Then, in 1965, the NFL played its first professional football game in Birmingham’s newly desegregated Legion Field, pitting the Dallas Cowboys against the Minnesota Vikings. Even though my mother’s father was gravely ill—he died the next day—Mother went to the game to keep from disappointing me. She knew I regarded it as a watershed event.
Mother and I bought new matching outfits: navy blue suits with gold blouses and gold hats. We sat in our seats and began to watch the game. Former Olympic gold medal sprinter Bob Hayes was a rookie wide receiver for the Cowboys, and he took the opening kickoff and ran it back ninety-plus yards. We cheered wildly. I don’t think my parents knew that I heard the man behind us say, “Oooh-wee. Look at that nigger run!”
We stayed in Birmingham only one more year before moving to Tuscaloosa, where my father accepted a job as dean of students at Stillman College. Over the years, Birmingham has remained fixed in my mind as a place and an experience inextricably bound up with those troubled times. A great deal has changed, including the election of successive black mayors and city council members (not least my friend Carole Smitherman). Ironically, Bull Connor’s successor many times removed was, until recently, a black woman.
The schools are completely integrated, and though neighborhoods are still largely segregated in the de facto sense, even that is breaking down. In the suburbs where we once shopped to purchase the higher-quality goods of white merchants, affluent blacks and whites, including Aunt Gee, live side by side.
When I visited Birmingham in 2003, my aunt Connie threw a party for me, inviting my friends from school and several teachers. Everyone was, of course, black. But the caterers were white. No one else seemed to notice. I asked Connie how she’d selected them. “The mother of one of my students started a catering service,” she replied. “I thought I’d give her a chance.” This was perfectly logical but out of bounds for the Birmingham that I had known and left as a child.
Back in 1961, CBS did a devastating documentary called Who Speaks for Birmingham? The film is filled with whites and blacks talking about life in “The Magic City,” as Birmingham is called. Several white citizens explain why race mixing is against natural law and why the “negras” are happy with the way things are. My parents and I watched it at the time and were appalled, angry, and hurt.
I once again saw clips of the documentary in 2005 when I took British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw and his wife, Alice, as well as British Ambassador David Manning and his wife, Catherine, to the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute. My father’s longtime friend and colleague, Dr. Odessa Woolfolk, walked us through the exhibits that chronicled segregation. I was proud of what we had overcome, but as I noticed the horrified looks on the faces of my guests, I became deeply embarrassed. How could it be that so much hatred and prejudice had been lodged in one place? And how could it be that this was the place from which I had come?
In recent years I have been spending more time in the city with my family and friends, getting to know the “new Birmingham.” Birmingham’s efforts to emerge from the dark shadows of that time are now decades old. Yet I want to be a part of that emergence because somehow it is important for me to come to terms with and feel good about the city of my birth.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Tuscaloosa
MY FATHER came home one day and he and my mother went into their bedroom, closed their door, and began talking. I couldn’t hear the words but it sounded like a very serious discussion. I wasn’t used to being shut out of my parents’ deliberations. We talked about everything—or at least I thought we did.
When they emerged, my mother was crying. Daddy wanted to take a job as dean of students at Stillman College, in Tuscaloosa, sixty miles from Birmingham. My mother, whose life had been spent in Birmingham and whose recently widowed mother was there, did not want to move. My parents had finally bought property, a plot of land adjoining one owned by my uncle Alto and his wife. They were planning to build there in a kind of family compound.
Moreover, Mother was gaining more and more acclaim for her cultural productions at school and for the excellence of Westminster’s choir. In fact, during the summer of 1965 in Denver, Mother had taken a workshop offered by the faculty of Westminster Choir College. The head of the famed music school in Princeton, New Jersey, had worked with and encouraged my mother, and she’d returned to Birmingham with new, challenging music for her small choir. She was at the top of her game. What’s more, she told my father, “Tuscaloosa is in the boondocks.”
I wasn’t thrilled with the idea of moving either. What about my piano lessons at Birmingham-Southern? What about my friend Velda Robinson, whom I saw at school every day, and Margaret and Vanessa, with whom I played in the neighborhood every evening?
My father was unmoved. For twelve years Daddy had juggled two jobs simultaneously—guidance counselor at Ullman High School and pastor of Westminster Presbyterian Church. Both were really full-time jobs and he worked all the time. Now, he wanted desperately to get out of the pulpit and into college work, and he was determined to take this opportunity. This was, for him, a logical extension of his commitment to youth in his ministry.
It seems that he had never really intended to preach for very long. He was taken with the study of theology and with the social ministry of the church but not with all of the duties that a senior pastor performed. The job of leading a church congregation is filled with politics, and putting up with slings and arrows from disaffected parishioners (and someone is always disaffected) was no longer fulfilling. Many years later he told me that he had felt pressured, if only by his own sense of obligation, into taking Westminster when his father had left for Mississippi and then died not long after founding the church. He had come to care deeply for his congregation, but he really wanted to be in a college. His studies at the University of Denver had confirmed that his passion was higher education. When Stillman called, he felt it was time to go.
I was shocked to learn that he had already decided to accept the job before asking my opinion. I challenged him about it, saying that it was my life too. He actually apologized but said that it was time to leave Birmingham. We would come back every Wednesday so that I could continue my lessons at Birmingham-Southern. And I could call Velda every night if I wanted to.
Several days later we went down to visit Tuscaloosa. My mother was reassured when she was offered a job teaching at Druid High School. Daddy had been given a large house on Geneva Drive on the small, quiet campus. Pretty soon Mother set about having it redecorated, clearly impressed with the fact that it was much nicer than our little manse in Birmingham. The family was moving to Tuscaloosa.
Life in Tuscaloosa was very different, largely because our lives revolved around the college. Stillman was a small college then of about 650 students, but it had a very nice, well-appointed campus. For the first time, I could wander about unaccompanied because the campus was isolated and safe. I would often walk the quarter mile to the student union, where there was a bowling alley, or over to my father’s office on the main quadrangle. My father even took advantage of the isolation of the campus to teach me at the age of eleven to drive along some of the back roads.
Stillman had no football team but an excellent basketball team, which we followed enthusiastically. We occasionally went to see the University of Alabama play football and began to develop an affinity for the Crimson Tide, which survives with me to this day. And of course we continued to watch the NFL, though poor reception in Tuscaloosa of the Birmingham stations made Sundays a bit of a challenge. I can still remember my father out in the backyard trying to adjust one of those huge ten-foot-tall antennas that were necessary to get long-distance reception in the 1960s. “No, Daddy, turn it the other way. The picture is even fuzzier now,” I would yell out the den window. Daddy and I would laugh about this many years later as we watched multiple football games on satellite TV.
The University of Alabama, just a few miles from Stillman, also provided a whole new range of educational activities.
My parents made certain that I spent a good deal of time on the newly integrated campus, attending the university’s speakers series and touring science labs and the library. Sometimes after school we would just go up to the campus and walk around. The speakers series was particularly stimulating. We saw both Robert F. Kennedy and David Brinkley, our family’s media hero, at the university’s new field house.
When it came to my formal schooling, however, things were more complicated. In my last year in Birmingham, I’d been one of eight sixth graders who’d been merged into the seventh-grade classroom. This was something of an experiment that I never fully understood but which my parents had championed. We did our sixth-grade work but joined the seventh graders for their math, science, and reading curriculum. Our teacher, Mrs. Mallard, somehow kept all of this straight, and I remember the year as a wonderful academic experience. This “merged” classroom was to have continued until we finished eighth grade.
But when we moved to Tuscaloosa, there was no such program. Placing me in seventh grade would have meant repeating much of the curriculum. Yet skipping a grade meant that I’d be eleven in eighth grade until November and then only twelve.
My parents were worried because there is a huge difference between eleven-year-old girls and thirteen-year-old girls. Arguably, seventh grade was the worst possible one to skip. We discussed the issue as a family. It was the first time that I heard about something called puberty, my parents saying that I’d be behind my classmates in both physical and social development. I can remember sitting on the living room sofa, waiting patiently while my parents fumbled for the right words to explain what they meant. There were long pauses during which they’d look at each other. My father, who was one of the most articulate people I knew, was, for the first time in my experience, tongue-tied. He looked down and stopped trying. So Mother took up the task, delivering a rather opaque and disjointed lecture on sexuality. I was bemused, taking from her remarks something about needing to stay away from boys and their raging hormones, whatever those were. I didn’t ask questions. I felt bad for my folks because they were so clearly embarrassed by the whole discussion. I didn’t bother to tell them that I knew quite a bit about all of this from another source, my friends’ older siblings. At the end I just said okay, and the conversation ended.
“Parents, talk to your children about sex” has been a part of our consciousness for some time now, and most schools have some form of sex education. But in the 1960s, many parents didn’t really want to deal with the subject. For instance, my uncle once told my cousin Lativia, “Keep your dress down!” She had no idea what he meant.
Ultimately, I decided to go to eighth grade. I could tell that my parents wanted me to, but they really didn’t push. They didn’t have to because it was an easy decision for me. I had always wanted to be one of the “big kids.”
It turned out, though, that fitting in was not as easy as I had imagined. I had only recently stopped playing with Barbie dolls, and now all my friends wanted to talk about were their boyfriends. I experienced early puberty, but I was still underdeveloped compared to my classmates. Eventually, though, I adjusted. I found a new best friend in Donna Green, who, like me, loved watching Dark Shadows on television after school.
In fact, my parents were a bit concerned when I suddenly announced that I had a boyfriend too. His name was Darrell Bell and he was a drummer in the Druid High School band. The bell lyre players, of which I was one, and the drummers sat next to each other, making it easy for Darrell and me to pass notes. My parents felt better when they learned that he was the son of the school guidance counselor. I guess they decided that with that parentage Darrell couldn’t get too far out of line.
I came to enjoy Druid and did well academically. I became less conscious of the age difference with my classmates. But for my mother, things were not working out as well. The school principal, Mr. Hughes, and my mother clashed repeatedly. Mother had been a favorite of her principal at Western-Olin and wanted to produce at Druid cultural events like the ones she’d put on in Birmingham. She was rebuffed, though. It seems that Mr. Hughes was wary of my mother emerging as a competitor to the school’s music teacher, who happened to be Mr. Hughes’ wife. Mother felt stifled, and Mr. Hughes felt that my mother didn’t respect him and his authority. I remember vividly the day that their conflict came to a head. It was in the spring and I was at lunch. My mother had been assigned one of the classroom annexes, actually a trailer, on the field next to the lunchroom. She had, of course, taken this as another affront.
Suddenly I heard a loud argument. I recognized Mother’s shrill voice immediately as she screamed at Mr. Hughes, “Don’t you ever come into my classroom unannounced and complain about my teaching!”
Mr. Hughes almost ran out of the room, yelling as he left, “That Rice woman is crazy!”
The kids in the lunchroom were laughing uncontrollably. Mr. Hughes was called “the bear” by the student body. “The bear got sent back to his cave,” one kid said. I laughed too. Maybe I should have been embarrassed, but I loved it when my mother stood up for herself, even if she made a bit of a spectacle in doing so.
Obviously, Mother’s relationship with Mr. Hughes was irrevocably broken after that. The next year, Tuscaloosa was opening two new middle schools, Woodlawn and Tuscaloosa Middle School, and the pressure was growing to integrate the schools and particularly the teaching staff. As it happened, my mother was assigned to the white school, Tuscaloosa. She was excited to be going there, breaking the color barrier, and teaching in a new environment. But before the school year started, she was reassigned to the black school, Woodlawn, without explanation. She was crestfallen, feeling that she’d been demoted. But she tried to make the best of it. She started a new arts program at Woodlawn and was put in charge of the opening ceremonies and cultural presentation for the school’s inauguration. Still, working in a middle school was not nearly as fulfilling for her as teaching at Western-Olin had been. That was clear to me, and I felt very bad about it.
Daddy’s career was flourishing in Tuscaloosa, however. He was right that college work suited him. Easily the most popular figure on the Stillman campus, he was also one of the movers in the city of Tuscaloosa. He was asked to speak everywhere, and everyone from the mayor to the leadership of the University of Alabama consulted him. Daddy struck up a friendship with the vice chancellor of the university, a man named John Blackburn, who would figure heavily in Daddy’s career advancement for years to come.
I remember how busy my father was in those days. Daddy was determined to take advantage of the numerous new “Great Society” programs sponsored by the federal government. He was the acting director and a counselor in the Upward Bound program at Stillman, less than a year after the Higher Education Act of 1965 created it. And Daddy’s church had housed one of the first Head Start programs back in 1965, so now in Tuscaloosa he was asked to chair the advisory board of the program. I could tell that he was a very important man in the community and I was very proud of him.
Yet John W. Rice Jr. was never one to grow complacent, and Daddy decided that Stillman’s students were hearing too little about the social and political events of the day. Daddy received permission from the new president, Harold Stinson, to start a speakers series. Dr. Stinson was shocked when he learned that Daddy had invited as the first speaker Stokely Carmichael, the firebrand radical leader of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).
Alabama had just begun to settle down from the upheavals of the past years. Not surprisingly, the thought of having Stokely Carmichael in Tuscaloosa was jarring. Stokely belonged to the new breed of black radical leaders. It was a time when the Black Panthers were a real and violent force on the West Coast and Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam were coming into their own. Stokely was making waves with incendiary language about the Vietnam War and white America. These were not people in the mold of Martin Luther King Jr., who believed in integration and the U.S. Constitution. They spoke in terms of revolution and bl
ood, not in the language of nonviolence and civil disobedience.
A couple of days before Stokely was to speak in the Stillman College gymnasium, the Tuscaloosa chief of police called my father and asked to see him. “Reverend,” he said, “Tuscaloosa just isn’t ready for Stokely Carmichael. What if he starts some kind of riot? I don’t want to stir up the rednecks either.” Daddy reassured him. He’d talked with Mr. Carmichael, who wanted only to be heard. It would be good for the students and, by the way, any University of Alabama students who wanted to come were welcome too. After Stillman agreed to some extra security arrangements, the chief of police decided to let the lecture go forward. “Reverend Rice,” he said, “I sure hope you know what you’re doing.” When he came home, Daddy told my mother and me that he’d assured the chief that he did indeed know what he was doing. Then he said, “I sure hope I do.”
On the night of Stokely’s appearance, the gymnasium was filled to capacity. Students had come from the University of Alabama, but none were white. Stokely, dressed in green fatigues, gave a stirring critique of American policy in Vietnam, adroitly displaying his rhetorical skills. The speech was radical. At one point he said that he had told the draft board to go ahead and draft him. “But don’t expect me to use the gun on Vietnamese,” he told the audience, implying but not saying that he might shoot American soldiers instead. “They classified me 4-F,” he said, making reference to the draft category that meant “unfit to serve.”
At the end, the place erupted in applause. We went backstage to see Carmichael. He was calm and courteous and told my father that Stillman College had been the first historically black college that had asked him to speak. “Thank you, Dean Rice,” he said. Daddy replied that he believed in letting people speak, and he invited Stokely to come back the next year. It was the beginning of what would become a long and unusual friendship.
Extraordinary, Ordinary People Page 10
