all about where we stood and who did what to us.  Took hours and I was sweating so bad I thought I would die."

"Well, are they gonna do anything?"

"Investigate, they said they'd investigate."

"Sure, by that time we could be dead."

"You ain't kidding. That mob was outright nasty. I gotta go now, but can you meet me in fifteen minutes and we'll go to the Community Center?"

"The Community Center," I whispered. It seemed like forever since I'd had an ordinary afternoon there listening to records and talking to friends who didn't use the word "integration." I thought about the wonderful times Minnijean and I had shared-times when our greatest concern was saving enough allowance to buy a new record or praying to be asked to walk to the cafeteria with the right boy. Maybe our lives could be that way again. I tiptoed past Grandma, peacefully snoozing in her rocking chair. Suddenly she was awake. "Just where do you think you're going, Missy?"

"Uh, to the Community Center. I didn't want to disturb you. I thought you were sleeping."

"Uh, huh. Have a seat. The best you can do is let up a window. But you ain't going to no Community Center."

I couldn't stop the rush of tears. I ran to my room and fell onto the bed, burying my face in the pillow to hide the sobs that wrenched my insides. All my disappointment over not getting into Central High and the mob chase as well as the big sudden changes in my life over the past few weeks came crashing in on me.

Then I heard Grandma India padding across the room and felt the weight of her body shift the plane of the mattress as she sat down.

"You had a good cry, girl?" Her voice was sympathetic but also one sliver away from being angry .

"Yes, ma'am."

"You'll make this your last cry. You're a warrior on the battlefield for your Lord. God's warriors don't cry, 'cause they trust that he's always by their side. The women of this family don't break down in the face of trouble. We act with courage, and with God's help, we ship trouble right on out."

"But I ..." I tried to explain.

"But nothing. Now, you get yourself together, read the Twenty- Third Psalm, and don't ever let me see you behave this way again."

"Yes, ma'am." The anger in her voice hurt my feelings, but her warm hand patted my arm to reassure me of her love. From then on, I knew I could only cry when no one would hear me.

The seat that changed the world…

In 1955, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama bus, as was required by Jim Crow laws.  Her arrest led to a year long black boycott of the buses as blacks began to exercise their economic power. The Montgomery Bus Boycott also brought a young Atlanta minister, Martin Luther King, into the national spotlight.  King practiced the teachings of Henry David Thoreau and Mahatma Gandhi, that of civil disobedience.  His organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), participated in peaceful marches and protests to work for civil and voting equality. 

In 1960, a group of black college students in Greensboro, North Carolina staged the first lunch counter sit-in at a segregated Woolworth's.  The Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), was formed by college students Diane Nash and John L. Lewis (Nashville Student Movement), to provide students for protest marches and sit-ins.

In 1961, James Farmer of CORE organized the Freedom Rides, as both white and black students rode chartered buses from Washington into the south, trying to integrate the bus station bathrooms and fountains.  They were met with violence and federal marshals had to be sent to provide protection.  These actions of civil disobedience signaled a change in the tactics of the movement, from the previous NAACP dependence on the courts for action.

Mississippi, Alabama and Washington

In 1962, a federal court ordered that the University of Mississippi admit its first black student, James Meredith, and Governor Ross Barnett refused to do so. Riots occurred to protest the order and President Kennedy had to send troops to admit Meredith.  Governor George Wallace did the same thing a year later, standing in the doorway of the University of Alabama in June of 1963 until federal marshals forced the admitting of the universities first black student. That very night, NAACP official Medgar Evers was murdered in Mississippi.

 Massive protest in the spring of 1963 in Birmingham, Alabama, one of the south's most segregated cities, brought on cruel beatings from the Birmingham police and police commissioner Bull Conner.  As the nation began to see pictures and film footage of these beatings, JFK was forced to take a more aggressive role in championing civil rights. 

In August of 1963 the idea of a March on Washington was brought back as over 200,000 demonstrators marched to the capital building and heard Martin Luther King give his "I Have a Dream" speech.                    

Homework Assignment #42 

Discuss the following terms:

1.  A. Philip Randolph

2.  James Farmer

3.  Brown v. the Board

4.  Thurgood Marshall

5.  Southern Manifesto

6.  Central High School

7.  Rosa Parks

8.  Montgomery Bus Boycott

9.  Martin Luther King

10.  civil disobedience

11.  SNCC

12. lunch-counters

13.  Diane Nash and John L. Lewis

14.  Freedom Rides

15.  James Meredith

16.  Medgar Evers

17. Birmingham, 1963

18.  March on Washington

Pictures of Charles Moore

On September 3, 1958, Charles Moore, a young photographer for the Montgomery Advertiser, witnessed an argument between the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and two policeman on the steps of the City Recorders’ Court. Moore's good fortune that day was in stark contrast with King's. Moore was the only member of the media to witness King's subsequent arrest, and his picture of the local minister being manhandled during the police booking became one of the most significant photographs of the civil rights movement.  King was taken to the back of the jail where he was frisked, roughed-up and tossed into a cell.

When Life picked up the picture from the Associated Press wire on September 15, it would be the first of Moore's celebrated civil rights photos to be published in the magazine. By 1965, the photographer would grow weary of years of violence--of hatred, street battles and the searing taste of tear gas--having witnessed many of the most significant events of the era. After documenting the fighting surrounding James Meredith's bloody admission to the University of Mississippi, the dogs being turned on protesters in Birmingham and the savagery of the civil rights march at Selma, Moore booked an around-the-world ticket on Pan Am in 1965 and would not return home for eight months.

When he began working at the paper in 1957, Moore had no knowledge of the national story that had occurred in Montgomery just a year before; Rosa Parks, a local seamstress, had refused to ride in the back of a city bus, as was the rule in the South, touching off a massive boycott. "To be honest, I was a young kid. I didn't know what was going on in the world. I had no interest. My head was into camping, wildlife and fashion. I wanted to photograph beauty," Moore said.  He had no idea that his pictures would do far more than help publicize King's efforts; they also would lead to national outrage culminating in President Johnson's signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. By that time, Moore's dramatic Life photos were given credit for helping to influence the legislation's passage.

King's Arrest: Fueling the movement

Before King's arrest on the courthouse steps, Moore had met him briefly on a routine assignment at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church just a few blocks from the paper. As a typical southern newspaper of its time, the Advertiser relegated "Negro News" to a separate section. Still, the paper did not ignore the growing national prominence of its local minister, and Moore soon began to realize the importance of the role he was playing.

^{When I met Dr. King, I was just at the beginning of my career. I never knew black people on a personal level because there was segregation. I had been to his church meetings and didn't have to go to many to be absolutely fascinated by this man. When I went down to meet him, I photographed him at the pulpit with a cross behind his head. I got down low to get the power of this man. I have to say, 'Yeah, I was on my knees to King.' I became fascinated [by the] power of his oratory. From then on I wanted to cover him. I wanted every assignment I could get.}

In September 1958, King attempted to enter a crowded courtroom for a hearing involving his fellow pastor and key aide, Ralph Abernathy. Moore had heard that King might be there and on his own initiative decided to drop by. "The police were telling him he couldn't go in and were giving him a hard time. He said, 'I'll just stay here' [on the courthouse steps] and refused to leave," Moore said.

The two inexperienced officers suddenly decided to arrest King, unaware of who he was. His wife, Coretta, protested but was told, "Just nod your head and you'll go to jail, too."  Although King was not being pushed, one officer twisted the minister's arm as the three walked a block and a half to the police booking area. "I saw an opening on the other side of the counter. I ran there real quickly. Nobody stopped me, and I quickly took a few frames from behind the counter,"  Moore said.

When the picture went out on the wire, two Life staffers appeared in town on the next day, photographer, Gray Villete and Dick Stolley, who later became managing editor. “They got in touch with me and I had them to my home for dinner. It was my first time with Life magazine people."

At the time, Moore did not understand the significance of his picture, but many others did. During the next two days, the national press corps poured into town. Rather than pay a fine for loitering, King was intent on serving his fourteen-day sentence in jail. To diffuse further publicity, Police Commissioner Clyde Sellers released him, saying that he was merely saving the taxpayers money by paying King's $10 fine.  "King was a master at using the media. The significance was that the whole world was aware that Martin Luther King had been put in jail," Moore later realized. 

When the picture was published in Life twelve days later, Moore was pleased but wished the magazine could have published his eight-picture sequence of the incident instead of just a single photo. Once before, Life had published a full-page fire picture of Moore's, but its editors did not choose to give prominent play to King's arrest. The photograph occupied one-sixth of a page and was used with three other pictures accompanying a story about "mostly quiet" civil rights integration.  Stories given far more dominant play in the same issue included “Chinese ‘Reds’ impose a blockade on Quemoy” and an article about fixing charges on television quiz shows. A prominent story on race riots in Britain also dwarfed the coverage of unrest at home.

Even with the understated play in Life, the photo's publication in the influential magazine triggered further outrage and a rush of financial aid for King's Montgomery Improvement Association. Although he had once been asked to appear on television’s Meet the Press, King was now even better known on a national level; his influence would soon grow to a fevered pitch. By the next time that King would be photographed by Moore during an arrest, the photographer would be on assignment for Life.

“Ole Miss”: Moore makes his mark as a freelancer

Upon his return to Montgomery, Moore faced two months of frustration. He missed the newspaper and had little to do.  “I felt like a stranger in hell back in Montgomery. I was struggling," he said. But Moore had a sudden turn of luck in September when he ran into Life's Miami Bureau Chief, Dick Billings, in Oxford, Mississippi.

Black student James Meredith had attempted to register at the University of Mississippi and the state's defiant Governor, Ross Barnett, ignored a federal court order by declaring himself the university's emergency registrar, and personally and physically barred Meredith.  The Governor was seen as a folk hero in his state and hated what he considered Life’s liberal bias, refusing to be photographed or interviewed. Moore's contacts from five years of covering state government paid off as he assured Billings that he could get a picture.

After being granted exclusive access to photograph Barnett, Moore says that he did not dare mention the word "Life." Billings was thrilled with the pictures. “After today, you're working for us,”  he was told. At the time, a mob of more than 2,000 was descending on the college town, intent on blocking Meredith at any cost.

Moore’s ascension to the ranks of Life photographers could not have come at a more dangerous time. U.S. Attorney General Bobby Kennedy sent 200 federal marshals to protect Meredith, and each other. Several other Life shooters were on the scene, some with combat experience. With two days to go before federal marshals would attempt to escort Meredith to his first class, Moore knew that it would be a violent weekend.

Word got out that he was working for the magazine. A pack of enraged white students shoved their way into Moore’s hotel room, shouting and cursing. One began to choke him before the former Golden Gloves boxer pushed him away. “I’ve never seen such hate in anyone’s face before. It was like I were vermin. . . . To him I was worse than ‘a nigger,’ I was a white nigger. And worse than that I was a white Life magazine nigger.”

On the street, the mob waved confederate flags. Some even loaded guns as they waited for Meredith’s arrival, not knowing he had already been hidden at a campus dormitory. Local lawmen, urged on by the Governor, were defiant of the federal authorities as well, intent on preventing the enrollment of the first black student there. One of Moore’s most chilling photographs showed local, plain-clothed policemen chuckling while one practiced a swing with a billy club before the start of the inevitable rioting. “They were talking about what they’re going to do to the U.S. Marshals, laughing and showing how they would take care of them,”  Moore said.

Moore had to make some quick decisions. The local police had blocked the campus, forbidding the press to enter. Readily identifiable as a news photographer, he was threatened again. “I was told, ‘You nigger lovers had better go home’ . . . and that this guy and his brother were out with their shotguns looking for me.” 

After buying a gas mask at a local Army and Navy store, Moore sneaked onto the campus with the help of a brave student that he remembers only as ‘John.’ The student drove a VW beetle, and Moore stashed his cameras in the vehicle’s trunk. “The cops searched the car but didn’t search the trunk, which was up front. That’s how I got in,”  he said.

It was Sunday evening and as darkness fell, the rioting began. The mob had surrounded the school’s administration building, the Lyceum, and started slashing tires and throwing rocks. Soon, it was a siege. Earlier, Moore had decided to bluff his way into the building, where 200 unarmed marshals were holed-up. Accompanied by a freelance writer who also was working for Life, Moore banged on the door, telling the guard that he was desperately ill and had to go to the toilet. The ruse worked, and the two were forgotten about in the ensuing chaos.  Outside, cars were set on fire and when a lead pipe knocked a marshal unconscious, the lawmen began to fire tear gas at the mob. Moore darted outside for a short time and ducked behind a jeep as a shotgun blast from the crowd wounded an AP reporter. “If you stayed outside and used a flash, you would die. Molotov cocktails were being thrown all over,” he said.

It was no safer inside. As soon as marshals fired the gas into the crowd, it would drift back inside, filling the building. Moore wore a gas mask through the evening as he photographed the wounded marshals, several shot and bleeding. After hearing about the melee, President Kennedy decided to send in federal troops but they did not arrive until the next day. Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach was trapped inside the building, and Moore overheard him pleading on the telephone with Bobby Kennedy

‘They’ve got guns out there, Bobby, they’ve got guns. Our men are being shot . . . .’ He was trying to convince Kennedy to let them have weapons to protect themselves and Kennedy said no. They had billy clubs, that’s all. The marshals were shooting tear gas to keep the crowd from rushing them. They [the crowd] even stole a bulldozer and were attacking the building with it.

When it was over, twenty-eight marshals had been shot and 160 were injured. Moore had been the only photographer inside and had exclusive shots of the wounded. Later, he learned that a French reporter and a local repairman had been killed in the night-long battle. “We put our lives on the line. I was just sitting on a trash can in front of the building, surrounded by smashed TV cameras and tear gas canisters. We were totally wiped out,”  Moore said.

 

Birmingham: Of barking dogs and walls of water

The most influential pictures of Moore’s career were taken over five days beginning on May 3, 1963.  Birmingham was considered the nation’s most segregated city, and the photographer had a hunch that he and Durham should go to the city after hearing reports on the radio about escalating tensions there.  Five minutes after the journalists arrived in Kelly Ingram Park, the scene of anti-segregation demonstrations, firemen had been ordered by Police Commissioner Bull Connor to bring out their hoses to contain the swelling crowd.

Moore crawled on the pavement and took a position between the firemen and the protesters, who were getting pummeled by a virtual wall of water. The scene disgusted Moore but he felt a responsibility to keep shooting. One of the firemen told him later, “We’re supposed to fight fires, not people.”  

 

One of Moore’s most remarkable photographs showed three students forced against a brick wall by a fierce spray of water propelled at 100 pounds per square inch. Fourteen-year-old Carolyn McKinstry was unaware at the time that she was being photographed. “After getting hit with the hose, that was the last thing on my mind. Dr. King had had motivational meetings with us. He had never mentioned the water hose but said there might be dogs and they might even spit on you,”  she said in a 1998 interview.

When she saw her picture in Life two weeks after the demonstrations, McKinstry had no special feeling about seeing herself in a national magazine, saying that she was still fearful and angry from the experience. However, a teenager at the time, she did remember being displeased at seeing her hair in disarray. Later, she would become appreciative of the sensitivity in Moore’s graphic photographs. Before the Birmingham unrest, “the black community had lost any trust that there could be a fair portrayal by the photographers. We were always portrayed in a negative light.” 
The protests continued for five days as King urged the demonstrators, many of them children, to return to the park. Some of the scores of angry onlookers were not schooled in the preacher’s philosophy of passive resistance; Moore was struck in the ankle by a large chunk of concrete. Despite searing pain and an injury to his tendons, he continued to work for the next three days after treatment by a black doctor. “He did that story half-crippled,” said Durham.

When the demonstrations did not abate, Connor ordered police dogs into the crowd and urged the officers to allow whites to view the demonstrations. “I want them to see the dogs work,” he said. Along with the fire hose images, the pictures of dogs snarling and ripping at the pants of protesters would be among the most dramatic of Moore’s career. Despite knowing that he was making meaningful photographs, Moore felt revulsion. “Attack dogs--that was repulsive,” he said.

As the demonstrations spread, Moore and Durham disobeyed a police order not to go outside the park and were arrested as they attempted to document a woman being knocked down by the water from the hoses. Locked up in a cell for four hours with Durham and about a dozen menacing white men, Moore, known as a fearless photographer, faced one of the most frightening experiences of his career. “We could have been beaten very badly if they would have known we were from Life.”  Another reporter from the magazine bailed them out. Facing the possibility of a six-month jail term in an unsympathetic city, Life’s lawyers advised Moore and Durham to leave town immediately and fly to New York. The charges were later dropped but for a year, Moore was a fugitive from justice in his own state, having to sneak home once to see his children in Dothan.

At Life, Moore was given the rare opportunity to supervise the eleven-page layout, and the magazine’s editors decided to give him his first byline. His photos inspired seven letters which were published in the June 7 issue--three critical and four sympathetic to the civil rights cause. Francis Pharr Jones, of Austin, Texas, wrote, “We assume the guilt of the white supremacist when we allow this persecution. . . . I shall never forget those tragic faces.” Grady Franklin, of Crawfordsville, Indiana, wrote, “Charles Moore’s photographs on the racial troubles in Birmingham were superb and bone-chilling--surely a candidate for the Pulitzer Prize in news photography.”

The dog attack and fire hose pictures have been among the best-selling of all time at Black Star, reprinted time and again in books and magazines. Picture editor Yukiko Launois recalled that there were many photographers working in the South at the time, but “I remember Charles’ photos, particularly of Birmingham, as the most memorable and distinguished.” Several others also had photographed the violent confrontation between police dogs and protesters. “Somehow, Charles’ image was better. Only Charles’ became a classic. From the beginning, Charles Moore was identified with that image.”

Politicians noticed as well. John F. Kennedy said that the situation in Birmingham had sickened him and mentioned the riots there in a speech the next month in which he asked Congress to initiate civil rights legislation.   Militant black leader Malcolm X mentioned the dog attacks in a speech that he gave in Africa.   Senator Jacob Javits of New York later credited Moore’s Birmingham photographs with helping to quicken passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.  Historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. later said that his police dog photographs transformed the national mood and made the legislation not just necessary, but possible.  A year after Moore’s classic photos were first published in Life, King was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

Selma: Atrocities on a ‘Bloody Sunday’

Moore’s first Life cover was of the March 7, 1965, face-off between Alabama state troopers and a mass of marchers demonstrating for voting rights. King had gone to Selma to direct a registration drive in a county where only three percent of blacks had registered to vote, so great was the intimidation there.  Governor George Wallace said that he would not tolerate such a march and had about 100 state troopers ready to block the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Moore and dozens of other newsmen were witnesses as the troopers warned the group that it had two minutes to retreat back to the local Episcopal church. But only a minute later, the guardsmen were told to attack.  Moore’s photographs depicted the savagery as troopers, some wearing gas masks, battered the demonstrators to the ground with billy clubs. More than sixty marchers were badly injured. One suffered a fractured skull. The incident became known as “Bloody Sunday.”

ABC interrupted its broadcast of the holocaust film, Judgment in Nuremberg, to report live on the beatings. In Congress, more than fifty speeches were delivered deploring the brutality.  Life’s coverage reflected the outrage of the nation-at-large.

 On April 2, it published five letters that were overwhelmingly critical of the troopers’ violence. Mrs. M. M. Warsaw, of Braintree, Massachusetts, wrote of one of Moore’s photos, “I wonder if the Selma policeman pictured on page 37 of your current issue would have the same defiant attitude and belligerence if he was brought face to face with the Negro Marines bravely going ashore at Da Nang, South Vietnam?” Julie G. Saunders of South Hadley, Massachusetts, wrote, “The whole tragedy greatly upset me, but not until reading your article have I cried about it. After reading your article I see that it is necessary that I become physically involved. . . . Even though I am safe and secure in this Northern school, . . . I am not free until they are.”

After many years on the bloody front lines of the civil rights movement, Moore had seen enough. “I had been involved in so much ugliness and I realized that I needed to do something else.” Turning his attention toward other types of assignments after the brutal Selma beatings, in years to come he would photograph travel stories, do corporate portraiture, and occasionally return to doing hard news for a variety of publications. After Moore became determined to get away from covering violence, Life’s editors later convinced him to cover the Vietnam war for two months including a photography essay for the magazine on B-52 air raids.

Despite covering most of the major civil rights stories of the era, Moore missed the biggest one of all. When King was assassinated in Memphis on April 4, 1968, he was in Palo Alto, California doing a sex education assignment for the Saturday Evening Post. “We had on the radio and heard the flash. I just pulled the car over to the side, listened to the news and cried. 

We Marched to Be Counted  (Newsweek, Dec. 11, 2000)

The war over ballots reminds blacks of the days we didn't have the vote at all. If you think it's all technicalities, remember Selma.                                                                          by John Lewis

People are going to die here, I remember thinking; I'm going to die here.

It was Sunday, March 7, 1965-really just the day before yesterday-and Hosea Williams and I were at the head of a column of nonviolent marchers setting out from Selma to Montgomery to petition for the right to vote in George Wallace's Alabama. As we crossed the Pettus Bridge, we saw a line of lawmen. "We should kneel and pray," I said to Hosea, but we didn't have time. "Troopers, "barked an officer, "advance! "They came at us like a human wave, a blur of blue uniforms, billy clubs, bullwhips and tear gas; one had a piece of rubber hose wrapped in barbed wire. Televised images of that day-on ABC, they broke into the network premiere of "Judgment at Nuremberg~-led President Johnson to declare, “At times history and fate meet at a single time in a single place to shape a turning point in man's unending search for freedom.  So it was at Lexington and Concord.  So it was a century ago at Appomattox.  So it was last week in Selma, Alabama.”

As I watched election night 2000 turn into this controversy over counts and recounts, my mind went back to that day on the bridge. What’s happening in Florida and in Washington is more than a game for pundits. The whole mess reminds African -Americans of an era when we had to pass literacy tests, pay poll taxes and cross every t and dot every i to get to be able to vote. You had black men and women, graduates of the best universities in the country, failing literacy tests. A man was once asked how many bubbles were in a bar of soap. For all the political maneuvering and legal wrangling, many people have missed an important point: the story of the 2000 election is about more than George W. Bush and Al Gore. It's about the right to vote. And you cannot understand the true implications of this campaign and the subsequent litigation without grasping how deeply many minorities feel about the seemingly simple matter of the sanctity of the ballot box.

There is a lot of troubling new talk of “political profiling" -allegations that officials tried to suppress the black vote on Election Day and may be maneuvering now to make sure it isn't counted. There are reports that officials put new voting machines in white areas but not black ones, and that African-Americans were asked present two, not just one, forms of identification to be allowed to vote. These charges should be looked into.  I like to believe that no one met in some smoke-filled room and said. "We're going to keep black voters out. We're going to keep Jewish voters out.”   Still,  I remember the same kinds of tactics in the old days, when whites would write down blacks' license-plate numbers when we drove to courthouses to try to register.

My greatest fear today is that the perception our votes were not counted may usher

in a period of great cynicism.  On the other hand-and I bet this is more likely-it may give people a greater sense of the importance of voting and of vigilance. The vote, after all, is the real heart of the movement.  Younger people shouldn't think civil rights were just about water fountains or stirring speeches on TV.  Late in the summer of 1961, after the Freedom Rides, we realized it was not enough to integrate lunch counters and buses. We had to get the vote.

Today there is some talk in black leadership circles that we shouldn't make too much

of an issue of the disproportionately high number of controversial or partially marked ballots in African-American precincts. According to this line of argument, we should be embarrassed that our folks didn't know enough to punch a ballot correctly. I reject this thinking. Anybody can make a mistake in the booth; some machines don't work; some ballots are confusing. And blacks just recently got into the habit of voting. Meanwhile, it was not just African0-American voters who slipped up; the confused voters in West Palm Beach, by and large, were older Jewish voters.

It will make a mockery of the memory of the martyrs if all of the people's votes are not counted and I think a lot of people realize that, at least in the back of their minds. I was at home in Atlanta last weekend,  and I'd go into a grocery store, or to city hall, or just walk down the street, and folks would say. "Congressman. they're trying to steal the election." Rank-and-file, middle-class people, white, black, Hispanic-not partisans.

If George W. Bush makes it to the White House, there will be a new rallying cry in many parts of America: never, ever again. We must learn how to vote, and have those votes counted. If there’s a perception that this is not a legitimate presidency, the political climate will not be orderly and peaceful. I'm not making a threat; I just think it's so. There will be tension. In minority circles a Bush win is going to instill a feeling that people have to organize better and become politically sophisticated. We've overcome more dangerous obstacles than clever Republican lawyers. And be assured we will overcome again.

"I Have A Dream"  - by Martin Luther King, Jr,

Delivered on the steps at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C. on August 28, 1963. Source: Martin Luther King, Jr: The Peaceful Warrior, Pocket Books, NY 1968

Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of captivity. But one hundred years later, we must face the tragic fact that the Negro is still not free.

One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still languishing in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land.

So we have come here today to dramatize an appalling condition. In a sense we have come to our nation's capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir.

This note was a promise that all men would be guaranteed the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check which has come back marked "insufficient funds." But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation.

So we have come to cash this check -- a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice. We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to open the doors of opportunity to all of God's children. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment and to underestimate the determination of the Negro. This sweltering summer of the Negro's legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality. Nineteen sixty-three is not an end, but a beginning. Those who hope that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will now be content will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual. There will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights.

The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges. But there is something that I must say to my people who stand on the warm threshold which leads into the palace of justice. In the process of gaining our rightful place we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred.

We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. we must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force.

The marvelous new militancy which has engulfed the Negro community must not lead us to distrust of all white people, for many of our white brothers, as evidenced by their presence here today, have come to realize that their destiny is tied up with our destiny and their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom.

We cannot walk alone. And as we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall march ahead. We cannot turn back. There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, "When will you be satisfied?" we can never be satisfied as long as our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities. We cannot be satisfied as long as the Negro's basic mobility is from a smaller ghetto to a larger one. We can never be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote. No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.

I am not unmindful that some of you have come here out of great trials and tribulations. Some of you have come fresh from narrow cells. Some of you have come from areas where your quest for freedom left you battered by the storms of persecution and staggered by the winds of police brutality. You have been the veterans of creative suffering. Continue to work with the faith that unearned suffering is redemptive.

Go back to Mississippi, go back to Alabama, go back to Georgia, go back to Louisiana, go back to the slums and ghettos of our northern cities, knowing that somehow this situation can and will be changed. Let us not wallow in the valley of despair. I say to you today, my friends, that in spite of the difficulties and frustrations of the moment, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal." I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slaveowners will be able to sit down together at a table of brotherhood. I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a desert state, sweltering with the heat of injustice and oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice. I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today.

I have a dream that one day the state of Alabama, whose governor's lips are presently dripping with the words of interposition and nullification, will be transformed into a situation where little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls and walk together as sisters and brothers. I have a dream today. I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together. This is our hope. This is the faith with which I return to the South. With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.

This will be the day when all of God's children will be able to sing with a new meaning, "My country, 'tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrim's pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring." And if America is to be a great nation, this must become true. So let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire. Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York. Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania! Let freedom ring from the snowcapped Rockies of Colorado! Let freedom ring from the curvaceous peaks of California! But not only that; let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia! Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee! Let freedom ring from every hill and every molehill of Mississippi. From every mountainside, let freedom ring.

When we let freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, "Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!"

Fighting for the right to vote….

The assassination of President Kennedy in 1963 brought a new impetus to the battle for civil-rights legislation, as Lyndon Baines Johnson pushed through the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (made illegal the segregation in public facilities and established an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission) and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (made illegal literacy tests and established registrars to help register blacks) as a memorial to JFK. The summer of 1964 was known as the "Freedom Summer" as civil rights activists descended on the south to stage demonstrations and work for political opportunity for blacks.   Three of the first activists to arrive were murdered in Mississippi, as was portrayed in the movie, Mississippi Burning.  

Violence takes over…

In 1966, King attempted to bring the movement north, to Chicago, where he protested the discrimination in housing and unemployment. The protests were not effective at all, as he was met with violence and indifference.  The horrible conditions in the northern cities and ghettos led to an increase in violence.  Riots occurred in Watts (South Central Las Angeles - 1964), Chicago and Cleveland (1966), and Detroit (1967).  The Special Commission (Kerner) on Civil Disorders in 1968 spoke of the need to restore law and order on one hand, and improve the social conditions of the urban black on the other.  Disillusionment with peaceful change also led to a more militant attitude in the civil rights movement.  The philosophy of Black Power could be seen in the formation of the Black Panthers in Oakland, the Nation of Islam and Malcom X (who was murdered form within the group in 1965), the more militant SNCC leadership of Stokely Carmichael and H Rap Brown.  The defining moment in the transition from the non-violent protest to the more radical movement would have to be the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King and the resulting riots across the country.    

Homework Assignment # 43

1. Discuss the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting rights Act of 1965.

2. Discuss the Freedom Summer.

3. Discuss Dr. King and Chicago.

4. Discuss the Kerner Commission.

5.  Discuss Black Power,  Malcolm X, and SNCC.

American History - Grisanzio                                           Eyes on the Prize Pt. 1

Emmett Till, 1953

1.  KKK

2.  lynchings

3.  murder

4.  trial

5.  closing statement of defense attorney

Montgomery Bus Boycott, 1955

6.  Rosa Parks

7.  boycott

8.  role of church/rallies

9.  Martin Luther King

10.  car pools

11.  Supreme Court

Little Rock, 1957

12. Brown v. the Board

13.  Little Rock 9

14.  Orval Faubus

15.  Ark. National Guard

16.  Elizabeth Eckford

17.  1st day of school

18.  Eisenhower reaction

19.  school year

Sit-ins, 1960

19.  Nashville black colleges

20.  Diane Nash and John Lewis

21.  Jim Lawson

22.  lunch counters

23.  jail

24.  boycott

25.  change of heart

Who Shall Lead. 1960

26.  federal mandate

27.  The Albany Movement

28.  SCLC role

29.  fill the jails

30.  Dr. King

Birmingham, 1963

31.  George Wallace

32.  segregation now.....

33.  Bombingham

34.  Bull Conner

35.  Letter from the Birmingham Jail

36.  children march

37.  dogs and water

38.  KKK

39.  Kennedy

March on Washington

40.  A. Philip Randolph

41.  John Lewis Speech

42.  "I Have a Dream"

43.  16th St. Baptist Church

44.  Four Little Girls

45.  tough choices

Power and the Vote

46.  Nation of Islam

47.  Malcolm X

48.  southern v. northern experience

49.  Mississippi

50.  Medgar Evers

51.  registration

52.  Freedom Summer

53.  Philadelphia, Ms.

54.  Civil rights Act of 1964

55.  Freedom Democrats

Selma, 1965

56.  county steps

57.  State of the Union, 1965

58.  SNCC and SCLC tension

59.  Malcolm X

60.  March to Montgomery

61.  Pettus Bridge

62.  LBJ Address

63.  2nd March to Montgomery