I’ve had many occasions to reflect upon that young man’s sacrifice. One election day more than a year after the interview, my telephone rang early, waking me. “Good morning, darling. I hope you weren’t asleep, but I wanted to catch you before you left for work. It’s election day. Don’t forget.” It was my mother’s voice.
“Election day? For what?” I mumbled.
“Don’t you read your own paper? For one thing, the mayor is trying to change the name of the county. There are a couple of other items, too.”
Still only half awake, my mind was on anything but an election. By then, I’d returned to my job as a newspaper reporter because I needed an income, and I had a deadline that day. “Mom, I don’t have time to vote today. I have an assignment this morning, and then—”
I didn’t finish, but I didn’t have to. “I don’t believe you,” my mother said. She couldn’t have sounded more hurt and angry if I’d slapped her.
“I don’t have an opinion about that name-change thing. And I don’t even know what else is on the ballot.”
“That’s why you read,” my mother said, then she was silent. She is not an inarticulate woman, but it seemed she had to search for words because she was shocked by my response. To her, the question Why should I vote? was like Why should I breathe? On that day, though, I was pretty sure my sisters in Dallas and New York weren’t headed for the polls, either. We all vote religiously in presidential or mayoral elections, but the occasional local election goes unnoticed because of busy schedules.
“Of course you vote,” my mother said. “I really can’t believe this, from you of all people. I thought you understood by now how important this is.”
I was waking up. I sighed. “Mom, of course I understand how important my choice to vote is. That choice is sacred to me.” Choice? I could almost read my mother’s mind, her silence was so loud. “And I understand that people sacrificed their lives so I could voice my opinion. In this case, I don’t have one. This is just a little local thing. Most people haven’t even heard about it.”
“Yes, the newspaper is expecting a five percent turnout, and that’s all the more reason for you to vote. That’s all I have to say about this. I have to go.”
We both hung up the phone feeling frustrated, at an impasse. I knew my mother was profoundly disappointed to hear her daughter sound like some insensitive person who didn’t understand where she had come from. I hated to prick my mother’s pain, but I’d longed to be honest about my feelings, too. I wasn’t a deadbeat. I voted and I voted often. Was it really shirking the responsibility of my race to miss one election?
Regardless, I got up earlier than planned, dug through my wallet for my voter registration card, and drove to the nearly deserted polling place about two miles from my home. It was a ghost town. The staff members were so glad to see me, they smiled as if I’d just brought them breakfast. At that moment, I was glad I was there.
I hadn’t gone just to avoid another argument with my mother. I hadn’t gone even because I had any opinion whatsoever on whether Dade County changed its name to Miami-Dade County.
In the end, maybe I’d gone because of the interview with Calvin Bess’s father. I thought about that visit, when he was forced to recall the death of a bright young man who never had the opportunity to grow up, meet his own son, finish his promising college education, or live the life his parents had dreamed for him.
Calvin’s father had told us how he felt on election days when neighbors who had known his child since he was a boy, and knew how he had died, still refused to walk the simple distance to a nearby church to cast their votes, even when it was time to choose a president. He said he had one neighbor who was barely literate and yet voted every single time, but unfortunately he was the exception: There’s other guys sitting around there saying, “Ain’t gon’ do no good.” It makes me feel bad, angry. I say, “Hey, I had a son who gave his life just for this purpose, to get people like you involved in voting.” It goes in one ear and out the other. I hate to call them ignorant, but what more can you say?
I couldn’t remember Calvin Bess and neglect to vote that day.
In November 1996, two weeks after our interview with Calvin Bess’s family, an unforgettable opportunity came to Mom and me: a chance to interview Stokely Carmichael, the influential black nationalist and former Black Panther who popularized the phrase “Black Power.” Since Calvin Bess had been working for Stokely Carmichael’s SNCC at the time of his death, the well-known activist had visited Calvin’s family often at their modest Tallahassee home in the following years. We’d hoped to have the chance to talk to him about Calvin, and now we did. He was in Miami to visit his mother, Mabel Carmichael, and to take part in a public tribute, and he was gracious enough to agree to an interview when my mother called.
It was November 5. Election day. I drove to South Dade to interview Kwame Turé, a.k.a. Stokely Carmichael.
Mom had heard that he was ill. His sickness, we learned, was prostate cancer. He walked and sat very gingerly, and I couldn’t help noticing how swollen his bare ankles and feet were. Yet he had a beautiful smile that enlivened his entire face, showcasing a row of bright teeth against his clay-brown skin. He spoke very properly, in a careful West Indian manner, and he was not nearly as intimidating as I had expected from a revolutionary. He seemed, in fact, like a man who could sit and listen very patiently to the arguments of someone with whom he disagreed vehemently.
On that day, even more than other days, I felt the very strong sense of recording a fleeting bit of history. I didn’t know how much longer Kwame Turé had left to live, but I did know how serious prostate cancer is, I knew it was undetected for some time, and I knew his feet were swollen. I did not believe he would live to see this book published.
I was every bit the journalist that day, helping Mom set up the video cameras, testing the microphone on our tape recorder, interviewing him in very much the same way I’ve interviewed countless other people. I listened with interest, not sorrow or mortification, as he described being in a Montgomery, Alabama, hotel on the day of an SNCC march in Montgomery in 1965, when he could see the horse-mounted police with their batons waiting for marchers. The marchers could not see the police, but Turé could see them from his fifth-floor vantage point. When he tried to run downstairs to warn the marchers, he found he’d been locked inside the hotel.
He told the story best in his own words: “Julian Bond was then our communicating secretary in Atlanta, so I had to call him, and I was giving Julian a blow-by-blow description of the brutality I was seeing before my very eyes. I mean, they were brutal. I’ve seen a lot of brutality in my life, but they trampled kids on horses, they had bullwhips, they had batons, they rode into the crowd and smashed them down. I mean, the horses were coming fast, at galloping speeds. So I was giving a blow-by-blow description. They sent a man from the telephone company, directly opposite me, and he began to climb the telephone pole. I told Julian, ‘OK, I’d better give it to you fast, because they’re getting ready to disconnect the phone, you know.’ And of course, the man did disconnect the phone. Since I couldn’t get out because they had locked the door, I had to stay by the window and see all this brutality, and there’s nothing worse than witnessing it when you yourself cannot participate in it.… That evening, I went off and they had to send me out of Montgomery. I went off. I went off.”3
After Turé described this scene, Mom began to cough and ended up needing a glass of water and excusing herself to go to the bathroom. When Mom returned, she said she’d been more caught up in his story of brutality than she thought. “The flashbacks,” she said. There were tears in her eyes, and it was only then that I understood that her emotions had provoked the coughing bout, not simply her allergies or her asthma. She had been drawn in. She told me later she felt as though she’d been in that hotel room with him, seeing everything he was seeing through his eyes.
We asked Turé why he visited the Bess family for so many years after Calvin died. He explained t
hat SNCC, which Calvin was working for at the time he died (and which Turé headed), was a poor organization. There were many others who died like Calvin, he said, and the visits were the least he could do. “There were many. We lost many people, so it wasn’t unusual at all,” he said with his gentle, plainspoken eloquence. “He was a comrade who had died, so we had a responsibility. Of course, we were poor, and we were so poor we couldn’t even feed the families of our dead comrades, you know. So, we couldn’t do anything for them, but at least we had a responsibility to visit them to let them know that, if nobody else knew, we knew the death was not in vain. We were aware of the sacrifices made, and grateful for those sacrifices made. And thankful to the family for having produced him.”
Simply put, he was a man who believed in doing what should be done. That, I think, was the quiet mark of his life. After the interview, I presented Turé with a copy of my first novel, The Between. Exactly two years later, to the month, he was dead.
“Keep writing that history,” he said to me that day.
I will, I told him. Oh yes, I will.
Twenty-Seven
PATRICIA STEPHENS DUE
“An elephant doesn’t die because of one broken rib.”
—Tsonga proverb
A month after our baby died in 1967, while I was still recovering both emotionally and physically, I was contacted by a white woman in Miami, Nancy Adams. She asked me to get involved with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, which was at the forefront of the school desegregation movement in Leon County, under a plan called “Freedom of Choice.” It was just the thing I needed to help pull myself out of my grief after such a sudden, unexpected loss. Under the new Freedom of Choice plan, Negro students could choose to attend white schools that had formerly been segregated, and we wanted to get the word out. Thirteen years after the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court ruling, students in northern Florida could finally attend integrated schools. But students had only thirty days to submit their choices to their school system.
I volunteered to help, but I had a great deal of difficulty setting up any kind of organized movement. In some ways, what happened during that period was a microcosm of what was going on in the civil rights movement around the country by 1967. The problems were clear in a frustrated letter I wrote to the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund on May 16, 1967:
The Leon County Community is very difficult to organize for several reasons. The major reason is that many potential leaders are employed by the state and others are dependent on whites in one way or another. Secondly, there is and has been for the past ten years a lack of communication among Negro groups in the community. Also, there is considerable rivalry and jealousy within groups, making it difficult for them to function effectively.… The lack of cooperation between the NAACP and the Educational Improvement Committee of the NAACP made it twice as difficult to operate; one would think they were separate groups.1
I did my best. Working out of John’s office because I had trouble obtaining an office of my own, I contacted volunteers and we scheduled meetings in twenty sections of Leon County. We handed out kits with fact sheets, leaders’ guides, booklets, and extra Freedom of Choice forms. After the meetings, we canvassed door to door. Most of our volunteers were high school and junior high school students. We were effective, but I hated the feeling that we were working against ourselves. All over the country, to tell the truth, the Movement seemed to be falling apart.
The strings that had bound us together in the first place had not always been strong. I thought too many leaders were blinded by their allegiance to their organizations instead of really keeping their “eyes on the prize.” I met the great NAACP leader Ruby Hurley once. I’d heard rumors that she couldn’t stand me, and that she had said so to others. When I met her in person, however, much to her apparent amazement, we liked each other. Hurley represented the NAACP and I represented CORE, so I guess she had considered me an upstart and a rival. I never felt that kind of rivalry.
I was an NAACP Youth Council adviser myself in Tallahassee at one point, and I had to try to learn to maneuver around organizational politics. I remember being involved in an activity that was not very successful once—I honestly can’t remember what it was—and I was quoted in the newspaper as an NAACP Youth Council Advisor. Soon afterward, the NAACP national director, who was very irate, contacted me. Roy Wilkins told me that there were very specific guidelines on approval for any event to be sanctioned by the NAACP, and I should never use that organization’s name without prior approval. Okay, I said. Perhaps I’ve never been very good at following rules, and I could understand his concern. So the next time I was involved in a big event, since I didn’t have time to go through all of the NAACP channels, I said I was representing CORE. This time, the event was a huge success, and once again I was contacted by Roy Wilkins. This time he wanted to know why I hadn’t given the NAACP credit.
As for me, I didn’t care who got credit, as long as the job got done. But more and more, it seemed to me it did not.
CORE had been in disarray since the departure of James Farmer in 1966, with much of the membership drifting away because of budget problems and infighting over racial and political ideology.2 The Black Panther Party had also been founded in 1966 by Huey Newton in Oakland, California, and there was growing strife among Negroes—or “blacks,” as we had begun calling ourselves—in the civil rights movement. By 1968, the Movement had firmly splintered off behind the “Black Power” slogan popularized by Stokely Carmichael in 1966, espousing black nationalism. Whites had held prominent positions in earlier stages of the Movement, and many Negro leaders had grown to resent white involvement. By 1968, CORE’s new director, Roy Innis, announced that black separatism was his organization’s goal. “Separatism is a necessary and pragmatic way of organizing two distinct and separate races of people,” Innis said in a press release. “When we have control of our self-destiny, then we can talk about integration.”3
I didn’t realize everything that was going on inside CORE until after the fact. I met Roy Innis only once or twice, so I never got to know him or his ideology very well. Personally, I thought it was about time for blacks to begin to love themselves more, and I liked the idea of “Black is Beautiful.” Some people may have misunderstood what the “Black Power” cry was all about. It had to be dramatized that way for black people to finally like themselves for who they were. We did not like ourselves, so “Black Power” and “Black is Beautiful” were a natural progression to raising our consciousness. On the other hand, I didn’t feel the need to reject any whites who were working with me. “Black is Beautiful” did not mean white was bad, and “Black Power” meant it was time for us to take charge of our own destiny. I thought it was a good thing.
Some whites did not agree and felt threatened, and some whites were ousted, just as Jim Robinson had been ousted from CORE years earlier. I think because they were feeling rejected, a lot of white activists began to desert the Movement to protest the Vietnam War and to support the Women’s Movement. I resented this, believing that if whites were truly dedicated to our cause, they should be willing to remain, even if there was some hostility toward them, just as blacks had been forced to tolerate hostility from white society for so long.
Now that the heyday of CORE and SNCC had passed, and black nationalism was gathering momentum, Dr. King and those in the more moderate SCLC found themselves pushed more and more to the side. Dr. King did not believe in black separatism, and he still firmly espoused nonviolence. He had also grown more committed to opposing the Vietnam War, even though some civil rights allies warned him that it would alienate him and the SCLC from President Johnson and the organization’s donors.4 Because of that war, Dr. King eventually opposed President Johnson’s 1968 presidential candidacy, despite everything President Johnson had done for the cause of civil rights.5 I thought Dr. King was putting too much emphasis on the Vietnam War. We had so much to worry about at home, I couldn’t understand why Dr. King would focus so much o
f his energy on the war. I know many other activists at the time felt the same way.
On the surface, despite many changes, so much remained the same. There can be a big difference between laws on paper and laws in practice. Priscilla and I had already learned that the hard way—when we tried to order food in 1966 and the waitress threatened to hit us with a chair—but it was an ongoing lesson for me and John in the late 1960s.
We had a favorite seafood restaurant in Leon County near Tallahassee, St. Mark’s, which had very good food. We would have eaten there often, except that we never knew how we would be treated and John decided he didn’t want to bring his family there anymore. He couldn’t feel relaxed with all of the stares and angry muttered comments from racist customers. It’s one thing to face that kind of stress without a family, but it’s different when a child is present. If someone had tried to act crazy then—either by trying to hurt me or Tananarive in John’s presence—John knew he might not stay in control of himself. So we stayed away.
Despite our new civil rights laws, discrimination and violence against blacks was still very much a part of life.
For me, 1968 began with yet another trying pregnancy, very soon after losing my day-old daughter—perhaps too soon. We lived in Quincy, where John was a labor union organizer and had a law practice, although he was still traveling a great deal. I spent much of my time alone with two-year-old Tananarive, which was becoming an all-too-familiar story.
Freedom in the Family Page 40
