Yet more than a year after the boycott’s end, Negroes were still riding in the back of the city buses in Tallahassee. Our CORE group decided to see what would happen to Negroes who tried to ride up front. We were somewhat surprised by what we found: None of the bus drivers or passengers bothered the Negro students when we sat at the front of the bus—except for funny looks, and we got plenty of those. While the desegregation order had held, our people were still segregating themselves. Most Negroes still rode at the back of the bus from fear or habit, or both. I guess no one wanted to be the only Negro sitting at the front of the bus because a shyness, a subservience, was so branded into us. Thinking back on it, that was a sad state of affairs, but at least Tallahassee CORE had conducted its first official activity.
To be truthful, we had hoped to have more of an impact.
Be careful what you wish for.
I’m still amazed all these years later how the actions of a very few people can have such wide-ranging repercussions. Rosa Parks, Wilhelmina Jakes, and Carrie Patterson were ordinary people who refused to give up their seats on the bus. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his voice to a newborn Movement. And in 1960, the entire South was ignited by the actions of four college freshmen in Greensboro, North Carolina: North Carolina A&T College students Ezell Blair Jr., Franklin McCain, Joseph McNeil, and David Richmond.
At 4:30 P.M. on February 1, 1960, those four neatly dressed boys sat at a lunch counter at a Greensboro Woolworth. They were told they could not be served unless they moved over to the stand-up counter reserved for Negroes, but they wouldn’t. A Negro woman who worked at the restaurant became exasperated and reportedly told them, “You’re acting stupid, ignorant. That’s why we can’t get anywhere today. You know you’re supposed to eat at the other end.”9 Eventually, the store closed without further incident. About fifteen minutes after closing time, the boys left, saying they would return the next day with other students from their school. And they did. The Greensboro sit-in—the action of four boys—stoked a fever that raced through other Southern cities in the days, weeks, and months to come. The student sit-in movement had begun.
I heard about the Greensboro sit-in through the CORE grapevine, and I was very excited! Marvin Rich, who was the public relations person for CORE, sent out press releases describing the situation in Greensboro, encouraging all CORE groups around the country to focus on picketing Woolworth to pressure them to change their policies in the South. We had a Woolworth right in Tallahassee, which also did not serve Negroes at the lunch counter, and we felt we could give these students support by sitting-in, too. After our CORE group had spent several months simply documenting discrimination policies throughout Tallahassee, this sounded like exactly the sort of nonviolent direction action we had trained for—and we were ready.
A regional “sympathy sit-in” day was scheduled for Saturday, February 13, and Tallahassee CORE took part.10 About ten of us—students from FAMU and two Negro high school students—dressed in neat school attire—carried our schoolbooks and calmly walked inside the Woolworth store on Monroe Street. In 1960, signs above the lunch counter at Woolworth advertised sundaes for a quarter and an entire roast turkey dinner for sixty-five cents. We sat at the cushioned, straight-back counter stools and asked for slices of cake. The surprised waitress refused, but we remained at the counter. The whites around us, realizing what was happening, soon began to disappear. One white man remained to eat his food—and the waitress thanked him for tolerating that day’s “indecency.” The entire time, we sat quietly and stoically on our stools, our heads in our books. One white onlooker congratulated FAMU student William Carpenter, telling him, “I think you’re doing a fine job. Just sit there.” Afterward, a young white hoodlum tried to bait Carpenter into an argument, but Carpenter wouldn’t respond. “I bet if I disjoint him, he’ll talk,” the hoodlum said. When Carpenter didn’t respond, the hoodlum moved on. For a time, it was quiet.
“What are you niggers doing in here?”
One voice ignited the next, and suddenly shoppers at the store who had gathered around us began to taunt us, making threats. “Ya’ll niggers want a whuppin’? You’re stinking this whole place up. You better get the hell out of here.” The waitress tried to ask the troublemakers to leave, saying, “You can see they aren’t here to start anything.”11
It’s a strange experience to incite such negative emotion through such a simple, peaceful act. The longer we sat there reading in silence, the more incensed the crowd around us became, calling us hateful names, chiefly “niggers.” The situation felt surreal. None of us could pay real attention to the words on our books’ pages. I even saw someone holding a small handgun—which was shocking—and no one said a word to him about putting the gun away, even inside a public store. Was he going to shoot at us? We had entered new, dangerous territory.
As the threats intensified, the store manager panicked and closed the counter. We stayed for a total of two hours. Curious reporters came to see what the excitement was about, and then we all left. Someone eventually called the police, but we were gone by then. That was our first sit-in. Although we didn’t realize it, the second would catapult us into national headlines.
Most of us were students, so we were careful to schedule protests around our classes. We decided we would go back on the following Saturday. We’d been lucky to avoid serious incident in our first sit-in, but we knew we couldn’t take that luck for granted.
Using our experience from the first sit-in, as well as the tactics I’d learned at the CORE workshop in Miami, Mr. Haley and I spoke to potential sit-in volunteers about how to react in the face of taunts or violence that might ensue in the next sit-in. We designated two white students from Florida State University to act as observers. They would be seated before our arrival, and they would have an important function: By remaining seated alongside the Negro students after we arrived, we hoped they would demonstrate through example that there was nothing earth-shattering about Negroes and whites sitting next to each other. They would also report what was said about us after we left. This is just one of the many ways interracial cooperation was so important to the Movement.
Finally, the day arrived: Saturday, February 20, 1960.
Seventeen of us—mostly FAMU students, with two high-school students and a local forty-three-year-old resident, Mary Ola Gaines—arrived at Woolworth at approximately 2:00 P.M. None of us knew Mrs. Gaines, who was the only legal-age adult in our group that day. She’d heard about the planned sit-in through the Inter-Civic Council and had decided to join us after work. I was very glad, and surprised, to see her arrive. Although two of the participants were local high school students, Mrs. Gaines’s arrival gave us even more legitimacy, since she was an established member of the Tallahassee community. A Georgia native, she had lived in Tallahassee since 1939 and worked for a white family as a housekeeper. She did not know anything about CORE, but she knew what she believed was right. “I was not afraid,” she told me thirty years later, when I finally had the chance to ask her why she had come that day. “I was doing something I thought would help.”12
Now, no one would be able to dismiss us as so-called “outside agitators.” I heard the waitress say, “Oh, Lord, here they come again.” We sat at the counter and ordered food, and the waitress seemed astonished. “Niggers eat in the back,” someone told us, referring to a counter in the rear. The other white patrons got out of the way, leaving only the sit-in participants and our two white observers.
In no time, it seemed, a large crowd grew behind us. Maybe they had been waiting for us this time. Again, we sat and tried to read our books while people shouted threats at us. I was trying to make my way through The Blue Book of Crime, a criminology book I’d borrowed from another student, and Barbara Broxton was reading How to Tell the Different Kind of Fingerprints, which would become quite ironic later. “I thought I smelled niggers,” someone called out. “You niggers sit in back!” someone else shouted angrily. We could feel the rage swelling behind us. O
ut of the corner of my eye, I noticed a man holding a baseball bat. The hoodlums who gathered around us were mostly younger men with upturned shirt collars, many of them wearing their hair slicked back in the style of the day. The crowd had become very big, very fast. I felt someone tug sharply on my clothing, but I sat stoically, not moving. The hoodlums were trying to pull us from our stools, trying to provoke us, but every single one of us held ourselves in check. We sat and read, all the while knowing that no one was likely to step forward to stop it if we were attacked.
Tananarive might ask, “Do you remember your heart pounding, your hands shaking?” Honestly, the answer is no. I can’t speak for everyone there—and I know we all processed our fears in different ways—but I wasn’t aware of the normal symptoms of fright. I was simply resigned, as if my feeling was “What else can you do to hurt me? I have to be free.” That feeling was my bedrock.
About forty-five tense minutes went by, and after our two white observers decided to leave, the mayor of Tallahassee came into the store with other members of the city commission to ask us to leave. Some people might think, “Well, weren’t you young people impressed that the mayor himself made the request?” To me, the answer was no. As long as he led a city with segregated policies, he had not won my respect. Most of us remained, except six students who changed their minds and decided to go back to campus. That left eleven, including me and Priscilla, Mrs. Gaines, six other FAMU students, and high-school students Charles and Henry Steele, who were sons of local minister Rev. C. K. Steele, pastor of Bethel Missionary Baptist Church and a charter member of Tallahassee CORE.
Four or five police officers arrived at 3:30 P.M. The mayor also came back and tried to direct questions to me, but Priscilla was our designated spokesperson, so she was the only one who could address authorities. She calmly told them that we would not leave until we were served. So that was that: All eleven us were arrested for disturbing the peace by “engaging in riotous conduct.” Can you imagine? Simply for sitting at a lunch counter! We were walked a couple of blocks to the jail as a crowd of white Tallahassee residents watched us on the sidelines, applauding the police and making catcalls, but all of us held our heads up high. We may have been nervous, but though we had been raised as law-abiding citizens and had never been arrested, we certainly were not ashamed.
At the police station, we were fingerprinted and processed. The jail on Park Avenue in Tallahassee was in a building that had been a savings and loan, so the jail cell was nothing more than an old bank vault. In addition to the others I mentioned, there were several FAMU students: a brother and sister named John and Barbara Broxton, who were from South Florida; William Larkins, who was also from South Florida and was the incoming president of FAMU’s student government association; Angelina Nance, from Greenwood, South Carolina; Merritt Spaulding from Alabama; and Clement Carney from New Jersey. Once we were inside the police station, officers continued to taunt and try to intimidate us. After some time, we were permitted to notify persons in the community of what had happened, so we called Rev. C. K. Steele and Rev. Dan Speed. To avoid publicity, police tried to sneak us out the back door when we were bailed out, but reporters circled the building to meet us.13
Our bail was set at $500 per person, which was very expensive in the 1960s. I do not remember how we paid our bail. We couldn’t find any local attorneys willing to represent us, so CORE asked the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in Miami to provide attorneys. Tobias Simon and Howard Dixon, who were both white, defended us, and the NAACP also assigned a Negro attorney in Miami, Grattan “G. E.” Graves Jr. We were arraigned February 22, and we pleaded not guilty. Meanwhile, despite the fact that there was very little press coverage of the sit-ins in the Tallahassee Democrat (I think the editors intended to have a news blackout to keep word of our activities from spreading), both Negroes and whites in Tallahassee were growing more aware of what had happened. FAMU students voted not to go to classes so the entire student body could attend our March 3 trial. When word of that spread, our trial was postponed for two weeks.
Mother and Daddy Marion heard about what had happened even before we could call them, and we did our best to reassure Mother on the telephone that we would try to keep safe. But Daddy Marion wrote us a letter on February 21 that conveyed not only his fears as a parent, but his cynicism about the potential success of the blossoming civil rights movement:
I wonder if either of you has counted the cost. I know that you feel that you are doing a grand and noble thing, and looking at it from one point of view, you are making some headway.
Remember this, if either of you get into trouble, the very people you are trying to help would never lend you a hand.
The facts are really this: About 10% or 15% of our race are just about ready for what you are trying to accomplish; the other 85% or 90% don’t care, are not at all interested, and would do nothing to aid the cause. They had just as soon walk all over you and even curse you for trying to help him. The great majority of them don’t want help and wouldn’t know how to appreciate anything you will have to suffer to accomplish.
Yes, I know it looks big and you feel like you are doing something, but stop and take stock and put the matter in balance. Right now you stand chances of being expelled from school, as FAMU is a State School, run with State Funds, and dictated to from the State’s governing powers. This might lead to your not being able to get employment anywhere in the State, unless you have money enough to open your own business, but right now all of us are living day to day with no preparation for tomorrow—financially nor for business. This thing could even come to the point of me losing my job—I do work for the County and State, you know—and I am too old to look for any type job now, nor would anyone employ me at my age. You may come out all right, but on the other hand you stand a great deal to lose and nothing to gain but short-lived satisfaction.
The thing both of you should consider is to get through College, or get an education, make a place in life for yourself where you can be self-sustaining. You have this great opportunity now, so take advantage of it. Stop leaving too much to chance.
I know both of you are going to do what you want to do. I think I know you that well. All I can say is to weigh the matter, consider all that might be affected, and then do what you are going to do. I know neither of you think Daddy Marion has any sense, but he has lived in this world a long time and what you are now doing is nothing new to him.
Love,
Daddy Marion
Daddy Marion’s conservatism was a bit of a surprise to us, considering how much he had influenced our thinking in terms of the rights and responsibilities of citizens, but he was a parent first. No one wants his children to be on the front lines. No one wants his own family to suffer. As much as it hurt us to realize that even the parents who had shaped our views were pessimistic at the time, we knew we had to press on. There was too much work left to do.
Robert Armstrong, a white Florida State University student, was arrested at a sit-in at McCrory’s on March 5 that received prominent coverage in the Democrat,14 and there were reportedly more than 200 people at the next Tallahassee CORE meeting, including many more whites who, I suppose, were beginning to realize that they could not be free, either, if all of us were not free. I was not in Tallahassee that day because several of us, including Priscilla and FAMU students, Merritt Spaulding and Charles Wilkerson, had driven to New York, where we participated in a press conference at the headquarters of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters on West 125th Street. Seven other Southern Negro students were with us, and we were all there to bring attention to the student sit-in movement. By then, about 200 Negro students in thirty-eight cities had been arrested in demonstrations in the South. Later that day, hundreds of demonstrators in Harlem picketed the Woolworth on 125th Street.15
My attention was still focused on Tallahassee, and soon I was back. With momentum building, the seeds for CORE’s largest Tallahassee sit-ins were sown. After failed negotiations with the ma
nagement of both Woolworth and McCrory’s, we decided to stage sit-ins at both counters on March 12, a day that would be scalded into my memory for the rest of my life.
By March 12, the growing fervor on the FAMU campus was a far cry from the quiet, early days when we struggled to encourage thirty people to attend a meeting. Students were angry that other students had actually been arrested for simply trying to order food, and since negotiations with the store managers had failed, dozens had volunteered to take part in the sit-ins scheduled that day. (Those of us who were already facing charges decided not to subject ourselves to further arrest, at least for a while.) I did not fault those students who felt, for whatever reason, that they could not take part; I had a good friend, for example, who told me he couldn’t be a demonstrator because he might not be able to adhere to our philosophy of nonviolence, and he didn’t want to damage our efforts. Others shied away because of fears for their personal safety, which I also understood. But the rest of us had to participate. That need was simply in our souls.
I witnessed twelve other FAMU and FSU students arrested that day at the Woolworth lunch counter and taken to jail. They were marched down the street in interracial pairs, escorted by police on all sides, with police and onlookers branding the whites as “nigger lovers.” “Hold hands with your nigger buddies you love so much,” police taunted white FSU student Oscar “Bob” Brock.16 A photographer captured the image of Brock walking alongside George Carter, a Negro student from FAMU. The solidarity between whites and Negroes was a very striking sight, but it was painful to see so many other young people’s lives being disrupted for so simple an act. We had to try to show the powers that be that we would not be intimidated by arrest, or our cause would be lost. On FAMU’s campus, our CORE group dispatched fifty more students to take over for those arrested at Woolworth, and fifty to sit-in at the lunch counter with white students at McCrory’s. In accordance with CORE protocol, we also tried desperately to reach city authorities to negotiate a way to end the arrests and protests. No one would talk to us.
Freedom in the Family Page 7
