When we had gone through an underpass beneath the tracks and emerged in the white district, there were no more smiles. On the contrary, the faces that turned to stare seemed to freeze in an identical expression—a rigid, hostile look of worry. As we approached a large building on Main Street, Billy dropped back to walk with me. “That’s where we were put in the clink,” he said. I saw a motorcycle policeman emerge from the building and, with his back to us, walk over to his machine. He had swung one leg over it when the column came into his line of vision. Without wasting a motion, he smoothly swung his leg back again and, at a measured pace, reentered the building. At an intersection up ahead of us, a white-capped traffic patrolman turned to signal waiting cars, spotted our column, put his hands on his hips in a gesture that was almost an audible exclamation, and left his post to stride down the sidewalk ahead of us, in the direction of the theatres.
“I feel bad,” Billy suddenly said to me as the column split into two sections, one bound for the Center and the other, which we followed, for the Carolina. “I just remembered I forgot to introduce you to our meeting.”
I said it was the last thing I would have expected him to do at so tense a time.
“I do apologize,” he said. “We like to respect our visiting guests.”
At the theatres, which were a few blocks apart, policemen were now collecting like flies around a pudding. Ahead of us walked an assistant police chief; patrolmen were standing before the movie houses; and several motorcycle officers hovered in the offing. The Carolina, a cliff-like building, stood on a windy corner at the bottom of an incline. As I followed the column toward it, I heard raucous laughter. At the rear entrance of a store, peering down an alley at us, stood a crowd of smirking men and women. “Hi, you niggers—” someone started to call out, and then the door was suddenly banged shut.
Before the lighted theatre marquee, announcing The Grass Is Greener, with Cary Grant, Deborah Kerr, and Robert Mitchum, about half of the column halted at Billy’s order; the rest, led by Claude, went around the corner to the colored entrance. Calmly, Billy and Claude instructed their pickets while the theatre manager and his assistants, crowded into the ticket booth, watched, as did the policemen and a number of men in some garages across the street. Then the pickets began their slow march back and forth. “Democracy Lies Buried Here,” proclaimed the first sign, which bore a white cross. It was carried by the boy who had been the blind student’s escort at the church. Now a faded stocking cap was pulled down over his ears, and the collar of his outer garment—an old suit jacket—was turned up against the strong wind. I also recognized the young girl who headed Claude’s column, and many of the other marchers. As they passed me, they did not so much as look at me. Each was withdrawn far back into his own loneliness.
Before long, four white teen-age boys, slack-jawed and leather-jacketed, appeared and, grinning widely, began circling the lines. The pickets paid no attention to them, and kept to their silent, expressionless march.
The biggest teen-age boy accosted Billy. “We going to kick up a little trouble with you,” he said.
“Go right ahead,” Billy replied. “I’ll get you a little help—a police escort.”
At that, the white boys sauntered away.
A little later, a newsboy who had ridden up on a bicycle began arranging bundles of papers on the sidewalk so as to increasingly confine the space in which the pickets walked. One of the policemen ordered him on.
After I had watched a couple of changes of shift, I decided to walk over to the Center and see how things were going there. On the way I met Ned, looking elated. “All is well,” he said. Through the lighted windows of several stores, I could see white salesmen selling goods to Negro customers. At the corner, where the Center’s marquee announced “Roaring Action, Excitement, Thrills, Stirring Adventure!”—provided by the ubiquitous Miss Kerr and Mr. Mitchum in The Sundowners—the picket lines were being photographed by a man crouching in the street under the watchful eyes of several policemen. On the corner directly opposite, John was being interviewed by a reporter. His hands fumbling in the cold, the man was writing down on a pad the wordings of the picket signs, which John obligingly read off to him: “We Hold These Truths to Be Self-Evident, That All Men Are Created Equal,” “Why Feed Red Propaganda by Making Democracy a Lie?,” and “This Generation Will Not Tolerate Segregation.” When the reporter asked if it was true that the pickets were being paid two-fifty an hour, John denied it with dignity. “We expect someday to be paid in being recognized as first-class citizens,” he said.
The picketing seemed to have little effect on most older white theatre patrons, who walked through the lines as though they were mist. One white woman, however, who had a Cub Scout in tow, crossed the street to offer an apology to John before entering the Center. “My sympathies are with you,” she said, “but I promised Sonny I’d let him see the kangaroos. He’d make himself sick if I took him home now.” The picket lines seemed to disturb quite a few white adolescent couples. They would halt their conversation for a moment when they spied the pickets, and then, looking straight ahead, would proceed into the theatre with elaborate nonchalance. Two young Negro couples, whose battle with their consciences had begun almost a block away from the theatre, stood under the lighted sign “Colored Entrance” for almost ten minutes, and at last walked hurriedly away.
Not long afterward, two young white men emerged from the theatre and, walking up to John and Ned, asked to take a turn on the picket line. They identified themselves as Duke graduate students. One revealed that he was from the Deep South, and Ned asked how his friends at home felt about such protests. “My own family is against integration,” the student said. “The thing you notice most now down home is the fear among the white people. The old patterns of habit and trust that held them together seem to be breaking up.”
A burly white man who had been standing nearby for some time, looking on with a preoccupied, troubled air, came over. He had just returned to North Carolina after ten years with the armed services in Japan, he said, and went on, “Over there, we were trying to tell people how liberal and democratic America is. The first day I got back, I stopped off at the courthouse on some business, and what did I see? All these kids filling the courtroom—on trial. It grated on me. I was going to go back into the service, but now I think maybe I can do more by staying right here.”
Just then, two big, husky white men stopped before him. “Ed, for God’s sake, where did you turn up from?” one of them shouted jubilantly.
After several minutes of loud, back-pounding reunion, one of the men stared at the picket line and said, “What do you know—what the jigs up to now?”
“They’re trying to get the theatres desegregated,” the man said stiffly.
His two friends broke into incredulous laughter. The man spoke to them earnestly for a while. Finally, with uneasy glances at each other, they bade him goodbye and moved on.
It was now past seven o’clock, and though I was dressed warmly, in boots and a fur coat, I was shivering. At this point, I encountered Billy, who noticed my plight, and told me to follow him. He led me down a side street and into an ancient office building. In its first-floor corridor, sitting on a flight of wooden stairs or huddled over a radiator, were about twenty of the pickets, trying to get warm while they waited their third or fourth turn on the line. A Negro attorney, Billy said, had allowed them the use of the hall for the evening, and it was hoped that, upon evidence of their good behavior, he would repeat his gesture on following nights. A few minutes after I arrived, a boy entered and stood near me, beating his gloveless hands together, his face stiff with cold. He told me it was his first experience in the movement, though his three brothers had picketed last year, and the oldest of his four sisters, a North Carolina College student, hoped to join the lines next week. His father was a bulldozer operator, he said. “The only thing bothering me is my homework,” he went on. “I want to go either to Michigan State or U.N.C. I got to make good grades
for that. I want to teach chemistry or math. Nothing’s going to keep me from it, nothing. But I’ve got to do my share in this movement, too.”
The door opened again and John came in, holding up a box of vanilla wafers and a bag of sugar cookies, which he passed around. A somewhat unkempt boy in sneakers and a frayed windbreaker stuffed a cookie into his mouth and then began talking to me in a burst of expansive confidence. “It’s not right that we can’t see movies except in the balcony,” he said. “But I understand why white folks don’t want to sit down and eat with Negroes. Not sit down and eat right beside them.”
A girl sitting on the steps, thumbing a textbook, her thin raincoat pulled over her cotton dress, looked up at him calmly. “Under the skin, same bony structure, Joe, same organs, same heart,” she said.
“I suppose when we’re old, and all this segregation gone, we’ll say, ‘Gee, that was done quick,’ ” the boy said.
“It doesn’t seem quick to me, Joe,” the girl replied.
A little later, I said good night to John and Billy, and told them I would look in at the church the next afternoon before they left for the theatres.
Back at the hotel, I bought a copy of the Durham evening paper. There on the front page were the headlines “N.C. HIGH COURT BACKS CONVICTIONS HERE—SIT-IN TRESPASS VERDICTS UPHELD.” The court held that “no statute in this state forbids discrimination of people on account of race or color, or white people in company with Negroes” by the owner of a privately owned restaurant in a privately owned building, and concluded that the defendants “have not shown the violation of any of their rights, or the rights of any one of them,” as guaranteed by the state and federal constitutions.
I decided to walk over to McKissick’s office, on the chance that he might still be there. I found him alone and looking tired, at work over a stack of documents on his desk. The next week, he said, he would start the necessary steps to carry the trespassing case to the United States Supreme Court. I had been told that a clear decision on this particular issue had so far been sidestepped by the highest court, and I also knew that there were several similar cases pending. When I spoke of this, McKissick summarized his legal view for me. “The stores have been licensed to serve the public by the state,” he said. “When they refuse service in one part of the store on the basis of race alone, and call in the police and courts to enforce that refusal, the aid of the state is being used to enforce racially discriminating policies contrary to the due-process and equal-protection clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment.” If the Supreme Court refused to review the case, he added, the seven defendants, as well as, presumably, the other seventy-three students under trespass charges, would go to jail.
· · ·
When I arrived at St. Joseph’s the next afternoon, many of the protesters were gathered before the bulletin board, which bore newspaper stories and photographs of the theatre picketing. I heard no mention of the court decision, but, possibly because of that news, or because of the continued unusual cold, or, as Claude suggested, because there were double chores to do, noticeably fewer people had turned up than on the previous day. As they waited for more to arrive, those on hand struck up some songs. One of these was a tune called “Freedom,” whose title they chorused again and again, while single voices came in with lines such as “We’ll sit at the counters all day long!” There was a now mournful, now serene piece called “We Shall Overcome,” which concluded with the phrase “Deep in my heart I do believe we’ll walk hand in hand someday.” The singing ended with
We shall not, we shall not be moved.
Just like a tree
Planted by the water,
We shall not be moved.
Black and white together,
We shall walk together.
We shall not be moved.
Just like a tree
Planted by the water,
Oh, let’s tell the Saviour,
We shall not be moved.
“We’d better get ready to start,” John said, finally. “You did a splendid job yesterday. But we must watch out for two things. First, the police warned us that unless we keep five feet apart on the picket lines they will take action. And, second, no young lady—or young man, either—is to leave from downtown alone. Last night, a young lady left the line by herself and was followed by a white man and given a bad scare. We will see that you leave either in a group or by bus or taxi or private car. Now let us pray.” All heads were bowed. “Thank You for the things You have done for us, O Lord,” John began. “We ask that You watch over us, guide us, and make us strong and able, so that You may be pleased with us. Make us like Moses when he led his people out of the wilderness. We don’t ask You to make the road easier for us, God, but only to always let us know You in our hearts.”
Back in New York, a few weeks later, I phoned McKissick to find out how the protest was coming. “All right,” he said. “The Crusaders kept the line going till the college students came in. One day, twenty-five faculty members from Duke and North Carolina College joined them. Groups like ours are now picketing theatres in five other North Carolina towns, and in more than a half-dozen places outside this state, including Dallas and Oklahoma City. Around here, it’s been the darnedest coldest weather since people can remember, but these kids have staying power; the picket lines haven’t missed a day. There have been no major incidents. But there have been no signs of theatre desegregation, either.”
Calvin Trillin
JULY 13, 1963 (INTEGRATING A PUBLIC UNIVERSITY)
BY MAY 17, 1954, when the United States Supreme Court declared racial segregation in public education unconstitutional, most Southern states had already desegregated their state universities, some voluntarily and some under a prophetic series of Supreme Court rulings on the practical inequality of “separate but equal” education. After the 1954 decision, some of the states had to pretend that the Negroes attending their universities with whites did not exist; otherwise, a good deal of the oratory of the late fifties would have been impossible. In 1957, for instance, when Governor Orval Faubus, of Arkansas, decided that the enrollment of a dozen Negro students in Central High School in Little Rock would result, as surely as election follows the Democratic nomination, in a breakdown of public order, the University of Arkansas had been integrated for nine years. Jimmie Davis promised the voters of Louisiana in 1959 that he would go to jail before allowing a Negro to attend classes with whites, and was elected governor on that platform, in a state whose university had been integrated for eight years. And a year later, when the Louisiana legislature passed a whole string of bizarre bills designed to prevent even the token integration of the New Orleans public schools, four hundred and twenty-five Negroes were attending the New Orleans branch of Louisiana State University.
In the states of the Deep South where no Negroes attended white universities before 1954, the first assault on segregation came in higher education, and came after the battle lines were drawn, with the result that it was considered as much of a threat to the system as if it had come in the grade schools or the high schools. The Negro students involved had none of the anonymity of those who had integrated the universities of Arkansas, Louisiana, Virginia, North Carolina, and Tennessee, nor were they blurred by inclusion in a group, like the teenagers in Little Rock or the four first-graders in New Orleans. One after another, they became famous, but only for two or three weeks, their names, in some cases, fading so quickly from the news that many people now find it hard to keep them straight: Autherine Lucy, at the University of Alabama; Charlayne Hunter and Hamilton Holmes, at the University of Georgia; James H. Meredith, at the University of Mississippi; Harvey Gantt, at Clemson College, in South Carolina. Student Heroes of a strange new kind, they were famed for no achievements in athletics or scholarship but merely for showing up to attend classes. Their presence was the test of the desegregation order, whether the test resulted in successful defiance, as in Alabama, where Autherine Lucy was expelled after three days for accusing the university
administration of complicity in the riots that accompanied her arrival, or in peaceful compliance, as in South Carolina, where the state authorities decided in advance that upon Harvey Gantt’s admission to Clemson order would be self-consciously maintained. Nowhere was the test more decisive than in Georgia, where Charlayne Hunter and Hamilton Holmes, two Negroes from Atlanta, entered the state university, in Athens, in January of 1961. During their first week at the university—which began in relative calm, was climaxed by their both being suspended “for their own safety” after a riot, and ended with their both returning to the campus, under a new court order—Georgia abandoned its policy of all-out resistance and accepted desegregated education.
According to the lawyer for the plaintiffs, an Atlanta Negro named Donald Hollowell, the University of Georgia case was “the case that turned the state around and allowed them to start, or at least to see, what was in the other direction.” Few would disagree with his belief that the enrollment of Charlayne and Hamilton in the university was the turning point for Georgia, being accomplished in a way and at a time that made it inevitable (a word formerly scorned and now almost popular in Georgia) that the state would move forward rather than backward. The walk out of the Deep South mentality has been accelerated a good deal since then by a federal-court ruling against the County Unit System, which formerly made Georgia the only state to elect not only its legislature but its governors, senators, and congressmen by a voting system designed to favor the rural voter, and the atmosphere in Georgia now is far different from what it was when Charlayne and Hamilton showed up in Athens on a cold Monday morning two and a half years ago. Among the Student Heroes, Charlayne and Hamilton have another distinction, too. They are the first to have completed their education, or at least their undergraduate education. Since both entered the University of Georgia after completing the first half of their sophomore year elsewhere—Hamilton had gone to Morehouse, a private Negro men’s college in Atlanta, and Charlayne to Wayne University, in Detroit, during the year and a half it took them to get into Georgia after first applying for admission—they graduated this June, both in good standing and Hamilton as a Phi Beta Kappa. As a reporter then based in Atlanta, I had covered both the week-long trial that resulted in their admission and the events that followed their arrival on campus in 1961, and this spring, ten weeks before Charlayne and Hamilton graduated, I returned to Georgia from New York, where I had been living, to see how integration had worked out at the University of Georgia—whether or not the Student Heroes had ever become simply students. And because this question involved not only the university’s attitude toward them but their attitude toward the university, I began by trying to find out how these two young people had happened to become Student Heroes in the first place. Both had always been considered perfectly cast for the role. Good-looking and well dressed, they seemed to be light-complexioned Negro versions of ideal college students—models for an autumn Coca-Cola ad in a Negro magazine. Both had attended Turner High School in Atlanta, and Charlayne, a slim, attractive girl with striking hazel eyes, had edited the school paper, had been crowned Miss Turner, and had finished third in her graduating class. The valedictorian that year was Hamilton, who had been president of the senior class and, as a promisingly shifty halfback, co-captain of the football team. Since Charlayne and Hamilton had been such unlikely targets for abuse from the start, and had eventually been joined at the university by several other Negro undergraduates, the situation, looked at from a distance, seemed rather heartening. None of the stories from Georgia about school integration had mentioned any violence done to the pioneers. They had dealt instead with the peaceful integration of public schools in Atlanta and the admission of Negroes to Georgia Tech in September of 1961 without even the pressure of a court case. The atmosphere was such that Emory University, a private school in Atlanta, had been able to desegregate its nursing school voluntarily and was planning the integration of its medical school, having already chosen Hamilton Holmes as its first Negro medical student. But I knew from occasional communications I had had from Charlayne and Hamilton since they entered the university that the general progress of the State of Georgia often did not seem closely related to the day-to-day problems facing the first Negroes at the University of Georgia. I was reminded of this again by Charlayne’s reply to a letter I wrote her announcing my plans to revisit the campus. “Well, this is Brotherhood Week in Athens,” she concluded, with characteristic irony, “and I’m going out to stand on the street corner and wait for an invitation to lunch.”…
The 60s Page 16
