In March that year, baseball star Jackie Robinson concluded his weekly column in the New York Post by telling his readers that a letter had come to his attention, and he wanted to share it. Robinson had parlayed his fame as an athlete into a national forum for serious discussions on racial matters. The letter, he said, was from a Negro college girl. It had been addressed to James Robinson, the executive secretary of CORE. That letter was from me.
Dated March 20, it began with such a breezy air, anyone might have thought it was a casual note between old friends: Dear Jim, How are things in New York? I hope the weather is a little warmer now. But this was far from a casual correspondence, which soon became clear:
We do not plan to discontinue our fight. There are eight of us in jail: seven A&M students and one high school student. We are in what you call a “bull rank” with four cells in it. There is running water in only two of the cells. Breakfast, if you can call it that, is served every morning at 6:30. Another meal is served at 12:30, and I am still trying to get up enough courage to eat it. In the evening, we are served sweet breads and watery coffee.
We are very happy we are able to do this to help our city, state, and nation. We strongly believe that Martin Luther King was right when he said, “We’ve got to fill the jails to win our equal rights.” Well, I’ve got to dress for our visitors. We have two ministers visit us every day. Write when you can. Tell everyone hello for us.
Yours truly, Pat.
P.S.—My parents were here last night to get us out, but we persuaded them to let us stay. Priscilla, my sister, is supposed to be on a special diet and Mother is worried about her.
My letter to CORE’s executive secretary, which had been smuggled out of our cell by ministers who visited us each day, was one of dozens of letters I would write during my long jail stay. Serving out our sentence was only the first step. People had to know that in the United States of America, in the year 1960, peaceful Negroes could be jailed just for asking for a piece of cake at a lunch counter. As absurd as it seemed, it was the reality of the South. The more letters I received from shocked sympathizers, the more I realized how ignorant people were about life in the South. I try and explain it to them, I wrote to CORE leadership, but my best in a letter is not enough.… There are so many things happening that people are completely unaware of.
Jackie Robinson helped us tell our story, even sending us all diaries so we could document everything that happened to us during our incarceration. Many people remember Robinson only as a legendary baseball player, but he was also very active in the freedom struggle, and he sent money to Tallahassee CORE to help them carry out their activities. News of our jail-in appeared in outlets like Jet magazine, the Pittsburgh Courier, and dozens of other publications around the country, even around the world. Barbara Broxton also wrote impassioned letters called “Jailhouse Notes” that appeared in the Southern Patriot, a publication of the Southern Conference Education Fund. She wrote, We do not consider going to jail a sacrifice but a privilege. Every night we thank God we are able to help those who are denied equal rights.8 We received a letter of support from as far away as Yokohama, Japan. We knew the nation was watching us, and parts of the world, too.
Also on March 20, Florida’s governor, LeRoy Collins, had delivered a live radio and television address that resounded through the city and state: “So far as I am personally concerned,” Governor Collins had said, “if a man has a department store and trade, I think it is unfair and morally wrong for him to single out one department and say he does not want or will not allow Negroes to patronize that one department.… People have told me that our racial strife could be eliminated if the colored people would just stay in their place, but friends, we can never stop Americans from struggling to be free.”9
While many Negroes were hailing Gov. Collins as courageous and heroic for his remarks (which, admittedly, were unusual for a Southern governor during that time), they still rang hollow to me. For one thing, we were still in jail. Words have never meant anything to me without action to back them up, and Collins had also said that “public disorder” was harmful to the community. At least Collins was weighing in on the question in some form, and while he received many thousands of supportive letters from throughout the country, the reaction in his own backyard was lukewarm at best. The idea of a biracial commission, which the governor had recommended for municipalities statewide, was dismissed by Tallahassee Mayor George Taff, and the state senate leader, Dewey Johnson, called the governor a “strict integrationist” who would “sell his soul” for the prospect of higher political ambitions.10
Daddy Marion, though, was pleased with the governor’s words. In his March 23 letter, he wrote to us that the governor had made “a wonderful plea for the people of Florida to consider the moral values implemented in this tense situation.” With the mounting publicity, we noticed a distinct change in Daddy Marion’s tone. Despite his worries for our welfare and his job security, he soon seemed to feel more heartened:
April 1, 1960
Dear Priscilla & Patricia:
It was lovely indeed to have letters from you and to know that you are in the best of spirits even if the surroundings are not the most pleasant in the world. May God bless you both.
Your mother has kept up with all newscasts, newspaper clippings, and the like, and has done all to keep up with your activities even if she has not taken the time to write. I would write more often if I could find the time when I am not so beat to my socks. Somehow I have not fully gotten myself together after my brother’s death. I have had many restless nights, which is nothing unusual, but I awake disturbed and not always knowing the reasons why.…
Patricia, you are becoming nationally known. All I can say is: More Power to You and may God Bless all of you in your efforts. Such a nationwide endeavor is bound to have some great effect on the thinking of the people of this great nation.… Mother just read your published letter over the phone to me. Well written, old girl.
Give my sincerest regards to your enclosed friends. Our sincerest love to you both. Keep up your good spirits and pray. Prayers can move mountains if Faith goes along with them. Thanks for your letters and keep writing.
Love,
Daddy Marion
Times were very tense, and I saw for myself how much tempers were flaring back on FAMU’s campus. During a short-lived period during my sentence when Barbara Broxton and I were designated as “trustees”—which meant we had been assigned cleaning duties at the police station—a police car drove us back to the campus so we could get some fresh clothes. Somehow, word had gotten out that we would be brought to the campus, and a crowd gathered as the police car arrived. Students were furious when they realized we were there under guard. Once we were out of the car, they surrounded it, began battering it with their hands and pelting it with rocks, and rocked it back and forth to overturn it. I raised my voice to appeal to them, explaining why we were there: “We have not chosen to be released from jail!” I told the angry students. “We will not pay for segregation by paying our fines, and we want to stay in jail so people will know we’re no longer going to put up with it!” The crowd cheered and the police whisked us away.
As it turned out, we lasted as trustees only one day since we refused to use the “Colored” bathroom and because the police chief accidentally tripped over my vacuum cleaner cord. Yes, it was an accident, but apparently they’d had enough of us by then. Since I was no longer allowed even the meager distraction of domestic work at the jailhouse, the days behind bars grew very long.
CORE sponsored a downtown boycott to protest our jailing. Although it wasn’t nearly as effective as the bus boycott had been, the boycott and the memory of the sit-ins and protests incited the ire of local segregationists. In April, the Pittsburgh Courier published photographs showing the vandalism carried out against two of our supporters in the community, Rev. Dan Speed and Rev. T. S. Johnson. Someone threw a brick through the window of the Speed & Co. grocery store on Floral Street, which
adjoined CORE’s meeting place. “A lot of people don’t know how that man suffered,” Daisy Young said later about Rev. Speed. According to Miss Young, Rev. Speed was not only targeted by vandals, but his grocery suppliers stopped delivering goods to him, trying to put him out of business. The minister had to drive to Jacksonville—nearly 160 miles each way—just to stock his store.11
Vandals also visited Rev. T. S. Johnson, pastor of Fountain Chapel AME Church, and broke the windshield of his car with a large concrete block. After assessing the damage, Rev. Speed offered a prayer: “Father God, forgive those of your image that have committed the wrong in smashing glass in food store windows, homes, and automobiles, and many other sins upon their hands in this our Southland, for we are in love with them like our Christ, for they know not what they do.”12
This vandalism was not happy news to us in jail, of course. But one important way we were able to raise our spirits in jail was through singing. In time, other inmates—both Negro and white—joined us in song. These women were troubled, and many of them were hardened, described in Priscilla’s diary as “forgers, assassins, drunkards, and whiskey-sellers,” but they sang with us. The lyrics of my favorite Freedom Song, “Oh Freedom,” summarized the sentiment that helped give us our resolve: Before I’ll be a slave, I’ll be buried in my grave. In fact, we four women arrested at Woolworth wrote our own freedom song, which we set to the tune of the Dixie standard “Old Black Joe.” The melody was befitting. Just as we intended to use the U.S. Constitution to tear down the walls of Jim Crow, we wanted to use the melody of a derogatory song to give us sustenance:
Gone are the days
When tradition had its say.
Now is the time
For the South to integrate.
We will fight on,
For a better land we know.
For the Constitution tells us so,
Fight on, fight on!
We’re fighting,
We’re fighting,
For a better land we know.
For the Constitution tells us so,
Fight on, fight on!
We felt so determined to stay in jail, and believed so strongly in our cause, that we were deeply disappointed when our number began to dwindle. We started with eight. Angelina Nance’s mother finally prevailed in paying her fine to get her out of jail after she had already served more than two weeks. Angelina didn’t want to leave, but her mother insisted, and we missed her terribly. Clement Carney left grudgingly to start the appeals process. Henry Steele, our youngest, also left for home to take part in an appeal, and I’m sure his mother in particular was relieved.
In the end, Priscilla and I, John and Barbara Broxton, and William Larkins remained. With ten days off for good behavior—and one additional day so authorities could stave off any publicity tied to our projected release date—we ultimately spent forty-nine days of our sixty-day sentence in the Leon County jail. I believe any of us would have been willing to spend a year, or longer.
Shortly before our release date, we had a surprising moment in jail. I’ve mentioned that some of our jailers were verbally abusive toward us, but one had been simply professional, neither more nor less. He came and did his job, and he never said much of anything for us or against us. Only days before we were to leave, that jailer, a tall, mature-looking young man whose name I do not know, unexpectedly showed up carrying a very young boy, perhaps as young as three or four. Since whites had been restricted from seeing us, it was a shock to see the jailer bringing a white child that young. Once they were closer, we could tell from the resemblance that the boy must be his son.
The jailer stood in front of our cell with his son on his arm, and the boy leaned his tiny face through the bars to gaze at us. The jailer asked the three of us who were jail-in participants to come forward. I braced for the worst, imagining that he was about to display us as an example of what happens to “uppity niggers,” sowing the seeds of racism in the next generation.
The jailer began to speak in a gentle tone, pointing us out one by one. “Now, these ladies are sisters, Priscilla Stephens and Patricia Stephens, and this other lady here is Barbara Broxton,” he said to his son. “Say hello to them.”
“Hi,” the boy said obediently, smiling.
“I know Daddy has told you only bad people go to jail. Well, you may be too young to understand, but these three ladies aren’t in jail because they’re crooks, or because they’re bad people. They’re in jail because they’re trying to change the laws that say Negroes and whites can’t eat together. They want to be treated just like anybody else. And they believe in what they’re doing so much, they were willing to go to jail to make it right. So you try to remember that, okay? One day, you’ll look back and realize how important it was for them to do this.”
The boy nodded soberly. Perhaps he understood, and perhaps he didn’t. But that jailer could have given no greater gift to those of us behind bars, nor to his son.
Now, with the help of CORE, we were going to tell everyone who would listen what had happened to us in Tallahassee to be sure that it would never happen again.
Eight
TANANARIVE DUE
“Or does it explode?”
—Langston Hughes
“A Raisin in the Sun”
I was fourteen years old, watching Saturday afternoon TV, at the precise moment my childhood ended. It was May 17, 1980, and the local television station began scrolling a silent announcement across the bottom of the screen: AFTER DELIBERATING FOR LESS THAN THREE HOURS, A TAMPA JURY.…
My heart began to race, and I felt the taste of something sour rise in my throat. After a trial lasting six weeks, the verdict in the Arthur McDuffie case was in.
It wasn’t his life, but his death, that had made Arthur McDuffie a household name in Miami that year. The thirty-three-year-old insurance executive had been beaten to death by Dade County police after he had led them on an eight-minute high-speed chase on his motorcycle. His beating was so severe, his skull had been cracked in half, from front to back.1
Arthur McDuffie was black. The four police officers on trial were not.
Realizing they’d killed McDuffie, police had tried to cover up the crime by bashing the motorcycle with “Kel-Lites,” heavy police-issue iron flashlights, to make it appear that it had crashed. Officially, his death had been called an accident: He’d cracked his head open after flying off his motorcycle, police lied, just as they had for generations from Mississippi swamps to Florida back roads. Such lies have a long history.
This particular lie might have lived forever if not for a courageous and persistent Miami Herald police reporter, Edna Buchanan, who got a tip, so she met with McDuffie’s family, examined the motorcycle herself, and saw the truth, which she printed in the newspaper for all to see: McDuffie had not died in a motorcycle accident. He had died at the hands of men.
The charge, inexplicably, was manslaughter. That in itself had caused a furor. When the subject of the manslaughter charge was raised at a candlelight vigil at our Unitarian church, I’d choked into sobs when I tried to talk about it. The judge determined that the case could not be tried fairly in Dade County, so it was moved upstate to the predominantly white community of Tampa in west-central Florida, where an all-white jury was selected to hear the evidence. If I’d had any fears at all about this trial—and, despite my parents’ concern, I had utter faith in the strength of the evidence of a dead man’s splintered skull and a tampered motorcycle—maybe it was that there might be a mistrial and the whole case would have to start again, or that the penalties for manslaughter would not be as severe as these officers deserved. (Eventually, one of the officers was charged with second-degree murder.)
I could not believe the words I saw at the bottom of the television screen on May 17, 1980: A TAMPA JURY HAS FOUND FOUR OFFICERS NOT GUILTY.
Did it say, could it say, not guilty? I blinked, stared at the screen, and blinked again.
“Mom!” I yelled, my limbs shaking, “It’s no
t guilty!”
I’d only experienced a shock like that once before: When I was thirteen, I’d been barely awake as I listened to my favorite morning radio program on pop station Y100 and the newscaster announced that State Rep. Gwen Cherry had been killed in a car accident the night before after driving into a Tallahassee ditch. I’d heard this same newscaster morning after morning, but suddenly he was talking about someone I knew, and I’d felt as if I’d slipped into a strange, jarring dream. Gwen Cherry was my godmother. She’d sponsored me when I spent a week serving as her page in the state House of Representatives less than a year earlier. She’d posed with us in the photograph my family took with Jimmy Carter when I was ten. She was one of the Miami black community’s favorite daughters, and my mother loved her like an older sister. Gwen Cherry’s death was a personal tragedy to my family.
As terrible and unexpected as personal tragedies always are, they can heal. But May 17 was different, and I knew it. The Arthur McDuffie verdict was something beyond personal, deeper than personal. It was staggering. It wasn’t just about McDuffie, a man we had never met. It was about all of the black people in Dade County. It was about all of us everywhere.
Arthur Lee McDuffie was a top performer at his insurance firm. He was a community volunteer. He was a former Marine who’d served as a military police officer. He had three children, and he’d been planning to remarry his former wife, a nurse. Aside from traffic violations, he’d never had any run-ins with the law. The night he died, he’d been doing silly stunts on his motorcycle, popping a wheelie like daredevil Evel Knievel, and he’d sped off when police spotted him. He led them on a chase.2 For some reason, he was being a cowboy that night. Who can say what he was thinking? Did he think he’d just shake them and write the night off as an adventure to share with his buddies? He had to know it was foolish to run. He had to know he’d be in a pile of trouble, but I wonder what was going through his mind when he scooted his motorcycle to a halt near the expressway on-ramp and waited for the police to climb out of their cars, as if to say All right, ya’ll, I’m just playing. Did he think he’d get only harsh words and a night in jail? Had he forgotten he was a black man?
Freedom in the Family Page 11
