Freedom in the Family

by Tananarive Due

  Could the tide be turning in our favor? Would the courts finally be our friend?

  A May 29 theater demonstration drew about 400 students, with all of us singing, clapping, and chanting for freedom while hundreds of white onlookers stood by and watched. We definitely were an intimidating sight to anyone hoping to purchase a ticket for a movie. An editorial in the Tallahassee Democrat the next day characterized our peaceful protest as “very much like a football pep rally, or an old fashioned camp meeting, or a college sing.… The words this time didn’t praise the old-time religion, nor the old Fam-U spirit, but something we across the street didn’t quite make out about freedom to go where they want and do what they want to do.”3 The article noted that the white street toughs on the scene were kept away from protesters by police.

  Still, after several days of protests, the panicked theater owners were successful in convincing Judge Ben C. Willis to issue a temporary restraining order against me specifically, as well as other members of CORE. The order also officially banned protesters from using derogatory signs, or signs that urged a boycott of the theaters.4 But we were determined to keep protesting, especially since the film The Ugly American was now playing at the Florida Theatre on Monroe Street. What better backdrop for a civil rights demonstration?

  As I learned later, by May 30 Tallahassee Mayor Sam Teague considered Tallahassee to be in a state of emergency. He took control of the police department, calling the sixty-eight-member force to a meeting at 5:00 A.M. Despite ridiculous warnings from the FBI that infiltrators at FAMU with plans “printed in Cuba” were going to try to disrupt his city, Teague said in a 1978 interview for an oral histories collection, “I realized as mayor that 99.9 percent of the students out here were well-meaning American citizens trying to improve their lot in life.” His biggest worry was for public safety, he said, so he told his officers to leave their cattle prods at the station, and he forbid them to use their nightsticks. Many of the officers were reportedly enraged, but Teague told them, “I want you to uphold the law, I want you to be dignified, but I don’t want anybody getting rapped on the head with a nightstick.” He had also asked city ministers to try to prevent confrontations at the demonstration between whites and Negroes.5

  The Florida Theatre demonstration drew hundreds of FAMU students, Negro high school students, and a white student from Florida State University. Again, we came with hand-painted placards, of which my favorite read, ARE YOU AN UGLY AMERICAN? We picketed and sang in front of the theater while crowds gawked at us, some of them with curiosity and some with anger. Again, as in previous demonstrations, there were so many students there that I did not know many of them personally. While I did know the students in the inner circle—students such as Rubin Kenon and FAMU student Arthenia Joyner, who were two of the real lieutenants in the Movement—we still did not share many parts of our lives with each other during that time. We had a single focus: freedom.

  For example, it was almost forty years before Rubin Kenon admitted to me that his fear was so great he became sick to his stomach and often had to vomit before he set out for protests. Or how he would survey his dormitory room before each demonstration, always believing he might be seeing it for the very last time, careful to leave specific items out where friends or relatives could find them later. Then he joined us on the front lines, despite his nausea and despite his fear.

  Rubin came to Florida A&M University in 1960 after growing up in Lake City, Florida, which he had always heard was the state’s lynching capital. When Tananarive and I interviewed him in a Lake City restaurant in 1997, he surveyed the room with awe as we sat at a table undisturbed, surrounded by both whites and blacks. “If someone would have told me that one day I’d be sitting next to these white boys over here in this place, I would have never believed it,” Rubin said. He told us a story about how the University of Florida moved its campus from Lake City to Gainesville in 1906 because there were simply too many dead black men swinging from Lake City’s trees. “I don’t think the administrators were so concerned about black people getting lynched,” Rubin said. “It just offends their sensibilities as they walk to class that they look up in a tree and see a black man hanging.”

  When he was thirteen or fourteen, Rubin was beaten up by Ku Klux Klan members. As a result of that incident—and the countless stories he’d heard of how Negroes were treated by his town’s whites, including how a white man had impregnated a Negro woman and then simply shot her to be rid of the problem—Rubin was afraid of white people. The fear he learned for police officers lingers to this day, he says. His mother, a schoolteacher he called “T. K.,” tried to teach him to stand up for himself, both through words and by her example. If she felt she was treated differently than a white customer at a shop, she took her money elsewhere. Once, at the icehouse, the iceman gave the block of ice to six-year-old Rubin to carry to his mother’s car instead of taking it himself, as would have been customary. Furious, his mother bought her own refrigerator two weeks later. “She never went back to that icehouse again,” Rubin said.

  When Rubin stumbled into FAMU’s civil rights activities in the 1960s, the two sides of his personality were at war. On one hand, he did believe in standing up for his rights, but on the other hand, he was downright terrified, and there was good reason to be afraid. Rubin, like me, could tell that the May 30 Ugly American demonstration was going to attract attention. Experience had taught us that racist mobs might form and try to harm us, but that was the risk we were all willing to take.

  Sure enough, across the street from the theater, a group of angry whites began to grow, and some of them were quite close to us. We picketed and sang, and they shouted and threatened. Some onlookers were waving Confederate flags, a reminder of the slaveholding mentality that was still flourishing in the South nearly a century after the end of the Civil War, a symbol that is still incorporated into some state flags, and people wonder why blacks find it so offensive! A good number of young white men flanking the protest were wearing their hair slicked back and their shirttails out: in those days, sure signs of hoodlums looking for trouble. “The air was so electrically charged at times that just the flick of an eyebrow was enough to set off an explosion,” Rubin recalled about that protest and others like it. “It was a time when we just didn’t know if we were going to survive.” After a few hours, the city decided to try to shut the protest down. Circuit Court Judge Ben Willis issued an injunction order informing us that we could not block entrances, we could not attempt to enter the theaters, we could not display signs pertaining to the policy of the theater, and so on.

  The students chose not to obey the order. We assembled to march from FAMU up the boulevard toward the capitol, where the State Theatre was located. I was in front of the march with Scout, the beautiful German shepherd I had bought to celebrate John’s graduation from law school. We have always had dogs. I couldn’t leave Scout in the apartment because John was studying at the library and then would go to work, and Scout’s stomach was upset because he had just been wormed. It wasn’t long before I began to realize that bringing Scout might have been a mistake. When the capitol press corps saw us approaching with Scout at the head of the march, they began pointing and yelling, “Reverse Birmingham!” (In Birmingham, Bull Connor’s police had turned German shepherds on child demonstrators.) Seeing a situation that could be damaging politically, a FAMU student named Arthur Teele—who would later become a high-level Reagan appointee to the Department of Transportation, a state NAACP official, and executive chair of the Miami-Dade County Commission—did some quick thinking. He drove up in his car, took Scout’s leash, and carried our dog away.

  That day, 220 of us were arrested, including me, Rubin, Doris Rutledge, and a freshman from Miami named Betty Jean Tucker, who later became a Miami-Dade County Commissioner under her married name, Betty Ferguson. But even arrest didn’t dampen our spirit of protest. While the police walked us down the street to the jailhouse, we shouted, “Free-dom! Free-dom! Free-dom!” Again, as in
1960, word got back to the FAMU campus that students had been arrested, so a sympathy march formed. This time, about 200 students were in the march, compared to 1,000 in 1960, but Mayor Teague decided nonetheless to disperse it with tear gas when students would not turn back. Thirty-seven more students were arrested and joined us at the jail.6

  Once again, much to the city’s dismay, I’m sure, Tallahassee was making national headlines because of civil rights arrests. The protest and arrests were described in the New York Times, and a photograph of me being lifted from a passive crouch by three police officers outside of the theater appeared in Time magazine and the Miami Herald. I was wearing dark glasses and a neat dress and pumps, hardly the picture of someone who posed a threat to the community. The Herald’s photo of my arrest accompanied a story about how Negro agitation was making civil rights a more important part of the national agenda, how President John F. Kennedy planned to push for new civil rights legislation in Congress, and how Secretary of State Dean Rusk had stated that the civil rights problem was putting our nation’s “leg in a cast” in the race against communism. “Our voice is muted, our friends are embarrassed, our enemies are gleeful because we have not put our hands fully … to this problem,” Rusk said.7

  Meanwhile, John had graduated from FAMU’s law school and was studying for the bar and working part-time at a steakhouse, the Silver Slipper, a gathering hole for local politicians. John had not been arrested with us, but he did go to the courthouse to try to get an appointment with Judge Ben Willis to get a clarification of his arrest order. John thought that would be the end of his involvement, but he was wrong. When he arrived back at our apartment, a deputy sheriff was waiting to serve him with a summons. He had been named a codefendant! Someone was making trouble for him.

  The next day, when John reported to work, his boss called him aside. “What you do on your own time is your business,” his boss said, “but when your business affects my business, you have to go. My customers saw you leading a march downtown with a German shepherd dog!” John was barely making any money as it was, but now he had been fired on the basis of a lie.

  At the contempt-of-court hearing before Judge Willis the next day, the charges were dropped against all 257 of us. Judge Willis told us he didn’t believe most of us had purposely ignored his injunction, and he clarified that the signs we’d carried had not defamed the theater. “They said ‘Segregation is unconstitutional,’ which is an expression of opinion, not derogatory or defamatory. Another said, ‘Are you an ugly American?’ and that was not defamatory. I’m glad no one asked me that. I’d have had to say ‘yes,’ ” the judge said, which sounded like his effort to make a joke. “Another sign said ‘Freedom,’ and there is nothing objectionable about that.”8

  But he also slowed our effectiveness by instituting rules to govern our protests, limiting the number of participants and outlining very specific guidelines for where we could stand and what we could say. For example, only eighteen students would be permitted to protest at one time at the Florida Theatre, and only ten at the State Theatre, which was only symbolic. At the time, one of our attorneys, Tobias Simon, proclaimed to gathered Negro onlookers in the courthouse that the ruling was a “tremendous victory. This is the first and only time in a Southern state has the right of a Negro to picket a white establishment been recognized and put into an order. I predict [the protests] will be effective and the day of segregated theaters in Tallahassee will come to end very shortly.”9 I always saw the ruling as an attempt to silence us to the point of ineffectiveness. Protests continued under the new guidelines, but they were definitely more lackluster.

  Besides, the end of the spring school term meant that many students who might participate were leaving Tallahassee for the summer. John and I remained behind, and Rubin Kenon was there that summer, too. We were also once again joined by Priscilla, who came to Tallahassee to visit me after she had surgery. This was a rare opportunity for us to spend time together again, but it’s a decision I believe my sister came to regret, and one that would make her vow to never again be involved in the Movement, at least for a time. She has described her visit to Tallahassee that summer as a turning point of her life, and not in the positive sense.

  Priscilla is one of the most open and warmhearted people I have ever known. She is certainly not without faults, as none of us is, but to me her big strength is that she has always enjoyed people very much. As someone who was not nearly as sociable, I was likely to be labeled as cold by people who did not know me well. Someone in the Movement once told me I was “as cold as an icicle,” but that has never been true of Priscilla. She has a radiant smile, and she is generous with it. Especially when we were younger, she always seemed to believe that people operated under the best of motives, and Mother worried that she was too naive. Despite everything she and I had witnessed in the past few years, Priscilla brought that same optimism back with her to Tallahassee in the summer of 1963.

  After her arrival, Priscilla and I visited with each other and probably had some fun, although, to be honest, I don’t remember much in the way of fun during those years. It wasn’t long before she became involved in civil rights again. Since the movie theater demonstrations had petered out for the summer, she and Rubin took part in small demonstrations to protest Tallahassee’s segregated so-called “public” swimming pools.

  On May 30, the same day of all the arrests at the Florida Theatre, three white Florida State University students had quietly waged a protest of their own by trying to purchase tickets to swim at Tallahassee’s “Negro-only” swimming pool. Saying they were not a part of CORE, students Anne Hamilton, James Walker, and John Parrott told police and reporters they only wanted to patronize the municipal pool closest to where they lived, which happened to be the pool designated for Negroes. “We thought the municipal pools were open to everybody and we wanted to go swimming,” Hamilton said. They were fingerprinted and released.10

  In June, Priscilla and Rubin decided to try the opposite tactic: They would try to swim at the “whites-only” Meyers Park swimming pool, something they called a “wade-in.” They tried to gain admission for three days, but were unsuccessful. On the third day, already wearing her swimming suit, Priscilla managed to slip past the gate and made her way toward the water. Police stopped her before she made it.

  In the beginning, at least, there was nothing noteworthy about Priscilla’s arrest. She allowed herself to be handcuffed, and the officer pulled her toward his parked police cruiser. He opened the door, and she began to climb inside. For some reason, Priscilla recalls, the officer thought she wasn’t moving fast enough. In front of a crowd of dozens of white onlookers, the officer kicked her in the stomach.

  Priscilla was almost too shocked to feel the pain right away. She had never before been physically abused by a police officer, and she could hardly believe that a man would strike a woman, especially a woman in handcuffs. Sitting in the police car, Priscilla looked out at the witnesses. “I looked at the crowd, and I said, ‘My god, you allow this? I’m doing nothing,’ ” she recalls. No one was cheering, but the faces that stared back at her in the bright sunshine that day seemed completely indifferent, except for one woman she noticed. That woman was staring at Priscilla with what looked like a sympathetic smile. “Oh, this lady is going to come forth,” Priscilla says she remembers thinking. “She’s going to tell what happened!”

  At her trial, exactly as she’d believed, Priscilla was excited to see the very same woman in the courtroom. Priscilla was not allowed to speak on her own behalf, as was always the case in these arrests, so as much as she wanted to complain about the officer’s behavior, the judge gave her no venue to do so. Instead, Priscilla kept looking at the white woman in the audience, expecting her to declare why she had come, what she had seen. The woman simply sat and watched, wearing the exact same smile. She never spoke.

  “The whole thing was over, and I had been sentenced, and this woman had said nothing. So my conclusion was the smile was just a smile,�
� Priscilla says. Had it always been a different kind of smile altogether, and Priscilla just hadn’t seen it? Had the woman come to gloat instead of defending her? To Priscilla, the woman’s lack of sympathy was even more troubling than the police officer’s kick because it meant she no longer trusted her own judgment of people. It was a disillusioning moment that Priscilla says she has never forgotten.

  Priscilla doesn’t know exactly how much time she spent in jail as a result of her “wade-in” experience, but she remembers that she was thrown into the isolation cell because she wouldn’t stop singing. Instead of having me and other students in jail with her this time, she was by herself, and the loneliness she felt was keen. To keep her spirits up, she sang “Oh, Freedom” and the song we’d made up during the 1960 jail-in to the tune of “Old Black Joe,” but the guards didn’t like her singing and put her in the tiny isolation cell. Her incarceration (and, no doubt, the kick) had aggravated her surgery, and she felt herself becoming inflamed. But she lay on the cold concrete floor, she says, singing and singing.11

  I was outraged about what had happened, of course. Priscilla, Rubin, and I went to a city commission meeting to file a police brutality complaint, but we never had the chance to speak because two city commissioners left the meeting, shutting it down. Instead of rebuking the police department at the meeting, the mayor offered praise.12

  The city closed the white pool rather than face more protests. After that, for five long years, no one could go swimming to escape the hot Tallahassee sun.13

  In July 1963, the Tallahassee CORE office got word that a crisis had arisen: A friend and CORE colleague named Zev Aelony had been arrested in Ocala, 182 miles southeast of Tallahassee. We had to go to Ocala right away to check on Zev’s welfare. As Priscilla’s recent police experience had only reinforced, a lone activist in police custody was not in safe hands. Rubin came with me in our worn 1952 Plymouth to see about Zev. That car was in such bad shape that the floor was missing, and you could see the road passing beneath your feet, but we were students, and it was the only car we had.