Many thanks to Pam Spaulding for capturing John Lewis’ speech at Equality Alabama’s gala a couple of weekends ago. John Lewis is an American hero and a powerful speaker; it is fantastic to hear him speaking so strongly on this issue and declaring himself an ally to the GLBT community.
John Lewis took batons to the head, was beaten to unconsciousness multiple times for equality — courage and moral conviction that [Bishop Harry] Jackson and his fellow charlatans of bigotry are bereft of.
Rep. Lewis spoke eloquently about the simplicity of the government staying out of the lives of gay and lesbian couples — there is no need to “save” marriage from two people who simply want to love one another and be legally affirmed in the same way that heterosexual couples are when they marry.
But perhaps the most powerful message was to those in the LGBT community who are waiting for equality to come to them — Lewis charged us to seize the moment, do not accept being told to wait your turn, to demand your rights through your representative, and most of all take personal responsibility — the message we all heard was loud and clear.
You may have noticed that Hungry Blues has changed its look. After more than two and a half years with my heavily modified versions of Scott Wallick’s VeryPlainTxt theme, I’ve been feeling the urge to change up the look of my site. When I came across Lucian E. Marin’s Journalist theme a little over a year ago, I wanted to switch to it right away. When it was first released, however, it didn’t offer widgets for managing the sidebar, and I didn’t have the time to learn how to widgetize it myself. But the Journalist theme is now fully widgetized, so I’ve made the switch (and a few modifications).
In addition to changing the design, I’ve added the Disqus comment management system, I’ve pared down the sidebar, and I’ve added pages for my Opentape and for my other activitiy around the web (twitter, flickr, tumblr, last.fm, ma.gnolia, etc.) via friendfeed.
I made one other change, which, for me, was the biggest. When I launched this blog in 2004, the tagline was “Searching the life and times of my father, Paul Greenberg,” and that has remained the tagline until this redesign. Now the tagline is the much blander “Ben Greenberg’s weblog.” One reason for the change is that the original tagline has sometimes misled new visitors to site. I’ve received a good number of comments and emails addressing me as Paul. While it’s an honor to be mistaken for my dad, I’d rather avoid the confusion.
But the main reason for changing the tagline has to do with how other things have changed since I began this blog. When I started Hungry Blues I was figuring out, through my blogging, what my father’s history had to do with my present. That isn’t really a question anymore. I’ve made the connections, and it’s changed the course of my life. Around the time I moved this site from the hosted Typepad blogging service over to my own Wordpress setup, I wrote:
Starting this blog has led me to friendships and political activism with Movement veterans. It has taken me to Mississippi and Alabama. Hungry Blues has led to my current work as a journalist and in internet communications for a human rights organization.
The focus of Hungry Blues broadened, but most everything on the blog has been part of “searching the life and times of my father.” This is still the case, and it will continue to be explained on the About page.
Today is the fourth of Cheshvan on the Jewish calendar—my father’s eleventh yahrtzeit (anniversary of death). It just so happened that in 1997, the fourth of Cheshvan fell on Election Day. It was oddly apropos for my dad. He fought for voting rights in the South as one of Dr. King’s lieutenants, was an expert on proportional representation, designed and implemented the overhaul of New York City’s method of school board elections and was a director of and advisor to many electoral campaigns—perhaps most notably those of New York City Mayor John Lindsay.
Bob Adamenko, Paul Greenberg and John Lindsay in 1965 at Lindsay's first public appearance after becoming Mayor of NYC.
It’s sad that my father did not live to see this presidential election. He would be so thrilled with Barack Obama quite possibly on the threshold of becoming America’s first Black president—and with how Obama’s campaign has been so expansive and revitalizing for American politics. (I can also imagine the arguments he would get into about whether Obama is a progressive candidate; the main thing would be to argue, not to settle on a position.)
Thank you to the readers and commenters at Hungry Blues, to the people from my father’s past who have contacted me through this site, and to all of the new friends and contacts I’ve made through the work I started here.
—
(More information about the photo of my dad and John Lindsay is here.)
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on November 2, 2008 at 3:12 pm
John Flemming from the Anniston Star has discovered important documents from the FBI’s 1965 investigation of the death of Jimmie Lee Jackson.
An FBI file about a 1965 shooting that provided a catalyst for the Selma-to-Montgomery March contains eyewitness accounts as well as a statement from the victim, who later died.
The file, obtained by The Anniston Star from an archive at Washington University in St. Louis, contains some 160 pages, including interviews with local police and affidavits of people caught up in a riot and its aftermath in Marion that led to the shooting of Jimmie Lee Jackson by an Alabama state trooper.
The trooper, James Bonard Fowler, was indicted for murder by a Perry County grand jury on May 9. He has admitted shooting Jackson, but has maintained to this newspaper that it was done in self-defense. Fowler remains free on $250,000 bond. Circuit Judge Thomas Jones of Selma will set a tentative trial date and Fowler will be allowed to enter a plea on July 10.
Neither the prosecution nor the defense in the case had seen the file until they were provided a copy by The Star this week. Parts of the file could be important to both sides because some statements bolster one side while others seem to bolster the other side, say those familiar with the case….
The names of many witnesses, as well as the names of the FBI agents conducting the interviews, are redacted, along with other parts of the statements. One statement that is mostly intact, however, is Jackson’s.
FBI agents interviewing him at Selma’s Good Samaritan Hospital on Feb. 23, 1965 – five days after the shooting and five days before he died – wrote that Jackson said he was in a Marion restaurant, Mack’s Café, when troopers came inside and started beating him.
The statement says Jackson saw troopers beating his mother and recalls being shot by a state trooper in the stomach. The agents wrote that Jackson recalled then running from the café into the street, where the troopers continued to beat him. The agents added that Jackson could not offer a description of the trooper who shot him or of the ones who beat him or his mother.
John Flemming, who originally discovered that James Bonard Fowler is alive and could be prosecuted, has been doing excellent reporting on the Jimmie Lee Jackson Case. You can find the archive of all of his articles on the case, as well as related documents, in the sidebar to his original 2005 article on Fowler.
Recently Flemming reported on a surprising claim by one of the doctors who treated Jackson before he died at the Good Samaritan Hospital in Selma. In a 1979 interview, Dr. William Dinkins claimed Jackson was actually killed by an anesthesia overdose and that the cause of death was covered up. The interview was conducted for the documentary, Eyes on the Prize, but was not used in the version that aired on TV.
Also in the Eyes on the Prize archive of interviews is an eyewitness account from civil rights leader Albert Turner, which corroborates Jackson’s statement to the FBI.
[T]hey took Jimmy and pinned him against the walls of the building and uh, at close range they shot him in the side. Just took the pistol and put it in his side and shot him three times. . . . then they ran him out of the . . . front door of the cafe. And as he run out of the door, the remaining troopers or some of the remaining troopers were lined up down the sidewalk back toward the church . . . he had to run through a corridor of . . . policemans standing with billy sticks. And as he ran by them they simply kept hitting him as he kept running through. And he made it back to the door of the church, and just beyond the church he fell.
I originally blogged about Turner’s statement in March 2005. I also wrote a letter to the editor about it, which the Anniston Star published that same month. This seems like a good time to get the Albert Turner interview back into the discussion of the death of Jimmie Lee Jackson.
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on June 3, 2007 at 11:15 am
I emphasized the importance of prosecution of the Fowler indictment for Jimmie Lee Jackson’s family, but I overstated the case, to the exclusion of others. Quoting Margaret Burnham from my neck of the woods, in Boston, Mullinax reminds us that
the Fowler case has important implications for the nation.
“The Fowler case has much more significance than merely to the family of the victim,” Burnham said from her Boston office.
She said the Perry County case represents a shared history from the days of legal segregation and repression of the constitutional rights of black Americans.
It represents our common burden as a nation, Burnham said.
She insists that the Jackson case isn’t an Alabama or a regional story, but a major national story.
“These miscarriages of justice must be revisited. These are not efforts to bring pain to an old man, but an important effort to get history right,” Burnham said.
In my earlier post, I let Rita Schwerner Bender, widow of another civil rights era murder victim, make the point about the need “to get history right,” but there are also people in Jimmie Lee Jackson’s own family making this point.
Jimmie Lee Jackson’s cousin, Carlton Hogue, said many members of his family feel that Wallace and the state are as culpable as Fowler in Jackson’s death.
“We are really angry more at the state of Alabama than the trooper,” Hogue said.
He said that it was Wallace’s troopers who drove from Montgomery at night to stop a riot in Marion that wasn’t even happening.
“When you boil it down, Fowler was the vehicle for George Wallace’s rage against black people,” Hogue said.
Jones said he believes Wallace fostered a climate of hate that empowered whites with a sense that they could lash out at blacks and get away with murder.
“George Corley Wallace contributed to the climate of lawlessness in Alabama,” Jones said.
“His words and his lack of action in not following through with Jackson’s death showed the Ku Klux Klan and the killers there were no consequences to their actions,” he said.
A grand jury in Alabama handed up an indictment on Wednesday in an obscure killing that helped inspire the historic Selma-to-Montgomery march in 1965. The case is the latest in a series of belated prosecutions of crimes from the civil rights era.In February 1965, a black farmer, Jimmie Lee Jackson, 26, was shot by Alabama state troopers who were suppressing a voting rights demonstration in Marion in the Black Belt. Historians have said the killing indirectly helped lead to the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Everyone assumes the identity of the defendant is former Alabama State Trooper James Bonard Fowler.
The identity of the killer has long been known, James B. Fowler, a retired trooper, and on Wednesday Mr. Fowler’s lawyer, George Beck of Montgomery, said he could “only assume” that Mr. Fowler was the subject of the indictment.The district attorney would not release the name or the charge until the defendant had been notified.Mr. Beck said, “I think we can all assume that Mr. Fowler was indicted.”Mr. Fowler, 73, has admitted the killing in interviews but insisted that the shooting was in self-defense as Mr. Jackson tried to grab the trooper’s gun.Books on the civil rights movement have painted a different picture of that night. Multiple accounts say that Mr. Jackson was in a group of demonstrators pushed back by club-swinging troopers into Mack’s Cafe and that he watched his grandfather, Cager Lee, 82, being beaten and his mother, Viola Jackson, attacked.When Mr. Jackson lunged to protect her, the historians say, a trooper shot him twice in the stomach.He died eight days later. To protest, activists decided to march from Selma to the state’s Capitol in Montgomery. The confrontation on March 7, 1965, or Bloody Sunday, led to the Voting Rights Act.
As the DA proceeds with the prosecution, keep in mind that though Fowler may well be guilty of shooting Jimmie Lee Jackson, historical accounts suggest that there are others who should also be held accountable. As I’ve written previously:
Eyewitnesses, including civil rights leader Albert Turner and the owner of Mack’s Café where Fowler shot Jackson, say that after the shooting, troopers dragged Jackson outside and had a bona fide lynching, beating him to a pulp with clubs and fists….Jimmie Lee Jackson died at Good Samaritan hospital in Selma. But he was carried first to the local hospital in Marion. According to Albert Turner, Jackson waited there an hour without treatment and it was another hour or more before Jackson was admitted at the hospital in Selma, approximately thirty miles away.
This is not to minimize the importance of the indictment. Jimmie Lee Jackson’s family needs to have have some measure of justice in the case—as John Flemming has made clear in a moving article in the Anniston Star.
After 43 years, it’s about time, Cager Lee [Jr.] and his family say.”This is a chance for justice to finally be served,” said B.J. Johniken, Cager Lee’s grandson and a cousin to Jimmie Lee Jackson. “Back then people could get off for that kind of thing. But it’s a new century now,” said the 26-year-old City of Anniston employee.For Cager’s granddaughter Kristy Thomas, an Anniston resident who works at the incinerator, the convening of the grand jury is something she thought would never happen.”I used to listen to my pa-pa tell this story when I was a kid,” said Thomas motioning to Cager Lee. “It was clear to me that there was never any attempt to even find who was responsible for this, any effort to try to get to the bottom of it. They thought then, that’s the way things should be, that it was just justified because he was a black man. I certainly never thought we would get to the point of actually doing something about it.”Joy Lee of Gadsden, a 37-year-old granddaughter of Cager, believes she lives in a better, more inclusive world because of the sacrifices people made during the civil rights movement.”Jimmie Lee and others enabled me to have a life and friends I have now,” she said. “My best friend is white. Now that’s progress, although we still have a long way to go.”Her aunt, Kay Johniken, a 49-year-old who works for the Anniston Water Works, agrees, but at the moment has her eye squarely on the events in Selma.”This [grand jury] should have happened in 1965,” she said. “Alabama was like an island during the civil rights movement. Law enforcement did whatever they wanted and often they were protected by their superiors.”…During a lull in the family chatter of a far-away time, Cager Lee excused himself for a trip to the other end of the house for some rest. When he passed from the room, unsteadily, leaning heavily on a cane, daughter Janice Jackson of Gadsden steered the subject to justice.”This is what I think that grand jury means to me, to us,” she said. “We want Cager to feel that justice was done. For him that shooting was just like it was yesterday. He has to feel that justice was done. It means everything to us.”A few minutes later, when Cager Lee shuffled back into the room, he said in a loud whisper, “Well, if that trooper gets indicted, then I’ll just say that I feel like he will be getting what is coming to him.”
But as Rita Schwerner Bender, widow of slain civil rights worker Michael Schwerner reminds us in the attached podcast, “these trials are in no way the end; these trials are only the beginning.”UPDATES
My new article came out today in the Black Commentator. Here is the opening section:
The Black Commentator
September 21, 2006 – Issue 198
Who Killed Jimmie Lee Jackson?
by Benjamin Greenberg
Guest Commentator
Jimmie Lee Jackson did not live to see his grandfather, Cager Lee, finally receive a voting card in his early 80s at the Marion, Alabama Town Hall, August 20, 1965. The day came just two weeks after the Voting Rights Act had been signed into law by President Johnson. Congress might not have passed the law in 1965 without the pressure it felt as the whole world watched the spectacle of the Selma to Montgomery March five months earlier.
Jimmie Lee Jackson died on February 26, 1965 from injuries sustained a week prior, during the violent response by state and local police to a night time civil rights demonstration in Marion. His death was never properly investigated. No one was ever charged. He was twenty-six years old.
In 2005, Perry County District Attorney Michael Jackson reopened the Jimmie Lee Jackson murder investigation. At the end of August, responding to public pressure and a formal request from the District Attorney, Alabama Governor Bob Riley issued a $5000 reward for information leading to an arrest and conviction in the 1965 case. “The person responsible for this murder should be brought to justice,” Riley said.
Governor Riley’s public statement on Jimmie Lee Jackson was delivered by his press secretary, Jeff Emerson, as a recorded message on the answering machine of journalist Kenneth Mullinax. Mullinax published the Governor’s remarks in the Montgomery Advertiser on August 29. “The entire statement was maybe two sentences,” Mullinax wrote to me in an email. Emerson has not returned any of my repeated calls requesting a written statement from the Governor on Jimmie Lee Jackson.
Jimmie Lee Jackson’s death inspired a determined throng of activists to attempt the dangerous march from Selma to Montgomery. The marchers had originally planned to deliver Jackson in his coffin to Governor George Wallace at the capitol in Montgomery. Their march for Jimmie Lee Jackson became the march for voting rights, which won Cager Lee his voting card, but won no justice for his dead grandson.
As the White Queen said, “What good is a memory, when it only works in one direction and that is backwards?” In this day of TV and make-believe we have become desensitized and some things are too beautiful to forget.
Thus was Linda!
“A tale begun in other days,
When summer suns were glowing–
A simple chime that served to time
The rhythm of our rowing–
When echoes live in memory yet,
Through envious years should say, “forget”
Linda lived a life of value undefined by property and prosperity.
She lived a life in pursuit of the beauty nestled in everyone and everything – a beauty that is unrecognized by most of us.
Linda led an ever-changing life exploring the unthinkable and the unknowable. Finding the magnificence that is buried deep beneath the surface.
Linda was compelled to give all that she had – a burden not generally appreciated nor understood.
I do not know the time nor the place when she came into my life – but today as I sit with the knowledge that I’ll not hear her happy voice or see her smiling face – I roam from room to room touching the material things that we shared, the precious items she willingly gave away; a set of 19th Century French classic books; a stack of Civil Rights era recordings, [“The Freedom Singers Sing of Freedom Now!” –Mercury Records –1964 – “The Freedom Movement Told by Coretta Scott King” – Caedmon –1969] and many more; her father’s sculptures and of course her love and wisdom.
Linda understood when we give away a small piece of ourselves we get an even greater reward.
And she did give –
I called her “The Modern Day Harriet Tubman”
This Jewish woman with all the gifts that upper middle class in New York can bestow – opened her household to anyone and everyone fleeing the south. Legends of the Civil Rights Movement, the people who most of us only read about and worshiped at their altar, were real to her – because they had stayed at her home.
Linda gave voice to students of other cultures where English was a second language. She opened them to the elements – a world of communications – gave them the courage to read, write and dream in English. She introduced them to poetry in French and Farsi as well as Mozart on the out of tune school piano.
“I have not seen they sunny face,
Nor heard thy silver laughter:
No thought of me shall find a place
In thy life’s hereafter-
Enough that now thou wilt not fail
To listen to my fairy-tale.”
“Love is grabbing hold of the great lion’s mane.” The ancient, fiery, Persian poet Hafiz wrote. And she did!
Linda was a warrior: The struggle for equality and justice was never far from the surface. Linda was prepared to suffer for the greater goodness of the world without falling prey to the continued enticement of money and fame. Linda had to go her own way, embolden the weak, bringing light into darkness with a spirit unbroken by the heartbreak and false promises of a world that did not understand.
Playing Beethoven on her beautiful Baby Grand from her living room overlooking West Loch, Pearl Harbor, Hawaii – Linda told me “the ambient noise of your daily routine is about to increase.”
“That is not possible,” I replied.
Bang! Went the piano top. She stood up. The cats scattered.
“Oh yes, they want to build an incinerator in my back yard – we must stop it!”
I walked over to the Lanai doors – It was a clear, bright Sunday. The afternoon sun, moving toward the south facing shores was just beginning to cast shadows. The gentle winds and billowing soft clouds gave an imperceptible repose to the surrounding loch. The sheer beauty of the waves gently licking the shore belied the carnage, which took place here at West Loch- the site of one of the bloodiest events of WWII.
She was right. The noise did increase. We were back on the path again. This time against the modern day Klan dressed in three-piece suits – the corporations and the City & County of Honolulu government and we did stop the incinerator.
“Come; hearken then, ere voice of dread,
With bitter tidings laden,
Shall summon to unwelcome bed
A melancholy maiden!
We are but older children, dear
Who fret to find our bedtime near.”
Last October, Linda, ScottyB, my son, Christopher and I ventured down to Lowndes County. Me, complete with all of my fears and prejudices and Linda armed only with her camera – she so loved everything about the place. The people who’d been involved in the Lowndes County Movement; the overgrown cemetery with its many secrets; the rustic homes that had provided shelter from the rage; the smell of autumn; and the chill in the air. We should all be privy to her view of Lowndes County.
“Without, the frost, the blinding snow,
The storm-wind’s moody madness—
Within, the firelight’s ruddy glow,
And childhood’s nest of gladness
The magic words shall hold thee fast:
Thou shalt not heed the waving blast.” Linda’s father told her “even if you do not practice being Jewish – always say you are Jewish so that Hitler will not have won”.
Linda lived and loved around the world – from New York, France, Iran, London, Hawaii, California, and “The Black Belt” being devoted to justice and equality – I think when her father welcomed her into the hereafter his first words to her “thanks to you – Hitler will not have won.”
“And, through the shadow of a sigh
May tremble through the story
For “happy summer days” gone by,
It shall not touch with breath of bale,
The pleasure of our fairy-tale”
Lewis Carroll
“Through the Looking-Glass
And what Alice found there”
MarshaRose
June 28, 2006
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on June 29, 2006 at 8:56 am
I wish I could show you one of Linda’s photographs. I wrote to one of Linda’s dearest friends, Marsha Joyner (who publishes on HungryBlues from time to time) that Linda had a genius for seeing the beauty in people. This was evident in many ways, but it was really striking in her photographs.
To what I wrote before, I want to add that Linda Dehnad and Scott B. Smith were married on June 26, 2002 and then moved back to Alabama where Scott B had been active in SNCC and the Lowndes County Freedom Organization in the 1960s. In the 1960s, Linda lived in NYC and was a central cog in SNCC’s New York office. At that time she was married to Danny Moses, who was also active in the Civil Rights and anti-war movements. They had a home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan which was a hub for many of the activists who came north from the South. From her first marriage, Linda is survived by three children, Jay, Julia and David.
Some of what I mean by Linda’s genius for seeing the beauty in people is in these excerpts from an email she sent me on April 3 of this year.
I heard Taylor Branch talking in Lowndes County yesterday at the “Mother Church” at a book-signing, the best book signing I’ve ever seen, because all the people there who’d been involved in the Lowndes County Movement got up to talk and told stories and it was warm and tight and it felt historical. . . .
The first woman to introduce herself was Bernice Johnson, age 91, and I was thrilled because I’ve come across her name in books, and the name “Bernice” always stops me because of Freedom Singer Bernice (Reagon), and finally I see Bernice Johnson in the flesh. She was two rows ahead of me . . . and I crawled up and we shook hands and I told her, not too loud as to upset the meeting cause someone was speaking, I told her how I’d waited a long time to see her and meet her, and when she shook my hand it was like a clear message. I knew for sure that it meant something like “We are sisters, no doubt about that, and I’m as thrilled as you are.” Second time I talked with her, was to ask if I could come over her house and take her picture because the lighting in the church made it hard, and her face is so beautiful I want to catch that beauty in a photo. We talked briefly about how I bet she had boys and men running all around her when she was young, and was she as beautiful then as she is now, and she just laughed and grinned and her eyes shone. Her daughter had to write the last two phone number digits cause she had forgotten them, and I also found out that her hearing aid had conked out and I couldn’t figure out if it was fixable or her hearing was beyond help. That didn’t seem to matter to her or to me. She squeezed my hand several times and it told me that it would be so much more fun to just get up and dance together and relate in some other way than with words. What struck me first was that it was exactly how I felt, and her message was clear and strong. . . .
Now I’m going to check out the pictures I took yesterday and I hope I have one I like of Bernice Johnson. I’ll go visit her whether or not I do, and it wouldn’t surprise me if we both got up to dance. Or might just sit in our chairs and do our dancing without standing. Lot’s of the older women I was sitting with have an easier time walking than I do, but the doctor is going to put something that’s not cortisone in my knees at 7:15 a.m. tomorrow and with luck I’ll be standing up without groaning which would be good, because these women had all had a hell of a more difficult life than I have, and they have the right to groan before I do. I don’t know. Maybe it makes me fit in more easily as we all laugh at each other’s expression of pain.
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on June 28, 2006 at 1:35 am
Those were the first words from Scott B. Smith, Jr when he reached me on the phone earlier this afternoon.
He wanted to inform me and all who knew her that Linda Dehnad, his wife, died this morning of undetermined causes at age 69. Linda went to Jackson Hospital in Montgomery, AL last night because she was suffering from severe stomach pain. It happened to be her and Scott B’s wedding anniversary. Exteremely frustrated and at her wits end after waiting for more than five hours to have her pain treated and her condition addressed, Linda asked Scott B to take her home around 9:30 PM. Scott B took care of Linda through the night; he fell asleep for a couple of hours at about 4 AM. When he woke up again at about 6 AM, Linda was dead.
Scott B said, “Linda came back to Montgomery with me to work with the people of Lowndes County. Though she was treated badly, she loved Lowndes County. Linda was a warrior. She never stopped trying to work with people. Anything she could do: she was doing it. She was concerned about the children. When she was teaching and was asked to use corporal punishment, Linda said, ‘I am not a slave owner. I am a teacher.’”
In her last years, Linda had ongoing pain from fibromyalgia. Lindaremained a gifted writer, teacher and photographer and a committed activist. She taught and mentored many, many people, including me (Ben).
Linda has requested that she be cremated. There will be a memorial service on Sunday, July 2, at the Unity Baptist Church in White Hall, Lowndes, County, AL. Church service begins at 11:00 a.m. Memorial service begins at 12:30 p.m.
Scott B welcomes phone calls, email and postal mail with condolences or memories of Linda. He would also welcome financial assistance to pay for Linda’s autopsy. You can reach Scott B by phone at 334-262-7547. His mailing address is 2010 McKinley Avenue, Montogmery, AL 36107. His email address is scottbsmith_jr at yahoo dot com.
UPDATE#1 (6/28): I made a mistake on Scott B’s phone number. Area code is 334, not what I had before. The number, above, is now correct.
UPDATE#2 (6/28): There is now a time for the memorial service, added above.
Because of Rosa Parks and many of the unknown Montgomery residents that were involved in the bus boycott and a lot more, Montgomery is a better place but we need to be better.
The Rosa Parks bus, the real one, is in Detroit at the Henry Ford Museum. It used to be here in Montgomery, but not anymore.
The owners wanted the bus scrapped after it quit running because it was THE bus. They lived in Chicago and owned most of the bus stations in the south in the 1950s.
Roy Hubert Summerford (my father-in-law) was a friend with the station manager and the dispatcher; they told him the Rosa Parks bus was about to forever be gone.
At the bus station, after 3 times being turned down to buy the bus, the owner finally agreed to sell the bus to Hubert. They said the bus would not ever run again without a new motor, but Hubert was very good with cars and trucks and I guess with buses too. After he paid for the bus he worked on it for about 30 minutes and cranked it up and droved it to his 10 acres of land outside the city limits of Montgomery. The bus went dead 3 times on the way to Hubert’s land but it cranked back up and kept going. It was in the winter and Vivian and I were waiting on him to bring the bus to the land. We couldn’t wait to see The Rosa Parks Bus; we couldn’t believe they let that bus go.
Hubert said that the time for America to know about the bus was far from now (1970). The KKK was still very much active in Montgomery. He took on the job of taking care of the bus. He concealed the bus and kept its identity quiet. He feared that they would bomb it. Notice the Cleveland Ave. at the top of the bus. That is the name of the street route that the bus took everyday. As this driver got to a certain place he could roll a bar inside the bus over his head and change the street marker. In 1971 Hubert took it out of the bus and wrapped it in a blanket, then placed it in the closet to keep it safe. We only took it out when we took pictures of the bus. He also said that we would know when the time was right to tell about the bus.
Right away without telling anyone what was on his mind Hubert knew that bus was as important as the Liberty Bell. Hubert knew its proper place was in a museum.
The owner [of the bus station] was still upset with Rosa Parks and did not want that bus in a museum in Montgomery or anywhere. In 1970 the owner was still mad about the bus boycott of 1955 and 56. The boycott had cost the company $3,000 a day.
In 1985 Hubert passed away leaving the bus to his only child, my wife, Vivian Summerford Williams. I began to take care of the bus.
In the 1990s the Montgomery Advertiser newspaper found out about the bus and called me to do a story on the bus, but the time was not right and I said no. They sent a reporter out to the land; I don’t know how they found out where the bus was, but they did. The reporter went to the bus without my permission and took pictures of the bus and put it on the front page of the paper and told America what the bus was and where it was. After that I had to check the bus everyday and had to run people away from it a lot. The KKK tried to catch it afire and shot holes in it. After that I had to rent a warehouse and store it inside under lock and key. This time they couldn’t find it.
In 2000, the decision was made to sell the bus, so that the world could enjoy it. However selling was difficult because of proper identification. Everyone in Montgomery knew it was “The Bus.” At the time Hubert purchased “The Bus,” the employees informally passed on the information about the bus.
Robert Lifson, President of Mastronet, Inc., an Internet auction house, decided he wanted to auction the bus for Vivian and me. He began a search for documents authenticating the bus. And he found them.
Mr. Lifson contacted retired employees of the bus company, including Mrs. Margaret Cummings, widow of the former bus station manager, Charles Homer Cummings. Mrs. Cummings provided a scrapbook of newspaper clippings that her husband had kept during and after the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955-56.
National City Lines (which was the parent company of the Montgomery City Bus Lines) had employed a clipping service to clip and save any newspaper articles about the company’s bus service. Charles Cummings had kept the scrapbook of newspaper articles from the 1955-56 Montgomery bus boycott. Next to articles describing the arrest of Rosa Parks, he wrote “#2857″ and “Blake/#2857.” James Blake was the bus driver who had Rosa Parks arrested. Mr. Cummings’ relatives confirm that he jotted down the bus number because he felt the events were so important.
In September 2001, an article in the Wall Street Journal announced that the Rosa Parks bus would be available in an Internet auction in October.
Museum staff began researching this opportunity. They spoke to people involved in the original 1955 events, to those who planned other museum exhibits, and to historians. A forensic document examiner was hired to see if the scrapbook was authentic. A museum conservator went to Montgomery to personally examine the bus. Convinced that this was the Rosa Parks bus, the Museum’s leadership decided to bid on the bus in the Internet auction.
The Henry Ford museum entered the auction of October 25, 2001, and was the high bidder at $427,919. The other final bidders for the bus, both of whom were convinced of its authenticity, were the Smithsonian Institution and the city of Denver, Colorado.
At the same time, the Museum successfully bid on the Montgomery City Bus Lines scrapbook of newspaper articles with the Rosa Parks bus identified in two places. With additional grants the Henry Ford Museum has completely restored “The Bus.”
My mother, Louise Williams had to ride the buses to and from work in the 1950s and knew other women who rode the bus and witnessed how the Blacks were treated and she chose to boycott the buses during the boycott also. She walked or rode a cab, but mostly walked.
I can’t explain the feeling that I got everytime I got on that bus. It made me feel great; sometimes I even cried. Now everyone who gets to see and touch the bus at the museum can get to feel that too.
I wrote about the bus and the Montgomery Bus Boycott. The book is The Thunder of Angels. I did this for the people who were involved in the boycott and never got their story told. I believe God put this on me to do because of the bus and my mother’s bad experiences on the buses in the 50s. I got to meet a lot of the boycott soldiers who became my friends and they told their stories to me to tell.
Photos All photos courtesy of Donnie Williams, except the final photo of the restored bus. Photo of restored bus by Erica Chappuis. Click on the two newspaper clippings to enlarge.
~ [Editor's note: It is an honor to publish this article by Donnie Williams for the 50th anniversary of the day when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white man on the Cleveland Avenue bus in Montgomery, Alabama. This article grew out of the correspondence between Mr. Williams and Marsha Joyner, after he found her latest piece on HungryBlues early in November. In that piece, Marsha was pictured in front of what she and many others had been led to believe was the original bus where Rosa Parks performed her momentous act of civil disobedience on Dec. 1, 1955. Fortunately, Mr. Williams has set the record straight with this teaser for his new book.
Marsha Joyner has posted an MS Word version of this article on the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Coalition-Hawaii website. --BG]
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on December 1, 2005 at 1:24 am
Former President of the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Coalition-Hawaii, Marsha Joyner, has name inscribed on the “Wall of Tolerance” at the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama
10-2005
We came in road-weary VW Buses, with backpacks and sleeping bags, willing to sleep on any floor, withstand certain adversity, every abuse and encounter death, to add another face to the struggle for equality and dignity in America during the 1950’s and 60’s. There had been protests against the American evil system of Jim Crow, in the courts and in the streets, but after Montgomery the protests swelled to a collective force.
Now in October 2005, we arrived in Montgomery, Alabama “The Cradle of the Confederacy” on jets, sports sedans and air conditioned SUV’s with matching luggage and stayed at the Embassy Suites, showing evidence of years of wear and tear.
I was moved beyond words to see my name and that of my mother among the 300+ names on the Wall of Tolerance. However, I was more impressed and honored to be with the thousands of allies, veterans of the movement, who were in the crowd and whose names did not appear. Black, white, red, yellow & brown, Uncles & Cousins, Mothers & Sisters, Christian & Jews, Gay & straight; some with walkers and in wheel chairs accompanied by children, grandchildren and great grandchildren, proud to share a moment, that for most, if not all of us, never dreamed would come.
Yes, I had a pittance in the Civil Rights Movement, I was the first “colored girl” to graduate (1956) from an integrated school in Baltimore MD after the Brown vs. BOE (1954), walked many picket lines, participated in sit-in demonstrations, gone to jail for having the audacity to ask to be served a 10 cent hamburger at the White Castle, faced death at the hands of an angry white mob when I had the impudence to attempt to register people to vote and walked the ever moving line of Jim Crow. But today I was in the company of real heroes, people who had practiced non-violence here in the overtly violent south.
It was here in Montgomery that a young Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was selected to lead a congregation and began his march toward fame. Here, he preached nonviolence in the face of Jim Crow. Rosa Parks sat down and refused to get up here, and thousands of unnamed “workers in the vineyard” walked to work for more than a year because of her. The bus boycott started here. Heroes whose names are lost to history took a stand for freedom here. People from Hawaii joined the thousands more who walked in the rain and mud for five days from from Selma to Montgomery, seeking the right to vote.
This magnificent day was the dedication of the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, which includes the Wall of Tolerance. The wall incorporates the names of people who have dedicated themselves to fighting intolerance in their daily lives. Using digital technology to spectacular effect, the names flow down a curved 20 by 40 foot wall. The names on the wall include Civil Rights workers from all fifty states and Japan.
Patiently, we stood in line to touch, to feel, to smell and take pictures of the bus in which Rosa Parks had refused to give up her seat to a white man, as if it were the Holy Grail and to gently touch the waters of the black granite memorial which flow over the names of 40 martyrs who lost their lives during the Civil Rights Movement, a period framed by the momentous Brown v. Board decision in 1954 and the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King in 1968.
The memorial sits only a few blocks west of the first capitol of the Confederacy, the spot where Jefferson Davis took the oath of office to become President of the Confederate States. From Court Square, the order was sent in 1861 to “reduce” Fort Sumter, beginning the Civil War. Ninety-four years later, on a December evening, Mrs. Rosa Parks began a historic bus ride from Court Square. East is the Dexter Avenue (King Memorial) Baptist Church, where a young pastor named Martin Luther King, Jr., led the movement Mrs. Parks began.
“Fifty years ago, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat just a few blocks away from where we are today,” said Center co-founder Morris Dees in his welcoming remarks. “You’ve come from throughout the United States to be a part of the march that she started. “The placement of your name on the Wall of Tolerance shows the march for justice continues,” he said.
“This event is about honoring heroes,” said U. S. Congressman Artur Davis (D-Ala,), who was the dedication’s keynote speaker. “It has been the lot of our country that the bravest of us have laid down their lives, some anonymously, some in full view of the world,” Davis said. “All share courage and are heroes. That’s what we honor today.”
He urged everyone to consider “the enduring power of people who are willing to take a stand.” Davis continued, “Standing here, five minutes away from where George Wallace declared that men and women could not be equal, there is a new ground rising. There is a new Alabama in sight. There is a new country in sight. But only if we keep believing in each other, in the power of right.”
NAACP chairman Julian Bond, greeted with a standing ovation as he was introduced, served as host for the dedication ceremony.
“Each of us is a ripple, and together we are all a mighty stream,” said Bond in his closing remark.
Monday, October 24, 2005 sitting in the airport as we said our goodbyes, the overhead TV monitors flashed an alert, “Civil Rights Giant Rosa Parks dies”. We hugged each other, as it seemed she, the woman whose name was on the invitation to the movement, had waited until the conclusion of the tribute to the other unsung heroes to take her final bow.
She left us physically but her legacy will never fade away.
She is at peace!
Marsha Joyner
October 25, 2005
Photos, courtesy of Marsha Joyner: Marsha Joyner with her son Chris German (L.) and with Cedrick Ashe (R.), standing in front of the bus on which Rosa Parks made history.
Marsha Joyner and Julian Bond at Southern Poverty Law Center
Correction:
First photo is taken in front of a replica of the Cleveland Avenue bus, on which Rosa Parks made history. The original bus is on display at the Henry Ford Museum in Detroit, Michigan. For more information see “The Bus,” by Donnie Williams.
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on November 8, 2005 at 12:38 am
Ted Poston, “They Are No Longer Afraid.” The New York Post
June 19, 1956.
You’d been living with [the bus boycott] daily for nearly three weeks in Montgomery, but you couldn’t quite put your finger on it. Only through the words of others were you finally able to articulate a feeling, which had been with you from the beginning.
Mrs. Jo Ann Robinson, dynamic president of the Women’s Political Council, had been one of the first to pinpoint it for you.
“Pass the lowliest, the most ignorant one, on the street and you’ll see it,” she said. “He walks a little straighter, his head is a little higher… They no longer lack courage; they’re no longer afraid. They’re free for the first time in their lives and they know they’ve won their own freedom. This goes not only for the lowest domestic but for the highest Negro professional also.”
J. E. Pierce, Alabama-born economist whom you’d known a decade ago in your native Kentucky, expanded it:
“What you’re seeing here is probably the closest approach to a classless society that has ever been created in any community in America. The whites have forced the Montgomery Negro to recognize one thing—that they are Negroes first and then domestics, doctors’ wives, scholars or lawyers second.
“But for the first time the Negro is accepting with pride, not shame, the fact that all Negroes look alike to white people. Through their unity, their car pools, their determination to share and share alike, they have found each other—as Negroes… Walk a little straighter… head a little higher.
“This new dignity is not accidental. And it is no accident that they call each other ‘ladies’ and ‘gentlemen’ on every possible occasion. For the first time in their lives they feel like ladies and gentlemen from the bottom to the top.”
I don’t have a TV, so it was Brandon who tipped me off that Julian Bond was one of the speakers at the Capital Rotunda, while Rosa Parks was lying in state. As usual, Bond is excellent—giving a nuanced treatment of Parks’ life and exploding the myth that the nonviolent movement and those who advocated self-defense were somehow separate, in binary opposition. Democracy Now! has Bond’s eulogy, as well as the remarks from Reverend Grainger Browning Jr., Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton, Dorothy Height, Johnnie Carr, Oprah Winfrey, Cicely Tyson, and Bruce Gordon, all of which are worth reading. Here is Julian Bond’s tribute to Rosa Parks:
We are gathered here to say goodbye and well done to Rosa Louise McCauley Parks. She leaves us as she lived her life with honor and dignity. She was daughter, sister, wife, aunt and mother to the Movement. But she was more than that. She leaves us just short of the 50th anniversary of the day she showed the world you can stand up for your rights by sitting down. Her actions produced a movement and introduced America to a new leader. Dr. King said she was anchored to that seat by the accumulated indignities of days gone by and the boundless aspirations of generations yet to come.
Now, she wasn’t the first to refuse to surrender to Montgomery’s apartheid. There had been Claudette Colvin, there had been Mary Louise Smith and countless others before her, those who believed they had rights just like any other citizen. But Rosa Parks was the first person to plead not guilty; for her, breaking Alabama law was obeying the Constitution. It was defending justice. She was tired, alright. She was tired of mistreatment. She was tired of second class citizenship. But, you know, she didn’t want to be known as the bus woman. She was much, much more than that.
A historian writes, “Although Martin Luther King played crucial role in transforming a local boycott into a social justice movement, he was, himself, transformed by a movement he did not initiate.” In Montgomery, the boycott owed its success to what a historian calls the self-reliant NAACP stalwarts who acted on their own before King could lead. Rosa Parks was first among those NAACP stalwarts. She had been active with the NAACP for more than a decade before the boycott began. When it began, she was secretary to the Alabama NAACP state conference. She was secretary to the Montgomery branch of the NAACP. She was advisor to the youth council of the NAACP. She was secretary to the Alabama Voters League. But she was more than that.
She was secretary to the Montgomery branch of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the pioneering black union, led nationally by A. Philip Randolph and locally by ED Nixon. She writes in her biography that Mr. Nixon once told her, “Women don’t belong nowhere but in the kitchen.” She said, “Mr. Nixon, what about me?” He said, “You’re a good secretary, and I need one.” But she was more than that.
She became such an icon in American history and popular culture that the Neville Brothers immortalized her. They sang, “Thank you, Ms. Rosa. You were the spark that started our freedom movement. Thank you, Sister Rosa Parks.” She was a long-time fighter for justice in Alabama. She and her husbands were strong defenders of the Scottsboro Boys. She fought for their freedom. She was active in the NAACP. But she was more than that.
Nine years ago she delivered the eulogy at the funeral for Robert Williams, much as we are eulogizing her today. For those of you who don’t remember, Williams was the NAACP president in Monroe, North Carolina. He answered Klan attacks bullet for bullet. For his courage, the NAACP expelled him. The State of North Carolina made him a criminal. And he found safety and sanctuary in Cuba and China. He became an all but forgotten man. In 1996, an elderly Rosa Parks, the exemplar of nonviolence, stood in a church pulpit in Monroe, North Carolina. She was glad, she said, to finally attend the funeral of a heroic black leader who had escaped the assassin’s bullet and lived a long and happy life. The work that he did, she said, should go down in history and never be forgotten.
It was my great pleasure to have known her over the years, giving me precious memories of the time we were together. I was once speaking in Detroit. And when the event was over, my host asked me if I would like to go out for a drink with Rosa Parks. Of course, I said yes. Ms. Parks had Coca-Cola. She turned to me, and she said, “Julian, what are you doing now? Where are you living?” I said, “Mrs. Parks, I’ve moved to Washington, D.C. I just saw you on TV. You and Jesse Jackson were picketing the Greyhound bus station in support of the striking bus drivers.” And I said, “You know, Mrs. Parks, I’ve just taken a job at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. It’s too close and too expensive to fly there. The train isn’t convenient. The best way to get there from D.C. is by bus.” And in her sweet, calm, quiet, respectful, gentle manner Ms. Parks said, “Don’t you ride that bus!”
Now, Ms. Parks was much, much more than the bus woman. She was much, much more than that. Eldridge Cleaver famously remarked that when she sat down that December day in Montgomery 50 years ago, somewhere in the universe a gear in the machinery had shifted. Rosa Parks shifted the gears of the universe all her life. Now she belongs to the universe . Thank you, Sister Rosa. Thank you, Rosa Parks.
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on November 3, 2005 at 3:34 pm
One year ago today, on August 13, 2004, Winston “DeRoyal” Carter was found hanging from a tree on County Road 65 in Tuskegee, AL. DeRoyal was 29 years old. DeRoyal was an African American man.
The story wasn’t going to get outside of Tuskegee, except a brave individual got the matter to the attention of Scott B. Smith, Jr., who conducted his own investigation. By chance, I ended up in touch with Scott B. and blogged his account of what happened to DeRoyal.
Carter’s body was found at 6:15 a.m. last Friday, August 13. Before the police arrived on the scene, the news got out to the community and a substantial crowd gathered and saw Carter’s body, still hanging from the tree. Observers noticed that Carter’s shoelaces had been tied together and used to hold his pants up instead of his belt, which was used to hang him from the tree. Community members also saw that there was no available surface for Carter to step off of in order to hang himself. Rather, he would have had to have climbed up the tree with no laces in his shoes and straddle the branch, in order to attach himself to it by his belt, and then lower himself down with his own arms from that position. As a method of suicide this seems highly improbable if not physically impossible.
Before there had been an autopsy or any substantive investigation, the Tuskegee Chief of Police, Lester Patrick, was “leaning toward suicide.” I was determined to make sure the story would spread, so I enlisted a number of higher traffic bloggers to join me in posting on DeRoyal’s mysterious death. For about a week, the story flew around the blogosphere. About ten days after my initial post, on August 31, DeRoyal Carter’s aunt found my blog and left a comment:
My name is Kathy Fetterman and I live in Northern Virginia. Winston Carter, “DeRoyal” as we lovingly called him, was my nephew – more like my little brother since he was raised by my parents (his paternal grandparents). I have major concerns about the nature of DeRoyal’s death. People want to say he committed suicide, but I have trouble believing that. The officers in Tuskegee are so quick to rule it a suicide because it’s easy. They never allowed us, his family, to see the crime scene pictures as they promised and these pictures were taken with a digital camera supposedly. I don’t know how thoroughly they investigated the crime scene or anything. There are so many unanswered questions. I just don’t believe my nephew would have done that to himself.
A lot of other deaths have been covered right away – why has it taken so long for this to make the news, especially when there were so many people at the scene? I don’t understand that either.
raised some concerns about the police investigation of his death. Mr. Carter’s family reports that the crime scene was never sealed off. The scene, where Mr.Carter was found hanging from a tree by County Road 65 in Tuskegee, was contaminated by passers through, making it impossible for anyone to cull proper evidence from the area. It has been distressing to Winston Carter’s family that the Tuskegee Police does not seem interested in a true investigation.
A number of people, including Kevin Hayden, contacted the Southern Poverty Law Center. The SPLC’s response was deeply disappointing.
Over time I learned about further problems with the police investigation and some more things about the circumstances surrounding DeRoyal’s death. I’m not at liberty to write about these things at present. What I can say, however, is that last fall I obtained a copy of the coroner’s report on DeRoyal Carter. The coroner’s report is publicly available, under Alabama’s Public Records Act . I think it is time I mentioned some troubling details in the report:
I received an initial letter, dated Oct. 27, 2004, acknowledging receipt of my request for the report. In the letter it stated, “As of this date, the report(s) has not been completed. Upon completion, a certified copy of the report will be forwarded to you.” In the third week of November I received the report with a cover letter from the Legal Custodian of Records , dated Nov. 15, certifying that the attached report is “true and complete.” The report itself has a cover letter, from the State Medical Examiner, dated Sept. 21, 2004. It was strange that the letter dated Oct. 27 said the report was not complete, though the report itself was dated Sept. 21.
On page 4 of the report, on the line for Toxicology, it reads: “Specimen collected, but not submitted.” I would wonder about this in any case, but I was particularly struck by it because Scott B. had said he heard that, at first, the police were insinuating that DeRoyal’s death was drug related. Even if the police backed away from this assertion, why wouldn’t they want a toxicology report if they had suspicion of this?
Also on page 4, on the line for Clothing, it reads: “One of the sneaker laces has been removed and is used as a belt on the pants.” Scott B. had told me about the laces having been taken out of DeRoyal’s shoes for use as a belt, and how this made his climbing up the tree even less probable. What I find odd now is that they say it was only one of his shoe laces. I don’t know what kind of shoes DeRoyal wore, but that would have to be a pretty long shoe lace to go around his waist. I read that he was not a large man (5′ 9″, 140 lbs), but I still had to wonder about this.
I wish, for the sake of DeRoyal Carter’s family, I had something conclusive to say.
May his soul find rest.
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on August 14, 2005 at 12:32 am
Folks I've got them hungry blues
And nothin' in this to lose
People tellin' me to choose
Between dyin' and lyin' and
keep on cryin'
Tired of them hungry blues
Listen ain't you heard the news
There's another thing to choose
A brand new world
clean and fine
Where nobody's hungry
And there's no color line
A thing like that's worth
anybody dyin'
I ain't got a thing to lose
But them doggone hungry blues
It was here in Montgomery that a young Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was selected to lead a congregation and began his march toward fame. Here, he preached nonviolence in the face of Jim Crow. Rosa Parks sat down and refused to get up here, and thousands of unnamed “workers in the vineyard” walked to work for more than a year because of her. The bus boycott started here. Heroes whose names are lost to history took a stand for freedom here. People from Hawaii joined the thousands more who walked in the rain and mud for five days from from Selma to Montgomery, seeking the right to vote.
“This event is about honoring heroes,” said U. S. Congressman Artur Davis (D-Ala,), who was the dedication’s keynote speaker. “It has been the lot of our country that the bravest of us have laid down their lives, some anonymously, some in full view of the world,” Davis said. “All share courage and are heroes. That’s what we honor today.”
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