Sometime during my sophomore year, Aunt Christine sent me a ski sweater—a soft green cardigan with a black-and-white strip that zipped in the front. It reminded me of Denver, the mountains, and fresh air. It also reminded me of a photo I’d seen of Marilyn Van Derbur, the Miss Colorado who became Miss America in 1958, posing in ski gear on a slope in her native state. I could enjoy skiing, I thought. I think I knew then what wouldn’t become evident to my family for months. I stuck it out another quarter at Michigan State and stayed through the summer to take a few more courses and work. Mother and Daddy thought I was working at the telephone company, but I was actually a barmaid at a little place called Sonny’s Lounge. It was a fun job that gave me free access to good music and interesting people. I even came up with a drink I called Mexican vodka, a mixture of mostly vodka, lime juice, and grenadine shaken with ice, which was popular enough for a local band to name a song after it.
At the end of summer, I packed everything I’d brought with me to Michigan State and got on the train headed back to Kansas City. But first, I made a quick stop in Chicago for the 1962 Chicago Charities College All-Star Game in Soldier Field. The popular preseason game matched the NFL championship team against a select team of college seniors. The team was to include Ernie Davis, the Syracuse University running back who in December 1961 had just become the first black college football player to win the Heisman Trophy. He was drafted by the Washington Redskins in the first round and immediately traded to the Cleveland Browns, where he was expected to join fellow Syracuse alum and All-American running back Jim Brown to create an offensive powerhouse. But while preparing for the All-Star Game during the summer, Davis was diagnosed with leukemia. The news shocked and saddened me. Nevertheless, I joined the crowd of sixty-five thousand spectators who watched the Green Bay Packers stomp the collegiate standouts 42–17 in the August 3 game without the star.
I got back on the train with my loaded trunk and headed to Kansas City to be with my family. The weeks passed quickly. As September rolled around, Daddy grew suspicious. He noticed that I had said nothing about returning to Michigan State and had never unpacked my trunk.
“When are you leaving to go back to Michigan?” he asked.
I hadn’t figured out how to bring it up before now.
“I’m not going back,” I told him.
Daddy remained cool. “Well, what are you planning to do?” he shot back.
I knew I had to have a plan. After high school, girls were expected to get married, go to college, or go to work. I’d left a scholarship behind at Michigan State. So I knew my plan had better be convincing.
“I’m going to Colorado,” I responded. “Uncle Byron and Aunt Christine said that I could come to Denver, stay with them, work, and go to school if I want to. That’s what I want to do.”
My parents were always pretty good about letting me make my own decisions, and this time was no different. They asked a few questions about what seemed to them a sudden move, but in the end, they agreed to let me find my own way. Afterward, I called Uncle Byron and Aunt Christine to make certain the offer was still good.
“Sure,” Uncle Byron said. “Come on.”
In mid-September 1962, I boarded a Greyhound bus with my loaded trunk, bound for Denver and, I hoped, a fresh start. The trip took about eighteen hours with stops in practically every hamlet and rural outpost along the way. The trip was so long that I was able to finish all six-hundred-plus pages of the Leon Uris novel Exodus.
Once I arrived in Denver, I applied for a job with Mountain Bell, the local telephone company. I was hired and offered a position as a service representative. I had gone through the training program when some of the black workers told me excitedly that I would be the first black employee in my new job. They were thrilled for me. I, on the other hand, was worried. I couldn’t go through that again. I didn’t want to be the center of attention, a racial symbol, or the standard-bearer of anyone’s expectations. I declined the service representative position and asked to be a cashier/teller.
I had been on the job for nearly two months when my parents and sisters came to Denver for Thanksgiving. Uncle Byron immediately began trying to woo Daddy to the city for good.
“So, what do you think?” Uncle Byron asked after showing Daddy around.
“I figured I’d be hip-deep in snow and couldn’t work,” Daddy responded.
But Daddy was surprised to learn that the winters in Denver were more agreeable to construction work than the icy winter months in Kansas City and agreed to return to Denver in January for work. The two of us shared the basement at Uncle Byron and Aunt Christine’s home. Daddy transferred his union membership, found work right away, and was surprised to run into other brick masons from Little Rock. Soon he was hooked on Denver, too.
By the time Daddy arrived, I had enrolled in night courses at the University of Colorado for the winter/spring semester in 1963. I worked all day as a teller at the telephone company and then walked the two and a half blocks to class. But during the two-hour break between work and school, I often stopped at a lounge to listen to jazz, a beauty college to get my hair cut, or anywhere along the way to avoid arriving on campus early. I still wasn’t quite focused on school.
At the end of the semester in May, I rode with Daddy to Kansas City in a rented truck to pick up Mother and the girls. A friend of Daddy’s helped him load the truck with all of the family’s belongings, and the two of them drove the truck back to Denver. Mother and I rotated driving the car. When we made it to Denver, my parents rented half of a duplex for a couple of months until they found a house they wanted to buy in the Park Hill neighborhood. We all moved into the new house together.
Park Hill had been an all-white, upper-middle-class neighborhood, but many white residents were beginning to move out as black families relocated there. One day, Mother answered a knock at the door and found Reverend J. Carlton Babbs, pastor of Park Hill United Methodist Church, standing there. He told Mother that he had heard we were new to the neighborhood, and he invited us to worship with his congregation. The previous home owners were among his members, and they must have told him about us. My parents thought it was such a gracious gesture that all of us attended services the following Sunday. When we got there, we saw only white families. We learned later that just one black family was among the three-thousand-member congregation and that Dr. Babbs was reaching out to the new neighbors in an effort to integrate his congregation. The church was convenient to our house, less than a ten-minute drive away. It had a radio ministry and vigorous youth programs, which enabled my younger sisters to make new friends. The members were friendly and welcoming. I especially liked that the worship services were orderly, meaningful, and short. I sometimes joke that I probably should have been Catholic or Episcopalian because after about an hour in church, I start looking at my watch. Park Hill was a good match for us all. My family soon became members, and we still worship there today.
Soon after we joined the church, a couple of my friends mentioned that they were preparing to go to D.C. for a massive civil rights rally, the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. A coalition of civil rights leaders had appealed to the masses to participate, but I hadn’t followed the planning of the event closely and had no intention of going. I just didn’t feel compelled to be part of the crowd. All of us have different roles, different ways of contributing to the common good. While I had tremendous respect for leaders like Roy Wilkins, who was among those involved in the planning, I had no burning desire to participate in a march that seemed to me then purely symbolic. But I must say that when I clicked on the television on August 28, 1963, I was moved by what I saw—hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children of every hue stretched from the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial. I was particularly satisfied that the march was peaceful, given the doubt I’d heard expressed in the news in the preceding weeks from some who feared the large gathering might turn violent. There was no denying the persuasive political power of that moment.
Just three weeks later, on September 15, 1963, I was horrified when I heard on the news that four black girls had perished in a Sunday morning bombing at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. I grieved for those girls, three of whom were fourteen years old and the other who was eleven. When I saw their pictures, I couldn’t get their faces out of my head. I kept seeing them smiling, dressed in their Sunday best, unaware even what hit them when the bomb went off. I remembered that kind of terror. I could even smell the dynamite. I knew that the same fate so easily could have been mine.
That same chilling thought raced through my mind again on November 22 when President Kennedy was assassinated. Again, I was devastated. He had seemed so decent on civil rights, and I was looking forward to voting for him the following year. It was to be my first time ever voting. Now President Kennedy was gone, his life extinguished by the same kind of hatred that had been so rampant in Little Rock. I wondered how—and sometimes why—I had survived.
By the end of 1963, I had dropped all but a single class at the university. I felt overloaded, as much by the times and my state of mind as by the pressures of trying to work full-time and go to school. Two years passed quickly with little change as I continued working at Mountain Bell and taking an occasional class. I told no one about my background in Little Rock. I even kept my distance from the two local NAACP chapters, which I suspect may have miffed some of the officers who knew my story. I couldn’t understand why two chapters of the NAACP were necessary with so few black residents in Denver. But I was too preoccupied trying to figure out my own life to ask questions. I wasn’t ready to become an envoy. I didn’t want any reminders of my past. I was disappointed in myself. I knew that I wasn’t living up to my potential.
Things began to look up for me in 1965 when I came up with a plan to finish college. I knew I would never get a degree at the rate I was going. I needed to attend school full-time and focus solely on my studies. The only way I could do it, I figured, was to get a better job, work for six months, and bank all of my earnings. I reached out to one of my aunts, who put me in touch with the National Urban League. Whitney Young, the group’s executive director, was pushing aggressively to end economic disparities between the races by encouraging corporations and the federal government to create more jobs for black men and women. I admired how he was helping to catapult the Urban League to the front of the civil rights movement with the NAACP and other groups that had been more prominent before his tenure. But the Urban League was more about jobs and opportunities and operated as a bridge to help black men and women who were prepared to enter the corporate arena. After I visited the office of the Denver chapter and registered for job opportunities, I got an interview at the Rocky Flats Plant, a federal nuclear weapons production facility near Denver. I figured there would be a routine background check of some kind, but I was stunned when Daddy came in one evening and told me that the FBI had been in the neighborhood asking questions about me. A neighbor had stopped by to tell him. My heart rate sped up, and I broke out in a sweat. Suddenly I flashed back to 1960 when FBI agents took my father away. It had been my only experience with the agency. I wondered why the FBI would be involved with my background check. Shortly thereafter, I received a call from a federal agent who informed me that I needed to make an appointment to answer some questions that involved classified information about my application for a government job. That made me even more nervous—almost nervous enough to skip the interview. But I needed the job. I also didn’t want to disappoint those who had helped me get the interview. That was important to me.
When I arrived at the federal building for the interview, I met with one of the agents, who soon began peppering me with questions: Did I know this person from Michigan State? Did I join that Communist group? Had I participated in a certain rally at the university? He also asked about some of my associations in Little Rock. I felt jittery inside, but I kept my answers short and truthful.
“Not to my knowledge,” I responded each time.
This was J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, but I didn’t realize then just what that meant. It was clear, though, that the agency had kept a file on me. I surmised it was likely because of my role in integrating Central High School. The suspicion sent a chill up my spine. Many years later, in the mid-1970s, news broke that Hoover indeed had kept files filled with personal (and often embarrassing) information on public figures, political and civil rights leaders, particularly those with whom he disagreed. While visiting a friend and her husband in D.C. around that time, I planned to file a Freedom of Information Act request to view my file, but while there, I decided against it. Those days were behind me, I told myself. I wanted to leave them there.
Whatever is in my file must not have appeared too threatening, though, because I got the job at the Rocky Flats Plant. I stuck to my plan and worked for six months, putting away practically all of my salary. I decided to apply to Colorado State College (now called the University of Northern Colorado) in nearby Greeley because the tuition was the more reasonable of the two area universities on a quarter system, and I wouldn’t lose any of my credits from Michigan State.
In addition to the money I had saved, I applied for scholarships. I wrote to Mrs. Bates to tell her that I was returning to school and that I had never received the scholarship the NAACP had promised. She responded with a check, for which I was grateful. I also applied for a federal student loan through the Denver National Bank, where I had small savings and checking accounts. But when a bank officer processed my application, she told me I needed to apply for the loan at my parents’ bank.
The bank officer’s dismissal infuriated me. I calmly asked to meet with the bank president. To my surprise, the president agreed to the meeting. I laid out my case. I first explained why I was applying for the loan. I told him that I was twenty-one years old and didn’t find it necessary to apply through my parents, particularly since I had arrived in Denver before them and had been banking at his institution since my arrival.
The bank president said simply that he agreed with me. I got the loan. It was a small victory but an important one. I felt a spark of the old Carlotta, the determined and focused Carlotta.
Finally, I was grabbing the reins of my life.
CHAPTER 14
A Season of Loss
When I saw Grandpa Cullins at a family reunion in Kansas City at the end of summer in 1965, he didn’t look well. He seemed thinner and slower than I remembered. I hadn’t seen him in the six years since I’d left Little Rock, and a bit of the fire in him had gone out. For the first time, Grandpa Cullins seemed to me like an old man.
The following spring, a telephone call brought dreaded news: Grandpa Cullins had died. He hadn’t been feeling well for days, family members said. Then, he went to sleep one night and never woke up. The news filled me with sorrow and regret. Grandpa had been a big presence in my life, but I wished I had not been so intimidated by him. Even with all he had taught me, I knew I could have learned so much more. But it was time to say good-bye for good. My parents, sisters, and I loaded the family car for a daylong trip and headed south to Little Rock.
It was my first trip home since my high school graduation, and I was a bit anxious. I wasn’t sure how it would feel to be back. As the car rolled toward Little Rock, I couldn’t help wondering: What had become of my old friends from the neighborhood? Had any of them returned to Little Rock? How was our old house holding up? Did it look the same? I was bound to pass it on the way to Uncle Teet’s house. Would I remember all of the good years there or flash back to the bombing? And what about Central? How would it feel to drive by that grand old building again?
At least some of my questions would be answered minutes after my family rolled into town. We had just parked at my cousin’s house and I was unpacking the car when a blue Volkswagen convertible pulled up behind me. The driver tooted his horn and called out to me.
I thought: I have the exact same car.
“This is Herbert,” the driver shoute
d as I craned my neck to see inside the car.
It was Herbert Monts, my childhood friend. I was thrilled to see him and rushed to his car. We had often joked as children about our twinlike connection, and now, after six years without seeing or talking to each other, we’d somehow ended up with the same taste in cars. The moment felt divinely inspired. Here I was, on my first trip home in six years, and the first person I saw was the one whose treatment by the justice system had embodied the injustice that made me want never to return. I had wondered about Herbert often through the years—how he was coping with prison, whether he had gotten out, and what he was doing with his life. But remembering was just too painful, and this moment outside my cousin’s house didn’t seem like the right time to bring it up. Neither of us mentioned Central, the bombing, his trial, or jail. There was just too much to say. He expressed his condolences, we asked about each other’s families and old friends, shared a bit of small talk, and then parted, promising to stay in touch.
I didn’t get to talk to Herbert again on that trip, but I saw a number of old friends at Grandpa’s funeral. It was held at the Cullins family church, Wesley Chapel, which Grandpa had helped to build. The church was filled with people who had come from all over Little Rock to pay their respects. The weather was uncharacteristically warm for April, and the ushers handed out paper fans. Tears rolled down my face as I thought about how much I would miss Grandpa. But on the ride to the cemetery in the family car, I got a good chuckle when one of my aunts commented about the nice eulogy the minister had given.
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