The images of Bull Connor’s dogs and fire hoses confronting unarmed, peaceful protesters in Kelly Ingram Park, located in downtown Birmingham directly across from Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, are some of the most indelible in American history. During that long, hot summer of 1963, Bull Connor even brought “irregulars” from the backwoods of Alabama to do the dirty work that even the police would not do. My folks and I would watch them streaming down Sixth Avenue in pickup trucks adorned with Confederate flags. Trying to intimidate us, they hung out of the windows and brandished sawed-off shotguns. The protesters met even these goons with dignity and reserve and refused to be provoked.
But on the night of Saturday, May 11, Bull Connor’s militia met up with a different kind of black protester. A full-scale riot erupted after the Ku Klux Klan bombed the A. G. Gaston Motel in an attempt to assassinate Martin Luther King, who had left the city hours earlier. Black protesters threw bricks at officers and attacked police cars in the area around the motel. Another large group of young men had gone drinking at an establishment on Fourth Avenue. “Lit up,” as southerners put it, with various strains of alcohol, they joined in the riot and marched on Kelly Ingram Park. The marchers encountered an armored personnel carrier parked there, and rumors spread that Bull Connor was in it. The men set fire not only to the carrier but also to nearby patrol cars and pickup trucks. Members of the mob were arrested and hauled off to jail, but the “resistance” had an effect. My parents wanted me to feel safe, but they also wanted me to see what was going on. The next morning, we drove down to Kelly Ingram Park, where one could see the carnage of burned vehicles and quite a few irregulars heading for home.
Ironically, we should have been in Denver as these events unfolded. I’ve often wondered why my parents were so insistent on staying home in 1963. If ever there had been a time to go to Denver for as long as possible, this would have been it. But we didn’t and thus witnessed the violence and turmoil. When I later asked them why, they didn’t really have a good answer. After I pushed, my father finally said that he had to be with his congregation. Perhaps it just seemed wrong to abandon Birmingham in the midst of the struggle.
• • •
THE SUMMER of police dogs and fire hoses finally captured the attention of the nation. Birmingham was clearly exposed as a city of appalling hatred, prejudice, and violence. That hatred found full expression on September 15, 1963, when a bomb at Sixteenth Street Baptist Church killed four little girls who were on their way to Sunday school.
Services hadn’t yet begun at Westminster that Sunday, but the choir, elders, and ushers were already in the sanctuary. I was there with my mother as she warmed up on the organ. All of a sudden there was a thud and a shudder. The distance between the two churches is about two miles as the crow flies. But it felt like the trouble was next door.
I remember Mrs. Florence Rice rushing in to say that it must have been a bomb. Everyone immediately wondered if the explosion was in our neighborhood, about five minutes away. Within what seemed like hours but was probably only a few minutes, someone called the church to say that Sixteenth Street Baptist had been bombed. No one knew how many other churches might have been targeted. People needed to get to safety.
My father didn’t try to conduct the service but somehow thought it safer if people remained together in the church. An hour or so later word came that the bomb had killed four little girls who were in the bathroom. I don’t remember how long it was, but we soon knew their names: Denise McNair, age eleven, and Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, and Carole Robertson, all age fourteen. Two other black children would die that day in racially motivated attacks. Everyone was scared, and parents just wanted to get their children home.
Back at home we turned on the television. Footage from the bombed-out church was all over the news along with the unbelievably sad pictures of little bodies being removed from the wreckage and taken away in hearses. My parents were constantly on the phone with members of the family and their friends across Birmingham. The men of the community took up the neighborhood watch. But I remember feeling that they were really powerless to stop this kind of tragedy. I just sat and watched television. When it came time to go to sleep, I asked if I could sleep in my parents’ bed.
I stayed home from school the next day, as did all of my friends. My father and mother went to work, but I went to Grandmother’s house. She was as dazed as everyone else and just kept saying that the Lord worked in mysterious ways. I remember thinking that these mysterious ways were awfully cruel, but I didn’t say anything to my devout grandmother.
The outrage would settle on our community, but at first we were just sad. Birmingham isn’t that big and everyone knew at least one of those little girls. This was a deeply personal tragedy. My friend Vanessa Hunter remembers that she saw Denise in the hallway that Friday. They had talked about not having any homework that weekend. Cynthia and Denise were from the neighborhood. I knew Denise best; though she was older, we would still play with dolls together. Her father was our milkman and a part-time photographer who worked at everyone’s birthday parties and weddings. Denise had been a student in my father’s first kindergarten.
My uncle had been Addie Mae Collins’ teacher, and he cried like a baby when he saw her picture on the news and again when he saw her empty chair the next day. Mr. John Springer, one of my father’s closest friends, lived next to the McNair family. He had not left for church that morning. A while after the bomb went off he saw people running toward the McNairs’ house. “I just heard Maxine wail,” he told me later. “The door was closed but she cried out so loud that I just knew what had happened.”
We tried to go to the funeral at which Dr. King officiated, but by the time we arrived at the church it was filled to capacity. Three of the girls were eulogized on the Wednesday after the bombing, and the other, Carole, on Tuesday at the Methodist church. Her parents had not wanted to eulogize their daughter in a mass funeral.
We stood outside on the steps at the funeral for the three. Some of my father’s students—fifteen-year-old James, Ricky, and Third—were pallbearers. Ricky almost collapsed, but James held him up. I don’t remember much except the recessional of coffins. They were small and white. In my mind’s eye, though, one of the coffins was pink.
The homegrown terrorism against Birmingham’s children seemed finally to rock the nation’s conscience. On June 11, President John F. Kennedy had delivered a historic address calling for an end to segregation and introduced a legislative package in Congress to do so. The proposed Civil Rights Act sought to atone for the systematic prejudice and oppression that characterized the South by banning segregation in public accommodations and allowing the federal government to join in state lawsuits to integrate public schools. Although this effort had begun months earlier, we believed the tumultuous summer of 1963—culminating in the horrific deaths of four little girls at the hands of violent extremists—would give the young President greater impetus to act.
I can remember my father, who hadn’t voted for John Kennedy, saying that he hoped the President had the muscle to carry through. If this attempt failed, he told my mother, the segregationists would be emboldened and life in Birmingham would be intolerable. He said that now that the hornets’ nest had been stirred, white supremacy would either die or triumph completely. There was no middle ground because the last card was about to be played.
Daddy said that there had always been the belief that when the federal government finally decided to intervene to change the South, it would win decisively; the Feds had just never chosen to do so. If Washington now proved powerless, there was no recourse left. We followed events in the nation’s capital through the daily reporting of Chet Huntley and David Brinkley. For us this wasn’t just some academic political debate; it was personal. We felt that our fate was completely in the hands of the Kennedys.
THAT FRIDAY, November 22, 1963, began like any other. In the most remarkable way, life had become more normal again after the awful events two mo
nths before. I was in Mrs. Riles’ geography class, which would be followed by recess and then history, which Mrs. Riles also taught.
Suddenly one of the other teachers rushed in to tell her that the President had been shot in Dallas. It was nearly time for recess anyway, so Mrs. Riles shooed us out onto the playground and headed to the teachers’ lounge to watch the reporting. I stood around with my friends on what was a pretty warm day for late November, not really knowing what to do.
Eventually the bell rang. We went back into the classroom, and Mrs. Riles started to teach again. A few minutes later, she stopped and went to the door. I heard her wail. “The President’s dead,” she said, “and there’s a southerner in the White House. What’s going to become of us now?”
School was dismissed, and I went to my uncle Alto’s classroom. We got in the car and headed to Grandmother’s house as we always did. He turned to me and said, “How do you feel?”
“Do you mean about the President?” I said. He nodded, and I told him that I was very sad. “And scared,” I added. Alto didn’t ask why, but Mrs. Riles had given me a reason.
It’s true that all Americans of a certain age remember where they were when they heard that President Kennedy had been shot. That night’s evening news and the constant replaying of the motorcade, the moment of impact, and the slumping President are images so vivid as to seem like yesterday. So too are the dignity of Jacqueline Kennedy, the swearing in of Lyndon Johnson, and the funeral cortege making its way mournfully through Washington, D.C. But for black citizens of Birmingham, John Kennedy’s assassination was personally threatening. I doubt if many children outside of the South would have described their reaction to his death as fear.
Fortunately, though Lyndon Johnson was a southerner, he carried through on Kennedy’s promise to end segregation. As a political scientist, I have read scores of academic papers on Johnson’s legislative approach. Some believe that Johnson was able to do what Kennedy could not have done: assemble a coalition of northern Democrats and liberal Republicans to ram through landmark legislation. Donald Rumsfeld, then a young congressman from Chicago, was one of the Republicans who supported the President. I can dispassionately analyze Johnson’s strategy and the shameful reaction of the Republican Party that resulted in the “Southern strategy,” a conscious attempt to court white voters disgruntled by desegregation. But I have to step out of my own experience to do so because this was not just any legislation—it produced fundamental changes in my family’s lives. And it did so almost immediately.
On that hot July day in 1964, we watched Huntley and Brinkley deliver the news that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had passed the U.S. Congress and had been sent to the President for his signature. Johnson would sign the legislation on July 2. The local news anchor repeated the story after the national news. “The so-called Civil Rights Act passed today,” he intoned, adding a rather telling qualifier to his description of the legislation.
But it didn’t matter. A couple of days later, my father said, “Let’s go out to dinner.” We got dressed up and went to a relatively new hotel about ten minutes from our house. We walked in and people literally looked up and stopped eating. But after a few minutes, perhaps recognizing that the law had changed, they went back to eating, and we were served without incident. A few days after that, however, we went to a drive-through hamburger stand called Jack’s. It was nighttime, and as I bit into my hamburger, I told my parents that something tasted funny. Daddy turned on the car light. The bun was filled with onions: nothing else, just onions.
Nonetheless, de jure segregation was over. Decent people, not extremists but ordinary people, would start to adapt to that fact. Much is rightly made of the historic significance of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. But in terms of daily life, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was at least as important, striking down legal segregation.
Many years later, when I was national security advisor, I was shocked to learn that this wasn’t universally understood. One day in a meeting to plan the President’s calendar, we reviewed a request to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the Civil Rights Act. The consensus was that the President could issue a paper statement without much fanfare; the fortieth anniversary of the 1965 Voting Rights Act was to be celebrated the next year, and that legislation was considered to be the real breakthrough. I hit the roof and, more pointedly than perhaps I should have, told my colleagues that they’d better understand that the 1964 act was the one that had made it possible for me to eat in a restaurant in my hometown. Taken aback, they relented, and we had a very nice celebration in the East Room. We invited Lynda Bird Johnson Robb, whom I had the chance to thank personally for the courage and commitment her father had shown in bringing about dramatic changes in my life.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Integration?
TO BE honest, some things remained the same after the 1964 legislation. The schools, for instance, remained segregated in all but name. Yet interaction between white and black students began to occur. In the fall of 1964, our school was selected to participate in the first integrated book fair where students displayed books that they’d read along with little synopses of the stories.
Mrs. Hattie Witt Bryant Green, who was the library teacher and was very demanding, carefully prepared us for the big day at the Tutwiler Hotel. We weren’t going to embarrass ourselves, she told us, in this first academic encounter with white people. Mrs. Green paid attention to every detail, insisting that the girls wear bows in their hair and that the boys wear ties. When we arrived at the hotel we found that we had been assigned to a separate room, but whites came through and looked at our projects, and we looked at theirs. After the event, Mrs. Green proudly pointed out that she never would have allowed her students to display projects as shabby as the ones the white students had created.
There were new opportunities for my parents too. The black and white presbyteries merged, and my mother’s choir had an opportunity to sing at a white Presbyterian church. Daddy had tried to break down racial barriers much earlier and had befriended a number of white ministers. A few Sundays after the Civil Rights Act passed, he got an alarmed call from one of these pastors. “Reverend Rice,” he said, “there are some Negro people out in front of the church and it seems they want to worship. What should I do?” My father replied that they probably weren’t there to make trouble, just to worship, and that the best thing to do would be to greet them and seat them. His friend called after the service to say that all had gone well.
A few days later, my father came home from school really excited to say that Dr. Sheffield wanted him and another guidance counselor, Mrs. Helen Heath, to be the first blacks to work for the state of Alabama at the employment office downtown. They would be trained at the University of South Carolina and spend the summer counseling in vocational education. He added that the clients and their fellow workers would be black and white. Mrs. Heath remembers that Dr. Sheffield also said that he wanted them to teach the white people how to say “knee-grow.” The time for saying “negra” had long passed.
I was really disappointed that we would not be going to Denver for the summer, but the trip to Columbia, South Carolina, was fun, especially since we got to fly on an airplane for the first time. I bought a new pink and white checked dress to wear aboard the Southern Airways flight.
That summer featured another highlight as well. I was almost ten and had begun to tire of the piano. Grandmother had stopped teaching, and Mother took up the role of my music instructor. This was not a good development. I can remember Mother yelling out from the kitchen as I practiced. “That’s not right,” she would call out.
“You’re not supposed to be listening. I’m practicing,” I would respond.
Somehow we just didn’t have the right chemistry for this endeavor. I was also no longer the cute little kid very much in demand to play at various functions in the city. I told my mother I wanted to quit. I can remember her response as if it were yesterday. “You are not old enough or good enough to
make that decision,” she said. “When you are, you can quit.” I was shocked, but I could tell that there wasn’t any room for debate.
Mother and Daddy decided that I needed a change to re-invigorate my interest. As it happened, Birmingham-Southern College had a very fine conservatory of music, but to date its student body had been exclusively white. My father called and said that he had a child who was an accomplished pianist and wanted to study at the conservatory. Several weeks passed, but I was granted an audition. I was to play for Professor Hugh Thomas, the head of the Music Department, and Ms. Daphne Grimsley, who headed up the precollegiate pedagogical department.
On the day of the audition I admitted to my parents that I was nervous. They were surprised because I had always displayed rock-solid nerves while performing in piano recitals or concerts. After all, I had been doing so most of my life. They asked if I needed more time to prepare. I finally admitted that I didn’t want to embarrass anyone. I’d be the first black student in the Birmingham-Southern program. I felt that I was carrying the weight of needing to be twice as good. They reassured me that I was indeed twice as good. Looking back, it is striking that they didn’t say, “You don’t have to be twice as good.”
The audition went very well. Ms. Grimsley was impressed and said she would take me on as her student. I got back into the car completely elated. We went to Forbes Piano store to buy the prescribed curriculum, and I was soon reenergized in my pursuit of a career as a concert pianist. Years later, my father said that he was really glad that he and my mother took the chance of letting me try to break this color barrier. He then laughed. “They were probably just relieved that you didn’t dance on the piano.”
As desegregation continued to take hold, social life changed too. We went to restaurants frequently and were generally treated with respect. And we took in a movie once in a while and went twice to the traveling ice show Holiday on Ice.
Extraordinary, Ordinary People Page 9
