Freedom in the Family

by Tananarive Due

  Neither Dan nor Judy had ever been jailed before that day, and neither had many of the other participants from FAMU. Some had taken part in the May protests, but others had only become involved as a result of recent mass meetings and rallies. John and I had tried to get the word out that arrest was a possibility, explaining that CORE did not have the funds to bail people out of jail, but some of the students who participated had not been present at those informational sessions, unfortunately. As I mentioned earlier, this became a real bone of contention with groups like the NAACP, because frantic parents deluged the NAACP with telephone calls, expecting to get their children out of jail. As far as the NAACP was concerned, CORE whipped the students into an emotional frenzy, but then took no responsibility for them. Besides, the NAACP had long held that courtroom action, not direct action, was the means to equal rights, and we students were considered too unruly.

  Judy’s mother, Ernestine Benninger, had been raised in the Baha’i faith, and she believes she passed on that religion’s principle of equality among the races to her daughter. Still, she was completely unprepared for the 2:00 A.M. telephone call that awakened her and her husband in Gainesville. The man on the phone was Dr. Marshall Jones, and he was a faculty member at the University of Florida who was very involved in that campus’s student movement. He told them that Judy had been arrested in Tallahassee and that she was in jail, but he gave no other details. “Our first reaction was ‘Oh my God!’ ” Mrs. Benninger recalled. She hadn’t known her daughter was in Tallahassee, much less why. She and her husband called the Leon County jail immediately, only to be told it was closed until 9:00 A.M. “So we lay there like boards until about 6:00 or 6:30, and got up and went up there. And she was really scared, because that was a Saturday night, and the women in the jail knew why these girls were there, and they really harassed them about what they were doing and why they were doing it.”8

  Judy’s arrest reached the newspaper in Gainesville, to her family’s mortification, but they were relieved to discover that Judy’s name was misspelled. Still, some people her family had considered friends simply had nothing to do with them after that. Later, Judy’s father, Lawrence Benninger, told his wife and daughter that he’d been in line for a vice presidency at the University of Florida, where he was a professor, but he was withdrawn from consideration after Judy’s arrest.

  Judy was among the students from the theater demonstration who chose to stay in jail rather than paying her fine after the trial. After their convictions, Judy and the three other white women arrested at the demonstration—including FSU students Rosemary Dudley, Mary Ann Stevens, and Elaine Simon—were tormented in jail. The guards promised that any prisoners who beat them up would be granted favors, so at night two women in a nearby cell tied razor blades to broomsticks and jabbed through the bars, stabbing at the civil rights demonstrators from a distance. Judy and the others were forced to crowd together at the edge of their bunks to avoid the weapons.9

  Judy stayed in jail for a week after her trial before her parents came and paid her fine to free her. She later told me she was furious when her parents paid the fine, calling their act “unforgivable.” She and others had agreed they would stay in jail until everyone could get out. “A lot of people had gotten out by that time, but I felt that the white people should stay until the end. I was very embarrassed that my parents had done that,” Judy said.

  Dan Harmeling, Steve Jones, and Frank O’Neil also chose to go to jail rather than pay their fines, a decision that became frightening right away. As soon as they were escorted to the cell block, the other white inmates began screaming to the guards, “Let them in! We’ll take care of them!” Their stay after their initial arrest had been without incident, but the mood had changed drastically. Dan recalls that Steve Jones insisted, “We’re not going to go in there. If we go in there, all we’ll get is beaten up.” The guard agreed. Instead of locking them in the regular cells, he took them to what he called a “security area,” which was solitary confinement. Dan and Steve Jones were placed in one cell, which Dan says was like “a closet,” and Frank O’Neil was alone in the other. Inside those cells were no lights.

  “Our food was brought to us and put through a slot in the door, and then if we wanted to see what we were eating, what was on our plates, we had to hold our food out of the slot and then look as the dim light shone on the food,” Dan recalls. They got no exercise because they were not allowed to leave their cell. They had only beds, a commode, and a small sink for drinking water. After five days, they agreed to pay their fines.

  Doris Rutledge, a Negro student at FAMU, was determined to stay in jail, but she too could remain only a little more than a week because her mother paid her fine, and she was forced to leave. So many people were in jail, Doris recalls, that a Negro woman locked up with them complained that police had gone out and arrested her just so she could cook for all the inmates. To protest her incarceration, Doris staged a hunger strike during most of her stay.

  There was one point of relief: Word circulated among them that higher-ups had given orders that no harm should come to any of them, in no small part, I’m certain, because of the fear of bad publicity. Still, some of the civil rights prisoners did not just adjust well to being in jail, and Doris remembers hearing one woman crying. Impatient with the woman’s tears, Doris brashly announced, “I don’t feel sorry for anybody except Ruby McCollum!”

  To Negroes in Florida, Ruby McCollum was a legendary example of how a Negro woman had been wronged by a racist system. The noted Harlem Renaissance writer Zora Neale Hurston had written about Ruby McCollum’s trial for the Pittsburgh Courier in 1952, and my family had followed that trial closely.

  On August 3, 1952, Mrs. McCollum, a Negro woman from Live Oak, Florida, whose husband had built a small fortune running numbers, shot a white doctor dead. The doctor, Clifford LeRoy Adams, was a popular man planning to run for governor. She never denied killing him, and prosecutors claimed she’d done it over a doctor bill she didn’t want to pay, but the case had never felt right to those of us who heard about it. It came out later that Mrs. McCollum had been sentenced to die without having the opportunity to tell her version of what had happened: that she and Adams had a long-standing affair, he was extorting money from her, he beat her, she’d already had one child by him and was pregnant with another, and she had reason to believe he was planning to kill her. (Mrs. McCollum lost Adams’s second baby in jail.) Live Oak’s white establishment was desperate to keep their relationship a secret, so those details were not permitted in court, just as Mrs. McCollum’s history of mental problems had never been brought out. After a long fight by journalists and her attorney, Mrs. McCollum’s death sentence was overturned and she was committed to a mental hospital.10

  When Doris said she didn’t feel sorry for anyone but Ruby McCollum, the other protesters got the message and grew silent. At that instant, Doris noticed a quiet woman she’d known from the campus, Kay McCollum. Doris had a sudden realization: This was Ruby McCollum’s daughter. She had never made the connection before, but she suddenly recognized Kay’s name from the book she had read about Ruby McCollum. Doris and the soft-spoken young woman made eye contact. “I apologized to her, and she said there was no need to,” Doris says. “That was a real different kind of experience for me, because there was just so much pain and history. In my mind, even though I thought I had experienced some kind of discrimination by not going to the theater, these people have destroyed her life.”

  Kay McCollum, in her willingness to go to jail to change the system that helped destroy her family, was taking her life back. Maybe, to her, that was a way she and her mother would both be free.

  In the fall of 1963, I was assigned to a student internship in social studies at a high school in Jacksonville, where I was ironically assigned to civics teacher Rutledge Pearson, who happened to be the state NAACP president. Mr. Pearson believed in having his students see their government at work, and consequently my first official activity was t
o accompany him downtown with his civics classes to Mayor Haydon Burns’s office. (Burns later became governor of Florida.) I had been in Jacksonville only about a week when I was called back to Tallahassee, where I was notified that Rubin Kenon and I had been indefinitely suspended from FAMU.

  The Board of Control wanted us out, and Dr. Gore bowed to their pressure. Although I wish he had been stronger, I have tried to appreciate, over the years, what a difficult position he was in. It was bad enough that after our arrest Dr. Gore told the press, in a statement showcased on the front page of the Tallahassee Democrat, “What [the students] have been doing is a waste of their time and ours and is not in the best interest of our institution or of the students.”11 Giving lip service to the power structure was one thing, but now he was interfering with my ability to complete my studies. And I was so close to finally getting my degree! Rubin, too, was crushed. “It was a thing that broke out tears,” he says.

  Rutledge Pearson, the state NAACP president and my student teaching director, was also outraged. He wrote a letter to President Gore, stating, “It is not our intention to idly stand by while these two young Americans are caused to suffer for rebellion against a system of living which is not of their making.” He then threatened if we were not reinstated to launch a statewide boycott of FAMU’s famed annual Orange Blossom Classic parade in Miami. He sent copies of his letter to both President Kennedy and Attorney General Robert Kennedy, but Dr. Gore was not swayed.12

  Unfortunately, Rubin actually suffered a nervous breakdown. Soon after learning he had been suspended from school, all the stress of the previous months caught up with him. He committed himself to a mental hospital in northern Florida, but during his two-month stay, he never lost sight of his goal of equality. When he wanted to visit the institution’s library, he was told there was one library for white patients and one for Negro patients, and he was enraged. He organized patients into pickets to protest the segregated libraries. “I’ll never forget, the administrator was a Harvard graduate, and he said, ‘I want to help you get out of here. What can we do to get you out of here?’ ” he recalls.

  Rubin’s hospitalization was very hard on his mother. “My mother cried all the time. She would come to see me and start crying,” he says, pointing out that she had remained calm during the large-scale protests, when he felt the danger was much greater. “And I would wonder why she was crying, because I was okay. Now you start crying!” he says.

  I can only imagine how Rubin’s mother felt. At this point, with more bombings and attacks against civil rights activists in the news, my own mother probably would have been happy to see me leave behind my life as a civil rights activist the way Priscilla had after the police officer kicked her. But Mother never wavered in her support, and after I poured out my heart to her on the telephone, she sent me an inspirational postcard printed with the saying, “TOUGH TIMES NEVER LAST … BUT TOUGH PEOPLE DO!” On the back of the postcard, she wrote her typical encouragement, Have Hope and remember the saying on this note—there are better days ahead.

  Rubin and I tried to fight through legal means. Right away, Tobias Simon filed a temporary restraining order in U.S. District Court to try to enjoin the Board of Control, Dr. Gore, and FAMU from carrying out the suspension. A month later, a federal judge in Tallahassee dismissed our lawsuit, refusing to allow me or Rubin to return to FAMU. Some FAMU students showed their support for us by staging a “sleep-in” outside Dr. Gore’s home, but to little effect. FAMU’s faculty senate met and issued a vote of confidence in Dr. Gore, supporting our suspension. For now, at least, Rubin and I were out of school.

  I had at least one bit of good news: On November 15, 1963, John officially became a member of the Florida bar and a practicing attorney. Since we were no longer eligible for student housing, John and I rented our first real house at 3108 Galimore Drive in Tallahassee. We got a second German shepherd we named “Freedom.”

  One afternoon in November, I was at home having a rare moment of relaxation, watching As the World Turns, when a newscaster interrupted with shocking news from Dallas: President Kennedy had been shot. It was November 22, 1963. I sat for a moment in disbelief, then I called John in St. Augustine, Florida, where he was defending his first official client. We could hardly believe what had happened. I held my breath, praying that the president was still alive, that he would survive. Soon the word was official: President Kennedy was dead.

  President Kennedy’s actions on the civil rights front had often been too slow for our liking, but we had held out hope that he would carry out his promises to push through civil rights legislation. Like many Negro activists in Florida, I’d written President Kennedy a letter that June, asking him not to grant federal money to a 400th birthday commemoration scheduled in 1965 in St. Augustine because it would signify “federal support to this celebration of four hundred years of slavery and segregation.”

  I was stunned. I could not believe it. It was pure chaos. In my lifetime, this was the first time a president had been killed while he was serving in the nation’s highest office. I knew politically who would succeed him, but John and I both had the same thought in our minds: What would happen to the nation and the struggle now? We realized how many others felt the same way as our phone continued to ring for weeks and weeks, with callers asking that same question. Although President Kennedy had moved much more slowly than I had wanted him to, a lot of us thought he was a good friend, and that this possibly would be the end of an era when we would have access to the president and to Attorney General Robert Kennedy, who dispatched federal help in times of need. The tone for justice had been set from the top.

  The day after the assassination, November 23, I received a telegram from James Farmer, who was at that time the national director of CORE. (In 1961, Jim Robinson had been removed as CORE’s leader, in no small part because the organization decided it should have a Negro director.)13 Farmer’s note really captured my feelings. It read, The assassination of a president is a tragedy not only for his family but for all Americans.… We believe this assassination was the result of the president’s efforts to bring about a more democratic America and we hope that this nation will rededicate itself to those ideals of his. Our prayers go out to Lyndon Johnson in the difficult days ahead.

  And the days ahead would be difficult, indeed.

  John had been scheduled to appear in court the same day President Kennedy was assassinated, and he knew something was wrong when he arrived at the St. Augustine office of his client, a fiery Negro dentist named Robert Hayling. He found Dr. Hayling red-eyed and teary.

  When we spoke on the telephone the day of the assassination, John told me that not a single one of the prosecutor’s witnesses—some of whom he believed were Ku Klux Klan members—appeared in court after news of the president’s death. “Maybe the reason the prosecutor’s witnesses didn’t show up is because Kennedy’s assassination shocked them enough for them to realize that they, too, have been part of this nation’s madness and they were ashamed to come to court,” John told his client at the time.

  Dr. Hayling scoffed at his young lawyer’s naivete. “Due, the reason those suckers didn’t show is they are out celebrating Kennedy’s assassination,” the dentist said.14

  Dr. Hayling, the advisor for St. Augustine’s NAACP Youth Council, had been badly beaten at a large Ku Klux Klan rally staged to celebrate the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, where the four little girls died. Can you imagine anyone wanting to celebrate such a horrible terrorist act at a rally? Dr. Hayling had tried to observe the rally with three colleagues, but instead was captured by Klan members and badly beaten. His activism had very nearly gotten him killed more than once. One night, someone drove past his house and shot through his doors and windows, killing the family dog, a boxer who had rushed, barking, to the front door inside the house. If his wife hadn’t left their bedroom moments before to use the bathroom, he says, she would have surely died in the shotgun blasts, too, because their bedroom wa
s riddled with bullet holes. His harrowing story, unfortunately, set the tone for the violent days to come.

  Dr. Hayling, who’d been raised in Tallahassee, first moved to St. Augustine, the nation’s oldest city, in 1960 with his wife and two children, opening a dental office as part of a program to repay his state-funded student loans to traditionally Negro Meharry Dental School. St. Augustine had grown progressively more dangerous and violent in the early to mid 1960s, when his NAACP Youth Council, and later, Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, began challenging the segregated policies of public accommodations.

  At the time Dr. Hayling first moved there, on the surface St. Augustine appeared to him to be one of the more tolerant cities in the South for Negroes. There were integrated neighborhoods, with Negro and white families living side by side; and more than half of Dr. Hayling’s dental patients were white. A popular dentist who preceded him had also been Negro, and residents were accustomed to being treated by a Negro dentist, rare for the time.

  But Dr. Hayling wasn’t satisfied with moving to town and opening a thriving practice. A former Air Force lieutenant known for his short temper when it came to matters of segregation, he became the advisor to the NAACP Youth Council, made up of adolescents and young adults, and he guided them on their quest to integrate the city’s restaurants and motels.