While the World Watched (13 page)

George Wallace responded to the president’s report. He told the
New York Times
that, in order to stop school integration, Alabama needed “a few first-class funerals.”
[51]
Wallace got his “first-class funerals” less than three months later—Cynthia, Denise, and Addie’s and Carole’s.
[52]

But the battle for desegregation in Alabama schools was only heating up. The school desegregation laws established in 1954 were little more than a piece of paper in Alabama because, thus far, nothing had changed. Some people would end up paying a dear price for their courageous stands against Governor Wallace and the Ku Klux Klan before the dust finally settled.

Chapter 13

The Battle Continues

* * *

I have a dream that one day the state of Alabama, whose governor’s lips are presently dripping with the words of interposition and nullification, will be transformed into a situation where little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls and walk together as sisters and brothers.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.,
“I Have a Dream”

All this will not be finished in the first 100 days. Nor will it be finished in the first 1,000 days, nor in the life of this administration, nor even perhaps in our lifetimes on this planet. But let us begin.

John F. Kennedy

On the day after George Wallace made his public stand in the University of Alabama’s doorway and President Kennedy spoke on television to the nation about Civil Rights, a member of the Klan shot and killed black Civil Rights leader Medgar Evers, the field secretary for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

Evers had attracted national attention back in the early 1960s when he led a store boycott in Jackson, Mississippi, and when he helped black student James Meredith enter the all-white University of Mississippi in 1962. As Evers pulled into the driveway of his home in Jackson, Mississippi, white supremacist and Klan member Byron De La Beckwith was hiding, waiting for Evers to step out of his car. Then, with Evers’s wife and young children watching, De La Beckwith shot him in the back. Evers died that night in his driveway.

When I heard about the assassination that evening on the television news, I worried about my own dad driving home from work.
Will someone shoot Daddy in the back and leave him to die in our driveway?
I wondered. But I didn’t talk to anyone about my fears. I kept them bottled inside, hidden away from my parents and my friends.

Even at that young age, I knew I couldn’t trust the legal system to bring about justice. Byron De La Beckwith was arrested, tried, and acquitted by an all-white jury. It was the verdict we’d expected. He went free for the next thirty-one years.
[53]

That incident set something off inside me—it seemed even more horrific than the other racially motivated murders that had happened recently throughout the South. I was starting to grasp how little value black people had in my country, and I knew it wasn’t right.
We aren’t considered “real people” who have feelings and dreams and ambitions—people who want the best for their children
, I railed to myself.
Is anybody going to stand up and say, “This is wrong! We’re going to bring justice to this situation!”

I started to worry even more about my own family after Evers’s death—especially my father and four brothers. It seemed so scary to me—a man shot in the back at night, unable to defend himself, with his family watching him die in his own driveway.
Surely
, I thought,
this is the epitome of evil: Byron De La Beckwith.

* * *

In the midst of all the hype surrounding school desegregation, I was beginning to think seriously about where I wanted to go to college myself within the next few years.

I had always been an A student, and I loved reading and learning. The expectation from my parents and my teachers alike was that college would be a given for me. From the time I was in elementary school, my teachers saw my spelling potential—already at a twelfth grade level, according to the California Achievement Tests—and they asked my parents if they could help me develop it. For two years, from the sixth grade to the eighth grade, from two o’clock to three o’clock each school day, my teachers took me to the teachers’ lounge and individually worked with me on my spelling skills.

I felt privileged to be allowed in an area that was typically off-limits to other students. Sometimes, however, I got so sick of spelling and spelling books that I cried. When that happened, one of my teachers would tell Miss Pullum—the lady who supervised our school cafeteria—to give me some ice cream. The choices were chocolate, vanilla, or strawberry. I always chose my favorite—chocolate. The ice cream came with a small wooden spoon wrapped in thin white paper. Other times one of the teachers would give me a quarter to buy a Coca-Cola. In those days, buying a Coke was a big treat—we seldom had Coke at home.

When I was a seventh grade student at Finley Avenue Elementary School, Mr. A. G. Gaston held a spelling bee for Birmingham’s black students. I entered the contest, and with more than four hundred other students participating, I won first place—out of my city, county, and state. While I was there, I met a fellow contestant, Mary Kate Bush, who later became a great source of strength to me, as well as a lifelong friend. In fact, Mary Kate became my roommate at Fisk University.

I was given a trophy with my name and my school’s name on it, and my photo appeared in the
Birmingham News
on May 7, 1961, with the caption “Birmingham Girl Winner of Gaston Spelling Bee.” Somewhere in a Birmingham school, a Gaston Spelling Bee trophy with the words
Carolyn Jean Maull
engraved on the front sits entombed in a glass cabinet. I still wonder if I could have won the National Spelling Bee competition if black students had been allowed to compete.

My parents were proud of me. But one omission in the local newspaper article upset my father. The reporter had listed me as the daughter of Mrs. Ernestine Maull and made no mention of my dad. It upset him because so many black children at that time had no fathers in their homes, and he wanted everyone to know I had a father.

* * *

I have often wondered what I might have become in life had society’s doors been more open to me—a child and youth of color—in the 1950s and 1960s. What path might I have walked if more opportunities had been available to me in Birmingham? What exciting turns would my life have taken if I had been as unhindered in my decision making as Alabama’s white children and youth?

“Carolyn,” Mama and Daddy suggested when I started thinking about my options for college, “please consider Fisk University in Nashville. Fisk is an all-black school. That’ll be easier. You certainly don’t want to go through what Vivian Malone or James Hood endured to go to college! You will face enough challenges at Fisk University, but the color of your skin won’t be one of them.”

Fisk University had been founded barely six months after the end of the Civil War and just two years after the Emancipation Proclamation, primarily to educate freedmen and the biracial, light-skinned children born to white slave owners who had impregnated their female slaves. These children, half-white and half-black, fit into neither white nor black society in the South.

From Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Where Do We Go from Here?” Speech

In assault after assault, we caused the sagging walls of segregation to come tumbling down. During this era the entire edifice of segregation was profoundly shaken. This is an accomplishment whose consequences are deeply felt by every southern Negro in his daily life. It is no longer possible to count the number of public establishments that are open to Negroes. Ten years ago, Negroes seemed almost invisible to the larger society, and the facts of their harsh lives were unknown to the majority of the nation. But today, civil rights is a dominating issue in every state, crowding the pages of the press and the daily conversation of white Americans. In this decade of change, the Negro stood up and confronted his oppressor. He faced the bullies and the guns, and the dogs and the tear gas. He put himself squarely before the vicious mobs and moved with strength and dignity toward them and decisively defeated them. And the courage with which he confronted enraged mobs dissolved the stereotype of the grinning, submissive Uncle Tom. He came out of his struggle integrated only slightly in the external society, but powerfully integrated within. This was a victory that had to precede all other gains.

In short, over the last ten years the Negro decided to straighten his back up, realizing that a man cannot ride your back unless it is bent. We made our government write new laws to alter some of the cruelest injustices that affected us. We made an indifferent and unconcerned nation rise from lethargy and subpoenaed its conscience to appear before the judgment seat of morality on the whole question of civil rights. We gained manhood in the nation that had always called us “boy.” . . . But in spite of a decade of significant progress, the problem is far from solved. The deep rumbling of discontent in our cities is indicative of the fact that the plant of freedom has grown only a bud and not yet a flower. . . .

With all the struggle and all the achievements, we must face the fact, however, that the Negro still lives in the basement of the Great Society. He is still at the bottom, despite the few who have penetrated to slightly higher levels. Even where the door has been forced partially open, mobility for the Negro is still sharply restricted. There is often no bottom at which to start, and when there is there’s almost no room at the top. In consequence, Negroes are still impoverished aliens in an affluent society. They are too poor even to rise with the society, too impoverished by the ages to be able to ascend by using their own resources. And the Negro did not do this himself; it was done to him. For more than half of his American history, he was enslaved. Yet, he built the spanning bridges and the grand mansions, the sturdy docks and stout factories of the South. His unpaid labor made cotton “King” and established America as a significant nation in international commerce. Even after his release from chattel slavery, the nation grew over him, submerging him. It became the richest, most powerful society in the history of man, but it left the Negro far behind.

And so we still have a long, long way to go before we reach the promised land of freedom. Yes, we have left the dusty soils of Egypt, and we have crossed a Red Sea that had for years been hardened by a long and piercing winter of massive resistance, but before we reach the majestic shores of the promised land, there will still be gigantic mountains of opposition ahead and prodigious hilltops of injustice. We still need some Paul Revere of conscience to alert every hamlet and every village of America that revolution is still at hand. Yes, we need a chart; we need a compass; indeed, we need some North Star to guide us into a future shrouded with impenetrable uncertainties.

Now, in order to answer the question, “Where do we go from here?” which is our theme, we must first honestly recognize where we are now. When the Constitution was written, a strange formula to determine taxes and representation declared that the Negro was sixty percent of a person. Today another curious formula seems to declare he is fifty percent of a person. Of the good things in life, the Negro has approximately one half those of whites. Of the bad things of life, he has twice those of whites. Thus, half of all Negroes live in substandard housing. And Negroes have half the income of whites. When we turn to the negative experiences of life, the Negro has a double share: There are twice as many unemployed; the rate of infant mortality among Negroes is double that of whites; and there are twice as many Negroes dying in Vietnam as whites in proportion to their size in the population.

In other spheres, the figures are equally alarming. In elementary schools, Negroes lag one to three years behind whites, and their segregated schools receive substantially less money per student than the white schools. One-twentieth as many Negroes as whites attend college. Of employed Negroes, seventy-five percent hold menial jobs. This is where we are.

Where do we go from here? First, we must massively assert our dignity and worth. We must stand up amid a system that still oppresses us and develop an unassailable and majestic sense of values. We must no longer be ashamed of being black. The job of arousing manhood within a people that have been taught for so many centuries that they are nobody is not easy.
[54]

Our society still had a long way to go, of course, but in the early days of September 1963, I felt a genuine hope about the future—about things improving between the races in Alabama. I was smart, talented, and I loved my school and church. I had my family and lots of good friends. I missed Mama Lessie, but I still had my wonderful granddaddy. I had matured listening to the words of my pastor, of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and of others that year. I was proud that I had participated in the Civil Rights movement, singing freedom songs and marching peacefully with my friends. Life was good. And I felt certain that things in Birmingham were finally changing for the better.

* * *

That sense of well-being was shattered the instant the bomb went off that Sunday morning in September 1963—the day I grew up. I’ve learned in the years since that some moments in history and in our lives go away. The issues we understand easily and the fears we resolve quickly fade into the past. They get filed away into a memory cabinet marked “closed.”

Other events, however, refuse to go away. They become a part of our “forever” thoughts, and they surface unexpectedly at the most unpredictable times. These memories can be painful, but perhaps some things should never go away—they should be kept in the forefront of our minds to provide continuing lessons for daily life.

Whatever excitement and girlish joy I felt before the bombing simply died for a long period after the bombing. My heart built a barrier that sealed off my hope, my happiness, and my very soul, just like the wall the church had built to seal off the restroom where the four girls perished. A dark cloud formed above my head and became my constant, unwanted companion. It followed me everywhere I went. It was like my life-changing baptism two years before—only a different kind of baptism. “Dead and buried,” but seemingly with no hope for a future “resurrection.” I had lost hope in my white fellow human beings.