Notes

from We’ve Got a Job: The 1963 Birmingham Children’s March

by Cynthia Levinson

Wash Booker didn’t take a bath in a tub with hot and cold running water until he was nine years old. He shared one room in a two-story tenement house with his older sister and his mother. The two women slept together in the bed; Wash slept on a rollaway.

Other families lived in the other rooms of the house. Everyone shared a common kitchen and bathroom. The bathroom, which was at the back of the house, scared Wash. “It was little bigger than a closet,” he said. “It had a commode that sat right in the middle of the floor. And there was no light.”

To take a bath, they first had to lug water to their room from the only sink in the house, near the bathroom. “We had a Number Ten tub,” Wash explained, describing the high-sided tin contraption. “We boiled water, poured [it] into the tub, and then put cold water in the tub. And that’s what we took a bath in, because there was no such thing as hot water in the house.” On cold mornings, “my mom would get up … and make the fire in the coal stove and get back in bed until the room got warm.”

Toys were scarce. One child in the neighborhood owned a bicycle. Wash and his sister had a wagon. For Christmas one year, they each received a pair of iron roller skates. When those wore out, Wash said, “we would take an old broom and turn it upside down, and that would be our horse. And we would get a coat hanger and make a cowboy gun.”

Occasionally, he would get a special treat. “If you were really, really good at church on Sunday,” Wash recalled, “and Momma had some extra money, and after you took your church clothes off, and if everything was just right, we would walk down to Ragland’s [Drug Store] sometime and get a scoop of hand-packed ice cream. That was the high point of my life.”

As a little boy, Wash spotted flashes of other worlds — neighborhoods where middle-class blacks like Audrey lived, and even fancier ones “over the mountain” in Mountain Brook, where his mother worked as a maid for a wealthy white family. “There would be times when we would go riding with somebody we knew that had a car … We would ride through Titusville or over to Mountain Brook … So, we knew that there was something better than the house that we lived in.” But anything better than what he had seemed unattainable.

Then, in 1958, when he was nine, his mother got a job as a dental assistant — and a raise. At about the same time, Wash got a job, too. Six days a week for eight years, he woke up by four o’clock in the morning to deliver milk. By the time he got to school each day, he’d already put in almost half a day’s work.

With the extra income, the Bookers moved to a housing project. “Loveman’s Village was brick,” Wash said, “and it was warm and well lit. There was a bathtub. It had hot and cold running water. There was a gas heater with a thermostat that came on whenever it got cold.”

Although life was better in the projects than in the tenement house, Wash began to glimpse more of the other world and realize what he was missing. “You’d walk by the Alabama Theatre, and the door would open, and you’d feel that cool air.” He also noticed white people eating at the counter at J. J. Newberry’s Department Store. “More than anything,” he said, “I wanted a banana split behind that counter … But you couldn’t go back there.” Instead Wash and other blacks had to eat in the basement standing up.

Wash got kicked out of school for the first time when he was in the fourth grade. His teacher threatened to beat him, as teachers commonly did back then, because he was not sitting quietly in his seat. He told her, “You’re not whippin’ me.” She took him to the principal’s office. “We went round and round,” he said. “I saw an opening, and I shot out the door.” The principal didn’t allow him to come back to school for a week.

By the time Wash was in seventh grade, he’d skip school for weeks at a time. “My friends and I would go into the woods and build a campfire [or] walk down the railroad tracks,” he said. Sometimes he’d go to the colored library, sit in the back room, and read. “It was all an adventure,” according to Wash. He liked wearing a Davy Crockett coonskin cap on his adventures.

Wash didn’t care if he got in trouble. But his mother did, and she was strict. When they shopped downtown, she insisted that he hold her hand and never touch the merchandise.

“My mother knew that I was too rambunctious to be a little black boy in the South,” he said. “That put me in a position to be killed. Sometimes she would beat me. She’d say, ‘I’d rather kill you myself than have a white man do it.’”

She was right to worry. There were many white men in Birmingham who might kill him, among them a white policeman named Bull Connor.

Theophilus Eugene Connor was nicknamed “Bull” because he bellowed like one. As commissioner of public safety, Bull Connor oversaw the police and fire departments, public schools, libraries, and the health department in Birmingham. During his second term as commissioner, Connor wrote a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt that revealed his views on race: he warned the liberal-leaning president that in cities where “the doctrine of white supremacy” fails, “Negroes become impudent, unruly, arrogant, law breaking, violent and insolent.” Several years later, a grand jury described Connor as “explosive, vindictive … dictatorial … autocratic and [someone who] uses no persuasion, logic, or reason, if any he has.”

Though Connor was commissioner of public safety, blacks knew that it wasn’t their health and safety he intended to protect. And he certainly didn’t put out their fires. Between the late 1940s and early 1960s, more than fifty black homes and churches in Birmingham were bombed. One neighborhood was hit so often, it was called “Dynamite Hill.” No one was ever prosecuted, even when the police could identify the bombers.

Wash remembers the police as “the ultimate terror … You saw the police, you ran. It was automatic.” Why were the police so frightening? “It was a rare weekend passed,” Wash said, “that one or two folk … didn’t get killed by the police … This is what they’d do to you: They’d call you and make you stick your head in the window [of the police car] … and then they would roll the window up … And then they’d hit you on your head … They’d beat people to death.” As a result, he said, parents could scare unruly children into minding them by threatening, “The police gonna get you.”

Shuttlesworth estimated that as many as a third of the force were also members of the Ku Klux Klan, a viciously racist organization. A local patrolman admitted, “Everyone thought we were in the Klan,” although he claimed he didn’t know any Klansmen on the force. “We were just doing what we had to do,” he stated.

Almost everyone knew that, card-carrying members or not, the Klan literally got away with murder, with the tacit permission and sometimes encouragement of Connor. And there were lots of Klansmen in town to carry out these despicable crimes: most of the 11,000 members of the KKK in Alabama lived in the Birmingham area.

Connor believed that his responsibility was to enforce the city’s laws, and he paid special attention to the Segregation Ordinances, which gave him legal muscle to do whatever he wanted. Since the Ordinances applied equally to both races — they were the only aspect of life in Birmingham that did — blacks were not his only victims; so were whites who pushed for integration.

In 1961, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), a group of white and black integrationists, decided to confront bus companies in the Deep South. Earlier U.S. Supreme Court rulings had banned segregated seating on buses that carried passengers across state lines and in the stations’ restaurants and waiting rooms, but the bus companies had ignored the ruling for fifteen years. Calling themselves “Freedom Riders,” CORE members announced that they were going to ride together “to provoke the southern authorities into arresting us and thereby prod the Justice Department into enforcing the law of the land.”

They set out on May 4, 1961, from Washington, DC. Ten days later, in Atlanta, Georgia, they split into two groups; one group rode a Greyhound bus and the other boarded a Trailways. When the Greyhound reached Anniston, Alabama, on the morning of May 14, segregationists were waiting at the station. First, they set the bus on fire, nearly burning the passengers inside alive. Then, as the passengers escaped from the smoke and flames, the segregationists beat them.

Some of the injured Freedom Riders, including several white women, were taken to the hospital but were left untreated and stranded in the hospital basement. Audrey’s father, along with a few other Movement members, drove to Anniston — sixty miles from Birmingham — to rescue them. Surrounded by white men pointing guns, they fetched the Freedom Riders from the hospital. Only Mr. Hendricks and one other black man were daring enough to transport the white women back to Birmingham in their cars. There, Audrey’s mother gave them food and clean clothes before they returned home.

Connor knew that the Trailways bus was headed to Birmingham. He told local Klansmen that he would give them fifteen minutes to confront the Freedom Riders when they reached town. Then he would send in the police. Birmingham patrolmen were advised, “If a call goes out to go to the bus stations, you don’t hear it.”

During the fifteen minutes after the bus arrived, racists assaulted not only the Freedom Riders but also other passengers — both black and white — who happened to be on the same bus, as well as bystanders waiting in the station to welcome their friends and family to Birmingham. The assailants also went after local white reporters, destroying cameras, film, and a microphone. Right on schedule, a detective announced, “Your fifteen minutes is up … The police are coming.” The attackers slipped away. When Connor was asked why it took so long for his men to drive the four blocks from the police station to the bus station, he explained that they were all at home celebrating Mother’s Day.

Only a few of the white assailants were ever prosecuted, and they served only a thirty-day term. The rest of them were never brought to trial or were acquitted. Shuttlesworth, who was leading services at his church at the time of these events, was convicted of breach of peace for inspiring the Freedom Riders to travel to Birmingham and, thus, inciting violence. He was fined $1000 and sentenced to three months at hard labor.

Unlike Audrey, Wash didn’t know that black kids were about to offer themselves up for arrest. He passed that spring doing what he’d done for the past six or seven years — hanging out in the woods with friends. He wasn’t even going to school very often, much less to mass meetings. When he found out about the marches, he thought the students were crazy.

“It was hard to come to grips with,” he said. “We knew [the police] to be torturers, murderers … , and the idea of voluntarily submitting yourself to be taken away with them was just to us — we couldn’t …”

First published in the United States under the title WE'VE GOT A JOB: The 1963 Birmingham Children's March by Cynthia Y. Levinson. Text Copyright ©2012 by Cynthia Y. Levinson. Published by arrangement with Peachtree Publishers.
Edgenuity