The Children

I have a pretty good imagination. I knew exactly what Harry Potter looked like, before the artists got hold of him and before the movies came out. Same with the hobbits from Tolkien. But there are some places where my imagination fails me. And one of those places is when I learned about the lives of the children in the Civil Rights movement. I can imagine being a child, but I cannot imagine the terror, and a world where people who look different are hated. I cannot imagine a world where horrible behavior is the norm, and kindness, politeness, recognition of worth and dignity are only rare exceptions. Especially concerning the children of the Civil Rights movement.

My imagination began to fail when I first read Robert Coles book The Story of Ruby Bridges. I can imagine being the loved child of hardworking parents, and that excited first day of school. But I can’t imagine what it would be like to be the only little girl my color to walk into a school. I can’t imagine what it would be like to be walked by marshals through a screaming mob of adults, all calling me bad names, all shouting at me to go home, to go back to where I belonged, all with scowling faces and angry eyes with a palpable hostility. Yet every morning, Ruby with her armed marshal escort would run this gauntlet, just for the privilege, the right, to go to the local neighborhood, formerly all-white elementary school.

I can’t imagine the isolation, or what it would be like to learn under siege, to have no friends, to be so very much alone. I can’t imagine how at age 6 I could learn how to decide which of the white adults around me I could trust, who would keep me safe, and who would like nothing more than to see me disappear off the face of the earth. I can’t imagine the amount of hate, destructive energy, and anger aimed at a six-year-old little girl in a white dress with a pink bow in her hair.

Yet the more I read, the more I learn, the more I look across that color line, I realize that Ruby was not the exception, but rather the rule. Ruby was not alone, nor was she the first. Young people formed much of the backbone of the Civil Rights movement. As young as Ruby, occasionally younger, but hundreds and thousands of young people, not yet old enough to vote, or go to war or smoke or drink.

There was Emmett Till, the fourteen-year-old who made the mistake of flirting with a white female shopkeeper. Till was abducted, beaten, and lynched. All for acting like any normal fourteen year old boy. I can’t imagine the absolute terror of it all. I can’t imagine his mother receiving back her son’s beaten, bruised, lifeless body. But his mother took that pain, her anger, her grief, and used them to present her son in an open casket, so the secrets could no longer be kept. Black children were being killed, had been killed for years, for the crime of talking to white women, for the crime of being alive, for the crime of thinking that they were equally as good as white people.

All over the South, lunch counters were designated only for whites until the young college students began their campaign of sitting in. In Greensboro, Raleigh, Nashville, Atlanta, to name a few, college students sat passively at lunch counters, waiting for service that never came. What did come was a constant barrage of hatred, cursing, and physical abuse by white staff, white police, and white bystanders. The young people studied Gandhian non-violence, and did not rise to the challenge. When in Nashville the police chief ordered arrests, the young demonstrators then refused to pay their fines, opting instead to brave the jail cells. This strategy, “jail—no bail,” was a way to cause even more inconvenience for the state. The state would have to maintain the protestors in jail. Soon they would be too full. The civil rights organizations saved money—by the protestors staying in jail, they didn’t pay fines out of their meager assets. In one day alone in Nashville, 82 lunch counter protestors were arrested.

When the Supreme Court outlawed segregation on interstate busses in 1961, the Freedom Riders —young black and white people—rode interstate busses to ensure their desegregation. In Birmingham, one Freedom Bus was attacked by a group of Klansmen. Before the bus arrived, a deal had been made: the police would allow fifteen minutes of uninterrupted beating of the Freedom Riders before they took action. The FBI knew of the plan, and did nothing to stop it. James Peck was beaten so severely that he required hospitalization and fifty stitches for six head wounds. These Freedom Riders were stranded in Birmingham—no bus driver would agree to drive them, rightly fearing for their own safety. Attorney General Robert Kennedy, with assistance from the Justice Department, helped the Freedom Riders fly out of Birmingham to the relative safety of New Orleans.

But the young people would not be deterred. Students meeting in Nashville decided to come north to Birmingham to continue the protests. When Diane Nash was asked about their decision, and was reminded that the earlier group of Freedom Riders was almost killed, Nash replied, “That’s exactly why the ride must not be stopped. If they stop us with violence, the movement would be dead. We’re coming.”

Once on the bus in Birmingham, these Nashville students were locked up on it, then locked up in jail, then were escorted to the Alabama border. But more students returned, and this next wave was severely beaten, even though the Governor had given Attorney General Kennedy assurance of their protection. After that, Kennedy once again ordered federal marshals to protect the demonstrators and they made their way to Jackson, Mississippi.

Home free, they thought, but not quite. Once in Jackson, the riders were escorted off the bus, and into police cars. This time they were arrested and convicted—because Attorney General Bobbie Kennedy had made a deal with the Mississippi Senator, James Eastland, that there would be no public violence, but also no desegregation in Mississippi. That summer, over 300 Freedom Riders were arrested in Mississippi alone. The jail sentences were long and abusive, and often included beatings, electric shocks from cattle prods, food deprivation, overheating by day and freezing by night, and solitary confinement. For those young people—those college students—who dared to sing freedom songs, the treatment was the worst. After that long summer, the Interstate Commerce Commission issued regulations that effectively desegregated interstate travel facilities throughout the nation. It was the children—college-age children—who made the difference.

In 1963, children again made a crucial difference in Birmingham, Alabama. Hundreds of high school students, all trained in non-violence, gathered in the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. At one o’clock on May 2nd, a double file of fifty teenagers left the church, singing “We Shall Overcome.” They were shuttled past the police barriers into police vans, all arrested. A second troop filed down the steps, then a third, then a fourth—all children. On and on it went. By four o’clock, 959 people, all children, had been sent to jail.

The next day, the people massed again, including over 1000 children. This time they were met with police dogs, and firemen armed with water cannons. Most of the children broke ranks, but one group sat down, refusing to flee. Bull Connor ordered the use of monitor-gun fire nozzles on them—nozzles that shoot water so powerful it could tear bark from trees at one hundred feet, and break bones at close range. Meanwhile, eight K-9 units were terrorizing marchers at the Sixteenth Street Church. Three teenagers were hospitalized with fang bites.

Four days later, there were over 2500 people in jail, many of them children. Although Martin Luther King, Jr., used the line “A little child shall lead them,” and received much support for this move, there were many within the movement that wondered about the use and abuse of young hostages in the civil rights movement. These young protestors were often held outdoors, even on cold rainy nights. Food was short. And yet, it was the young people themselves who volunteered for this duty, who insisted on being small and proud warriors in a large battle that was not only about them, but was also about their future grandchildren.

On May 17, 1954, the United States Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, that separate public schools for whites and blacks were illegal. School boards across the nation were ordered to integrate, “with all deliberate speed.” “With all deliberate speed” meant three years later in Little Rock. Little Rock was known as a relatively liberal southern city, with some integration of its libraries, parks, buses, residential neighborhoods and the police. The school board was the first to issue a statement of compliance with the Brown decision. But the situation became explosive. Melba Pattillo Beals, now a resident of Marin County and professor of communication at Dominican University, tells the story in her memoir Warriors Don’t Cry. Many of you may have heard her tell her story. She was fifteen years old, one of the Little Rock 9. Governor Orval Faubus was decidedly against the move to desegregate the schools, and refused to cooperate. Rather, on Labor Day, he announced he would surround Central High School with National Guard. This was not to protect the children from the mob, but, as it turned out, rather to keep the Nine out. Faubus’ announcement incited the white population, and gave tacit approval of efforts to keep the school “clean.”

On the first day of school, one of the Nine, Elizabeth Eckford didn’t get the message about where the Nine should meet—her family didn’t have a phone. So she braved the crowds herself, not knowing what was in store. And what was in store were a chain of armed guards—the National Guard—there to keep her out, and a mob of yelling, swearing, physically abusive white parents of Central High students. As Elizabeth tried to get in, one Guardsman raised his bayonet, another moved to block her way. No one would let her in. And then the calls came out of the crowd, “Lynch her. Lynch her.” There she was, a high school sophomore, surrounded by a crowd of at least fifty people, all swearing at her, yelling at her, threatening her. Elizabeth fled to a nearby bus-stop bench, but the mob continued to harass her. Finally, a New York Times reporter, Benjamin Fine, stepped up to her, and comforted her, saying “Don’t let them see you cry.” Grace Lorch, a white woman joined them, and guided Elizabeth to the safety of a bus, and helped whisk her away.

Melba and her mother watched Elizabeth from across the street. Knowing they couldn’t help her, they turned and began to edge away from the crowd. But the mob noticed them, shouting out “they’re getting away,” and began to chase Melba and her mother. They ran for their lives, barely making it to the car, and only after her mother’s blouse was ripped, and Melba just missed being hit with a tree branch. Melba took off before her mother could even close the car door. One man caught up and pounded on the hood of the car, another threw a brick at the windshield. They got away, but barely.

Imagine that, if you can, as your first day at your new high school. I can’t. My imagination simply fails me.

It wasn’t until two weeks later that the students made it in to school. They secretly entered through a side door. But the crowd found out, and stormed the school. A riot ensued, and the Nine barely made it out. Later that day, President Eisenhower took an incredible stand—he ordered more than one thousand members of the renowned 101st Airborne Division to fly in to protect the students. This was the first time the federal government intervened to such a degree, and the first time that the civil rights movement was enforced by the feds over the rights and desires of the state.

But what moves me the most was the way these students, these young people were treated. When walking from class to class, white students stepped on their heels until they bled. While walking up or down the staircases in the seven story building, eggs and other objects—sometimes dynamite—would be dropped on them. Forcibly held in bathroom stalls, lit pieces of paper would be dropped over the top onto them. In the showers in gym class, the water would be turned to scalding temperatures. But worst of all, was the isolation—other than during a thirty-minute lunch period with three or four of the Nine, to not hear another kind word, to not make eye contact with anyone, to not say a word to a friend all day long—that, again, is something that I cannot imagine. To know that you are a warrior in a foreign, hostile land. To know that you can’t cry, can’t retaliate, can’t fight back, can’t complain, can’t find compatriots. That is something my mind cannot comprehend, that I cannot imagine.

Yes, there were a few white people who were kind, who did treat the Nine well. There was Link, a senior who fed information to Melba about what was being planned. In public Link pretended to go along with the harassment plans, but did his best in private to warn Melba. Yet even with Link, Melba could never be certain—would there be some point in which he would lure her into security, only to pull the rug out from under her? A couple of teachers were fair, but too quickly any white students who tried to befriend the Nine were targeted for abuse. Throughout the entire year, it was a nightmare, a terror, a battlefield where it was only the determination and grit of the Nine that kept them alive, that kept them safe, that reduced the harm their psyches felt. These children were truly warriors.

An aside, after that year Melba Pattillo was sent, with help from the NAACP, to a white family in Santa Rose where she completed high school. She went to San Francisco State, and then Columbia, for her masters in journalism.

The stories I’ve shared are stories from the South, but the problems weren’t only there. Racism was equally as present in the North, even though there weren’t signs over the water fountains or on the restroom doors. My high school, just north of Detroit, had one Black face in it—an exchange student from Africa. Other doors were held closed up north and out west, too—jobs, promotions, the ability to rise to one’s ability, regardless of the color of skin. Sundown towns proliferated—towns where no Blacks (or Chinese) were allowed after dark, including my home town of Royal Oak. Hundreds of towns across the North and West, including California, were sundown towns with harsh racial histories. I’m sure there are stories of racial maltreatment to be uncovered here, too, not just in the “bad” South.

But these children: this never should have happened, and yet it did. I don’t know if I would have had the strength of character, the sense of faith and hope and possibility that carried these young people through their struggles, their wars, their private hells. Would I have stood up to those crowds, those water cannon, those police dogs, those angry mobs that didn’t look like me, for something I knew I might never achieve? Would I be willing to gamble on which faces to trust, and which ones not to? Would I be willing to work within a governmental system that I knew was flawed, that I knew did not believe in me, that I knew did not grant justice, just because someone had to do it? Would I, as a parent, let my child do this? I don’t know. I’d like to think so, but I really don’t know. Here, again, my imagination fails me. And yet it is an important question to ask ourselves: what commitments are we willing to make toward the healing of our world, toward the creation of justice for all peoples, in the south, the north, the east and west, and all around this globe?

Certainly, what we asked those children to endure was more than we should have asked. Melba Pattillo Beals writes:

The Children by the Rev. Dr. Lisa Presley February 3, 2008

The Children
by the Rev. Dr. Lisa Presley
February 3, 2008