In late February of 1968, I left Quincy so that Tananarive and I could stay with Mother for a month in Miami. John was traveling so often that my doctor in Tallahassee worried about my isolation in Quincy, believing that if I went into labor when I was alone, I might not survive childbirth. The baby was scheduled to be born in April.
I was being treated by a new doctor in Miami, and he was not an honest man. Although I had a checkup the day before and the doctor told me everything was fine, this doctor lied to the hospital on Sunday, March 17, saying I had gone into premature labor. It may sound silly, but because my previous births had been through cesarean section and I was so involved in other things, I had no idea what labor was like. After I was admitted to the hospital, nurses kept coming into my room, asking “Did you have another one?” They wanted to time my contractions, but I really did not know what they were talking about. “Oh, you just missed it,” I kept saying, feeling afraid and foolish.
My hospitalization was so sudden that I had a hard time contacting John. The Miami doctor suggested that I have my tubes tied in light of my difficult pregnancies, and my husband needed to sign papers for this to happen. I also wanted him with me during our child’s birth. John arrived in Miami just as I was being taken into the operating room. Fortunately, we decided against having my tubes tied.
I had an emergency cesarean section at Baptist Hospital, and Johnita Patricia Due was born. This time, the baby was fine, despite the fact that the doctor had delivered her a month early! My blood pressure was very high before the surgery, and I experienced terrible vomiting, so after such a hard time, I was incredibly grateful to see my new baby girl, healthy and alive. I was told Johnita looked more like me than John, unlike our two previous children, but it was hard for me to tell. I was just happy she was alive.
As soon as I was well enough to leave Miami, Tananarive and I flew back home with two-week-old Johnita, where other family members were waiting to help take care of the baby. My aunt on my biological father’s side, Hattie Martin, sent her nineteen-year-old daughter, Shilda, to stay at the house and help me, as she had with Tananarive in 1966. My great-aunt Amy, my father’s aunt, also came from time to time to do my laundry and iron. Aunt Amy, like many other relatives, did not offer me much conversation, but in her own way she showed me she cared. I think my biological father’s family saw me as an oddity, the way many people in my home county did in the 1960s, but many of them were there for me when it mattered. I was recovering slowly, but I was happy to be back in my own home.
Finally, I thought, life was turning brighter.
Johnita, the new baby, had more than one godmother: Hers were Mrs. Susan Ausley and Mrs. Vivian Kelly, both of whom had been helpful during the voter registration campaign.
While John and I were celebrating the new addition to our family, the world outside took some terrible turns that did not give us much faith in what the future might hold for our children. On April 4, only the day after one of Dr. King’s most famous speeches—where he spoke of going to the “mountaintop” and seeing the “Promised Land”—one of our greatest fears was realized: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was shot to death on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. A white man named James Earl Ray was charged with his murder.
“Oh, my God. Oh, no. Oh, no,” I kept saying, hardly believing my eyes as I watched the television reports. President Kennedy’s assassination had been a shock in 1963, but Dr. King’s senseless death in 1968 hit me and John on a much deeper level. His death was not only the death of one man, in my mind, but the death of the dream all of us had shared.
Our phone began ringing off the hook as activists I had worked with during the Movement began to call. All of them sounded so angry: Is there any hope for this country? In major cities, as blacks tried to grapple with their feelings of rage and grief, riots broke out and buildings burned. On the nightly news, the whole country appeared to be in flames. The riots went on for ten days in more than a hundred cities, costing forty-six people their lives.6 I won’t mention his name, but I remember one young man I’d worked with calling me from Detroit, where looting was rampant. “Do you want some jewelry?” he asked me.
“No. You get out of there,” I told him quickly. “Just take care of yourself.”
I understood why people were rioting. After so much frustration and so many sacrifices, sometimes you feel as if you’re about to lose your mind, and it only takes one event to trigger violence. But I am not a believer in riots. As anguished as I felt, I knew that was not the answer.
What really made Dr. King’s death so hard on me was feeling helpless. I’d just had a major operation two weeks earlier, when Johnita was born, and there was nothing I could do. Atlanta was a five-hour drive from Quincy, and Dr. King’s funeral was going to be held there. I really wanted to attend the funeral out of respect for his family, to show them that I cared. I really agonized, because I wanted so much to be among the thousands of blacks I knew would be there to bury the great civil rights leader who had sacrificed his life trying to make the world better for others. But I was still too weak, and I could not go. John went to the funeral march and walked behind the mule-drawn casket in the endless sea of people that filled Atlanta’s streets. He could not get inside the doors of Ebenezer Baptist Church for the service because the church overflowed with mourners.
To this day, I regret that I could not be there.
Dr. King’s assassination made many activists feel more determined than ever to show this country’s racists that the murder of one leader would not stop our people’s fight for freedom. Even though I now had two young children, I was no exception.
The civil rights movement had taken many forms since I first got involved as a college student, from sit-ins to the jail-in to the Freedom Rides to voter registration to political empowerment, and now my focus was on economic empowerment. At the time of Dr. King’s death, he’d been in Memphis trying to resolve an ongoing sanitation workers’ strike and planning a Poor People’s Campaign. He was in a pessimistic mood at the end of his life. He had announced to his church in Atlanta that his Sunday sermon would be entitled “Why America May Go to Hell.”7 He never got the chance to preach that sermon. The assassination of Robert Kennedy exactly two months later, on June 4, was surreal and devastating.
In Memphis, black sanitation workers had staged a strike and launched demonstrations because Mayor Henry Loeb refused to recognize their nearly all-black local. Black workers were tired of white sanitation workers receiving favorable treatment, so 1,300 of them had left the job. A community boycott of downtown stores was also happening.8 Because Dr. King had died trying to help sanitation workers, the spotlight was on the problems of sanitation workers throughout the country.
In Florida, we had our own problem brewing with sanitation workers in St. Petersburg. The custom in St. Petersburg’s sanitation department had been for the blacks to ride on the trucks and physically gather the garbage while whites drove the trucks. Obviously, it was more pleasant to be a driver than a garbage handler—not to mention that driving was less demanding work, but the white drivers were paid more than the black garbage handlers. That was just one of many problems of discrimination the black workers faced.
In addition to his law practice, John was working for the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, which had been supportive of CORE and had Dr. King’s blessing, so they sent him to St. Petersburg to talk to the workers to convince them to join the union. John had been able to get a union representative from AFSCME to help him organize an integrated local union, but the city’s history of racial problems made John’s work an uphill battle. The public employees’ union was all-white, so blacks were suspicious of the union.
I went with John, bringing Tananarive and little Johnita, who was only a few months old. The union put John up in a very nice hotel in nearby Tampa, so our family stayed there at first. My reputation had spread to St. Petersburg, and when blacks heard I was staying with John, they ask
ed me to join their grassroots campaign. They wanted my help in organizing, speaking, and rallying the community for a sanitation workers’ strike—just like in Memphis. I sympathized with their cause, so I agreed.
As a result, John and I ended up on opposing sides of the issue. This was the first time this had happened so dramatically in the course of our marriage.
John and I still chuckle about it today. He was being put up in a fancy hotel, and I was brought to a simpler hotel for Negroes in St. Petersburg that served as a gathering place for community activists. The girls and I traveled back and forth between the accommodations so we could spend time with John, but the people of St. Petersburg made us feel very much at home. I think they felt particularly warmly toward me because I had come with my children, which showed them that I truly believed in what they were doing. All my needs were seen to, especially those that counted most: those of my children.
The only way we could ensure that blacks’ concerns would be listened to during the sanitation workers’ strike was to keep the trucks from completing their routes. We decided that volunteers—me included—would go to the sanitation headquarters before the trucks left early in the morning to block their way. Tananarive was only two, Johnita was practically a newborn, and John was busy on union business, so I needed a baby-sitter.
At 4:00 or 4:30 in the morning on the first day of our protest, I heard a knock at my hotel room door. Someone from the community had volunteered to baby-sit for me, and she was there right on time to do her job. I wish I knew the names of the people who volunteered for babysitting, but I do not. I do know they were just as dedicated as I was, in their own way. No one job was more important to me than another, because to me, there was no job more important than taking care of my two babies.
I was ready to go, trying to be quiet so I wouldn’t wake the children. As usual, I was neatly dressed, and I had already prepared contact numbers for the baby-sitter in case I was either killed or arrested. “Good luck, Mrs. Due,” the baby-sitter whispered in the darkness, and I went on my way to stop the garbage trucks.
Unfortunately, we did not have large crowds of volunteers to block the trucks, so we could not form a human wall. Instead, the handful of us who came before dawn did the only thing we could: We sat down on the hard asphalt in front of the trucks so that the drivers would have to run over us if they wanted to leave. Then we waited to see what would happen next. I knew from experience that blacks were not treated as human beings, so I realized these drivers might feel justified running over us.
Those white drivers were very angry. They were already annoyed about the complaints of the black sanitation workers who, in their minds, were trying to unjustly steal their jobs, but now they had to contend with blacks trying to keep them from working. The drivers started their trucks and began rolling toward us. As the huge trucks came closer to us, instead of slowing down, we heard roars from the engines. They were accelerating.
I sat like a stone. I closed my eyes, accepting that I might be about to die. I had already decided I’m doing this, and I may have to pay the consequences. I never could have done it otherwise. I could not afford to think about the reactions of Mother, or of John, or of the daughters who might never get to know their mother. Just as I’d felt when I was a student, I was ready to give my life.
If the truck drivers weren’t going to stop, I knew there was no way I could move in time. The drivers knew that, too. They wanted us to be certain we were about to be killed, because they raced right up to us—then stopped, their brakes screeching. Then they backed up and did it all over again, always racing and stopping on a dime. Eventually, feeling they had made their point, they drove around us and went to work.
The next day, another knock at my hotel room door came promptly at 4:00 A.M., and another baby-sitter came. Just like the day before, I went to sit in front of the garbage trucks.
This time, the police came, and I was arrested. This was my first arrest since the birth of my children. Although I knew they were in good hands, my thoughts were of them as I was taken to my jail cell. Still, while the other demonstrators were bonding out, I was firm: “No, no, no. I’m not going to bond out,” I said.
The jailers looked at me like I was crazy, but I later heard that a police officer who had worked in Tallahassee was present, and he recognized me. “She’s not joking,” he told his fellow officers. “She’s going to stay in jail.” He must have started rumors about the jail-in in my past, because after only a day, the jailer said, “You’re free to go.”
“But I didn’t pay the fine,” I said.
“Never mind that. Just go.”
At my trial, I was found guilty and charged $25. I guess they thought I wouldn’t refuse to pay such a small fine, but they were wrong. “I’m not going to pay any fine,” I said.
Once again, after I said I wouldn’t pay, I was told I could leave without paying. My attorney was James Sanderlin—a black lawyer who later became a judge—and I think he was as happy to be rid of me as the police and the court were. I believe everyone’s thinking was “Let’s get her out of town.”
No one wanted the publicity of a protestor’s extended jail stay, especially a mother with two small children. That would have been a public relations nightmare. I remained in St. Petersburg a while longer, and I decided to help John. I convinced the residents to talk to him about the union just so they could hear what he had to say. Eventually, the black sanitation workers decided to join AFSCME. To show their gratitude, the sanitation workers sang a song for the civil rights workers to the tune of “How Sweet It Is to Be Loved by You”: Thank you for the sore feet that you have given us, / Thank you for the hours that you have walked with us, / Thank you for singing with us, / Thank you for clapping with us, and thank you for working for freedom with us. 9 It was so good to see people happy. That time, John and I were the perfect team.
Our most difficult ordeals as a married civil rights couple were yet to come.
Twenty-Eight
TANANARIVE DUE
“To give to thy friend is not to cast away, it is to store for the future.”
—Swahili proverb
In the 1946 Frank Capra Christmas classic It’s a Wonderful Life, a man played by Jimmy Stewart learns how much his presence has meant to his quaint little town of Bedford Falls: first because an angel allows him to see how the town would have deteriorated without his selfless presence, and then when all his friends and neighbors, rich and poor (even a black woman!), pour into his living room to give him money to pull him out of a financial mess, all of them singing “Hark the Herald Angels Sing.” It’s a favorite moment in film for Americans.
On a Monday night in October 1997, my father had a similar moment of enlightenment in the quaint little town of Miami, Florida, where his selfless presence was celebrated at a meeting at the Joseph Caleb Center in Miami’s inner-city in northwest Dade County. Like the Jimmy Stewart character in It’s a Wonderful Life, my father was feeling gloomy when he had his glimpse into the community’s heart. He was not at the meeting by choice. Also like the movie character, an unexpected turn had left him feeling mounting desperation.
For seven years my father had served as director of the Office of Black Affairs, and for seventeen years as program officer of the Community Relations Board of Miami-Dade County. From that post—and in his years with Legal Services, the Economic Opportunity Program Inc. (EOPI), and the NAACP—he had traversed the county and state from end to end, forging the next phase of the civil rights work he’d begun as a young man in law school. He’d worked on tenants’ rights, poverty programs, school desegregation, legal aid, Haitian amnesty, police accountability, and juvenile justice. In 1995, under the auspices of the Black Affairs Advisory Board, he’d helped mobilize community pressure to free more than 200 Haitian children being held at the Guantanamo Bay naval camp, one of the things he has told me he is most proud of. His office’s community advisory committee included a vocal member—my mother—so my parents were doing
what they have always done in more than thirty years of life together as civil rights activists and community advocates. They were working for change in the best ways they knew how.
In 1997, in the wake of budget problems, the mayor was cutting jobs. My parents worried in the weeks after the rumors of cutbacks began circulating, but I was never seriously concerned. My father was John Due. He’d been out on the streets trying to ease the lives of people in the county since I could remember, braving riots, frustration, and bureaucracy. Even if the county shuffled him to a new position, I was certain his bosses would take care of my father after he’d spent twenty-five years trying to keep a lid on such an emotionally volatile place.
I was wrong. Dad was among 158 people who received pink slips. No new job had been offered to him. Two years before retirement, it seemed, my father was being put out to pasture. The new mayor of Dade County, Alex Penelas, was in his thirties, one of my peers. Also, newer voices from different communities were vying for recognition, some of whom had not lived in Miami during the 1980 riots and had no memory of a time, some years earlier, when black people had to carry passes to work on Miami Beach—or, like my father, were constantly followed by police when they crossed the causeway. Miami is a city of newcomers who bring memories of their histories from other places, which gives the region both its amazing vitality and a kind of collective community amnesia. I realized my father was being forgotten by the county he and my mother had helped build.
Sometimes bad news dazes me, leaving me feeling paralyzed. That had happened in the wake of Hurricane Andrew in 1992, when it took me two full days to pull myself away from the Herald’s newsroom to visit my parents, aunt, and grandmother in the hurricane-torn area of Southwest Dade and bring them a hot meal. It happened again when I heard about my father’s pink slip in 1997. I felt helpless to do anything. I was a reporter dancing that ambiguous line of trying to observe and report the news while my family was busily making news. I’d had to grow accustomed to this role at the newspaper, with coworkers on the news desk often asking me for my parents’ telephone number when they needed comments for their stories. (Once, during my earliest days as an intern at one of the Herald’s suburban bureaus, I quoted my own father in a story about the NAACP, in a moment of supreme awkwardness and understaffing. It only happened once, and yet it seemed to be the story of my life.)
Freedom in the Family Page 41
