Extraordinary, Ordinary People: A Memoir of Family

chapter fifteen

It’s funny what impresses you as a child. For me, the first salvo, the first shock of recognition, was learning of the boycott of the downtown stores in 1962. The action was organized to bring pressure on the stores to hire black clerks and to take down racial signage. That Easter everyone made sure to wear old clothes just to demonstrate that they were supporting the campaign.

But it was Christmas when I realized that something truly serious was under way. It had been our tradition to go downtown and see the elaborately decorated store windows at Pizitz and Loveman’s. Much like Macy’s in New York, the stores had animated mannequins in beautifully staged Christmas scenes. After viewing the windows, we’d always go into the stores and buy gifts for family, teachers, and friends.

But in 1962, my parents explained that we couldn’t go to the stores because of something called a boycott. Black people were standing up for what was right, and we would too. I was terribly disappointed but old enough to understand the larger issues at stake. Strangely, we did go to visit Santa that year, though we didn’t buy anything in the store.

Clearly, the boycott was succeeding. Sales declined 11 percent that year, leading the city of Birmingham to threaten to cut off a surplus food program servicing about nineteen thousand poor black families if the boycott didn’t stop. The churches, including Westminster, responded by conducting a food drive to make certain that those families wouldn’t be hurt.

Though they supported the boycott, my parents didn’t want me to go without toys that Christmas, so they arranged for Aunt Gee to bring them from her home in Norfolk, Virginia. Santa Claus, therefore, showed up as expected with a Charmin’ Chatty doll that spoke multiple languages. Like the iconic Chatty Cathy, the doll spoke when you pulled the string in her back. You could insert records in the side of this doll, however, and she would speak French, Spanish, and German. I loved her and got an early lesson in the fun of being multilingual.

Then came the crucible year of 1963 with its escalating challenges and violence. Throughout the winter and early spring, voting rights actions, sit-ins, and large protests removed any sense of normalcy in the city. In March two black candidates competed for spots on the Birmingham city council, and one of them received so many votes that he forced his opponent into a runoff election. And in April Albert Boutwell won the mayor’s race, handing a defeat to Bull Connor as the city switched to a mayoral form of government. Connor refused to step down, and for almost two months Birmingham had two governments. I’d never heard my father speak about any other human being the way he spoke about Bull Connor. He was, according to my father, the personification of evil. I hated him too and remember him as really ugly with a scowling, wrinkled face. I recoiled every time I heard him talking on television about the “Negras” who needed to be separated from honest white folk.

That same month, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) launched demonstrations to end segregation. George Wallace sent a hundred state troopers into Birmingham to reinforce the police. And on April 12, Good Friday, Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested in downtown Birmingham. From there he wrote his famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”

In the midst of this turmoil, people had to make decisions about what role they would play. The epicenter of the civil rights movement became the black Baptist church, and the working classes served as its foot soldiers. The Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, who had led the local chapter of the NAACP and eventually served as president of the national SCLC, left for Cincinnati in 1961 but returned frequently to Birmingham during the tumultuous days of 1963. Reverend Shuttlesworth has not, to my mind, received his due in the stories of these turbulent years. People in Birmingham know that it was he who was the heart and soul of the civil rights movement. The great national leaders Martin Luther King and Ralph Abernathy built on what Fred Shuttlesworth began.

My father and Reverend Shuttlesworth would sit on the front porch at our house and talk late into the evening. I can remember bouncing over to them and climbing on Daddy’s lap. He would shoo me off since they were often deep in conversation. We visited Reverend Shuttlesworth in Cincinnati in 1972, and the two men again spent long hours revisiting old times.

Nevertheless, I had always wondered if Reverend Shuttlesworth harbored any resentment toward my father for refusing to march with him. He has said that he thought that my father would not march because he feared his church would be bombed. While that doesn’t really sound like Daddy, perhaps concern for his parishioners was indeed a consideration. And Reverend Shuttlesworth has always said that he knew that Reverend Rice was “there for him.”

I gained a deeper appreciation for the respect the two men had for each other during a recent visit with Reverend Shuttlesworth, who, due to a stroke, can barely speak. He nodded when his wife asked if he remembered my father. “Were you good friends?” she asked. He nodded again. Then, when I handed him a picture of my father, he smiled broadly and kept running his hand across my father’s face. “Oh, Condoleezza,” he said. I cried because it spoke volumes about how he felt about my dad. They might have disagreed about tactics, but they cared for each other as friends.

Today there is a narrative that the middle classes who would eventually benefit disproportionately from desegregation did little to actually bring it about. It is true that few adults in my community marched with Martin Luther King. But the story of the choices that people made is far more complex than the caricature that neatly separates those who marched from those who didn’t.

First, if you were black in Birmingham in 1963, there was no escaping the violence and no place to hide. What I remember most from this time is the sound of bombs going off in neighborhoods, including our own. Clearly, leaders of the movement such as attorney Arthur Shores were singled out. His home was bombed twice in 1963 and his neighborhood became known as “Dynamite Hill.” But the white “night riders” and the KKK cared little about the role you played in the struggle; they were content to terrify any black family they could.

I can remember coming home from my grandparents’ one night. We’d just gotten out of the car when we heard a loud blast down the street. In Birmingham that spring, no one had to think twice: a bomb had exploded in the neighborhood. In fact, it had been a gas bomb, hurled into the window of a house about a block or so away. My father hurried my mother and me back into the car and started to drive off. Mother asked where he was going. “To the police,” he said.

“Are you crazy?” she asked. “They probably set off the thing in the first place.” Daddy didn’t say anything but drove to the Rays’ house in Hooper City instead.

Several hours later we returned home and learned that a second bomb had gone off. As terrorists still do today, bombers exploded the first device in hopes that a crowd would gather. They detonated the second bomb—filled with shrapnel and nails—in order to injure as many innocent onlookers as possible. Fortunately, people knew better, and no one went out into the streets after the first explosion. Still, no one slept that night. When we got home, Daddy didn’t say anything more about the bomb. He just went outside and sat on the porch with his gun on his lap. He sat there all night looking for white night riders.

Eventually Daddy and the men of the neighborhood formed a watch. They would take shifts at the head of the two entrances to our streets. There was a formal schedule, and Daddy would move among the watchers to pray with them and keep their spirits up. Occasionally they would fire a gun into the air to scare off intruders, but they never actually shot anyone. Really light-skinned blacks were told to identify themselves loudly upon approach to the neighborhoods so that there wouldn’t be any “accidents.”

Because of this experience, I’m a fierce defender of the Second Amendment and the right to bear arms. Had my father and his neighbors registered their weapons, Bull Connor surely would have confiscated them or worse. The Constitution speaks of the right to a well-regulated militia. The inspiration for this was the Founding Fathers’ fear of the government. They insisted that citizens had the right to protect themselves when the authorities would not and, if necessary, resist the authorities themselves. What better example of responsible gun ownership is there than what the men of my neighborhood did in response to the KKK and Bull Connor?

A second point worth making about the Birmingham movement was that Dr. King’s strategy was hardly uncontroversial. Daddy sometimes derided those who later said they’d marched even though many had not. “If everyone who says he marched with King actually did,” he once told me, “there wouldn’t have been any room on the streets of Birmingham.”

My father had his own reasons for refusing to join King in his acts of civil disobedience. I can remember as if it were yesterday a conversation between my parents about how to react to the call to take to the streets and behave nonviolently. I stood in the hallway of our house, listening as my parents conferred in the living room. “Ann, I’m not going out there because if some redneck comes after me with a billy club or a dog, I’m going to try to kill him,” he said. “Then they’ll kill me, and my daughter will be an orphan.”

Years later I asked my dad if I had heard him correctly. He wasn’t defensive about his refusal to march with Dr. King; in fact, he told me definitively that he didn’t believe in being nonviolent in the face of violence.

He also hated the use of children and teenagers in the march. Out of frustration with the slow response to the protests, Martin Luther King and the movement preachers called children into the streets on May 2 for what became known as the Children’s Crusade. Some of my friends were involved. James Stewart, George Hunter III (called “Third”), Raymond Goolsby, and Ricky Hall, all students of my father, were told to go out first and distract the police. Others were to follow and get as close to city hall as they could before being stopped. As they approached city hall from Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, Bull Connor yelled over the bullhorn, “Do you have a permit?” When they said that they didn’t, he sent police to arrest the kids. When the kids kept coming, he called in police dogs and turned fire hoses on the marchers. These young kids had been led straight into the teeth of Bull Connor’s henchmen. The rightness of their cause aside, my father was appalled at what he saw as endangering innocent children.

Daddy nonetheless did what he could to support his students. On that day and several to follow, large numbers of high school students left school and joined the marchers. My father, their teachers, and for the most part their parents tried to dissuade them, saying they should fight racism with their minds, not their bodies. But when the Birmingham Board of Education demanded that the teachers report “absences” so that the kids could be disqualified for graduation, they refused. Students were encouraged to come to school, be marked present, and then leave for the protests. The teachers would turn their heads while the students left.

By the afternoon of May 2, policemen had arrested hundreds of students, and when the jails couldn’t hold any more protesters, the police shipped them off to the fairgrounds. My father received permission to go and walk among the kids so that he could report to their parents that they were safe, and I went with him. After a couple of days of crowded conditions—so crowded that the students had to sleep in shifts because there was no room to lie down—the adults had had enough. They mobilized lawyers to get the kids released.

The images of Bull Connor’s dogs and fire hoses confronting unarmed, peaceful protesters in Kelly Ingram Park, located in downtown Birmingham directly across from Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, are some of the most indelible in American history. During that long, hot summer of 1963, Bull Connor even brought “irregulars” from the backwoods of Alabama to do the dirty work that even the police would not do. My folks and I would watch them streaming down Sixth Avenue in pickup trucks adorned with Confederate flags. Trying to intimidate us, they hung out of the windows and brandished sawed-off shotguns. The protesters met even these goons with dignity and reserve and refused to be provoked.

But on the night of Saturday, May 11, Bull Connor’s militia met up with a different kind of black protester. A full-scale riot erupted after the Ku Klux Klan bombed the A. G. Gaston Motel in an attempt to assassinate Martin Luther King, who had left the city hours earlier. Black protesters threw bricks at officers and attacked police cars in the area around the motel. Another large group of young men had gone drinking at an establishment on Fourth Avenue. “Lit up,” as Southerners put it, with various strains of alcohol, they joined in the riot and marched on Kelly Ingram Park. The marchers encountered an armored personnel carrier parked there, and rumors spread that Bull Connor was in it. The men set fire not only to the carrier but also to nearby patrol cars and pickup trucks. Members of the mob were arrested and hauled off to jail, but the “resistance” had an effect. My parents wanted me to feel safe, but they also wanted me to see what was going on. The next morning, we drove down to Kelly Ingram Park, where one could see the carnage of burned vehicles and quite a few irregulars heading for home.

Ironically, we should have been in Denver as these events unfolded. I’ve often wondered why my parents were so insistent on staying home in 1963. If ever there had been a time to go to Denver for as long as possible, this would have been it. But we didn’t and thus witnessed the violence and turmoil. When I later asked them why, they didn’t really have a good answer. After I pushed, my father finally said that he had to be with his congregation. Perhaps it just seemed wrong to abandon Birmingham in the midst of the struggle.

The summer of police dogs and fire hoses finally captured the attention of the nation. Birmingham was clearly exposed as a city of appalling hatred, prejudice, and violence. That hatred found full expression on September 15, 1963, when a bomb at Sixteenth Street Baptist Church killed four little girls who were on their way to Sunday school.

Services hadn’t yet begun at Westminster that Sunday, but the choir, elders, and ushers were already in the sanctuary. I was there with my mother as she warmed up on the organ. All of a sudden there was a thud and a shudder. The distance between the two churches is about two miles as the crow flies, but it felt like the trouble was next door. After what seemed like hours but was probably only a few minutes, someone called the church to say that Sixteenth Street Baptist had been bombed. No one knew how many other churches might have been targeted.

My father didn’t try to conduct the service but somehow thought it safer if people remained together in the church. An hour or so later word came that the bomb had killed four little girls who were in the bathroom. I don’t remember how long it was, but we soon knew their names: Denise McNair, age eleven, and Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, and Carole Robertson, all age fourteen. Two other black children would die that day in racially motivated attacks. Everyone was scared and parents just wanted to get their children home.

Back at home we turned on the television. Footage from the bombed-out church was all over the news, along with the unbelievably sad pictures of little bodies being removed from the wreckage and taken away in hearses. My parents were constantly on the phone with members of the family and their friends across Birmingham. The men of the community took up the neighborhood watch. But I remember feeling that they were really powerless to stop this kind of tragedy. I just sat and watched television. When it came time to go to sleep, I asked if I could sleep in my parents’ bed.

I stayed home from school the next day, as did all of my friends. My father and mother went to work, but I went to Grandmother’s house. She was as dazed as anyone else and just kept saying that the Lord worked in mysterious ways. I remember thinking that these mysterious ways were awfully cruel, but I didn’t say anything to my devout grandmother.

The outrage would settle on our community, but at first we were just sad. Birmingham isn’t that big, and everyone knew at least one of those little girls. This was a deeply personal tragedy. Cynthia and Denise were from the neighborhood. I knew Denise best; though she was older, we would still play with dolls together. Her father was our milkman and a part-time photographer who worked at everyone’s birthday parties and weddings. Denise had been a student in my father’s first kindergarten.

My uncle had been Addie Mae Collins’ teacher, and he cried like a baby when he saw her picture on the news and again when he saw her empty chair the next day. Mr. John Springer, one of my father’s closest friends, lived next door to the McNair family. He had not left for church that morning. A while after the bomb went off he saw people running toward the McNairs’ house. “I just heard Maxine wail,” he told me later. “The door was closed, but she cried out so loud that I just knew what had happened.”

Three of the girls were eulogized on the Wednesday after the bombing, and the other, Carole, on Tuesday at the Methodist church. We tried to go to the funeral for the three, at which Dr. King officiated, but by the time we arrived at the church it was filled to capacity, so we stood outside on the steps. Three of my father’s students—fifteen-year-old James, Ricky, and Third—were pallbearers. Ricky almost collapsed, but James held him up. I don’t remember much except the recessional of coffins. They were small and white. In my mind’s eye, though, one of the coffins was pink.

The homegrown terrorism against Birmingham’s children seemed finally to rock the nation’s conscience. On June 11, President John F. Kennedy had delivered a historic address calling for an end to segregation and introduced a legislative package in Congress to do so. The proposed Civil Rights Act sought to atone for the systematic prejudice and oppression that characterized the South by banning segregation in public accommodations and allowing the federal government to join in state lawsuits to integrate public schools. Although this effort had begun months earlier, we believed the tumultuous summer of 1963—culminating in the horrific deaths of four little girls at the hands of violent extremists—would give the young president greater impetus to act.

I can remember my father, who hadn’t voted for John Kennedy, saying that he hoped the President had the muscle to carry through. If this attempt failed, he told my mother, the segregationists would be emboldened and life in Birmingham would be intolerable. He said that now that the hornets’ nest had been stirred, white supremacy would either die or triumph completely. There was no middle ground.

We followed events in the nation’s capital through the daily reporting of Chet Huntley and David Brinkley. For us this wasn’t just some academic political debate; it was personal. We felt that our fate was completely in the hands of the Kennedys.

That Friday, November 22, 1963, started like any other. In the most remarkable way, life had become more normal again after the awful events two months before. I was in Mrs. Riles’ geography class, which would be followed by recess and then history, which Mrs. Riles also taught. Suddenly one of the other teachers rushed in to tell her that the President had been shot in Dallas.

It was nearly time for recess anyway, so Mrs. Riles shooed us out onto the playground and headed to the teachers’ lounge to watch the reporting. I stood around with my friends on what was a pretty warm day for late November, not really knowing what to do.

Eventually the bell rang. We went back into the classroom, and Mrs. Riles started to teach again. A few minutes later, she stopped and went to the door. I heard her wail. “The President’s dead,” she said, “and there’s a Southerner in the White House. What’s going to become of us now?”

School was dismissed, and I went to my uncle Alto’s classroom. We got in the car and headed to my grandmother’s house, as we always did. He turned to me and said, “How do you feel?”

“Do you mean about the President?” I said. He nodded, and I told him that I was very sad. “And scared,” I added. Alto didn’t ask why, but Mrs. Riles had given me a reason.

It’s true that Americans of a certain age remember where they were when they heard that President Kennedy had been shot. That night’s evening news and the constant replaying of the motorcade, the moment of impact, and the slumping President are images so vivid as to seem like yesterday. So too are the dignity of Jacqueline Kennedy, the swearing in of Lyndon Johnson, and the funeral cortege making its way mournfully through Washington, D.C. But for black citizens of Birmingham, John Kennedy’s assassination was personally threatening. I doubt if many children outside the South would have described their reaction to his death as fear.

Fortunately, though Lyndon Johnson was a southerner, he carried through on Kennedy’s promise to end segregation. As a political scientist, I have read scores of academic papers on Johnson’s legislative approach. Some believe that Johnson was able to do what Kennedy could not have: assemble a coalition of northern Democrats and liberal Republicans to ram through landmark legislation. Donald Rumsfeld, then a young congressman from Chicago, was one of the Republicans who supported the President. I can dispassionately analyze Johnson’s strategy and the shameful reaction of the Republican Party that resulted in the “Southern strategy,” a conscious attempt to court white voters disgruntled by desegregation. But I have to step out of my own experience to do so because this was not just any legislation—it produced fundamental changes in my family’s lives. And it did so almost immediately.

On a hot July day in 1964, we watched Huntley and Brinkley deliver the news that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had passed the U.S. Congress and had been sent to the President for his signature. Johnson would sign the legislation on July 2. The local news anchor repeated the story after the national news. “The so-called Civil Rights Act passed today,” he intoned, adding a rather telling qualifier to his description of the legislation.

But it didn’t matter. A couple of days later, my father said, “Let’s go out to dinner.” We got dressed up and went to a relatively new hotel about ten minutes from our house. We walked in, and people literally looked up and stopped eating. But in a few minutes, perhaps recognizing that the law had changed, they went back to eating, and we were served without incident. A few days after that, however, we went to a drive-through hamburger stand called Jack’s. It was nighttime, and as I bit into my hamburger, I told my parents that something tasted funny. Daddy turned on the car light. The bun was filled with onions: nothing else, just onions.

Nonetheless, de jure segregation was over. Decent people—not extremists, but ordinary people—would start to adapt to that fact. Much is rightly made of the historic significance of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. But in terms of daily life, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was at least as important, striking down legal segregation.

Many years later when I was national security advisor I was shocked to learn that this wasn’t universally understood. One day in a meeting to plan the President’s calendar, we reviewed a request to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the Civil Rights Act. The consensus was that the President could issue a paper statement without much fanfare because the fortieth anniversary of the 1965 Voting Rights Act was to be celebrated the next year, and that legislation was considered to be the real breakthrough. I hit the roof and, more pointedly than perhaps I should have, told my colleagues that they’d better understand that the 1964 act was the one that had made it possible for me to eat in a restaurant in my hometown. Taken aback, they relented, and we had a very nice celebration in the East Room. We invited Lynda Bird Johnson Robb, whom I had the chance to thank personally for the courage and commitment her father had shown in bringing about dramatic changes in my life.