Freedom in the Family

by Tananarive Due

  With that, we were on our way. When we arrived, the black cabbie who drove us from the airport was very enthusiastic. “Somebody better stand up and say something,” he said.

  I could hardly believe the scene waiting for me and John when we arrived at the state capitol. A huge crowd had amassed in a lobby area, made up of local residents, activists, and students from Florida A&M University and local high schools. Some people were carrying picket signs, and protesters sang “We Shall Overcome.” A pack of reporters was also there to document it. There were so many people, we could hardly squeeze inside. Instead of being in Tallahassee in the year 2000, I felt as if I was back in Tallahassee in 1960 or 1963. I could feel a powerful, familiar charge in the air.

  When we arrived, Sen. Meek and Rep. Hill were conducting a press conference. Another black legislator from Miami, Rep. James Bush, noticed that we had come. “John Due and Mrs. Patricia Due are here!” he said, waving us to the front of the crowd. “Mrs. Due has been to jail fighting for civil rights. Mrs. Due, come say a few words.”

  I had not planned to make a speech, and I was tired from our sudden trip, but the crowd gave me energy. As I walked forward, people began to clap. I looked at their young, encouraging faces—so many of them looked like children—and I could hardly believe I had been their age when I took part in my first sit-in, when my life changed forever.

  “I’m so happy to be here,” I said, “because I’m proud to see Senator Meek and Representative Hill carry on the second generation. I spent forty-nine days in jail in 1960 for sitting-in at a Woolworth lunch counter. You see I’m wearing these dark glasses. Well, it’s because a police officer hit me in the face with tear gas while I was taking part in a peaceful march from FAMU’s campus. As I look at you all today, I am so proud, and at the same time I can hardly believe we’re still here trying to fight for the same things. We’re still trying to fight for dignity as black people.”

  Soon afterward, I was invited by U.S. Rep. Carrie Meek, who was also in Tallahassee, to speak again at a meeting in a nearby upstairs conference room, which was also packed. Again, I told my story. I didn’t notice it at the time, but I was told later that Sen. Kendrick Meek was visibly emotionally affected and that Rep. Tony Hill was in tears as they heard me speak. I was nearly in tears myself, but not from sadness. Not from hopelessness. As I stood in that hot, crowded room of people of all ages who had faced arrest and discomfort for the sake of their beliefs and I told them about the history of our collective struggle, I felt absolutely free.

  That feeling of liberation was multiplied many times over only two months later, on March 7, 2000, when Tallahassee was the site of the largest protest march in the state’s history.

  The march was such a success because of the efforts of people throughout the state. John did his part, too. Weeks after the sit-in, John helped build a coalition between Monica Russo, president of the Service Employees International Union 1199 of Florida, and Miami-Dade NAACP chairman Leroy Thompson to sponsor a “Jobs with Justice” Task Force, supporting low-income workers to achieve a living wage and exercise their right to organize. Sen. Meek and Rep. Hill then asked Jobs with Justice to help them mobilize a statewide march on Tallahassee, in conjunction with the Florida State Conference of NAACP branches. John asked Dorothy Thompson of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) to organize the twenty-three buses of marchers from Miami, and other leaders statewide worked to bring people to the state capital.

  John and I drove to Tallahassee, spending the night in Tallahassee at Mary Lee Blount’s house with her and her mother, Mrs. Dorothy Jones, who had a cross burned in her yard in the 1960s after she gave me shelter in Quincy. Tuesday morning, John and I set out for a restaurant to meet our host for the march, Jeanette D. Wynn, the Florida president of AFSCME, AFL-CIO. Then, we joined the masses assembling on Apalachee Parkway for the uphill march to the state capitol building.

  At any march, I’d learned from experience that you never know until the day of the event exactly how many people will turn out, but it was obvious to me right away that this march would be one to remember. The people came, and they kept coming. Some people had driven all night to get to Tallahassee by the time the march began. Buses came from Atlanta and all over the state. Lined up, the buses stretched for a mile. The streets were crowded with men, women, and families, and many people were wearing “March on Florida” T-shirts from vendors or carrying picket signs that read JEB CROW, or ONE FLORIDA—ONE TERM, or one FLORIDA CHEATS MY GRANDKIDS.2 Spurred by a sit-in started by only two young state legislators, protesters came in unprecedented thousands to march on the state capitol.

  As is usually the case with large-scale demonstrations, there were conflicting reports on how many people attended the march; the NAACP estimated that there were 50,000 people, while the city’s estimate ranged between 9,000 and 11,000. But official numbers didn’t matter to me. All I know is that there were marchers everywhere I looked, in every direction. I felt as if I had been completely swallowed inside a sea of people in a way I had not been since the March on Washington in 1963. “This is like the Million Man March,” John said, excited. All of us had our different reasons for wanting to be there—and different histories that had brought us to that day—but we were all marching together.

  John and I met up with Mrs. Vivian Kelly, who walked the entire march, despite being eighty years old. It was March, but it was warm, so I was worried about Mrs. Kelly. But she is still a real soldier, just like she was when she did voter registration in Quincy in the 1960s and had to outrun a farmer’s dogs. “I’m all right, Pat,” Mrs. Kelly kept saying when I asked how she was doing under the Tallahassee sun.

  Rev. Jesse Jackson was there, as were SCLC president Martin Luther King III, national NAACP president Kweisi Mfume, activist Dick Gregory, U.S. congressmen, and many others. I also saw James Orange, another of the longtime SCLC activists, who had helped me carry Lydia during Florida’s Poor People’s March, when she took her first steps. I know there were many people in that crowd I had probably been arrested with in the 1960s, but whom I had never met.

  That day, as we marched up Apalachee Parkway, I was literally surrounded by history. Jesse Jackson led his familiar chant: “I am somebody!” And just as I had thought as I basked in the fellowship of activists during the March on Washington, as John and I marched in Tallahassee that day, I thought to myself, “A job well done!”

  “This is not about the swift,” Sen. Kendrick Meek said in his speech. “It’s about those willing to endure, to hold on for their children and their unborn children.”3

  He was right. When we risked our lives in the 1960s to register blacks to vote, we did it because we believed—and I still believe—that voting can make a difference. Nothing happens overnight, but I believe leadership can emerge to create a brighter tomorrow for everyone. I have seen it happen time and again.

  Rep. Anthony Hill and Sen. Kendrick Meek, for instance, did not stop trying to get their message heard with their sit-in or the march. They crossed back and forth across the entire state of Florida in eight months to help register more than 30,000 new voters, encouraging each person to bring five people with them to the polls. It was the most successful voter registration drive in state history.4

  The whole world saw the result of their efforts.

  In November 2000, as a result of Florida’s newly registered voters, the presidential election between Al Gore and George W. Bush was so close in Florida that a winner could not be determined right away. In a history-making moment, the world had to wait while lawyers argued about how to count the ballots in Florida. Although the United States Supreme Court stopped the recounts, our message had been heard loud and clear.

  We are somebody.

  We did not win our battle against One Florida. Governor Bush dismantled most aspects of affirmative action in Florida soon after the sit-in and the historic march on Tallahassee in 2000, but none of us had been there in vain. In our willingness t
o stand up for what we honestly believed was right, and to demand our right to be heard, we had won something no one could take from us: We gave each other the strength to fight another day.

  Yes, the fight will go on.

  To me, that’s what history is all about. Once you know what others have done, it helps you understand what you can do.

  I originally wanted to call this book Ordinary People, Extraordinary Things, because that is the key. Experience has taught me a great secret I have spent most of my life trying to share with my children and anyone who will listen: History happens one person at a time.

  Patricia Stephens, Mrs. Lottie Hamilton (mother of Patricia and Priscilla), and Priscilla Stephens. The Stephens sisters were on a national speaking tour after spending forty-nine days in jail for sitting-in at a Woolworth lunch counter in Tallahassee, Florida. Their mother accompanied them on the tour because they were minors. (Photo from The Philadelphia Tribune, May 24, 1960)

  Priscilla Stephens, Walter Stephens, Lottie Hamilton (their mother, standing behind them), Patricia Stephens, their stepfather, Marion Hamilton, and, seated, their grandmother, Mrs. Alma E. Peterson (Mrs. Hamilton’s mother), posing in front of their home in Belle Glade, Florida, in Palm Beach County around 1955. (Due Family Collection)

  Richard Allen Powell, the father of Lottie Hamilton, the parent who raised her. (Due Family Collection)

  Patricia Stephens holding her favorite doll as she stands with her sister, Priscilla, and their mother, Mrs. Lottie Hamilton, in their yard in Belle Glade around 1950. Mrs. Hamilton went out of her way to get Negro dolls for her girls to make certain that they loved themselves. (Due Family Collection)

  Priscilla Gwendolyn Stephens, Marion Hamilton (Daddy Marion), and Patricia Gloria Stephens in band uniforms in Belle Glade, where Daddy Marion was band director as well as the Social Studies teacher. He had once played with Lionel Hampton’s band. Priscilla played the flute and Patricia played the trumpet and bassoon. Patricia and Priscilla both raised money to buy the band uniforms. (Due Family Collection)

  A 1959 photo of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) workshop at the Sir John Hotel in Miami’s Overtown, where Patricia and Priscilla Stephens first learned about CORE. Seated, left to right: Mrs. Shirley Zoloth, one of the people who persuaded Mrs. Hamilton to let Patricia and Priscilla participate; Patricia Stephens; person unknown; Vera Williams from St. Louis CORE; and Priscilla Stephens. Standing, left to right: Jim Dewar; Zev Aelony (interviewed for Freedom in the Family); person unknown; James T. McCain, a CORE field secretary from Sumter, S.C. who celebrated his ninety-seventh birthday in March 2002; and Gordon Carey, CORE field secretary. (Due Family Collection)

  Patricia Stephens, a student at all-black Florida A&M University, talks to a student from all-white Florida State University while picketing for the right to eat at a lunch counter in December 1960 in Tallahassee, Florida. (Courtesy of the Florida State Archives)

  Patricia Stephens looks on as Priscilla points at a police officer during the December 1960 demonstration. Officers had refused to respond to hecklers threatening students on the picket line. (Courtesy of the Florida State Archives)

  FAMU students on March 12, 1960, as they marched downtown to protest the arrest of fellow FAMU students. On the far right, behind the sign that says “Give Us Back Our Students,” is William Larkins, incoming Student Government Association President at FAMU, and one of the students who later spent forty-nine days in jail for the February 20, 1960, arrest at Woolworth. Patricia Stephens had teargas thrown in her eyes during this march. (Courtesy of the Florida State Archives)

  St. Augustine dentist and activist Dr. Robert Hayling speaks as John D. Due Jr. and other activists look on. Dr. Hayling was badly beaten by the Ku Klux Klan in the 1960s. (Courtesy of the Florida State Archives)

  Florida Theatre demonstration held after an injunction limited to eighteen the number of people allowed to picket. Patricia Stephens Due is shown in black dress and dark glasses; John D. Due’s head appears above the cap of the police officer. This demonstration resulted in six-month jail sentences for Patricia Stephens Due and Rubin Kenon, both FAMU student leaders. Under pressure from the Board of Control, FAMU president Dr. George W. Gore suspended them from school after their arrests. (Courtesy of the Florida State Archives)

  During a protest against segregated lunch counters in December 1960, FAMU student Nathaniel Williams is pushed from the sidewalk to the street by racist white hoodlums while holding a picket sign that says “Join Us in Our Fight for Freedom.” To his left is Henry Marion Steele, a high school student who had been arrested earlier at a Woolworth lunch counter. White CORE member Barbara LaCombe climbs into her car to escape the melee. (Photographer: Stephen K. Beasley)

  With money in his hand, FAMU student Benjamin Cowins tries to get service at a McCrory’s lunch counter on February 21, 1961. He looks toward the waitress, who is ignoring him. Two weeks later he was arrested at a Neisners lunch counter, which led to his spending thirty days in jail. (Photo from the collection of Benjamin Cowins)

  Calvin Bess, who died under suspicious circumstances in 1967 while registering black voters in Mississippi. (Photo from the collection of Cherrye Bess Branch)

  Letter inviting supporters to a luncheon to hear Patricia Stephens talk about her forty-nine days in jail. Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt hosted the gathering for CORE to raise funds for activists in the South. Jackie Robinson and Daisy Bates, organizer of the Little Rock Nine who integrated Central High School for the 1957–58 school term, also attended. (Due Family Collection)

  Patricia Stephens Due and John D. Due Jr. in April 1963, four months after they married. (Due Family Collection)

  James and Lydia Stewart Graham, who raised John D. Due Jr. (Due Family Collection)

  Lucille Graham Ransaw, John D. Due Jr.’s mother (Due Family Collection)

  Rev. C. K. Steele congratulates John D. Due Jr. as he graduates from FAMU’s law school in April 1963. (Due Family Collection)

  John D. Due Jr. speaks on FAMU’s campus to remind students of the consequences of their actions in demonstrations. Looking on, left to right: Doris Rutledge, who was arrested several times and later became a CORE field worker; Patricia Stephens Due; Rubin Kenon, suspended from FAMU for his activism; and others. (From the collection of Doris Rutledge Hart)

  Tananarive’s dedication, 1966. Back row, left to right: Mrs. Susan Ausley, an activist at a time when it was dangerous for whites to be involved (she later became Johnita’s godmother); James and Lillian Shaw, activists and Tananarive’s godparents (James Shaw secretly gave bond money to Richard Haley and Daisy Young to get students out of jail); Rev. Grant A. Butler, the minister, and Mrs. Candaisy Blackshear; Horace Walter Stephens, Tananarive’s uncle; and Dr. Irene Johnson, one of Patricia Stephens Due’s FAMU professors. Front row, left to right: Wanda Crutcher, daughter of Rev. James and Addie Crutcher, Quincy, Florida, activists; Mrs. Dorothy C. Jones, one of Tananarive’s godparents and former elementary teacher of Patricia Stephens Due (Mrs. Jones allowed Patricia to live with her in the early sixties when it was very dangerous); John D. Due (holding Tananarive); Patricia Stephens Due; and Mrs. Addie Crutcher holding Stephen Crutcher. (Photographer: Stephen K. Beasley)

  The 1971 Poor People’s March from Miami to Tallahassee, sponsored by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to demand prison reform, an improved welfare system, and greater political representation. Lydia and Johnita Due, daughters of Patricia and John Due, headed the march, being pushed in a double stroller by Rev. Ralph Abernathy, head of SCLC, and Miami community activist Mrs. Gladys Taylor, with Rev. James Orange and other SCLC staffers participating. Lydia learned to walk on this march. (Johnson of Miami)

  Fourteen-year-old Tananarive Due speaks at the seventy-first NAACP convention in Miami Beach after winning a gold medal in the Afro-American Cultural, Technology, and Scientific Olympics, dubbed ACT-SO, in the area of Original Essay. ACT-SO, an Olympics of the mind, was the brainchild of Vernon Jarrett, a journalist fro
m Chicago, who wanted black youth to compete in the academic arena as they do in the sports arena. (Lee’s Photos / Columbus Lee)

  Johnita Due sits with lawmakers as she serves as a page in the Florida Legislature. Left to right: Rep. William “Bill” Flynn from Miami, a former restaurant owner who, in the 1960s, threatened blacks with bodily harm if they came in his restaurant, but repented later and asked the Dues to allow Johnita to stay with him and his wife in Tallahassee; Rep. Arnett Girardeau, Johnita’s sponsor, from Jacksonville (a dentist and member of the NAACP Executive Board, one of the first black senators in Florida); Johnita; Rep. Carrie Meek, who later became Florida’s first female senator and now sits in the U.S. House of Representatives; Rep. Joe Kershaw, from Miami, the first black in the Florida House since Reconstruction. (Due Family Collection)

  Tananarive Due receives a gold medal in the ACT-SO essay competition at the 1980 NAACP Convention. Dr. Benjamin Mays, former president of Morehouse College, stands to her left; to her right is Lerone Bennett Jr., historian and author of Before the Mayflower. (Lee’s Photos / Columbus Lee)

  The Due family meets presidential candidate Jimmy Carter in October 1976. Left to right: Tananarive; John D. Due Jr.; Patricia Stephens Due; and Rep. Gwendolyn Cherry, one of Florida’s first black representatives. Lydia Due sits in front of Carter and Johnita Due sits in front of Rep. Cherry. (President Carter later signed this photo.) (Johnson of Miami)