Freedom in the Family

by Tananarive Due

  After all of the outrages suffered by blacks in riot-torn Dade County for so many years, this intrusion was the final outrage, the last indecency.

  The hurricane itself had already brought its own injustices. My parents and NAACP observers believed white neighborhoods like affluent Country Walk were receiving more attention than equally battered poor black areas in Goulds, Naranja, West Perrine, and Richmond Heights. It was already painfully clear to my parents that while insurance claims could repair the damage to their waterfront home, there were so many uninsured and under-insured poorer families—often black families—who would never fully recover.

  All that fueled the anger and indignation my mother battered those police officers with at her front gate that night. Here, in the midst of this chaos, in a city with a history like Miami’s, a pack of police officers would descend upon her home simply because of a vague coincidence—and because she and all who lived there were black.

  Black and white. Yet again. And again. And again.

  As the lieutenant’s radio squawked that night, my mother learned that the report of the stolen machine guns had been embellished by imagination, like so many other strange myths that had grown out of the hurricane. The theft had been thirty-six hours before, not that night, as the officers believed. The van’s warm hood was irrelevant, proving nothing.

  Eventually, with nothing to go on and an obstacle in their path, the police left. The following day, representatives from Metro–Dade Police visited my parents’ house to make an embarrassed formal apology. They also tried to explain the circumstances.

  The Florida Highway patrolmen who had surrounded my parents’ house that night were not from Dade County at all. They’d been recent arrivals from Orlando, brought in because help was so sorely needed. They did not know to respect the official county car parked near the van, or that John Due, the man they believed was harboring gun thieves in his home, was a respected civil rights attorney and the director of Dade County’s Office of Black Affairs. They did not know that his eldest daughter was a reporter for the Miami Herald, the city’s daily newspaper.

  And they did not know that Patricia Stephens Due, the woman who stood in their overwhelming spotlight that night in a short, sheer slip as though she wore a bulletproof vest, had fortified her soul by standing unarmed against guns and worse threats long ago, during the era when anyone bold and black was begging for harm, very nearly expecting it.

  My mother had never flinched before, and she sure wasn’t about to start.

  Nineteen

  PATRICIA STEPHENS DUE

  “I am not truly free if I am taking away someone else’s freedom, just as surely as I am not free when my freedom is taken from me. The oppressed and the oppressor alike are robbed of freedom.”

  —Nelson Mandela

  If Tallahassee’s white power structure expected me to be silenced because I was no longer enrolled as a student at FAMU, they were sorely wrong. If anything, now I had more time to dedicate to the civil rights struggle. I turned my attention to an area that was potentially much more powerful than a movie theater’s segregation policies: voter registration.

  By the end of 1963, all over the country, civil rights activists’ agenda was shifting from public facilities to voter registration. The presidential election was coming up in the fall of 1964. Although we didn’t know it at the time, President Johnson would be running against a reactionary Republican candidate, Barry Goldwater, who, like Alabama Governor George Wallace, would ride the backlash against civil rights. I had a much broader role throughout all of northern Florida, not just in Tallahassee, because I had been named a CORE field secretary. I was now on CORE’s staff, not simply a volunteer. I have been told I was one of the first female field secretaries in the organization’s history—another was Mary Hamilton, a fiery speaker who had been involved with the freedom rides and came to stay with John and me in Tallahassee when she was needed—but I never gave much consideration to the fact that I was a woman. Society wasn’t discriminating against me because I was a woman. Society never saw past my skin color. I saw myself as a Negro, period.

  CORE was launching a voter registration drive in North Florida, and I was named project director. I wanted to base my headquarters in Gadsden County, where the majority of the population was Negro. After years away from the county of my birth, I was finally back home in Gadsden County, but I did not receive a very warm welcome when I returned, even from blood relatives and some people who had known me since I was a child. By then, after reading my name in the newspapers since 1960, many people were afraid to be seen talking to me. When I asked them about providing me with housing or office space for the voting project, they said absolutely not. No one wanted to be associated with me.

  In the beginning, the only person who reached out to me was a former elementary-school teacher, Mrs. Dorothy Chandler Jones. Mrs. Jones, who was still teaching in 1963, also ran a grocery store on the property beside her well-kept house in St. Hebron, outside of Quincy. Mrs. Jones had been a friend of Mother’s for years. She was raising her fourteen-year-old daughter, Mary Lee, alone after her husband’s death. She divided her time between being a mother, teaching, her church activities, and keeping alive the tradition of Community Grocery, the tiny grocery store her husband had opened in the 1950s. I knew Mrs. Jones’s home very well because Mother had sent me to her house for piano lessons when I was young. She had a large property, an acre or more, and I can still see myself climbing the steps to her house, my hair in ribbons, wearing my neatest dress, with little ankle socks. She spanked my hands whenever I hit the wrong note, although I rarely gave her reason to. Those days felt very far away by 1963.

  When I came back to Mrs. Jones’s house to tell her what I needed, she invited me right inside. I sat at her kitchen table with a man she’d invited to meet me, Rev. D. H. Jamison, who first provided the contact names in several counties of the ministers and community leaders who would be crucial to help initiate a massive voter education drive in North Florida, people like Rev. James Crutcher in Quincy and Mr. E. K. Bass in Suwannee County. I can’t express what a godsend Mrs. Jones was at that time. She let me sleep at her house, giving up her own master bedroom and bathroom to make me comfortable. She also allowed me to bring my dogs, Scout and Freedom, to stay in her backyard. I will never forget that kindness and bravery.

  “Some of my neighbors talked to me and said, ‘What you trying to do? Get hurt?’ I said, ‘I’m just trying to make things better for everybody,’ ” Mrs. Jones recalled when I interviewed her at that same house more than thirty years later. (During a later interview with her when Tananarive was present, in 1996, Mrs. Jones was recovering from a stroke, speaking in a painstaking way, often frustrated when she could not express herself as clearly as she wanted. She was as tenacious about regaining her powers of speech as she has always been about everything else. As a young woman, she had worked in tobacco fields and taught school to put herself through college, attending classes only in the summers. It took her many, many years, but she finally got her degree. Likewise, in only a few short months since her stroke at the age of eighty, Mrs. Jones had worked hard enough to make herself understood.)

  “Some of the neighbors would say, ‘Well, we’re getting on all right. We don’t need anybody coming here trying to start something.’ That’s what they’d say—start something,” Mrs. Jones said, still looking amazed at the silliness of her neighbors’ words. “I’d say, ‘We need to start something.’ ”1 True to that belief, Mrs. Jones later took part in a demonstration at Quincy’s Leaf Theater, standing outside in plain sight of everyone in the small town.

  She caught grief at her workplace. Her principal called her in to explain why she was being seen demonstrating against the theater, which only allowed Negroes to sit in the balcony, and why she was allowing civil rights workers, both Negro and white, to stay at her house. “My principal told me, ‘We heard you’re letting white folks stay in your house—white people.’ I said I’d let stay th
ere who I wanted to stay, and he didn’t have anything to do with it,” Mrs. Jones says. “And if he could do anything about it, he could do it. If he wanted to get taken to court, it’s all right with me.” She told her principal she dared the school superintendent to come to her classroom to talk to her himself if he had problems with her involvement. “And the next time [the superintendent] came, he passed by my room and looked the other way,” Mrs. Jones says.

  As the registration drive escalated, Mrs. Jones woke up one morning to realize that someone had burned a cross in front of her house, a common scare tactic in the South. Her neighbors were terrified, but not Mrs. Jones. “It didn’t frighten me. In the Bible, fear is mentioned 365 times—Do not fear—and that has always gone with me. I don’t fear. I’m not afraid of rattlesnakes. I’m not afraid,” she says.

  But Mrs. Jones’s daughter, fourteen-year-old Mary Lee, had fears. Because they had a grocery store, Mary Lee didn’t worry about her mother losing her teaching job, but she worried about other things, like having crosses burned in her yard. And whether or not a racist might run me or her mother off the road one dark night while we were on our way home from a civil rights meeting. But aside from her fears, Mary Lee didn’t feel a personal connection to the Movement. When her mother took her to mass meetings, she often curled up and fell asleep on the church benches. The Movement was not about her, she believed. She was oblivious to its impact on her.

  Not long afterward, Mary Lee would learn that her mother’s involvement was very personal. In high school, she got a memorable taste of racism. When Mary Lee was in eleventh grade, her mother insisted on signing her up for a new option called “Freedom of Choice,” where Mary Lee could choose any school to attend—Negro or white. “My mom was determined I was going to go to the ‘white’ high school, because she wanted to see what they were getting that we weren’t getting,” says Mary Lee, who is today Mary Lee Blount and has two adult children of her own. Mary Lee wasn’t enthusiastic about integrating Quincy High School, but she agreed.

  She hated the experience, she says. She and the handful of other Negro students felt completely isolated. Younger white children who tried to talk to her on the school bus were chastised by their older brothers and sisters, so no one would talk to her. At worst, the other whites at school were hostile. At best, they might smile at her, but that was all. The entire auditorium stirred with resentment and disbelief when teachers inducted her into the National Honor Society. The school staged a private prom at a country club instead of holding the prom at the school as usual, purposely excluding the Negro students. “It helped me learn myself and know myself,” Mary Lee says of the experience. “It helped me be all I could be. I became a better student. I had to study my lessons, because I felt if I didn’t they were looking for any reason to knock me down and say, ‘Oh, she’s mediocre.’ So I really learned independence.”2

  Mrs. Jones, Mary Lee’s mother, can no longer live on her own, so she lives in Tallahassee with Mary Lee, an accountant and university instructor of accounting and taxation. I will never forget the help she gave me, and I know the Movement took a toll on their family.

  Even after I enlisted Mrs. Jones as an ally in the voter registration campaign, I knew I needed another foot soldier to help me. Luckily, I also knew the right person to ask.

  Judy Benninger was about to leave the University of Florida after losing her scholarship and being placed on academic probation because of her involvement in the Tallahassee theater demonstrations. I’d worked with Judy long enough to realize that she had the drive and organizational skills to be a useful ally. She became the assistant secretary for what we called the “Big Bend Voter Education Campaign.” In Tallahassee, our steering committee included Dr. James Hudson from FAMU, a Negro school principal named Sam Hunter, and white couples George and Clifton Lewis and James and Lillian Shaw. Mrs. Lewis allowed us to use her Tallahassee apartment as a temporary office. Then we got help from Susan Ausley, a white woman married to a prominent attorney, John Ausley. Mrs. Ausley intervened when we had trouble getting a city permit to rewire an old building we would use in Frenchtown.

  Our goal was to register as many new Negro voters as possible in Gadsden and Leon Counties. At the time, fewer than half of Leon County’s 14,000 eligible Negro voters were registered, and Negroes made up 33 percent of the population in 1960.3 Gadsden County was even worse. Fewer than 500 Negroes were registered there, a county where their population of 24,000 outnumbered the 17,000 whites!4

  Why was Negro voter participation so limited? While it appeared that Negroes in Florida were free to vote, a history of intimidation had prevented many from registering. Florida had a poll tax until 1937, which had prevented many Negroes from voting, and after that, Negroes complained about threats when they tried to vote. Certainly, quite a few wondered if voting would make any difference, since Florida’s one-party Democratic machinery was all white and could effectively eliminate Negro participation in primary elections.5 Everything was stacked against us, which is why the charges of voter discrimination in Florida, even during the 2000 presidential election, were particularly painful to me—and rang so true.

  The task before us in 1964 was obvious, but before we could go to the community with our cause, Judy and I had to work on a few social differences. I very much agreed with CORE’s interracial strategy, which held that our efforts would be more effective if whites and Negroes worked together. But as a white woman with only limited contact with Negroes throughout her life between Oklahoma, Alabama, and Gainesville, Florida, Judy had a lot to learn about how to approach Negroes. Many of our meetings were held in churches, for example, and I knew that her casual way of dressing would turn off many potential voters and activists. The clothes I considered casual wear, like jeans and a blouse, were what Judy considered her “dress-up” clothes. She couldn’t go to a Negro church dressed like that.

  Negroes, especially in that era, were very conservative in appearance and public behavior, which was a big part of our problem as civil rights activists. When we asked Negroes to break the law, or to draw attention to themselves publicly, we were asking them to break deep social taboos. At the very least, the people we approached had to understand that we were not so different from them. In terms of religion, Judy considered herself a “nonbeliever,” so she did not attend church. When she visited Negro churches with me, every single custom was foreign to her. She had to learn to wear a dressy dress, and she had to learn to address people she did not know by their courtesy titles, not their first names, which was more formal than she was used to. It was a cultural learning experience for both of us.

  Obviously, Negroes and whites would have to learn to work together if we were going to set any kind of example for the community at large, and I think interracial involvement was a very important part of the civil rights movement. It was also much more dangerous because of the extra attention we drew to ourselves. Our project started getting in trouble right away, when we’d barely had a chance to start.

  In January of 1964, John and I brought Judy, FAMU student Julius Hamilton, and white students Rosemary Dudley and Dennis Flood to a Negro-owned tavern, the 40 Club, in a town between Quincy and Tallahassee appropriately named Midway. The place was really bustling. There must have been at least a couple of hundred people there, which made it the perfect place to get the word out on voter registration. If you wanted to reach the people, you had to go where the people congregated, and it wasn’t always at church. The tavern’s owner was a distant relative of mine, so I asked if we could go inside to make an announcement encouraging people to vote. I’m sure he looked at us with distrust—we were two white women, one white man, one Negro woman, and two Negro men—but he told us we could come in. We all sat down, and at a lull in the music, we were told we could make our announcement. Julius began making his pitch for Gadsden County voters.

  In no time, a sheriff’s deputy showed up. Dennis managed to slip outside, but Judy, Rosemary, and Julius were arrested. (Dennis
was arrested later, when he came to visit the others at jail.) John and I were the only two in the group who weren’t arrested, and we speculated that it might have been because I was from Gadsden County and rumored to be remotely related to the sheriff through blood. More likely, it was because the police knew me by reputation, and no one wanted the extra publicity that would be brought by my arrest and an extended jail stay similar to the Tallahassee jail-in. The others were carted off to jail, which was very demoralizing for our group. When they asked why they were being arrested, the deputy replied, “Being in the wrong place.”6 They were held for three days without bond before they were charged with trespassing.

  In a newspaper story about the incident, Sheriff Otho Edwards was quoted as saying there was “no need” for a voter registration drive in Gadsden County because “the county had no restrictions against Negroes registering to vote.”7 That was laughable, considering the stir we caused just by bringing up the issue, not to mention that 94 percent of Negroes were not registered. Newspapers also claimed that the proprietor asked us not to come inside, which simply wasn’t true. I believe either the proprietor or someone else inside the tavern panicked and called the police so they wouldn’t be associated with us. That’s how fearful people were. But I never would have thrust our group upon an unwilling party. The way it was portrayed, anyone would have thought we had barged in uninvited and caused a disturbance, and I didn’t operate that way, not unless it was a planned demonstration.

  So, Judy got her education very quickly when it came to the nature of our work. When I interviewed her in 1990, she recalled a similar incident, when we decided we wanted a decent meal while we distributed flyers encouraging people to vote, so we went to a Negro restaurant in Quincy, the Fountainette, owned by someone I knew. The owner allowed us in, but the police showed up and arrested Judy for trespassing. It seemed that this happened everywhere we went.