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Cradle of Freedom puts a human face on the story of the black American struggle for equality in Alabama during the 1960s. While exceptional leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, Fred Shuttlesworth, Ralph Abernathy, John Lewis, and others rose up from the ranks and carved their places in history, the burden of the movement was not carried by them alone. It was fueled by the commitment and hard work of thousands of everyday people who decided that the time had come to take a stand.
Cradle of Freedom is tied to the chronology of pivotal events occurring in Alabama the Montgomery bus boycott, the Freedom Rides, the Letter from the Birmingham Jail, the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church, Bloody Sunday, and the Black Power movement in the Black Belt. Gaillard artfully interweaves fresh stories of ordinary people with the familiar ones of the civil rights icons. We learn about the ministers and lawyers, both black and white, who aided the movement in distinct ways at key points. We meet Vernon Johns, King's predecessor at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, who first suggested boycotting the buses and who wrote later, "It is a heart strangely un-Christian that cannot thrill with joy when the least of men begin to pull in the direction of the stars." We hear from John Hulett who tells how terror of lynching forced him down into ditches whenever headlights appeared on a night road. We see the Edmund Pettus Bridge beatings from the perspective of marcher JoAnne Bland, who was only a child at the time. We learn of E. D. Nixon, a Pullman porter who helped organize the bus boycott and who later choked with emotion when, for the first time in his life, a white man extended his hand in greeting to him on a public street.
How these ordinary people rose to the challenges of an unfair system with a will and determination that changed their times forever is a fascinating and extraordinary story that Gaillard tells with his hallmark talent. Cradle of Freedom unfolds with the dramatic flow of a novel, yet it is based on meticulous research. With authority and grace, Gaillard explains how the southern state deemed the Cradle of the Confederacy became with great struggle, some loss, and much hope the Cradle of Freedom.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780817387082 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Alabama Press |
| Publication date: | 02/28/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 440 |
| File size: | 807 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Cradle of Freedom
Alabama and the Movement That Changed America
By Frye Gaillard
The University of Alabama Press
Copyright © 2004 The University of Alabama PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8173-8708-2
CHAPTER 1
We Are Not Wrong
They filled the church by late afternoon, and soon they were lining the sanctuary walls and spilling from the balcony to the stairs and then to the parking lot outside. Bob Graetz had gotten there late. Already he could hear the music and the prayers, the fervent voices coming from a source that he couldn't really see. By the time he arrived, the crowd had spread across the street, maybe four thousand people scattered across the yards in this all-black neighborhood in Montgomery, Alabama.
In a sense they were there to honor Rosa Parks, a respected black woman who had refused to give up her seat on a bus. But as Graetz understood it, there was a lot more at stake. Graetz was a white man, the Lutheran minister to a black congregation, not yet fully plugged into the community. He had called Mrs. Parks, a neighbor and a friend, when he had heard there was some kind of trouble on a bus—an arrest, perhaps, of somebody important.
"Do you know who it was?" he wanted to know.
There was a moment of silence on the other end of the line, and then Mrs. Parks admitted with a sigh, "Well, you see, Pastor Graetz, it was me."
As the word quickly spread, Graetz was astonished at what happened next. On December 5, 1955, the black community of Montgomery seemed to change. It was a day that would live forever in his memory—that would become, for him, a kind of demarcation in time, a dividing line between the days of racial oppression in the South and the dawn of an era a little more just.
There had been a few people who dreamed of such a day, who believed it could happen, but there were not many. What Graetz discovered when he came to Montgomery was a people defeated, devoid of any hope. Even their body language made it clear: the slouch of the shoulders, the aversion of the eyes as they made their way through their daily routines. But this particular day it was different. They came together at Holt Street Baptist, a church that was chosen that night for its size. It was a handsome building of sturdy red brick, with Corinthian columns and stained glass windows and wooden bell towers that made it the tallest building on the street. The people were dressed for a festive occasion, the women in hats, the men wearing ties, but there was a certain solemnity in the moment also.
When Graetz arrived with a deacon from his church, he noticed that the crowd was almost silent. Soon that would change with the singing and the prayers, a release of emotion that was so overwhelming, one white reporter from Montgomery would declare: "That audience was so on fire ... on fire for freedom."
Graetz was determined to take it all in, and with his deacon, Robert Dandridge, at his side he squeezed through the door and into the vestibule of the church. But the sanctuary was already full, and there was simply no way to make it any farther. Graetz couldn't see the pulpit from where he was standing, and he thought it was strange when the program began that none of the speakers was introduced by name. It was a remnant of fear, he would later understand, an old terror of retribution by the whites.
Soon it would vanish, but in the meantime, Deacon Dandridge knew the sound of every voice. "That's Ralph Abernathy," he would say, and then at the end: "That's Martin Luther King."
Graetz had already met Dr. King, and like most people he was favorably impressed. King was young, still a few weeks short of his twenty-seventh birthday, but he was bright and articulate, a black man who was finishing his Ph.D., and there were not many of those in the state of Alabama. He seemed to be a man who was sure of himself, and for Graetz, it was hard to imagine, when he heard about it later, that on the afternoon of the speech King had been so overwhelmed by his doubts, his sense of inadequacy for the task that lay ahead, that he laid his trembling pen aside and prayed that God would help him find the words.
King had only twenty minutes to prepare, and he knew that his mission that night was double-edged. On the one hand, it was important for blacks in Montgomery to draw the line, to proclaim with unmistakable resolve that the years of mistreatment on the buses had to stop. All over Alabama, it was perhaps the most insulting form of segregation—black people paying their money at the front, then walking around to the rear door of the bus and taking their seats in the rows near the back. The price for defying the system was high. In the city of Mobile a few years earlier, a black man had been killed by a white bus driver, and in Montgomery, Birmingham, and other places, there were stories of black women cursed by the drivers and sometimes arrested and hauled off to jail.
Now, suddenly, the Negro community in Montgomery had a symbol, a woman revered by everybody who knew her. If it could happen to Mrs. Parks, King had heard people say, then of course it could happen to anybody in town. He was determined to channel the new wave of anger, to encourage the awakening they had seen that day, as black people by the thousands stayed off the buses, demanding justice as the price of their return. And yet he knew they were playing with fire, stoking a rage that ran deep in the psyche of virtually every black person in the South. It was a rage that could easily get out of hand, and so he told the people at the church: "In our protest, there will be no cross burnings. No white person will be taken from his home by a hooded Negro mob and brutally murdered. There will be no threats and intimidation. We will be guided by the highest principles of law and order."
But they were not wrong, and they would not stop.
"If we are wrong, the Supreme Court of this nation is wrong. If we are wrong, the Constitution of the United States is wrong. If we are wrong, God Almighty is wrong.... If we are wrong, justice is a lie."
In the decades after that December 5 speech, many historians understood clearly that the civil rights movement found a leader that night—a man of such rare and unaccustomed eloquence that black and white people all over America would be struck by the power of his vision for the country. Many would admire him; some would hate him, but he was not a man many people could ignore.
Bob Graetz certainly believed that was true. But as a person who was both a foot soldier in the movement, and later a historian, Graetz also believed that the opening day of the bus boycott had an importance much larger than Martin Luther King. December 5, 1955, was a day for the people. Dr. King may have put their feelings into words, but the feelings, Graetz believed, would have been there without him. For the Negro citizens of Montgomery, Alabama, the time had finally come to take a stand.
It began with Rosa Parks and a private act of defiance, then quickly evolved into something much bigger: a remarkable assemblage of grassroots leaders—preachers, teachers, a Pullman porter on a train—who came together and made common cause in a way that few of them could remember.
One by one, they all heard the story—how she was tired that day, December 1, 1955, a cold winter Thursday, almost dark when she left her downtown job at 5:30. She worked as a seamstress at the Montgomery Fair Department Store, and her chronic bursitis had flared up again, that throbbing pain in her shoulder and her arm that made her long once again for some rest. As was often the case, the bus was crowded when it stopped to pick her up, only one seat available, and it was near the front, a row behind the whites-only section. She took it gratefully and settled in for the ride.
A short time later, the bus made a stop at the Empire Theater, and one of the new passengers, a white man, found himself with no place to sit. The bus driver, James F. Blake, turned to the blacks in Mrs. Parks's row and ordered them to move. When nobody responded, Blake told them sternly, "You better make it light on yourselves and let me have those seats."
Three of the Negro passengers obeyed, but Mrs. Parks did not. She recognized the driver right away. One day in 1943, she had paid her money at the front of his bus and walked straight to her seat, instead of backing down the steps and reentering from the rear. James Blake had ordered her evicted from the bus. She had never forgotten her feeling of embarrassment, but it was not simply that memory, bitter as it was, that triggered her resistance in 1955. Mrs. Parks had long been active in the cause of civil rights, a leader in the NAACP, where one of her duties was to work with young people.
They came every Sunday to her well-kept apartment on the west side of town, listening intently as she talked about citizenship and the right to vote and the crippling reality of racial segregation. Mrs. Parks knew the children often jeered at the rules. Sometimes just for fun, they would sit in the whites-only section of the buses and swap the signs on the public water fountains, giggling as the white people stopped to take a drink. Mrs. Parks did her best to rechannel their rebellion—to prepare them for a day when the game was likely to turn more serious—and the children adored her. Many years later, they remembered her warmth and her radiant smile, and also a certain toughness at her core.
She had gone away in the summer of 1955, spending two weeks at the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee. It was a beautiful spot nestled back in the hills, where a white Tennessean by the name of Myles Horton set out to train a new generation of activists. Horton himself was an even-tempered man known for his wit. Asked one time in the 1950s how he managed to get blacks and whites to eat together at his school, he told his interrogators it was easy. "First, the food is prepared. Second, it's put on the table. Third, we ring the bell."
Mrs. Parks was impressed with the spirit of the place, especially as she studied the details of its history. Beginning in 1932, when the Depression's grip deepened in much of the South, Horton was determined to create a retreat, a sanctuary, where people could gather—Appalachian miners and textile workers and men who made a living cutting timber in the forests. In the early years his constituency was white, but that began to change in the 1950s after the Supreme Court's landmark decision in Brown vs. Board of Education, which overturned racial segregation in the schools.
To Horton in the '50s it was suddenly apparent that racial understanding was the issue of the day, and Highlander was a place for the barriers to fall. He invited interracial groups to the school, and together they talked about the tools of rebellion—simple things like picket lines and citizenship schools where people could prepare themselves for the vote.
Rosa Parks took it all in, but in the end the thing that stayed with her most was not so much the content of the classes; it was the simple reality of interracial living. Never, she said, in her forty-two years had she been around a group of white people who were willing to accept a black person as an equal. It was a new and almost startling experience, and it left her with a different understanding of the world. She had always known that segregation was wrong, and now at Highlander she had seen the alternative, a fleeting glimpse of a better way of life.
All of this she remembered on December 1, 1955, when the Montgomery bus driver ordered her to move. She told him no, she couldn't do that, and when the driver threatened to have her arrested, she looked up from where she was sitting and replied: "You may do that."
The police came quickly and took her away, and it was then that she felt her first rush of fear. She had never been to jail, had never imagined that such a thing might occur, and suddenly she noticed that her throat felt dry. She glanced at the water fountain at the station, but there was only one, and the policemen told her it was only for the whites.
They did allow her to make a phone call, and by the time she was able to reach her family, the word of her arrest had already spread. E. D. Nixon was one of the first to get the news, which was no surprise, for if you were black and in trouble in Montgomery, Alabama, Nixon was usually the person you called. He was a Pullman porter, the president of his union, and a protégé of A. Philip Randolph, one of the country's most respected civil rights leaders.
Nixon was tough. He was a handsome, dark-skinned man, ramrod straight with iron-gray hair as he began to age, and as one friend put it, a face that looked like it was carved out of ebony. He was given, on occasion, to fearless confrontations with people in power—governors, mayors, it didn't really matter—and he often got what he wanted. One southern journalist thought he "had the bearing of an African prince—which he might well have been if not for the intervention of slavery."
The journalist, Ray Jenkins, remembered a telling encounter with Nixon in Montgomery. They had stopped to chat on a busy street corner, and Jenkins automatically extended his hand. Nixon, the old warhorse, became suddenly emotional, telling Jenkins with a catch in his voice: "You don't know what this means." Jenkins was puzzled. He thought of Nixon as one of the most formidable men in the city, physically imposing, and mentally as strong as any public figure he had ever met. But this was Alabama, the segregated South, and Nixon explained that never in his life—and he was now pushing sixty—had a white man shaken his hand in public.
For the young reporter, it was a watershed in his understanding of the movement. It was true, of course, that it was partly about overturning old laws, those devastating codes of racial segregation that blacks encountered every day of their lives. But beneath that goal was something more basic, a mission so pure and easy to understand that Jenkins was amazed that many people had missed it. For E. D. Nixon and many others of his generation, the issue at the heart of the movement was respect.
That was the quality that was missing on the buses, and for some time now Nixon had been searching for the perfect test case, the perfect vehicle, to bring about a change. A few months earlier, on March 2, 1955, a young black woman named Claudette Colvin had also refused to give up her seat. She was handcuffed and taken to jail, which Nixon, of course, regarded as a travesty. He knew, however, that Claudette Colvin was a teenage girl, not serene or secure in the way of Mrs. Parks. She had cursed her tormentors as they carried her away, and the word quickly spread following her arrest that she was pregnant out of wedlock.
Reluctantly, Nixon was compelled to conclude that this was not the symbol he was seeking. Colvin, he knew, would bear the brunt of attacks that no teenager ought to have to endure, and the issues were certain to become muddied in the process. Rosa Parks, however, was a whole different matter. Nixon was certain that she could be the one, the rallying point for a bus boycott and perhaps for a legal challenge to segregation. But the first order of business was to get her out of jail.
He knew the city's most prominent black lawyer, Fred Gray, was out of town, so he called his friend Clifford Durr, a white man sympathetic to the cause. Durr was a well-known attorney and a liberal on race, known for his gentle and clear-headed views. In his later years, he reminded one reporter of Jimmy Carter. His wife, Virginia, was more outspoken—a firebrand, some people said, less tolerant of people with whom she disagreed. Both the Durrs were fond of Rosa Parks, and they agreed to go with Nixon to the jail, where they posted bond and then took her to her home.
There, over coffee, they talked about the future. Nixon made the case with characteristic passion that this was the time—the moment they had dreamed about for many years. Mrs. Parks was not so sure, and her husband, Raymond, was even less so. "The white folks will kill you, Rosa," he said. She knew that his fears were not overstated; black people had been murdered for less in Montgomery. And yet as she listened to E. D. Nixon and thought about the lessons of the last several months—her visit to Highlander, her evening in jail—she knew in her heart what she needed to do.
"I'll go along with you, Mr. Nixon," she said.
With that, it was settled, and soon the grapevine was beginning to work, that intricate web of personal communication that held the black community together. Attorney Fred Gray returned to the city and put in a call to Jo Ann Robinson, who was eager to take advantage of the moment. Mrs. Robinson taught English at Alabama State College and was president of the Women's Political Council, where she had emerged through the years as a sometimes angry and outspoken activist. She had had her own experience with the buses. One day near Christmas in 1949, not long after her arrival in the city, she was on her way to the airport for a trip back home to Cleveland. She boarded the bus, and sat near the front, and soon her holiday reverie was interrupted.
"Get up from there!" the bus driver screamed, and as he rushed toward her seat with his hand drawn back, she thought for a moment he intended to hit her. Startled and frightened, she fled from the bus, and would tell an interviewer years later, "I felt like a dog. I think he wanted to hurt me, and he did.... I cried all the way to Cleveland."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Cradle of Freedom by Frye Gaillard. Copyright © 2004 The University of Alabama Press. Excerpted by permission of The University of Alabama Press.
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Table of Contents
Contents Prologue 000 Part 1 Daybreak 1. We Are Not Wrong 000 2. The Resistance 000 3. The Courts and the Klan 000 4. The Price of Victory 000 Part 2 The Belly of the Beast 5. A Ten Dollar Fine 000 6. The Burning of the Bus 000 7. The Message 000 8. "The Line in the Dust" 000 Part 3 The Shadow of Death 9. A History of Hate 000 10. Bull Connor's Mistake 000 11. "Keep On Pushing" 000 12. The Schoolhouse Door 000 13. "I Have a Dream" 000 14. The Patent Leather Shoe 000 15. Eyes on the Prize 000 Part 4 Revolution 16. The Battle Plan 000 17. Bloody Sunday 000 18. "The Arc Is Long" 000 Part 5 Black Power 19. The Martyrs and the Law 000 20. The Black Panthers 000 21. "A Messy Business" 000 22. The Sheriff without a Gun 000 23. Unfinished Business 000 Epilogue 000 Notes and Acknowledgments 000 Bibliography 000 Index 000Library of Congress Subject Headings for this publication: African Americans Civil rights Alabama History 20th century, Civil rights movements Alabama History 20th century, Alabama Race relations