by Bobby Love
* * *
At this time Greensboro was bubbling with civil rights activities. Sit-ins, marches, and calls for integration were roiling the city. Things got really heated in 1960 with the four young men who refused to leave the Woolworth’s lunch counter without being served. Their actions sparked a movement, not just in Greensboro but all across the South. Even though all of this was happening right downtown, we could only watch things unfold on the TV in our living room because Mama refused to let any of us kids go down there to participate. She wanted things to be different for Black people, but she was unwilling to sacrifice her children for the cause.
“It’s too dangerous,” she’d tell me whenever I asked if we could go downtown to march or protest.
I kept asking, but Mama didn’t budge. “Buddy, you better not go anywhere near that madness or I’ll send your brother to snatch you right up.”
I knew she was serious.
Despite the fact that my mother tried to keep me from getting caught up in the civil rights movement, she couldn’t keep the movement from coming for me.
The summer before I started eighth grade, a letter arrived in our mailbox informing my mother that the city was going to actually start enforcing its desegregation laws. That meant I was supposed to stop taking a one-hour bus ride to attend an all-Black school on the other side of town and start attending the junior high school that sat three blocks from my house.
Gillespie Park Junior High School had been an all-white school for seventh-, eighth-, and ninth-graders up until 1957, when four brave Black children had integrated the institution. Every year since then a few more Black students had enrolled in the school, but now the city government was getting involved, requiring all of us Black kids who lived in the district to start attending Gillespie whether we wanted to or not. When that letter arrived, my mind immediately flashed to all of the things that were happening in Greensboro—the sit-ins, the violence, the police dogs tearing at flesh. I was scared, but Mama said I had to go because it was the law now. Mama always followed the rules. To her, it kept us safe.
She tried to put a positive spin on it. “At least you’ll be closer to home, Buddy.”
“But what if they try to do something bad to us?” I asked.
Mama sighed before answering. “God will protect you,” she said. “Your job is to get your education and stay out of trouble. That’s all you can do.”
That was Mama’s reply for a lot of things.
The good news was that I wouldn’t be going to Gillespie by myself. I had friends from the neighborhood who had gotten the same letter as me. And we were all worried. At thirteen and fourteen years old, we weren’t ready to lay down our lives just so we could go to school with white kids.
I remember the first day of school, my friends Spencer, Lewis, and Jesse were by my side as we walked the three blocks to Gillespie. My mother couldn’t come with me because she had to work, and as she always reminded me, she didn’t get paid if she didn’t show up.
When we rounded the corner where the school was, we were met by a parking lot with a bunch of white people shouting at us. “Niggers, get away from here!” “Y’all not wanted here!” “This is our school!” This was different from seeing it on the TV screen. To me, these people looked like they wanted to use their bare hands to tear us apart. Even though there were now a significant number of Black students at Gillespie, the whites still felt it was their school and didn’t want this influx of new Black bodies sent by the city.
We walked past the angry protestors and entered the school on the other side of the building. I could feel my heart pounding and the sweat running down my back. I didn’t dare say a word, but I was grateful that I was with my friends. Once we made it inside, a man who introduced himself as Mr. Dean came out into the hallway. I thought he looked like Howdy Doody with his gap-toothed smile. It turned out he was the principal.
Mr. Dean didn’t waste any time trying to make us feel welcome. He gave each of us a piece of paper with our schedules and told us to get to class.
I went to my assigned eighth-grade classroom and found myself for the first time in my life in a class with white children and a white teacher. I took a chair in the back of the room and prayed my way to lunchtime, when I’d get to meet up with my friends again.
At noon, when I made my way to the cafeteria, I kept my head down and tried not to attract the attention of any adults. But that was hard. Nearly every adult in the building was white—the teachers, the secretaries, and the principal of course. As I recall, there was only one Black teacher in the entire school, and she seemed as overwhelmed and out of place as we were.
“Yo, Curtis!” Spencer called out when he saw me. My friends called me by my middle name because I hated the name Walter.
I ran over to Spencer and breathed a sigh of relief. We’d made it halfway through the first day.
Jesse soon joined us, and the three of us got in line behind the few white kids already standing there. Despite the fact that I was still on guard, I was hungry and was happy we were close to the front of the line. But then the kid in front of us let his friend cut in and join him in the line. Then he did the same thing again and again with other kids. Pretty soon, instead of being at the head of the line for lunch, we were way at the back.
Spencer was the first to speak up. He tapped one of the white kids who’d skipped us on the shoulder and said, “Hey, y’all can’t get in front of us.”
The boy laughed and said, “You can’t stop us,” and went back to talking to his friends.
He didn’t know those were fighting words.
Jesse, Spencer, and I muscled our way back to the head of the line, and that’s all it took. A big fight broke out, right there in the lunchroom. Fists were flying as white kids hit us and we hit them back, but the only kids that got pulled into the principal’s office were the Black ones.
When I went home defeated after that first day, I threw myself on the living room couch and wailed to my mother and sister, “Why do we have to go to that school with these white kids who hate us?” And my sister Jean looked at me and said, “I got two words for you: Thurgood Marshall.”
I was confused. Mama explained who Thurgood Marshall was right then and there. She ended her little sermon with “It’s for the best, Buddy. This is what all the people are fighting for and this is how you fight. By going to that school and showing those white folks that you deserve to be there.”
For the next two weeks I tried to keep my mama’s words in my head, but I dreaded going back to Gillespie, knowing that I would be fighting all the time. Whenever I tried to sit down, someone would say, “That’s my seat.” In the lunchroom we were pushed to the end of the line. The teachers never defended us, and the white students knew they could get away with bullying us. I think I got into at least one fight a day, and I spent more time in the principal’s office than in the classroom.
Mr. Dean had no sympathy for me and my friends’ situations. In fact, he told us Black kids that it was our job to be more understanding and sympathetic to the white students.
“You have to remember, Walter,” Mr. Dean said to me one day when I was in his office. “This has been their school for a long time and now you’re coming in here trying to change things.”
I didn’t know how I was going to survive the agony of going back to Gillespie for two more years.
Luckily, the problem resolved itself.
About three weeks into the school year, I found out that some of the white kids had left Gillespie and they weren’t coming back. The next day a few more left. The following day even more failed to show up. By the end of the first semester, there were only a handful of white kids left in the entire school. The others had all found schools to attend where they wouldn’t have to learn alongside Negroes. The white teachers and administrators, however, were still there and they didn’t show us any love. There was one teacher in particular, Mr. Morgan. He taught civics and was a former marine. Mr. Morgan claimed he was
n’t a racist and said he treated all his students equally, but in the same breath he would refer to us Black kids as “nigrunts.”
“I don’t have any problem with you nigrunts as long as you do as you’re told,” he regularly reminded us. I hated it when he called us that and I hated the way a lot of the white teachers were openly hostile to us, but at that point in my life, school was where I got to hang out with my friends and play basketball and baseball. And now that the white kids were mostly gone and I wasn’t worried about getting into fights every day, I could also concentrate on learning. I liked math and art class. Going to Gillespie wasn’t a positive experience like my former school had been, where all of the teachers had been Black, but I managed to make it through eighth grade without too much drama.
By the time summer arrived, I was ready for some fun. My friend Eddie Lee and I bought tickets to see the singer Sam Cooke at the Greensboro Coliseum. This was going to be my first live concert. The Coliseum was brand new and had brought some great musical acts to the city. But Sam Cooke was going to be one of the first performers that both Blacks and whites were coming to see together. Eddie and I could only afford the cheapest tickets in the nosebleed section, but I planned on sneaking down closer to the stage once the music started.
The night of the concert, I was so excited.
“You ready for this, man?” I said to Eddie as we entered the gleaming new building.
Eddie grinned at me. “You know I am.”
We took the stairs two at a time up to our seats, and sure enough, they were so far away we could barely see the opening act. The sound in that place was fantastic, though, and the cool clothes cats were wearing were incredible. Between the fashion and the music, I was already in heaven.
I turned to Eddie. “Hey, as soon as Sam Cooke comes out and they turn the lights back down, let’s go sneak down toward the stage.”
“You sure?” Eddie said, looking around to see what kind of security was on duty.
Because this was an integrated concert, and because Sam Cooke had a reputation as a civil rights agitator, there were cops everywhere.
But I wasn’t deterred. I loved Sam Cooke and I wanted to get as close to the music as possible.
“If you’re too scared to come down there with me,” I said to Eddie, “then just stay up here. I’ll find you after the show.”
Eddie slumped back in his chair and looked like he was trying to make up his mind.
“Ladies and gentlemen, please take your seats. The show is about to start,” a voice announced and the lights went down.
“You coming?” I asked Eddie one last time.
“Naw, man, I’ll watch from up here,” he said.
I shrugged. “Suit yourself. I’ll catch you later.” And with that, I started making my way down to the stage area. As I was walking, doing my best to act like I was looking for my seat, Sam came onstage and started singing. People went crazy. They stood up, clapped, and screamed their approval. In all of the chaos, it was easy for me to blend in.
Then Sam started singing his second song, and the crowd was loving it. I was just feet away from the stage when he abruptly stopped singing.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he spoke into the microphone. “I’m going to have to ask you to please take your seats,” he said. “I can’t sing with so much commotion and noise. Please sit down or the show will be over.”
People looked at each other with confusion. I was confused too. Why should we sit down? We were here to jam. A murmur of defiance started to spread across the Coliseum. But Sam was adamant. “Please sit down or I won’t perform,” he repeated.
Nobody sat down, so he walked off the stage and refused to come back. A few minutes later a voice announced that the show was over.
I was devastated. And angry. This was my first concert. I’d saved up fifteen dollars for the ticket and spent all of my leftover money on bus fare. All around me people were expressing their displeasure, and I fed off their anger. I ran up to the front of the stage and shouted as loud as my thirteen-year-old lungs could project, “Sam Cooke ain’t shit!”
Before I could open my mouth to repeat it, I felt a firm hand on my shoulder.
“You’re under arrest. Come with me,” a voice growled in my ear. It was a cop.
I struggled to get out of his grasp, but he just grabbed me tighter.
“What did I do?” I cried as he pulled me through the crowd. I tried to find Eddie in the mass of people being forced out of the building, but it was useless.
“What did I do?” I asked again, trying to stay calm.
The officer didn’t slow his pace, but he answered me. “You used profanity in a crowded area.”
“That’s a crime?” I asked.
“Yeah, it’s a crime,” the cop said as we approached a room behind the stage. He opened the door, threw me in a metal folding chair, and told me to stay put. And then he left. I was too terrified to move. This was my first time being in trouble with the law. I wondered where Eddie was. I wondered how I was going to get out of this mess. I knew Mama was going to kill me.
I didn’t have to wait for long. The cop came back, and another white man accompanied him. I assumed he was a detective because he was wearing a suit.
The detective had a notepad in his hand and asked me my name, how old I was, and where I lived. I answered his questions and then asked again what I had done wrong.
He repeated what the other officer had said before. “You used profanity in a crowded area. And we’re charging you with disorderly conduct. You could have incited a riot or something, boy, with all those people in here.”
A riot? I thought to myself. With all the noise that was going on, nobody even heard me. These cops had to be kidding. But they weren’t. They took their time writing up a citation and telling me that what I had done was very dangerous. I didn’t try to argue with them because I was scared that they might do something to me and nobody would ever know what happened.
Finally the detective announced that he would drive me home. I tried to refuse the ride, but he said he had to drive me home on account of my age. That put the fear of God in me, but I climbed into his unmarked black sedan anyway and prayed I’d actually make it home safely. I also prayed that the detective wouldn’t demand to see my mother when we got to my house. Thankfully, the Lord answered both of my prayers. When we pulled up in front of my house, the detective handed me a slip of paper.
“This is your citation with your court date. Make sure you show up in court on that day, boy. You hear me?”
I took the paper and nodded my head. “Yes, sir.” And then I scrambled out of the car and ran up to the front door. I let myself in and watched his car pull away. I gave a sigh of relief and looked down at the paper in my hand. Before I went to my room, I ripped it up into little pieces and threw the shreds in the trash can in the kitchen under a pile of greasy napkins. I didn’t want my mother to know anything about what happened to me at the concert. I had to destroy all of the evidence so I could put the whole miserable experience behind me.
* * *
About one month later I was sitting in Mr. Morgan’s civics class. Ninth grade had started without incident or drama.
“Walter Curtis Miller, please come down to the principal’s office.” The voice of Mrs. Olsen, the school secretary, rang out over the intercom.
“O-h-h, Curtis, you’re in trouble,” somebody called out behind me. And then a few others joined in the chant.
“You nigrunts quiet down,” Mr. Morgan said, standing up and demanding calm. “Mr. Miller.” He turned to me. “Collect your stuff and go on downstairs.”
“Yes, sir,” I said, wondering what I had done. I racked my brain as I headed down the three flights of stairs to the first floor. Since it was only a few weeks into the school year, I couldn’t imagine how I could already be in trouble.
A man in a uniform who looked like a police officer was now standing in my principal’s office.
“Hello, Mr. Miller,” he
said to me. He then told me he was a probation officer.
I was too frightened to respond.
“Have a seat,” he said.
I turned to the principal to see if he was going to intervene, but all he did was point to the chair in front of his desk. I sat down.
“You didn’t show up for your court date,” the officer said.
I didn’t know if that was a question or a statement, so I just shrugged and said, “No, sir.”
The man then turned to Mr. Dean and recounted what I had done at the concert the month before.
Mr. Dean listened to the detective and then turned to me and said, “Well, Walter, I hope you learned your lesson.”
“Yes, sir, I did,” I said. “And I won’t ever do that again.”
“Good,” Mr. Dean said. “I know you know better.”
“Can I go back to class now?” I asked the principal.
Mr. Dean leaned over on his desk. “Walter, this officer is going to tell you what happens next. This isn’t school business so I’m not in charge here.”
I turned to the man in uniform. “Can I go back to class now?”
“No, boy, I’m going to take you home and we’re going to talk to your mother.”
The officer’s words scared me. I thought I had succeeded in keeping my mother from finding out about the whole Sam Cooke concert incident. And now it was all going to blow up in my face.
The probation officer drove me home and waited in the house with me until my mother made it home from work.
When Mama arrived and saw me sitting in the living room with a white man in a police uniform, she almost passed out from fright.
“Buddy, what’s going on here?” she said.
