I wanted this terrible thing to stop, but I didn’t have the courage to risk alienating my best friend. Like many people who fail to live up to their best lights, I found that my deep sense of belonging and my tenacious desire for acceptance trumped my moral judgment. I joined in the song.
I knew that we were being cruel, though I had no way to understand how cruel, and I knew that what I was doing was wrong. I wasn’t punished for it, however. Surely the little boy told his mother, but she must not have felt at liberty to tell mine. Afterward, David and I simply pretended it hadn’t happened, and no one ever said a word to us about it. But the episode violated everything that I had been taught—nearly everything, that is. Obviously, if someone had taught me that it was wrong to call another person that word, someone else had taught me that there was such a category. Still, I knew that it was my solemn duty to be kind to our guests, to see that anyone who came into our home was treated graciously and warmly. Color was not at issue in that sense. Beyond that, however, I knew that it was not only evil to say that word, of course, but that it was unspeakably wicked even to think that word, to place another human into a category separate from our own.
The very idea of “nigger,” quite apart from the specific racial context of our particular lives, was the heart of human evil, the avenue down which the Nazis had marched into Poland, and David and I, like some of the Poles, had somehow welcomed them. The fact that this cruelty violated my relationship with Mrs. McIver, whom I called Fanny Mae, of course, was only the top layer of the sin that we had committed. The thick bottom layer was the whole idea that another child of God could belong to a category less than human. My father had explained much of this to Vern and me at the Ku Klux Klan meeting, and that was far from the last lesson.
Daddy had observed the escalating violence of the black freedom movement of the 1960s with growing uneasiness. Yet he knew that remaining silent about race would betray his calling. Born in 1959, I don’t remember learning that race was the issue for my father and my five uncles who were Methodist ministers, or for any white preacher in the South. That’s just the way it was. In our family, at least, if you didn’t take a stand at all, you weren’t much of a man or much of a preacher; the “race question” was the acid test of integrity. At the same time, it could destroy your ministry, and the point was to lead the people as far as you could without losing influence or your livelihood. You wanted to remain true to your lights and yet avoid the fate of the irrelevant crusader. If the people in the pew were ever going to imagine a new world, beyond the boundaries of white supremacy, someone they respected had to make the case.
If he hoped to stay in the conversation, a preacher who believed in racial equality could never afford to neglect to shine his shoes or forget to visit a parishioner in the hospital. “It forced me to be a better pastor than I probably would have been,” my father explained later, “because I found that people who opposed me on race would often attack me on other issues, because I hadn’t been to see their grandmama. And sometimes, if I had been to see Grandmama in the nursing home even more than they had, it made it hard for them to oppose me on race, and they’d stand with me even when they didn’t agree with me.”
My father’s commitment to civil rights grew over the same years that the Ku Klux Klan went through its series of revivals and as black Southerners pushed the issue of racial justice to the forefront of American life. Daddy’s beliefs came in part from his own family heritage, but his moral and intellectual world had expanded a good deal when he was an undergraduate at Guilford College, a Quaker school in Greensboro with a liberal social vision. From its founding in the 1830s, Guilford had been coeducational, advocating an unusual egalitarianism between the sexes. There Daddy had read the work of Southern dissidents, like Lillian Smith’s Killers of the Dream and Stetson Kennedy’s Southern Exposure. He’d studied with Gordon Lovejoy, who’d preached racial equality for the National Conference of Christians and Jews. Charlotte Hawkins Brown, the great African American educator, had come to speak at Guilford from Palmer Memorial Institute in Sedalia, just down the road, and made quite an impression on him.
In about 1950, early in his college days, my father went home to Biscoe and attended a meeting of the Lions Club with Charles Buie, the father of the girl he intended to marry. Mr. Buie liked young Vernon, though the prosperous Buies were uneasy at the prospect of their daughter marrying a poor preacher’s son. What happened next could not have helped matters. When the meeting opened with everyone standing for the Pledge of Allegiance, my father would not say the words. “It said ‘liberty and justice for all,’ and I knew that was a lie, and just not true,” Daddy told me years later. “I knew it ought to be true, but it was no more true than the tooth fairy. I couldn’t say it.” The troubling thing, however, was that his wealthy and imposing prospective father-in-law, whom he greatly admired, was standing beside him. But Daddy wasn’t going to say that pledge. “Mr. Buie flashed his eyes at me and he realized that I wasn’t going to say it,” my father said. “It was a hard thing. I don’t think he really understood why I wouldn’t say it. We didn’t speak of it again.”
He clashed more openly with his own father in those years when his mind was growing in all directions like ten acres of kudzu. One day, overtaken by the powerful logic of A. J. Muste, the dean of American pacifism, Vernon called his father on the telephone to tell him that he’d decided to register as a conscientious objector. In the days after World War II, as the McCarthy era opened in all its repression and conformity, announcing one’s unwillingness to fight for one’s country was not especially fashionable. In the small-town South, particularly, this was not how to win friends and influence people. Jack Tyson told his son to come home and talk it over with him. “I told him I hadn’t called to discuss it, I had called to tell him what I was going to do,” Daddy remembered. “He said I was making a big mistake. And when I went down to the draft board to register as a conscientious objector, my best friend’s mother was working at the desk. For the rest of my life, she never spoke to me again.” That hurt, but what really hurt was to break with his father on an important issue. “I went in my room and laid down on the bed and cried,” he recalled. “I’d never parted with him on anything serious before. And the funny thing was that within a year reading Reinhold Niebuhr shot my pacifism all full of holes.” Like his father before him, Daddy became a growing person who felt the call of conscience and frequently acted on it. And the most important issue, of course, was race.
In 1952, when my father took his first appointment as the student pastor at Oak Ridge Military Institute, Zack Whitaker, one of the officials at Oak Ridge, took him aside and urged him to go easy about racial matters. “I don’t know how you feel about things, Vernon,” Whitaker said, “But I know you’re a young man. And I know we haven’t treated the nigrahs right. But this is not the time and Oak Ridge is not the place to talk about things like that.” My father hadn’t even delivered his first sermon, but he’d grown up in a preacher’s house and knew exactly what was happening.
“He was trying to put his hand over my mouth before I had even opened it,” Daddy remembered. On the second Sunday in February—“Race Relations Sunday,” the Methodist church hierarchy had designated it—Daddy preached about the inevitable crisis of race that faced the church, advocating a new openness to equality for all Americans, and led his congregation in singing “In Christ There Is No East or West.” The great hymn reads, in part, “Join hands, then, brothers of the faith / Whate’er your race may be. / Who serves my Father as a son / Is surely kin to me.” Later in the spring, he took the church youth group to hear Marian Anderson, the famous African American contralto whose historic defiance of segregation in 1939 had echoed from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial to the palaces of Europe. Daddy made sure that Mr. Whitaker’s daughter was on the bus.
The 1950s marked a lonely vigil for Southern liberals like my father, who operated under galling strictures that made it hard to take a meaningful stand. I
n 1955–56, however, the patient toil of generations of black Southerners in Montgomery, Alabama, lifted up a stirring young preacher named Martin Luther King Jr., whose vision gave voice to a prophetic tradition nurtured since the days of slavery. Knowing white Americans better than they knew themselves, King did nothing to stanch the rivers of ink that described him as a Southern black Gandhi, “the little brown saint” of Alabama. King blended the nonviolence of Gandhi with the political realism of Reinhold Niebuhr, who had taught a generation of theologians, including my father, that good intentions were not good enough. In a fallen world marked by human depravity and deep-seated sin, in a world where Hitler and Stalin had recruited millions of followers to commit mass murder, love must harness power and seek justice in order to have moral meaning. Love without power remained impotent, and power without love was bankrupt.
No dreamer at all, King understood the world that confronted black Southerners as they called for their freedom. The Cold War competition between the United States and the Soviet Union offered African Americans the unique leverage to redeem or repudiate American democracy in the eyes of the world. The demonstrations in the streets of the civil rights–era South were carefully staged dramas that forced the contradictions of American democracy to the surface. The street-theater morality plays that King and his organizers presented in Montgomery, Albany, Birmingham, and Selma captured in almost poetic fashion both the brutal social order of Jim Crow and the obvious justice of black demands. But their audience included a mostly dark-skinned world torn apart by the Cold War, and their intention was to force the federal government to intervene on behalf of black Southerners. Once the campaign began, King made no secret of his strategy. “Mr. Kennedy is battling for the minds and the hearts of men in Asia and Africa,” he told a crowd in Birmingham, “and they aren’t gonna respect the United States of America if she deprives men and women of the basic rights of life because of the color of their skin.”
Though the crusades in Alabama received more press coverage, North Carolina had provided no hiding place from the civil rights movement. On February 1, 1960, four black college students from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College sat down at the segregated Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, where my mother and father had both attended college a decade earlier, and asked to be served. The next day twenty-three classmates joined them; the next day, there were sixty-six; the day after, one hundred. When white hoodlums with Confederate flags blocked the doors, players from the North Carolina A & T football team formed a flying wedge that broke through the hostile crowd, each player carrying a little American flag. The wedge of big bodies permitted demonstrators to reach the lunch counter. One of the hoodlums demanded to know just who they thought they were, and one of the black football players replied, “We’re the Union Army.” Within two months, there was an army of sorts; the nonviolent warriors carried the sit-in campaign to fifty-four towns and cities across nine of the eleven states of the old Confederacy.
The battalions of nonviolence eventually overran segregation, and they also helped free white Southerners who felt the way my father did. After the sit-ins opened a new, more aggressive phase of the freedom movement, Daddy began to press the Methodist Church to live up to the inclusive vision of the gospel. “Since 1960, I have increasingly become associated with those who fight for social reform and renewal in our state,” an entry in his diary revealed. Mama wrote on February 10, 1962: “Beautiful Sunday. Vernon preached on race relations. He really ‘laid it on the line.’ It was real good.” That was when we were living in Sanford and he was serving Jonesboro Heights Methodist Church. He persuaded the administrative board of his local congregation to vote to seat anyone who came to church, regardless of color. He chaired the Commission on Social Action of the North Carolina Council of Churches and sat on the executive committee of the North Carolina Council on Human Relations. “I believe that the Church must relate itself to this struggle for racial equality,” his diary said in 1962. “It is doing so in spots and these spots are increasing. I hope it is not too late.” In later years, I would come to understand what he meant by that.
On April 3, 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) launched their Birmingham campaign with sit-ins at the city’s segregated lunch counters. The movement initially found it hard to recruit supporters, with large elements of the black community still reluctant and many of King’s supporters in jail. Slapped with a court injunction to cease the demonstrations, King decided to go to jail himself on the same day that a group of “moderate” white clergymen pronounced the campaign “unwise and untimely.” During eight days of confinement, King penned his famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” an eloquent critique of “the white moderate who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to ‘justice.’ ”
It is easy, King wrote, for those who had not suffered the violence and the indignity of segregation to advise patience. But it was excruciating, he said, to “see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an air-tight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society.” King described the agony of finding “your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her little eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see the depressing clouds of inferiority begin to form in her little mental sky.” Black Americans find themselves “living constantly at tip-toe stance never quite knowing what to expect next, and plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of ‘nobodiness,’ ” King wrote. And the biggest obstacle, King argued, was the sympathetic white liberal who wanted to preserve peace and civility.
The effect of King’s words on my father was electric. He was already committed to racial equality, but Dr. King hit him with the conviction that he needed to do something. “When I began to read his ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail,’ ” Daddy recounted, “I wept while I was reading it and got down on my knees, because it was the best thing outside Scripture that I had ever found.”
As his rhetoric galvanized liberals like my father, Dr. King’s organizers located the perfect adversary in Birmingham’s Public Safety Commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor. Knowing that the television cameras followed Dr. King, they also knew they could count on the volatile Connor for a dramatic display of brutality; though the SCLC organizers did not know it, Connor longed to be governor of Alabama and believed that becoming the state’s leading segregationist firebrand was his ticket. Sure enough, whether it was temper or ambition, Connor ordered his officers to use police dogs and fire hoses. In resorting to open violence, Connor stepped right into King’s trap. “The ball game was over, once the hoses and the dogs were brought in,” former city official David Vann recalled. “In marching only one block, they could get enough news film to fill all the newscasts of all the television stations in the United States.” The images of violence in Birmingham echoed around the world: “Sensational aspects of the Birmingham crisis including arrests of children and use of dogs and hoses have received widespread play,” one diplomat reported to the White House.
While the televised drama played out perfectly, Birmingham could not be reduced to an epic struggle between pure nonviolence and bare-fanged evil. King and his organizers were committed to nonviolence, but their strategy depended on provoking violence against demonstrators. And though the SCLC taught nonviolence and begged those who could not accept nonviolent discipline to stay home, black bystanders often pelted police with “nonviolent” rocks, bricks, and bottles, which helped prod Connor’s cops into stupid overreactions that played to King’s advantage in the media.
Beyond the chaos in the streets, white terrorism, especially dynamite bombings, had long plagued Birmingham’s black community. But Klan terrorists who wanted to kill the leaders of the freedom movement knew that they themselves
might die in the attempt. Colonel “Stone” Johnson, a black labor union representative, organized the Civil Rights Guards, who armed themselves to protect the movement and sometimes exchanged fire with the Klan. Asked many years later how he’d managed to protect civil rights leaders in Birmingham, given his commitment to nonviolence, Johnson grinned and said, “With my nonviolent .38 police special.”
Armed self-defense was nothing new. But black Birmingham responded to the bombings in a new way during the SCLC’s 1963 campaign. After white terrorists bombed King’s motel room, poor blacks whose commitment to nonviolence was negligible took to the streets, ravaging nine blocks of Birmingham, overturning cars, shattering storefronts, and burning buildings. It was in large measure the prospect of race war in the streets, with the whole world watching, that forced President Kennedy to respond. Kennedy, a devoted Cold Warrior, lobbied white business leaders in Birmingham to reach an agreement with the freedom movement, ending what he called “a spectacle which was seriously damaging the reputation of both Birmingham and the country.” Birmingham was a decisive triumph for nonviolent direct action, but violence and nonviolence were both more ethically complicated and more tightly intertwined than they appeared in most media accounts and history books.
Across the South, the news from Birmingham inspired dozens of similar campaigns. In cities, hamlets, small towns, and rural crossroads far beyond the scope of television camera crews and civil rights celebrities, black Southerners pushed hard for their freedom. In a ten-week period, African Americans launched at least 758 demonstrations in 186 cities and towns, yielding 14,733 arrests.
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