Freedom in the Family

by Tananarive Due

  Marry me, Patricia. Those were the words I’d secretly prayed to hear, so I’ll never know why I did what I did next. I guess I was just so shocked, and probably I was also feeling shy and embarrassed at such an unusual outpouring from John Due. I couldn’t make a sound for a moment. Then I laughed hysterically. I was mortified, but I couldn’t help myself.

  To poor John, it was like a slap in the face. He stood up and dumped me out of his lap and went back into the house. For all I knew, I had just missed my chance to marry the man I thought I might really be in love with.

  I stayed with the Johnsons and went to Howard University’s sociology department that summer, where I was awarded a scholarship to pay for my tuition and travel expenses. I was only a couple hours’ train ride away from John B., but somehow, with my shifting priorities and a new man in my life, John B. and I just drifted apart.

  Summer at Howard was busy. I became involved with NAG, the Nonviolent Action Group, an affiliate of SNCC chaired by Marion Berry, who later became the mayor of Washington, D.C. NAG conducted sit-ins and demonstrations in the Washington area. It seemed like I was on a different picket line every day.

  By fall, I needed a change. I had been offered a job in New York as a girls’ group worker for the Lower East Side Mission of Trinity Parish, so I decided to take that opportunity. The job called for a college degree, and although I had not yet graduated, I was hired based on my civil rights experience. As a group worker, I was part of a contingent that lobbied in Washington, D.C., for better benefits for the residents of the Lower East Side and New York City, but for the most part, my life was suddenly removed from the civil rights arena completely. Instead, I concentrated on the young people who were serviced by this large organization. The Lower East Side Mission of Trinity Parish was reportedly one of the richest church organizations in the country and had a huge staff serving the New York area. I also had a very busy social life, meeting young African dignitaries from emerging independent nations at the U.N. I swear, sometimes it seemed I had one date for breakfast, one for lunch, and one for dinner. During this time, I even considered going to Africa to serve in the Peace Corps.

  Back in Tallahassee, the civil rights movement was still marching forward while I was away. White activist Jeff Poland, who’d been arrested during the 1960 sit-ins, returned to Tallahassee voluntarily to serve out his sentence in May 1961, after the U.S. Supreme Court appeal failed. (He had transferred to another college after his suspension from Florida State University.) In jail, Jeff staged a hunger strike lasting nearly a month to protest segregated lunch counters. Sixty-eight ministers, including Rev. Steele and Rev. Alexander Sherman, fasted on Fridays in sympathy and encouraged others in Tallahassee to do the same.5

  Priscilla was still in Tallahassee, too, although she had graduated from FAMU. She became involved in CORE’s next phase of the civil rights struggle: the Freedom Rides. In the South, Negroes had to ride in the “colored” section at the back of the bus or in segregated train cars. In response to a December Supreme Court ruling, Boynton v. Virginia (which banned segregation during interstate travel in buses, trains, and terminal accommodations), CORE and other organizations launched an ambitious Freedom Ride throughout the South. White and Negro riders volunteered to ride buses and, if arrested, remain in jail rather than pay their bail. The Freedom Ride gained a great deal of publicity, but it also brought reprisals: The buses were often met by angry mobs, and a Greyhound bus riding toward Birmingham, Alabama, was set afire. On a Birmingham-bound Trailways bus, eight white men boarded the bus and beat two of the Freedom Riders with metal pipes. (James Peck, who later wrote the book Freedom Ride about his horrible experience, was knocked unconscious and needed fifty stitches as a result of his beating.) Other Freedom Riders were arrested and jailed, more than 360 by the end of the summer. Even the new CORE national director, James Farmer, was jailed in Mississippi.6

  Tallahassee was one of the designated stops during the Freedom Rides, and a bus carrying ten participating ministers and rabbis rolled into town in June. The morning after their arrival, the Freedom Riders sat at the municipal airport restaurant to order food, but they were all arrested for “unlawful assembly.” Priscilla, Jeff Poland, and another Negro activist were waiting to greet them, and all three were arrested, too. Additionally, Priscilla was charged with interfering with a police officer and resisting arrest. Judge John Rudd, who had tried Priscilla before, gave her a mandatory five-day jail sentence and an additional thirty-day sentence stemming from a probation violation.7 (The clergymen were sentenced with fines of $500 apiece or sixty days in jail. Although they chose jail, when they came back to serve their terms in 1964 after losing their appeal, the clergymen were freed after only a few days in a surprise court action.) In November, when the Interstate Commerce Commission prohibited all segregation in travel terminals, Richard Haley came back to Tallahassee and worked with Priscilla, Ben Cowins, John Due, and Robert Armstrong from FSU to test how communities were complying.8

  I was away while this was going on in Tallahassee, and I’m sure some of my fellow civil rights activists believed I had dropped out of the scene completely. But it wasn’t that simple. Sometimes when you’re a soldier—and I saw myself as such—you’re on the front lines all the time. You burn yourself out. Sometimes you’re so weary that you aren’t as effective as you could be, and you can be more effective if you just step aside for a little while. So that’s exactly what I did. During my year in New York, I never went to a CORE or NAACP meeting. I concentrated on my job, and in a way that was an extension of what I was trying to do, what I was fighting for. I wanted young people to have the opportunity to do things they had not done before. Those young people who lived on the Lower East Side had never even been to Carnegie Hall! It was only a couple of subway stops from where we were. So I made it my business to try to expose the young people—and I say “young people” even though some of them were almost as old as I was—to things they needed to be exposed to.

  Sometimes civil rights includes those quieter battles, too.

  By 1962, John Due was in Washington working as an intern for the U.S. Department of Labor, and I was ready to visit him to see if his feelings about me had changed since our disastrous night at Daisy Young’s house. Even though several young men had expressed interest in me at that time, I still felt unresolved. Once I got to Washington, John told me he was in love with someone else, and I said, “Okay, that’s fine. I just needed to know how you felt.” Although it wasn’t what I wanted to hear, I was relieved when I went back on the train. I had been dating a Nigerian physician on and off, and now I felt more free to open my heart to him.

  I had met my Nigerian beau, a physician from Lagos, when I attended a party with Priscilla. Like many of the Africans we met, he was surprised to see American Negroes attending an African party—many Africans thought American Negroes were ignorant about them, that we had learned everything we knew about Africans from Tarzan movies. He was not very political, but he was proud of our involvement. During this time, many African nations were fighting for and gaining their independence from colonial rule, so they were happy to see American Negroes fighting for freedom, too. My Nigerian friend was a graduate of Harvard Medical School, and I enjoyed his company though I had not been dating him long.

  A couple of weeks later, my telephone rang, and it was John Due telling me he was in New York and wanted to see me. We went out for spaghetti and meatballs at a little restaurant right near my apartment. John was in New York on his way to a friend’s wedding in Boston, but we talked so long that he missed his connection and got to Boston late. After that visit, I started wondering “Why is he coming to see me?” It was weird. But I let it go. I didn’t pursue it.

  I had other things on my mind. I had gotten an offer from the Henry Street Settlement to work with pre-delinquent children, who today we would call “at-risk” children. While I was pondering that, I received word that I would be permitted to go back to school at FAMU. I was excited about
that for two reasons: First, I thought it was important for me to demonstrate that activists could be involved and finish their studies at state-supported institutions. Secondly, I was excited because I assumed John Due also would be back at FAMU.

  In more ways than one, our school year at FAMU at the beginning of the fall of 1962 was going to get off to an explosive start. Much had changed in parts of Florida, but not in Tallahassee. In a state where larger cities had desegregated public facilities and lunch counters, Tallahassee was refusing even to appoint a biracial commission, as other cities had, to tackle the race problem, choosing instead to live with its head in the sand.9 Two years after the jail-in, Tallahassee’s facilities were still segregated. This was the situation facing us in the fall when we went back to school, and some of the most significant demonstrations of Tallahassee’s civil rights movement were going to take place during the upcoming school year. Many students’ lives were about to change forever, including mine.

  I went back to campus to register in Lee Auditorium, where the registrar’s office was. While going upstairs, I ran into John Due. He casually said, “Hi, how are you?” No big deal on his part. He seemed to be going his separate way, and I felt my stomach sink. For the next month or two, it really seemed he wasn’t interested in me. He was in the graduate department because he was in law school, and he was dating other women in the graduate school. We didn’t even seem to have a close friendship anymore. Priscilla decided to go to New York to do graduate study at Banks Street College, so for the first time I didn’t have my sister’s company at school, either.

  As disappointed as I was, I didn’t have much time to mourn the apparent end of my bond with John Due. The school year was barely underway when I was arrested again on September 25. This time, in an effort to make sure public travel facilities were truly desegregated, we’d targeted the Trailways station in Tallahassee and the Carousel restaurant inside.

  Aside from the Freedom Rides, Tallahassee CORE had been very quiet in the previous months. I think many other activists were truly afraid of CORE because our tactics always led to confrontations, and usually to arrest, but we believed this was the most effective method for change. So again, just as it had been at Neisner’s, there were only a handful of us at the protest. We had a core group of activists working to revitalize the Tallahassee chapter, and all of us were Florida A&M students. Besides myself, the group included a political science major from Lake City with a boyish sense of humor, Rubin Kenon; a smooth-faced student named Julius Hamilton (“Ol’ Prettyboy,” Rubin called Julius); a student from New Jersey named James Hamilton; and a FAMU political science club member named Ira Simmons. We became a very close group over time, although our relationship had almost nothing to do with socializing. We gave each other strength and emotional support, and we shared a purpose.

  Our CORE group decided to test the new travel desegregation rules at Carousel, a privately owned restaurant inside Tallahassee’s Trailways bus station. Neatly dressed, as always, the four of us went to Carousel at about 9:00 P.M., sat down at a table, and tried to order food. I was the spokesperson, so I put in the food order, but the manager told us to move to the other side because we were in the “white” section. When we didn’t move, the manager called the police. We were charged with “disobeying a police officer” and had to spend the night in jail. Once again, we were brought before Judge Rudd, who set our trial for October. Our bond was set at $100 apiece, and payment was arranged by Rev. Dan Speed.10

  This time, we thought, how could we possibly lose? The law was on our side, and even the president of the restaurant chain had sent a letter to the Interstate Commerce Commission, insisting that he had warned its Tallahassee operators to stop discriminating on the basis of race.11 When Judge Rudd convicted us anyway, we filed a $1 million lawsuit in U.S. District Court. We charged that Tallahassee operated under “apartheid principles, policies, and practices.” Our brief also quoted the Langston Hughes poem “Merry-Go-Round.” We asked for $100,000 for actual damages and $900,000 in punitive damages. Even though we didn’t win our lawsuit, we never had to serve our sentences.

  Each and every victory was so hard fought. And the real battles were only beginning.

  When I returned to FAMU in the fall of 1962, I lived in Tallahassee with Rev. C. K. Steele and his family, which gave me a rare chance to be part of a civil rights family and draw conclusions about what hardships and challenges related to the Movement I might expect when I had my own family. I feel so very fortunate to have gotten to know the Steeles. As crowded as their house was—with Rev. and Mrs. Steele, four of their five sons, and one daughter—the Steeles took me in when I needed a place to live. The Steele children at home were Henry, Clifford, Darryl, Derek, and Rochelle, whom we called “Pat,” and they lived downstairs while I lived upstairs, paying $45 a month for my room and board.

  I cannot say enough good things about Rev. Charles Kenzie Steele, who died in 1980. He was very courageous, a man of principles and tireless dedication who would not back down under pressure. To me, he was also a perfect example of a man who was not nurtured and appreciated enough by his own community while he was still alive. In truth, I think Rev. Steele received much more respect outside of Tallahassee than he did in his own city. He was the pastor of Bethel Missionary Baptist Church, and as the president of the Inter-Civic Council, he had been one of the main organizers of the Tallahassee bus boycott of the late 1950s. He was a friend of Dr. King’s, had hosted Dr. King and his wife, Coretta, at his home, and was also the founding first vice president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. His home was a beehive of activity during the height of the bus boycott, his son Henry recalls. Henry remembers seeing an “ugly little man”—who later turned out to be James Baldwin—hanging around his family’s front yard. Scores of reporters and other out-of-town activists also camped out at the Steeles’ home as part of an open-door policy. As a boy, Henry loved the excitement and was too young to be daunted by the potential dangers that came hand in hand with his father’s activism.

  Henry, who was about thirteen during the boycott, considered all of the commotion at home part of what was necessary to fight injustice. “I was too excited about it to be really scared about anything,” says Rev. Henry Steele, who is today a minister himself. He recalls how, as a youngster, during his annual summer visit with his grandparents in Montgomery, he’d witnessed the height of the Montgomery bus boycott and attended the mass meetings of thousands led by Dr. Martin Luther King and Rev. Ralph Abernathy. He felt change in the air, and he wasn’t too concerned about the consequences. In that way, perhaps, Henry was his father’s son. (Henry’s first job, in fact, was as an assistant to Rev. Abernathy at West Hunter Street Baptist Church in Atlanta, in the wake of Dr. King’s assassination in 1968.)12

  But life was very hard for the Steeles as a result of Rev. Steele’s activism.

  If a brick came crashing through the family’s window in the middle of the night, it was no big deal to Henry. In the event of such attacks, the family had a plan. They ran into the hallway, where there were no windows, and crouched there together until the crisis had passed. And there were many crises. About six months into the Tallahassee bus boycott, he says, his family was forced to move out of the church parsonage because of so many rock-throwing attacks, threatening phone calls, and shooting incidents. Appearances by the Klan were regular. Klan members drove past their house on Tennessee Street, or Highway 90, on their way to Klan rallies, and long lines of hooded Klansmen gathered outside the house to harass them. Once, the Klan burned a cross on their lawn, right in front of the church. As a precaution, some deacons stood guard at the Steeles’ house at night. Henry recalls that bullet-riddled venetian blinds hung in their window for years after the boycott, lingering evidence of the price his family had paid. Henry also remembers his father sitting by the window with a Smith & Wesson in his lap to do what he would have to do to protect his family, preacher or no preacher.

  That aside, though, R
ev. Steele was also known for his lack of malice toward his tormentors. In The Pain and the Promise: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Tallahassee, Florida, Glenda Rabby writes that when there were threatening phone calls, “instead of hanging up, Steele would often preach to the callers over the phone, telling them about nonviolence, redemptive love, and the life of Christ, even inviting them to call back after he finished his meal.”13

  It’s not surprising that Henry’s mother had a nervous breakdown during this time. It’s so unfortunate that Mrs. Lois Steele died in 1983, before she could share her trials and tribulations in her own words. She was only fifty-nine when she died, and she was one of the Movement’s quiet heroines. I do believe the stressful circumstances of her life probably cut her years short; she became a wife and mother very young, got swept into the civil rights movement, and then had to nurse her husband through a long illness before he finally died. And she outlived her eldest son, Charles, making her burden all the greater.

  The youngest Steele son, Derek, fell into a life of drug abuse for several years as an adult, spending time in jail before he went clean and became a chaplain, counseling addicts in Tallahassee. He told the Tallahassee Democrat in 1998 that he certainly didn’t blame his father’s notoriety for his troubles, but he felt the weight of his father’s achievements on his shoulders.14

  Besides the emotional toll, which was especially high on Lois Steele, there was also a financial toll. Mrs. Steele was trained as a teacher, and she’d worked hard to complete her schooling, despite several pregnancies after her marriage at the age of sixteen. When she appeared for job interview after job interview, principals refused to hire her. Negro principals at Negro schools had to follow the orders of their superiors and the white power structure. One day a principal took her aside and confided, “Mrs. Steele, actually, we have been told not to hire you.” His family went without a lot of things, Henry says. He feels that the church, rather than rallying behind their pastor to see that his family was cared for, instead put pressure on Rev. Steele to curtail his activities. Members were afraid they might lose their jobs for belonging to his church. One church member, ironically, was FAMU’s president, Dr. George W. Gore.