Extraordinary, Ordinary People: A Memoir of Family

chapter fourteen

When we returned home late in the summer of 1962, tensions were rising in Birmingham. Slowly but surely, the firewall separating the races was crumbling. Segregation was being challenged—and challenged hard—by the growing momentum of the civil rights movement, creating an atmosphere in Birmingham that was increasingly charged.

Over the years, officials in Birmingham had flagrantly ignored a series of landmark federal-level decisions. In 1957 Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, had been integrated with the help of federal forces. In Birmingham, however, Brown v. Board of Education had had little effect: the schools remained segregated. Similarly, the law requiring blacks to sit in the back of the bus had been declared unconstitutional after Rosa Parks raised national awareness with her refusal to give up her seat to a white man in 1955 in Montgomery. Still, Birmingham officials dragged their feet in desegregating the buses.

Several citizens’ committees had tried to promote racial justice over the years. As far back as 1951, there had even been an Interracial Division of the Jefferson County Coordinating Council of Social Forces that was funded by the Birmingham Community Chest. But in 1956 the division was disbanded in the face of increasing hostility and violence. Several other efforts emerged during that period but quickly lost steam. When Alabama outlawed the NAACP that same year, the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth formed the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights. Segregationists responded by bombing his house on Christmas night.

Throughout the late 1950s and early 1960s challenges to the system were met with growing violence. The singer Nat King Cole was attacked during his performance at Birmingham’s Municipal Auditorium in 1956. In 1958 the Ku Klux Klan lit eighteen crosses throughout Jefferson County, and the next year they paraded through black neighborhoods. The Klan burned eleven schools the year after that.

There were decent people, many of them white, who were trying to do the right thing. In 1997, I was very proud to accept an honorary degree at the University of Alabama alongside Mrs. Virginia Durr, who, with her husband, had publicly challenged Bull Connor and other segregationists. The Russakoffs were among the many Jewish families who tried to cross color lines. And of course Judge Frank Johnson was a pioneering figure whose rulings started to bring change but also drew sharp criticism and put him and his family in danger.

In the face of these challenges, Birmingham’s authorities remained steadfast in their insistence on segregation. Bull Connor became the fist of Jim Crow in the city and Governor George Wallace its soul in the statehouse in Montgomery. We watched on TV as Wallace stood in the doorway of the University of Alabama to prevent its integration. I’ll never forget his infamous words during his inaugural address: “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.”

To be fair, around that time, my family had begun to experience small cracks in the walls separating the races. When I was about seven my mother developed a very bad bronchial infection. Nothing seemed to make her better. Desperate to find her proper care, my father asked Dr. Clay Sheffield, a white colleague, to recommend a physician.

And so on Saturday afternoon my parents and I went to visit Dr. Carmichael, an ear, nose, and throat specialist. We were escorted into the Negro waiting room, located up the back stairs above the pharmacy. The paint was peeling, the benches were pretty hard, and the wait was very long.

After Dr. Carmichael finally saw my mother, he called my father aside. “When you bring Angelena next week,” he said, “come after five o’clock.” The next Saturday we arrived after five o’clock and were escorted into the now empty white waiting room with large leather chairs and plenty of magazines to look at. Dr. Carmichael broke the rules because he respected my father as a human being. He was ready for change. Over time, the two waiting rooms merged and more black families joined us “up front.”

I can remember, too, another act of “white kindness” that occurred when at age seven I wanted desperately to go to the circus. Again, Dr. Sheffield came through, somehow wangling tickets. Unfortunately, I hated the circus and wanted to go home after a few minutes. My father, who’d moved heaven and earth to get the tickets, was furious. We stayed until the end.

Then there was the white saleslady who also found a way around the rules. One day Mother and I went to buy me an Easter dress. We were downtown at Burger-Phillips and a clerk whom Mother did not know said that I would have to try the dresses on in the storeroom. Blacks were not permitted in the fitting rooms. I remember it as if it were yesterday. Mother looked her dead in the eye. “Either she tries them on in the fitting room or we won’t buy a dress here,” she sternly replied. “Make your choice.” The poor woman shooed us into the dressing room and stood guard outside, hoping that no one would see us.

But of course these breaks in segregation were isolated incidents. They were small cracks in the facade of a relentlessly unequal and demeaning system of racial separation. Parents in Birmingham made their children’s opportunities as equal as possible and their worlds as pleasant as they could. Segregation did not intrude every day and people lived good lives. We found a way to live normally in highly abnormal circumstances. But there was no denying that Birmingham eclipsed every other big American city in the ugliness of its racism.

The history of the civil rights movement has been chronicled many times, and as a student of politics, I’m able to read these accounts with some measure of detachment. But I lived in Birmingham, and by 1962 my parents’ attempts to shield me from the hostility of the place in which we lived were no longer succeeding. Birmingham would shortly become “Bombingham”; it was a very scary place.