Political Science Term

At The Dark End of The

Street

Danielle L. Mcguire

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Title: At The Dark End of The Street

Author: Danielle L. Mcguire

Copyright 2010 by Danielle L. McGuire

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Begin Content

Acclaim for Danielle L. McGuire's

At the Dark End of the

Street

Winner of the Frederick Jackson Turner Award

Honorable Mention for the Darlene Clark Hine Award

"One of those rare studies that makes a well-known story

seem startlingly new. Anyone who thinks he knows the

history of the modern civil rights movement needs to read

this terrifying, illuminating book."

--Kevin Boyle, author of Arc of Justice:

A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age,

winner of the National Book Award

"Valuable for reminding us of Parks's radicalism. She was

not a frail old lady who wouldn't get up from her bus seat

'because she was tired and her feet ached.'... A welcome

corrective."

--The Independent Weekly (Raleigh, NC)

"This gripping story changes the history books, giving us a

revised Rosa Parks and a new civil rights story. You can't

write a general U.S. history without altering crucial

sentences because of McGuire's work. Masterfully narrated,

At the Dark End of the Street presents a deep civil rights

movement with women at the center, a narrative as

poignant, painful and complicated as our own lives."

--Timothy B. Tyson, author of

Blood Done Sign My Name: A True Story

"Groundbreaking.... Inspiring."

--Elle

"People can learn about a new side of Rosa Parks. They can

also discover other previously unknown female freedom

fighters."

--Time

"McGuire restores to memory the courageous black women

who dared seek legal remedy, when black women and their

families faced particular hazards for doing so. McGuire

brings the reader through a dark time via a painful but

somehow gratifying passage in this compelling, carefully

documented work."

--Publishers Weekly (starred)

"Just when we thought there couldn't possibly be anything

left to uncover about the civil rights movement, Danielle

McGuire finds a new facet of that endlessly prismatic

struggle at the core of our national identity."

--Diane McWhorter, author of

Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama:

the Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution

"Eye-opening."

--Sacramento Book Review

"Following the lead of pioneers like Darlene Clark Hine,

Danielle McGuire details the all too ignored tactic of rape of

black women in the everyday practice of southern white

supremacy. Just as important, she plots resistance against

this outrage as an integral facet of the civil rights movement

of the 1950s and 1960s. This book is as essential as its

history is infuriating."

--Nell Irvin Painter, author of

The History of White People

Danielle L. McGuire

At the Dark End of the

Street

Danielle L. McGuire was born in Janesville, Wisconsin. She

attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and received

her Ph.D. from Rutgers University. She is an assistant

professor in the History Department at Wayne State

University and lives in Detroit, Michigan.

www.atthedarkendofthestreet.com

[Blank Page]

At the Dark End of the StreetBlack Women, Rape, and

Resistance--a New Historyof the Civil Rights Movementfrom

Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power

Danielle L. McGuire

***

VINTAGE BOOKS

A DIVISION OF RANDOM HOUSE, INC.

NEW YORK

For Recy and Ruby

FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, OCTOBER 2011

Copyright © 2010 by Danielle L. McGuire

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by

Vintage Books,

a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada

by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally

published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A.

Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2010.

Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Random

House, Inc.

A portion of this work was originally published in slightly

different form in

The Journal of American History.

The Library of Congress cataloged the Knopf edition as

follows:

McGuire, Danielle L.

At the dark end of the street / by Danielle L. McGuire. -- 1st

ed.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. African-American women--Civil rights--Alabama--History-

-20th century.

2. African-American women--Violence against--Alabama--

History--20th century. 3. Rape--Political aspects--Southern

States--History--20th century.

4. Civil rights movements--Southern States--History--20th

century.

5. Southern States--Race relations--History--20th century. I.

Title.

E185.61.M4777 2010

323.1196'0730761--dc22 2010012072

Vintage ISBN: 978-0-307-38924-4

Book design by Maggie Hinders

www.vintagebooks.com

Printed in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6

Sex is the principle around which the whole structure of

segregation ... is organized.

--GUNNAR MYRDAL, 1944

[Blank Page]

Contents

List of Illustrations XI

Prologue XV

chapter 1 "They'd Kill Me If I Told" 3

chapter 2 "Negroes Every Day Are Being Molested" 48

chapter 3 "Walking in Pride and Dignity" 84

chapter 4 "There's Open Season on Negroes Now" 135

chapter 5 "It Was Like All of Us Had Been Raped" 160

chapter 6 "A Black Woman's Body Was Never

Hers Alone" 191

chapter 7 Sex and Civil Rights 212

chapter 8 "Power to the Ice Pick!" 246

epilogue "We All Lived in Fear for Years" 279

Acknowledgments 285

Notes -289

Bibliography 349

Index 379

[Blank Page]

Illustrations

18 Members of the SNYC's Third Conference Preparation

Group gather at Miles College in Alabama, 1940. (Courtesy

of the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard

University)

19 Esther Cooper, executive secretary of the SNYC

(Courtesy of the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center,

Howard University)

21 Recy Taylor, Willie Guy Taylor, and their child, Joyce Lee

Taylor (Courtesy

of the Chicago Defender)

23 Rosa Parks's letter to Chauncey Sparks, governor of

Alabama (Courtesy of the Alabama Department of Archives

and History, Montgomery, Alabama)

58 Willie McGee (© Photo by Robert W. Kelley/Time & Life

Pictures/Getty

Images)

60 More than five hundred white men, women, and children

gather outside the Jones County Courthouse in Ellisville,

Mississippi, 1951. (© Photo by Robert W. Kelley/Time & Life

Pictures/Getty Images)

79 Members of the Sojourners for Truth and Justice--a

national black women's organization dedicated to the

protection of "Negro Womanhood"--with Paul Robeson in

1952. (Louise Thompson Patterson Papers, Manuscript,

Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University)

81 Rosa Lee Ingram with sons Sammie and Wallace in an

Albany, Georgia, jail cell, 1948 (© AP/Wide World)

95 Rosa Parks and Frederick Douglass Patterson at

Highlander Folk School in

July 1955 (Courtesy of Wisconsin Historical Society, 56309)

109 Boycotters, February 1956 (© Photo by Don

Cravens/Time & Life Pictures/ Getty Images)

111 Three police officers watch a group of African-American

women waiting at a carpool pickup location. (© Photo by

Don Cravens/Time & Life Pictures/ Getty Images)

116 African-American women filled the pews at weekly mass

meetings. (© Photo by Grey Villet/Time & Life Pictures/Getty

Images)

xii

121 Armed white men attack two black women after a

desegregation attempt in Montgomery, Alabama. (© Photo

by Charles Moore/Blackstar)

123 Rosa Parks (Courtesy of the Montgomery County

Archives)

124 Mrs. A. W. West (Courtesy of the Montgomery County

Archives)

124 Jo Ann Robinson (Courtesy of the Montgomery County

Archives)

125 Euretta Adair (Courtesy of the Montgomery County

Archives)

125 E. D. Nixon (Courtesy of the Montgomery County

Archives)

126 Reverend Solomon Seay, Sr. (Courtesy of the

Montgomery County Archives)

126 Reverend Ralph Abernathy (Courtesy of the

Montgomery County Archives)

127 Reverend E. N. French (Courtesy of the Montgomery

County Archives)

127 Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. (Courtesy of the

Montgomery County Archives)

128 Fred Gray (Courtesy of the Montgomery County

Archives)

129 African Americans gather outside the courthouse as

Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., stands trial for conspiracy.

(© Photo by Don Cravens/ Time & Life Pictures/Getty

Images)

131 Rosa Parks speaks with an interviewer as she arrives at

court with E. D. Nixon and others on trial for violating a 1921

antiboycott law. (© Bettman/ Corbis)

132 The Fellowship of Reconciliation comic book, published

circa 1957, gave rise to the myth of Rosa Parks's "tired feet"

and Martin Luther King, Jr.'s, heroic leadership of the

Montgomery bus boycott. (Courtesy of the Fellowship of

Reconciliation and the Ed King Collection of Civil Rights

Material, Archives Center, National Museum of American

History, Smithsonian Institution)

136 Melba Patillo (Courtesy of the Wisconsin Historical

Society, 52734)

138 Police investigate a Ku Klux Klan cross left on the front

lawn of L. C. and Daisy Bates in October 1956. (Courtesy of

the Wisconsin Historical Society, 52745)

141 Alabama state senator Samuel Engelhardt, Jt., promotes

a "white only" anti-integration rally. (© Photo by Don

Cravens/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)

162 Scene of the crime where four white men from

Tallahassee, Florida, kidnapped and raped an African-

American college student (© Photo by Grey Villet//Time Life

Pictures/Getty Images)

163 Joe D. Cooke, Jr., an intern from Florida State University,

defied racial conventions when he agreed to search for the

white assailants of an African-American college student. (©

Photo by Grey Villet//Time Life Pictures/Getty Images)

166 On May 4, 1959, more than one thousand Florida A&M

University students gathered on the university's quadrangle

to demand justice for Betty Jean Owens. (Courtesy of The

FAMUAN, the Florida A&M University student newspaper,

May 1959)

xiii

167 Patrick Scarborough, David Beagles, Ollie Stoutamire,

and Ted Collins-worth (© Photo by Grey Villet//Time Life

Pictures/Getty Images)

171 State prosecutor William Hopkins (© Photo by Grey

Villet//Time Life Pictures/Getty Images)

171 Judge W. May Walker (© Photo by Grey Villet//Time Life

Pictures/Getty Images)

182 African Americans and whites outside the Leon County

Courthouse in Tallahassee await the verdict of four white

men accused of raping Betty Jean Owens, a black college

student. (© Photo by Grey Villet//Time Life Pictures/Getty

Images)

186 Cartoon featured in an African-American newspaper,

May 16, 1959 (Courtesy of the Baltimore Afro-American)

189 African-American women made up the bulk of the 257

Florida A&M University students arrested for protesting

segregated movie theaters in Tallahassee in the spring of

1963. (Courtesy of the State Archives of Florida)

192 Fannie Lou Hamer (Will D. Campbell Papers, McCain

Library and Archives, University of Southern Mississippi)

196 Two trustees carry an African-American woman to the

paddy wagon in Jackson, Mississippi, 1963. (Courtesy of the

Library of Congress)

198 Police crammed a group of teenage girls into a stockade

in Leesburg, Georgia, after they were arrested for protesting

segregation at a movie theater. (© Photo by Danny

Lyon/Magnum Photos)

202 Endesha Ida Mae Holland with SNCC voting-rights

activists (© 1978 Matt Heron/Take Stock Photos)

205 Allen Thompson, mayor of Jackson, Mississippi, with

police force and armored tank as the city prepares for the

arrival of black and white voting-rights volunteers in the

summer of 1964 (© 1978 Matt Heron/Take Stock Photos)

214 Dallas County sheriff Jim Clark (Courtesy of the Library

of Congress)

215 Jim Clark ordered hundreds of schoolchildren arrested

after they held a silent demonstration outside the Dallas

County Courthouse on February 3, 1965. (©

Corbis/Bettman)

218 An Alabama state trooper accosts Annie Cooper, an

African-American woman, as members of Jim Clark's

mounted posse rally in the background. (© Corbis/Bettman)

224 Viola Liuzzo (© AP/Wide World)

225 An Alabama state trooper's car is parked near the site

where the Ku Klux Klan fatally shot Viola Liuzzo and injured

Leroy Moton. (© AP/Wide World)

226 An all-white jury found Klansmen Collie Leroy Wilkins,

Eugene Thomas, and William Eaton not guilty for the murder

of Viola Liuzzo. (© AP/Wide World)

xiv

235 County prosecutor James Dukes and district attorney

James Finch outside the Forrest County Courthouse

(Moncrief Photograph Collection, #607, Mississippi

Department of Archives & History

[http://www.mdah.state.ms.us])

239 The front page of the November 12, 1965, Hattiesburg

American highlights the historic verdict.

242 Mildred and Richard Loving share a laugh with friends

during an outing in

Virginia, 1965. (© Photo by Grey Villet/Time Life

Pictures/Getty Images) 247 Joan Little surrenders to the

North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation,

September 7, 1975. (Photo courtesy of the North Carolina

State Archives.

Reprinted with the permission of The News and Observer of

Raleigh, North

Carolina)

255 Attorney Jerry Paul defied the state's racial status quo

by representing African Americans and working on civil

rights cases. (Photo courtesy of the North Carolina State

Archives. Reprinted with the permission of The News and

Observer of Raleigh, North Carolina)

257 Joan Little, 1975 (Photo courtesy of the North Carolina

State Archives. Reprinted with the permission of The News

and Observer of Raleigh, North Carolina)

266 Demonstrators outside the Wake County Courthouse.

(Photo courtesy of the North Carolina State Archives.

Reprinted with the permission of The News and Observer of

Raleigh, North Carolina)

267 An eclectic group of protesters join forces to "Free Joan

Little," 1975. (Photo courtesy of the North Carolina State

Archives. Reprinted with the permission of The News and

Observer of Raleigh, North Carolina)

268 An African-American woman pickets outside the Wake

County Courthouse in Raleigh, 1975 (Photo courtesy of the

North Carolina State Archives. Reprinted with the permission

of The News and Observer of Raleigh, North Carolina)

269 The Wake County Courthouse, Raleigh, July 14, 1975

(Photo courtesy of the North Carolina State Archives.

Reprinted with the permission of The News and Observer of

Raleigh, North Carolina)

269 Outside the Joan Little trial, 1975 (Photo courtesy of the

North Carolina

State Archives. Reprinted with the permission of The News

and Observer of

Raleigh, North Carolina) 275 Joan Little and Karen Galloway,

July 14, 1975 (Photo courtesy of the North

Carolina State Archives. Reprinted with the permission of

The News and

Observer of Raleigh, North Carolina)

278 Joan Little, published in the Baltimore Afro-American,

1975 (Courtesy of the Baltimore Afro-American)

Prologue

ON SEPTEMBER 3, 1944, the Rock Hill Holiness Church, in

Abbeville, Alabama, rocked late into the night. It was nearly

midnight when the doors of the wooden, one-story church

swung open releasing streams of worshippers, all African

American, into the moonlight. After a night of singing and

praying, Recy Taylor, Fannie Daniel, and Daniel's eighteen-

year-old son, West, stepped out of the country chapel and

strolled toward home alongside the peanut plantations that

bounded the Abbeville-Headland highway. Taylor, a slender,

copper-colored, and beautiful twenty-four-year-old mother

and sharecropper, noticed a rattletrap green Chevrolet pass

them at least three times, young white men gawking from

its windows.

"You reckon what they are up to?" Taylor asked.

Taylor and Daniel, a stout sixty-one-year-old woman,

watched the car creep by one last time and roll to a stop a

few feet ahead of them. Seven men, armed with knives and

guns, got out of the car and walked toward the women.

Herbert Lovett, the oldest of the crew at twenty-four and a

private in the U.S. Army, shouted, "Halt!"

When they ignored the order, Lovett leveled his shotgun.

West tugged at his mother's sleeve, begging her to stop.

"They might shoot you," he whispered.

xvi

As the circle of men closed in, Lovett waved his gun at

Taylor.

"We're looking for this girl, right there. She's the one that

cut that white boy in Clopton this evening," Lovett said,

adding that the local sheriff, George H. Gamble, had

dispatched the group to find the alleged assailant.

"You're wrong," Fannie insisted. "She's been to my house all

day."

The men crowded closer, nodding their heads in agreement.

"Ain't this her?" Lovett asked.

"Yep, this the one," Joe Culpepper said. "I know her by the

clothes she got on."

"That's her," Luther Lee agreed. "Get her!"

Lovett lurched toward Taylor and grabbed her arm. Then he

turned to West and asked if Taylor was his wife.

"No," West replied, "she's Willie Guy Taylor's wife."

Undeterred, Lovett extended his hand to the teenager,

ordered him to shake it, and promised not to hurt Taylor.

"We're going to take her up here and see if Mr. Gamble

knows her," Lovett claimed. "If she's not the one, we'll bring

her right back."

As Lovett spoke, Taylor managed to wrest her arm from his

grasp and bolted toward a stand of trees behind a cabin. 1

"Come back! Come back!" Fannie yelled. "They going to

shoot you. Come back!" 2

"Stop!" Lovett shouted. He cocked the gun at the back of

her head. "I'll kill you if you run."

Lovett walked Taylor to the car and shoved her into the

backseat. Three men piled in behind her, while four others

squeezed into the front. The headlights switched off and the

car crept away. After a few miles, the green sedan turned off

the main highway, rattled down a red-clay tractor path into

the woods, and stopped in a grove of pecan trees. "Y'all

aren't carrying me to Mr. Gamble," Taylor shouted. The men

in the backseat clasped her wrists and ordered her to be

quiet. Lovett grabbed his gun and waved Taylor and his

companions out of the car.

"Ger them rags off," he barked, pointing the shotgun at her,

"or I'll kill you and leave you down here in the woods."

xvii

Sobbing, Taylor pulled off her clothes.

"Please," she cried, "let me go home to my husband and my

baby."

Lovett spread an old hunting coat on the ground, told his

friends to strip down to their socks and undershirts, and

ordered Taylor to lie down. Lovett passed his rifle to a friend

and took off his pants. Hovering over the young mother, he

snarled, "Act just like you do with your husband or I'll cut

your damn throat."

Lovett was the first of six men to rape Taylor that night.

When they finished, someone helped her get dressed, tied a

handkerchief over her eyes, and shoved her back into the

car. Back on the highway, the men stopped and ordered

Taylor out of the car. "Don't move until we get away from

here," one of them yelled. Taylor heard the car disappear

into the night. She pulled off the blindfold, got her bearings,

and began the long walk home. 3

A few days later, a telephone rang at the NAACP branch

office in Montgomery, Alabama. E. D. Nixon, the local

president, promised to send his best investigator to

Abbeville. That investigator would launch a movement that

would ultimately change the world. Her name was Rosa

Parks. 4

In later years, historians would paint Parks as a sweet and

reticent old woman, whose tired feet caused her to defy Jim

Crow on Montgomery's city buses. Her solitary and

spontaneous act, the story goes, sparked the 1955 bus

boycott and gave birth to the civil rights movement. But

Rosa Parks was a militant race woman, a sharp detective,

and an antirape activist long before she became the patron

saint of the bus boycott. After meeting with Recy Taylor,

Rosa Parks helped form the Committee for Equal Justice.

With support from local people, she helped organize what

the Chicago Defender called the "strongest campaign for

equal justice

xviii

to be seen in a decade." Eleven years later this group of

homegrown leaders would become better known as the

Montgomery Improvement Association. The 1955

Montgomery bus boycott, often heralded as the opening

scene of the civil rights movement, was in many ways the

last act of a decades-long struggle to protect black women,

like Taylor, from sexualized violence and rape.

The kidnapping and rape of Recy Taylor was not unusual in

the segregated South. The sexual exploitation of black

women by white men had its roots in slavery and continued

throughout the better part of the twentieth century.

When African Americans tested their freedom during

Reconstruction, former slaveholders and their sympathizers

used rape as a "weapon of terror" to dominate the bodies

and minds of African-American men and women. 5 Interracial

rape was not only used to uphold white patriarchal power

but was also deployed as a justification for lynching black

men who challenged the Southern status quo. In addition to

the immediate physical danger African Americans faced,

sexual and racial violence functioned as a tool of coercion,

control, and harassment. 6 Ida B. Wells, the gun-toting editor

of the Memphis Free Press who led a crusade against

lynching in the 1890s, argued that white men accused black

men of rape as part of a larger "system of intimidation"

designed to keep blacks "subservient and submissive."

Worse, Wells argued at the turn of the century, white men

used the protection of white womanhood to "justify their

own barbarism." 7

The rape of black women by white men continued, often

unpunished, throughout the Jim Crow era. As Reconstruction

collapsed and Jim Crow arose, white men abducted and

assaulted black women with alarming regularity. White men

lured black women and girls away from home with promises

of steady work and better wages; attacked them on the job;

abducted them at gunpoint while traveling to or from home,

work, or church; raped them as a form of retribution or to

enforce rules of racial and

xix

economic hierarchy; sexually humiliated and assaulted

them on streetcars and buses, in taxicabs and trains, and in

other public spaces. As the acclaimed freedom fighter

Fannie Lou Hamer put it, "A black woman's body was never

hers alone." 8

Black women did not keep their stories secret. African-

American women reclaimed their bodies and their humanity

by testifying about their assaults. They launched the first

public attacks on sexual violence as a "systemic abuse of

women" in response to slavery and the wave of lynchings in

the post-Emancipation South. 9 Slave narratives offer stark

testimony about the brutal sexual exploitation bondswomen

faced. For example, Harriet Jacobs detailed her master's

lechery in her autobiography to "arouse the women of the

North" and "convince the people of the Free States what

Slavery really is." 10

When African-American clubwomen

began to organize antilynching campaigns during the late

nineteenth century, they testified about decades of sexual

abuse. 11

On October 5, 1892, hundreds of black women

converged on Lyric Hall in New York City to hear Ida B.

Wells's thunderous voice. While black men were being

accused of ravishing white women, she argued, "The rape of

helpless Negro girls, which began in slavery days, still

continues without reproof from church, state or press." 12

At

the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago, Fannie Barrier Williams told

an audience of black and white clubwomen about the

"shameful fact that I am constantly in receipt of letters from

the still unprotected women of the South. Anna Julia Cooper,

a Washington, D.C., educator, author, and respected

clubwoman, echoed Williams's testimony. Black women, she

told the crowd, were engaged in a "painful, patient, and

silent toil... to gain title to the bodies of their daughters." 13

Throughout the twentieth century, black women persisted in

telling their stories, frequently cited in local and national

NAACP reports. Their testimonies spilled out in letters to the

Justice Department and appeared on the front pages of the

nation's leading black newspapers. Black women regularly

denounced their sexual misuse. By deploying their voices as

weapons in the wars against white supremacy, whether in

the church, the courtroom, or in congressional

xx

hearings, African-American women loudly resisted what

Martin Luther King, Jr., called the "thingification" of their

humanity. Decades before radical feminists in the women's

movement urged rape survivors to "speak out," African-

American women's public protests galvanized local,

national, and even international outrage and sparked larger

campaigns for racial justice and human dignity. When Recy

Taylor spoke out against her assailants and Rosa Parks and

her allies in Montgomery mobilized in defense of her

womanhood in 1944, they joined this tradition of testimony

and protest.

Montgomery, Alabama, was not the only place in which

attacks on black women fueled protests against white

supremacy. Between 1940 and 1975, sexual violence and

interracial rape became one crucial battleground upon

which African Americans sought to destroy white supremacy

and gain personal and political autonomy. Civil rights

campaigns in Little Rock, Arkansas; Macon, Georgia;

Tallahassee, Florida; Washington, North Carolina;

Birmingham and Selma, Alabama; Hattiesburg, Mississippi;

and many other places had roots in organized resistance to

sexual violence and appeals for protection of black

womanhood.

And yet analyses of rape and sexualized violence play little

or no role in most histories of the civil rights movement,

which present it as a struggle between black and white

men--the heroic leadership of Martin Luther King confronting

intransigent white supremacist like "Bull" Connor. The real

story--that the civil rights movement is also rooted in

African-American women's long struggle against sexual

violence--has never before been written. The stories of black

women who fought for bodily integrity and personal dignity

hold profound truths about the sexualized violence that

marked racial politics and African American lives during the

modern civil rights movement. If we understand the role

rape and sexual violence played in African Americans' daily

lives and within the larger freedom struggle, we have to

reinterpret, if not rewrite, the history of the civil rights

movement. At the Dark End of the Street does both.

xxi

It is no surprise that buses became the target of African-

American resistance in Montgomery during the 1955--56

boycott. It was much easier, not to mention safer, for black

women to stop riding the buses than it was to bring their

assailants--usually white policemen or bus drivers--to

justice. By walking hundreds of miles to protest humiliation

and testifying publicly about physical and sexual abuse,

black women reclaimed their bodies and demanded to be

treated with dignity and respect. Coupling new historical

evidence with a fresh perspective, Chapters 2 and 3 reveal

the history of the Montgomery campaign as a women's

movement for dignity.

Issues of sexual violence were crucial both to the civil rights

movement and to the white supremacist resistance.

Segregationists responded to the nascent African-American

freedom movement with a sexually charged campaign of

terror to derail the freedom movement. Between 1956 and

1960, black Southerners braved the Ku Klux Klan, the White

Citizens' Council, and other extremist groups, sparking some

of the fiercest struggles for black humanity of the modern

civil rights movement. These battles, highlighted in Chapter

4, exposed the power of sex in maintaining the South's

racial hierarchy and underscored the extent to which whites

would fight to preserve it.

Often ignored by civil rights historians, a number of

campaigns led to trials and even convictions throughout the

South. These cases, many virtually unknown, broke with

Southern tradition and fractured the philosophical and

political foundations of white supremacy by challenging the

relationship between sexual domination and racial equality.

Nowhere was this more apparent and more important than

in Tallahassee, Florida, where Betty Jean Owens, an African-

American college student, stood in front of an all-white jury

in 1959 and testified about being kidnapped and gang-

raped by four white men. The extraordinary trial, the subject

of Chapter 5, focused national attention on the sexual

exploitation of African-American women. For perhaps the

first time since Reconstruction, black Southerners

xxii

could imagine government as a defender of their manhood

and womanhood. The Tallahassee case led to rape

convictions elsewhere that year in Montgomery, Alabama;

Raleigh, North Carolina; and Burton, South Carolina. The

1959 Tallahassee rape was a watershed case that remains

as revealing now as it was important then.

Black women's testimonies revealed their vulnerability

across the South, especially in Mississippi. Most accounts of

the Mississippi movement focus on racist brutality directed

at men--from Emmett Till and Medgar Evers to Andrew

Goodman, Michael Schwerner, and James Chaney. Chapter 6

challenges the dominant historical narrative of the

Mississippi freedom struggle by documenting black women's

resistance to racial and sexual abuse.

The 1965 Selma, Alabama, campaign, like the Montgomery

movement, has an important history rooted in sexualized

violence that historians have not yet explored. Federal

intervention and congressional action on behalf of African

Americans in 1964 and 1965--especially the Civil Rights Act

and the Voting Rights Act--constituted the most dangerous

threat to white dominion and left segregationists reeling.

But the segregationists fired back with traditional

ammunition of sexual slander and the "black beast rapist."

Chapter 7 documents how white supremacists in Selma and

across the South used the rhetoric of rape and

"miscegenation" to resuscitate and revive massive

resistance, underscoring the importance of sex and sexual

violence to the maintenance of white supremacy. Civil rights

activists were not only "outside agitators" or Communists

intent on destroying the Southern way of life; now they were

sexual fiends. It was within this storm--and because of it--

that the Ku Klux Klan murdered Viola Liuzzo, a white

housewife from Detroit who embraced the black freedom

struggle. Her detractors, of course, accused her of

embracing black men.

An analysis of sex and sexualized violence in well-known

civil rights narratives changes the historical markers and

meanings of the movement. Like the Tallahassee case, the

1965 trial of Norman Cannon, a white man who abducted

and raped a black teenager in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, had

broad implications for both

xxiii

the Mississippi movement and the African-American

freedom struggle as a whole. The verdict was recognized

nationally as a major victory. It ought to be considered one

of the bookends of the modern civil rights movement. And

yet the story has never been told. While the Voting Rights

Act is often referenced as the culminating achievement of

the modern civil rights movement, a pillar of white

supremacy fell in 1967 when the Supreme Court banned

laws prohibiting interracial marriage in the landmark Loving

v. Virginia decision. Only when we place the Loving decision

within the long struggle for black women's bodily integrity

and freedom from racial and sexual terror can it be properly

recognized as a major marker in the African-American

freedom movement.

The struggle did not stop with that landmark victory. The

right of African-American women to defend themselves from

white men's sexual advances was tested in the 1975 trial of

Joan Little, a twenty-year-old black female inmate from

Washington, North Carolina, who killed her white jailer after

he allegedly sexually assaulted her. The broad coalition of

supporters who rallied to Little's defense--from the National

Organization for Women to the Black Panther Party--

reflected the enormous social, political, and economic

changes wrought by the civil rights movement, the women's

movement, and the emergence of the New Left and Black

Power. But it also showed continuity with the past--the Free

Joan Little movement mirrored the eclectic coalition that

formed to demand justice for Recy Taylor in 1944. They were

both led primarily by African-American women and helped

serve as catalysts for larger struggles. The stunning verdict,

announced by a jury made up of whites and blacks, signaled

the death knell of the rape of black women that had been a

feature of Southern race politics since slavery.

Like the kidnapping and rape of Recy Taylor in Abbeville,

Alabama, in 1944; Betty Jean Owens in 1959; Rosa Lee

Coates in 1965; and hundreds of other African-American

women throughout the segregated South, these brutal

attacks almost always began at the dark end of the street.

But African Americans would never let them stay there.

[Blank Page]

At the Dark End of the

Street

[Blank Page]

***

CHAPTER 1"They'd Kill Me

If I Told"

THE ROAD TO ABBEVILLE, a rural county seat ninety miles

southeast of Montgomery, was familiar territory for Rosa

Parks. Her father, James McCauley, a handsome, barrel-

chested builder and expert stonemason, was one of eleven

children reared by Anderson and Louisa McCauley in the

hardscrabble town. The sprawling McCauley clan squeezed

into a tiny, wood-frame home with dirt floors. Similar cabins

provided shelter for the bulk of Abbeville's two thousand

souls--mostly sharecroppers and tenant farmers who

scraped a living out of the peanut and cotton fields that

quilted the countryside. 1

While Rosa's grandmother, Louisa McCauley, maintained the

homestead and tended to her growing family, her husband

and oldest sons built big, beautiful homes throughout

Alabama's Black Belt, a band of inky, fertile soil stretching

across the middle of the state. 2 The region was known for its

bumper cotton crops and punishing plantations. As skilled

laborers and contract workers, the McCauley men

maintained a sense of independence that few African

Americans could claim. Despite the promises of

a progressive New South, the legacy of slavery in the Black

Belt was palpable. Tenant farming and debt peonage

dominated the economy, and the ghosts of the "peculiar

institution" haunted the rolling landscape, where the

children and grandchildren of slaves and slave owners eyed

each other with fear and familiarity. 3

That familiarity was visible in James McCauley's pale almond

skin and dark, wavy hair. The grandson of a fair-skinned

slave woman and a "Yankee soldier," he had a light

coloration that mocked the new segregation laws that white

legislators passed at the turn of the century. 4 City workers

nailed wooden signs proclaiming "Colored" or "Whites Only"

between seats in streetcars and above doorways in

theaters, restaurants, and boardinghouses. Toilets, water

fountains, telephone booths, waiting rooms, and ticket

windows were all similarly marked. In Birmingham,

Alabama, Jim Crow laws barred whites and blacks from

being together in "any room, hall, theatre, picture house,

auditorium, yard, court, park or other indoor or outdoor

place." Black nurses could not care for white patients, and

black students dared not use "white" textbooks. In Texas,

circuses were segregated, and "Caucasians" and "Africans"

could not watch a boxing or wrestling match together. Some

states prohibited black and white workers from laboring

together in the same room, while others barred blacks from

certain trades altogether. 5 For the most part, the McCauleys

pursued their daily affairs without giving much thought to

these laws.

One Sunday, in the spring of 1912, James McCauley decided

to go hear his brother-in-law preach at the white-framed

Mount Zion African Methodist Episcopal Church in Pine

Level, Alabama. Across the pews, he saw a striking woman

with diaphanous skin, high cheekbones, plum lips, and

flowing waves of dark, shiny hair. She was twenty-four years

old, had attended Payne University in Selma, Alabama, and

taught school nearby. Her name was Leona Edwards.

Like many black Southerners, McCauley and Edwards shared

a family history that involved interracial couplings ranging

from tragic love to brutal rape. Leona was the daughter of

Rose Percival,

born a slave; and Sylvester Edwards, whose milky-white

complexion and straight brown hair were the product of an

illicit relationship between a white plantation owner and his

slave mistress. After his mother and father died, Sylvester

became an object of mistreatment in the plantation

household. The white overseer beat him mercilessly,

starved him, and refused to let the boy wear shoes. Years of

cruelty hardened Sylvester until he felt what his

granddaughter Rosa would describe as an "intense,

passionate hatred for white people." 6

After slavery ended, despite his disdain, Sylvester often

passed for white. After shaking Sylvester's hand and

speaking to him as an equal, whites occasionally discovered

he was "black" and became angry or embarrassed. In a kind

of tragicomic retribution for years of mistreatment, Edwards

enjoyed watching whites squirm over the unspoken

absurdities of the color line. Though he used his apparent

whiteness to his advantage when necessary, he remained

pugnacious toward whites and taught his three daughters to

be especially wary of white men. Leona inherited both her

father's pigmentation and his pride--she became a teacher

so she would never have to cook or clean for whites. 7

It didn't take long for Leona and James McCauley to fall in

love. They were married "right there in Pine Level" on April

12, 1912, and moved to Tuskegee, Alabama, home of

Booker T. Washington's famed Tuskegee Institute. Their

daughter, Rosa, was born roughly nine months after the

wedding. Leona hoped her itinerant husband would land a

job at Tuskegee and settle down, but the "citadel of black

intellectual life" was not as appealing to James as it was to

his wife. 8 He saw himself as a rambling man, more

interested in making good money than putting down roots.

His long trips away from home left Leona depressed and

tearful, alone with her new baby. When James decided he

wanted to move back to Abbeville to be closer to his family,

Leona had no choice but to leave Tuskegee and abandon her

dream of racial uplift.

Rosa was two years old when they moved in with her

father's extended family in Abbeville. Surrounded by

playmates, she

quickly became the center of attention. Over time, however,

the dirt floors and crowded beds were too much for Leona,

who was not particularly fond of her in-laws. James

announced in 1915 or 1916 that he planned to move north,

joining the millions of African Americans fleeing the South in

search of better jobs and the promise of freedom. Leona

decided to stay behind. She and little Rosa left Abbeville and

returned to her parents' farm in Pine Level, where Sylvester

Edwards taught his granddaughter, who the world would

come to know as Rosa Parks, "not to put up with bad

treatment from anybody." 9

When Rosa Parks returned to Abbeville almost thirty years

later to investigate the rape of Recy Taylor, she was, in a

sense, coming home. Though she had not seen her father in

years, she remained kin to a sizable portion of the black

community there. She could count on the McCauleys for a

hot meal, a warm bed, and all the local gossip. News of the

gang rape of Mrs. Taylor had reverberated through the

sharecroppers' cabins and the tattered gray shacks in the

colored section of town. Taylor, her husband, and their

three-year-old daughter, Joyce Lee, rented one of these

cabins at the bottom of a rust-colored hill just outside of

town. Here Parks scribbled notes as she listened to Taylor

testify about the vicious attack. 10

Her time was limited.

Deputy Sheriff Lewey Corbitt, known among blacks in

Abbeville as a mean man with a propensity for violence,

drove repeatedly past the house. Finally, he burst into the

cabin and ordered Parks out of town. "I don't want any

troublemakers here in Abbeville," he said. "If you don't go,"

he said, "I'll lock you up." 11

Parks gathered up her notes and carried Taylor's story back

to Montgomery, where she and the city's most militant black

activists organized a campaign to defend Recy Taylor. 12

Eleven years later, this group of homegrown leaders would

take history in their hands and become heralded as the

Montgomery Improvement Association, eventually vaulting

its first president, Dr. Martin

Luther King, Jr., to international prominence during the

Montgomery bus boycott. But when the coalition first took

root, King was still in high school in Atlanta.

Alone on the dark highway after her assailants dumped her

out of the car, Recy Taylor pulled off the blindfold and got

her bearings. In the moonlight, she recognized the

silhouette of Judge Charlie Nordan's barn and knew which

way to turn. Staggering along the edge of the road, she saw

the deputy sheriff's car whiz past. As she approached Three

Points--the intersection of three main roads near the center

of Abbeville--she saw another familiar vehicle. Will Cook, the

former chief of police and a local shopkeeper, pulled his

automobile to the side of the road. Taylor's father, Benny

Corbitt (no relation to the deputy sheriff), called to his

daughter, the oldest of seven children, and she crawled into

the car. As the dark, open space of the highway receded

behind small storefronts, Taylor saw her husband, Willie Guy

Taylor, and her friends Fannie and West Daniel, huddling

with two police officers in front of Cook's store. 13

It was

nearly three in the morning.

Recy Taylor had no way of knowing that Fannie Daniel had

immediately reported the abduction to Cook, who must

have felt the fear and urgency in the older woman's voice.

Her son's description of the green Chevrolet assured Cook's

assistance. He "knew at once," he said, who owned it. Cook

fired off a series of orders to get the investigation under

way, sending Fannie and West to rouse George Gamble, the

Henry County sheriff; then driving to Benny Corbitt's house

to notify him about the abduction of his daughter. Benny

grabbed a pistol, slid it into his waistband, and ran outside.

First he went to Price's lumber, where white men had taken

black women before, and searched desperately between the

stacks of wood. When he could not find her there, he began

walking through town. Finally, he headed east, toward

"lovers' lane," a wooded area outside town where white

teenagers were known to congregate after hours. His shirt

was soaked with sweat when

he finally spotted the silhouette of his daughter staggering

on the roadside. Her clothes were tattered and torn, and she

was shaking with sobs. 14

After such a brutal gang rape, Taylor must have been in

extreme pain and shock. There was no telling what physical

injuries she sustained, how many bruises would mar her

skin the next morning. The psychological wounds were

bound to last a lifetime. That she could walk a distance after

the attack indicates only a dogged determination to return

home alive.

When Taylor stumbled into the arms of her husband, he was

standing outside Cook's store. Taylor's family and friends

crowded around her, listening quietly as she told them what

happened. She told Sheriff Gamble that she could not name

any of her assailants, but her description of the car pointed

to one suspect. "There's only one car in the county that fits

that description," he said. Telling Taylor to stay put, he

quickly walked to his car.

Thirty minutes later the sheriff returned with Hugo Wilson,

his father, and their big green sedan. Taylor identified the

car and pointed to Wilson as one of the rapists. Fannie and

West Daniel backed Taylor up. West identified Wilson's car

as the one "that the white boys were in when they stopped

me, my Mama and Recy Taylor." Wilson, he said, pointing to

the young white man, "made Recy Taylor get in the car and

drove off with her." Sheriff Gamble took Wilson to the

jailhouse, and Willie Guy Taylor walked his wife home. 15

Under questioning from Gamble at the Henry County jail,

Wilson admitted picking Taylor up and, as he put it,

"carrying her to the spot," and gave up the names of his

accomplices. Dillard York, Billy Howerton, Herbert Lovett,

Luther Lee, Joe Culpepper, and Robert Gamble, he said, "all

had intercourse with her." Wilson swore that they did not

use force. "We all paid her." 16

Wilson's defense was certainly plausible; it was not

uncommon for white Southerners--even die-hard

segregationists--to visit black prostitutes under the cover of

darkness. African Americans called white men who

surreptitiously searched for coerced or consensual

interracial intercourse "alleybats." 17

Still, Gamble must have

known Wilson was not telling the truth. He himself had seen

Taylor distraught, disheveled, and trembling. Three

eyewitnesses identified Wilson as the driver of the car used

in the armed abduction. Sheriff Gamble could have justified

arresting Wilson without difficulty. At the very least, he

might have called the other men Wilson named and brought

them in for questioning. Instead, Gamble sent Wilson home

with a $250 bond and instructions to have his parents sign

and return it at their leisure. The sheriff did not call the

other men in, issue any warrants, or make any arrests. 18

If Sheriff Gamble hoped the case would quietly disappear,

he was disappointed. Rosa Parks had been a member of the

Montgomery NAACP for only a year when she met with Recy

Taylor in 1944, but she was already a seasoned activist. Her

quiet demeanor hid a steely determination to battle white

supremacy. Rosa's grandfather taught her to stand up for

herself and others and introduced her to the boisterous

exhortations of the Jamaican-born black nationalist Marcus

Garvey when she was in grade school. Garvey's

condemnation of white supremacy and his calls for a "Back

to Africa" movement were common topics of conversation in

the Edwards household. Garvey's fearless race pride rallied

millions into the ranks of his Universal Negro Improvement

Association. From its auspicious beginning in 1914 to its

stark demise eleven years later, the UNIA was the biggest

and brassiest organization for black human rights in the

world. Garvey's call for a "new world of Black men, not

peons, serfs, dogs, or slaves," resonated with Edwards, who

refused to be cowed by white men, even when they wore

hoods and carried guns. 19

Perhaps her grandfather took

young Rosa to Tuskegee in 1923, where Garvey enjoyed a

warm reception from students and faculty and impressed

African-American ministers from Birmingham.

Sylvester Edwards became his granddaughter's political

mentor at a time when Garvey's rise coincided with a

national resurgence

of the Ku Klux Klan, a terrorist organization dedicated to

"100 Percent Americanism" and the supremacy of white

Anglo-Saxon Christians. Though they hid behind masks

when committing acts of terrorism, businessmen, police

officers, civic leaders, and state politicians north and south

proudly proclaimed their loyalty to the hooded order. By

1924 the KKK counted four to six million members

nationwide. Alabama boasted 115,000 men and women in

148 separate klaverns. Even Governor Bibb Graves held a

membership card. 20

After World War I the Alabama Klan unleashed a wave of

terror designed to return "uppity" African Americans to their

proper place in the segregated social order. The war to

"make the world safe for democracy" had upended the

racial status quo in the South. The promise of a better life in

the North encouraged thousands of domestics and

sharecroppers to flee low-paying jobs and the constant

threat of facial violence, launching the Great Migration.

Meanwhile many black soldiers returned to the South

expecting that their military service would be rewarded with

better treatment. "Whites didn't like blacks having that kind

of attitude," Rosa Parks recalled years later, "so they started

doing all kinds of violent things to black people to remind

them that they didn't have any rights ... I heard a lot about

black people being found dead and nobody knew what

happened," she said. "Other people would just pick them up

and bury them." 21

In 1919 the Alabama Klan lynched four

African Americans in Montgomery in less than twelve hours.

In Ensley Klansmen flogged a black doctor who treated

white patients; the Klan murdered two black men in Shelby

County who decided to quit their low-paying farm jobs; and

in Houston County an angry horde of hooded vigilantes shot

and killed a black man as he waited on a platform for a

northbound train. 22

Sylvester Edwards refused to be the Klan's next victim.

Cradling his double-barreled shotgun as the robed rebels

paraded on the street outside his home in Pine Level, he

positioned himself between the front door and the yawning

fireplace. Rosa remembered

kneeling beside his chair as he waited, rocking slowly back

and forth. "I don't know how long I would last if they came

breaking in here," he said to Rosa, "but I'm getting the first

one who comes through the door." Rosa sat with her

grandfather each night, waiting for the danger to pass.

"Whatever happened," she said later, "I wanted to see it. I

wanted to see him shoot that gun. I wasn't going to be

caught asleep." 23

By the time she was ten years old, Rosa was as defiant as

her grandfather. "I saw Franklin," she announced to her

grandmother one summer day, referring to a notorious

white bully. "He threatened to hit me," she said. "I picked up

a brick and dared him to hit me." Her grandmother scolded

her and insisted that black children could not "talk to white

folks that way ... You'll be lynched before you're twenty

years old." The sharp reprimand hurt young Rosa's feelings,

but it did not curtail her feisty behavior: "I felt that I was

very much in my rights to try to defend myself if I could."

When another white boy on skates whizzed past and tried to

push Rosa off the sidewalk, she pushed him back. The boy's

mother saw the infraction and threatened to have Rosa

arrested. "He pushed me," Rosa snapped, "and I didn't want

to be pushed." 24

"It had been passed down almost in our

genes," she said later, "that a proud African American can

simply not accept bad treatment from anybody." 25

As a young woman, Rosa McCauley was drawn to Raymond

Parks, a spirited and brazen barber who lived in

Montgomery, soon after she met him in the spring of 1931.

At first his light complexion turned her off, and she rebuffed

his flirtations. "I thought he was too white," she admitted; "I

had an aversion to white men." But when she found out that

Parks was a charter member of the Montgomery NAACP who

carried a pistol in his pocket so that he could stand up to

whites without fear, she relented and agreed to a date. Over

the next year, they spent hours sitting in the rumble seat of

his little red Nash, talking about injustice in Alabama. "He

was the first man of our race, aside from my grandfather,"

she said, "with whom I actually discussed anything about

the racial conditions." 26

Raymond and Rosa had plenty to talk about. Rape and

rumors of rape preoccupied Alabamians during the

Depression years, and stories of racialized sexual violence

echoed out from Alabama to the rest of the world. It is likely

Rosa and Raymond discussed the brutal rape of Murdus

Dixon, a twelve-year-old black Birmingham girl raped at

knifepoint in the early 1930s by a white man who hired her

as a domestic. Police refused to arrest the man, and the

case languished until it finally disappeared from public

conversation. 27

By the spring of 1931, most conversation in Alabama

centered on what had happened in the small town of

Scottsboro. On March 25 hundreds of white men in dusty

overalls, with shotguns slung over their shoulders, crowded

around the crumbling two-story jail-house. Inside were nine

African-American boys, none older than twenty, who had

been kicked off a Memphis-bound freight train and arrested

after roughhousing with a handful of white hoboes. But

when Ruby Bates and Victoria Price, two white women

working as prostitutes, were also taken off the train, they

accused the black youths of rape. By late afternoon, their

accusation had been transformed into a lurid tale. Rumors

spread that nine "black brutes" had "chewed off one of the

breasts" of Ruby Bates. By the time the young men were

brought to the Scottsboro jail, an incensed mob had already

decided they were guilty. "Give 'em to us," someone

shouted, as the mob pushed toward the jailhouse door. "Let

those niggers out!" "If you don't," another threatened,

"we're coming in after them." Fearing a mass lynching, the

sheriff asked Governor B. M. Miller to send in the National

Guard. 28

Denied a lynching, white Scottsboro clamored for a quick

hearing and a quicker execution. The "nigger rape case," as

locals called it, began the day after the arrests. Within two

weeks the young men had been tried, convicted, and

sentenced to die in Alabama's electric chair. The instant trial

and harsh sentences aroused anger and protest around the

country. The Central Committee of the Communist Party of

the United States issued a statement calling the ruling a

"cold blooded 'illegal' lynching." The Interdenominational

Ministers Alliance, a group of black clergymen from

Chattanooga, Tennessee, raised fifty dollars for their

defense, and the Alabama Interracial Commission passed a

resolution calling for a careful review of the facts. In the

months after the trial, the International Labor Defense, the

NAACP, trade unions, leftist groups, and outraged

individuals flooded the governor's office with letters of

protest.

In Montgomery, Raymond Parks joined other black activists

in secret meetings to raise money for the Scottsboro

defense. "It gnawed at him to see those innocent kids were

framed," Rosa said. "He'd say, 'I'll never sleep until they're

free.' " 29

After Rosa and Raymond were married in 1932,

they hosted gatherings of local Scottsboro defenders in the

front room of their little shotgun house in Montgomery's

Centennial Hill neighborhood near Alabama State College.

"Whenever they met," Parks recalled, "they had someone

posted as lookout and someone always had a gun." At one

meeting, the men sat around a small card table covered

with guns plotting to save the youths from the electric chair.

"This was the first time I'd seen so few men with so many

guns," Parks remembered fondly. "I didn't even think to offer

them something to drink ... I don't know where I would have

put any refreshments. No one was thinking of food anyway."

Rosa Parks spent the rest of the evening on the back porch

with her legs folded into her chest, her chin resting gently

on her knees. After the men left, Raymond lifted his wife

from the porch and assured her everything was all right.

Even though the immediate danger had passed, she was

sad and angry "about the fact that black men could not hold

a meeting without fear of bodily injury or death." It would

take Parks and other activists, mainly the International

Labor Defense and the NAACP, almost twenty years to free

the Scottsboro boys. When the last of the nine men walked

out of prison in 1950, Scottsboro was "synonymous with

Southern racism, repression, and injustice," and

Montgomery was heading for the history books. 30

In the early 1940s, Rosa and Raymond Parks hosted Voters

League meetings, where they encouraged their friends and

neighbors in Montgomery to register to vote, even though it

was a dangerous proposition. These clandestine meetings,

like the Scottsboro gatherings, introduced Parks to

Alabama's underground network of black activists who

worked for racial justice during the dark days of the

Depression. 31

That support network became indispensable

when Rosa Parks tried and twice failed to register to vote.

Unlike whites, blacks had to pass a literacy test to prove

their intellectual fitness to vote. County registrars routinely

failed the South's most-educated blacks and passed

illiterate whites as a way to maintain lily-white voter rolls.

Parks persisted, however, and finally received her

registration certificate in 1945, after taking the qualifying

exam three times. She was so sure she passed the third test

that she copied her answers on a separate sheet of paper in

case the registrar claimed she failed. She kept that copy,

she said later, so she could "bring suit against the voter

registration board." 32

It was after her second attempt to register, in 1943, that

Rosa Parks first collided with a burly white bus driver named

James F. Blake. Blake was known around town as a "vicious

bigot" who targeted black women for mistreatment, calling

them "bitches" and "coons." When Parks refused to reenter

Blake's bus from the rear door after paying up front, a

humiliating Jim Crow practice, he threatened to throw her off

the bus. She refused. "I [don't] see the need of getting off

and getting back on," she protested, "when people were

standing in the stepwell." Besides, she added, "how was I

going to squeeze in anyway?" Parks's behavior infuriated

Blake. He lunged at her, grabbed her by the coat sleeve,

and pulled her toward the door. "I know one thing," she

warned as he dragged her out, "you better not hit me." As

she was about to disembark, she pretended to drop her

purse and quickly sat down in the front seat to retrieve it.

Her spurt of defiance enraged the bus driver. "Get off my

bus!" Blake roared as she finally stepped into the street. As

the bus pulled away from the curb, Parks vowed to never

ride on Blake's bus again. 33

Rosa Parks joined the Montgomery NAACP chapter shortly

after the 1943 bus incident with Blake. At the first meeting

she attended, she was elected branch secretary. 34

The

humble title obscured the importance of the job, which

required Parks to spend much of her time traveling down

dusty Alabama roads interviewing people and documenting

acts of brutality, unsolved murders, voter intimidation, and

other racial incidents. Her belief in racial equality and her

ingrained sense of self-worth helped Parks become known

as someone who could be trusted with delicate or

dangerous information. "Rosa will talk to you," folks quietly

assured victims of racial violence. 35

Having been politicized

and deeply affected by the injustice in the Scottsboro case,

Parks was especially interested in interracial rape cases. 36

Rosa Parks carried Recy Taylor's story from Abbeville to

Montgomery, where she helped organize her defense. 37

E.

D. Nixon, a union man who headed the Alabama

Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters; Rufus A. Lewis, who

directed both a local funeral home and the football team at

Alabama State; and E. G. Jackson, who served as editor of

the Alabama Tribune, all signed on to help. With support

from national labor unions, African-American organizations,

and women's groups, Rosa Parks and her local allies formed

the Alabama Committee for Equal Justice for Mrs. Recy

Taylor. By the spring of 1945, they had recruited supporters

around the country and had organized what the Chicago

Defender called the "strongest campaign for equal justice to

be seen in a decade." 38

When the Henry County Grand Jury took up Recy Taylor's

case on October 3 and 4, 1944, no one expected equal

justice, but Taylor's family and friends hoped for an honest

hearing. Once there, Taylor discovered that none of the

assailants had actually been arrested. That meant the only

witnesses present, when the all-white, all-male jury came

together during the fall session, were Taylor's loved ones,

none of whom could provide the names of the white men

who assaulted her. Aside from identifying Hugo

Wilson and his car the night of the attack, Sheriff Gamble

never arranged a police lineup, so Taylor could not point to

her attackers in court. He claimed he placed Hugo Wilson

and his accomplices under a $250 appearance bond, but

court records indicate that the bonds were issued late in the

afternoon, a day after Taylor's hearing. 39

Circuit solicitor

Keener Baxley, whose son Bill would eventually become

attorney general of Alabama in 1971 and pardon the last

Scottsboro defendant, appeared to go through the motions

of a legitimate trial. It was clear that the proceeding was a

farce designed by Baxley and others to protect themselves

from outside criticism and to remind black women that they

could not rely upon even the most basic protections under

the law. 40

By creating a faint shadow of judicial procedure, white

leaders could dismiss complaints of racial discrimination by

arguing that Recy Taylor received every consideration the

law allowed. White Alabamians were so sensitive to the

national and international outrage over the near lynching

and subsequent trials of the Scottsboro nine that state and

county leaders had to at least give an appearance of equal

justice. Baxley and Gamble knew exactly what they were

doing. Without an indictment from the grand jury, Taylor's

case would never make it out of Henry County. There would

be no further hearings, and they expected that the matter

would eventually die.

For nearly a month after the grand jury met, Baxley and

Gamble's strategy appeared to be working. Taylor and her

husband quietly returned to their jobs and daily burdens,

resigned to the bitter truth that her assailants roamed freely

through town. They did not have much of a choice. After

reporting the rape, Taylor received multiple death threats.

The night after the attack, for example, white vigilantes

firebombed Taylor's home while the family slept, setting the

front porch on fire. Taylor's husband rushed outside and

quickly put out the flames, saving his wife and toddler. They

moved in with her father and six siblings the next morning,

and Taylor stayed close to home. "I haven't gone up into the

town since it happened," she told a reporter later. "I'm

afraid they'll kill me. They said they'd kill me if I told on

them." 41

The entire family took precautions as well. "Nobody

would walk at night," Taylor's brother, Robert, recalled.

"Everybody tried to make sure that they done what they had

to do in the daytime." And each night, after everyone was

tucked safely into bed, Benny Corbitt climbed a tree in his

backyard. Cradling a double-barreled shotgun and a sack of

shells, he guarded the cabin until the sun broke on the

horizon, and then went inside to sleep. 42

As the crisp fall days passed, however, the story of the

brutal rape and the phony hearing spread across the state

and then the nation, passed on in union halls, churches,

NAACP chapters, barbershops, pool halls, and juke joints,

through the underground networks of African-American

activists, and along the infrastructure built by the defenders

of the Scottsboro youth. Bolstered by a rising black

militancy fueled by the global war against fascism, black

activists in Alabama and their allies in national labor unions

and leftist and liberal organizations joined in coalition to

defend Taylor and demand punishment for the white men

who kidnapped and raped her. 43

Many of these activists came together at the Negro Masonic

Temple in Birmingham, the nerve center of Alabama's black

political community. Here, militant members of the

Birmingham and Montgomery NAACP chapters swapped

organizing strategies with sharecroppers and steel-fisted

union men whose battles for better wages and human

dignity in the 1930s had laid a solid foundation. Editors and

reporters from Alabama's black newspapers, mainly the

Alabama Tribune and the Birmingham World, could interview

members of the middle-class, progressive, and Communist-

infused Southern Negro Youth Congress (SNYC), or catch up

on regional news with the leading lights of the Alabama

branch of the Southern Conference for Human Welfare

(SCHW), the South's most prominent interracial liberal

organization. Labor organizers passing through Birmingham

could stop in to make a connection, gather information, or

have a friendly chat.

[Image: African-American women played a prominent role in

the Southern Negro Youth Conference, a leftist organization

committed to fighting racial injustice. Members of the

SNYC's Third Conference Preparation Group gather at Miles

College in Alabama, 1940.]

Together these eclectic groups and individuals turned the

Masonic temple into a hive of activity. They coordinated

campaigns, investigated police brutality, condemned the

poll tax, pushed for the ballot, and fought for human

rights. 44

The SNYC, an outgrowth of the left-wing, New York-based

National Negro Congress, was just nine years old in 1944,

but it was perhaps the most promising civil rights

organization in Alabama at the time. 45

At first, the SNYC

attracted mostly young, college-educated black

Southerners, but it quickly gained attention and support

from prominent African-American leaders with national

political reach. The list of SNYC board members included

conservatives like Charles Gomillion and F. D. Patterson, the

dean and president of the Tuskegee Institute; Percy Surton,

a Tuskegee Airman and well-known lawyer; Atlantans

Reverend Martin Luther King, Sr., and Benjamin Mays,

president of Morehouse College; Ralph Abernathy, a

powerful young preacher in Montgomery; Modjeska Simkins,

an outspoken and fearless NAACP leader in South Carolina;

and Nannie Burroughs, a nationally known educator and

women's club leader from Virginia.

[Image: As executive secretary of the SNYC, Esther Cooper,

seated right, organized committees, lobbied government

officials, published newsletters, and investigated racial

crimes. She visited Recy Taylor in Abbeville, Alabama, in July

1945.]

This broad-based coalition helped publicize the SNYC's

activities. 46

In Alabama the SNYC leadership included black women,

many of whom practiced a tradition of collective organizing

rooted in sharecroppers' struggles to win the most

rudimentary rights from white landlords in the early

1930s. 47

Other members were middle-class, college-

educated black women who saw the SNYC as providing

more opportunities for women than traditional black

organizations. Esther V. Cooper, a feisty organizer and

women's rights advocate, was only twenty-three years old in

1940 when she helped lead the Birmingham chapter of the

SNYC. Just before she moved there, Cooper wrote a master's

thesis at Fisk University devoted to the "special issues that

confronted working-class black women," especially

domestics and sharecroppers. 48

Dedi-cared to cultivating

black female leadership throughout Alabama and building

bridges with existing women's networks, she was the SNYC's

executive secretary by 1942.

Rosa Parks and the SNYC women were natural allies. By

leveraging their relationships with CIO-affiliated unions,

Communist networks, and local and national civil rights

organizations, Parks, Cooper, and their cohorts helped

spread Recy Taylor's story from the back roads of Alabama

to the street corners of Harlem. Reaching out to friends and

affiliates around the country, they sought publicity, funding,

and legal assistance. 49

By the end of October, Taylor's story

had traveled all the way to Pennsylvania, where the widely

read and respected black newspaper the Pittsburgh Courier

ran it on October 28, 1944. Strategically placed beneath a

banner headline that declared "Treatment of Negro Called

Greatest Evil in America," the succinct front-page article,

"Alabama Whites Attack Woman; Not Punished," highlighted

sexual violence as one of those evils. 50

The prominent

article and provocative headline reflected the Couriers

"Double V" strategy. During the war years, the black press,

led by the Pittsburgh Courier, urged African Americans to

adopt "double victory" as a wartime battle cry. "The first V

[is] for victory over our enemies from without," a Courier

reader argued in a letter to the editor. "The second V [is] for

victory over our enemies from within. For surely those who

perpetuate these ugly prejudices here are seeking to

destroy our democratic form of government just as surely as

the Axis forces." 51

Readers responded to the black press's

drumbeat to "Defeat Mussolini and Hitler by Enforcing the

Constitution and Abolishing Jim Crow," devouring 200,000

copies of the Courier each week. The Courier was not alone

in its success; wartime readership of black newspapers

increased nearly 40 percent. 52

The Courier article made the rape of Recy Taylor a national

example of Southern injustice. It immediately sparked

nation-wide interest. Eugene Gordon, a prominent black

Communist and writer for the New York Daily Worker,

followed up on the Courier's lead by traveling to Alabama to

interview Taylor. 53

Gordon's November 19 article, "Alabama

Authorities Ignore White Gang's Rape of Negro Mother,"

reported that since the attack, "Alabama justice has been

blind, deaf, and mute."

[Image: Recy Taylor, Willie Guy Taylor, and their child, Joyce

Lee Taylor.]

Gordon blasted segregationists' long-standing defense of

white womanhood and their manipulation of interracial rape

to justify violence against black men. Pointing to the most

recent example, Gordon argued that "every southern

newspaper played up the rape of the unnamed wife of a

white soldier in Florida" but failed to report the crime

against Recy Taylor. Worse, he fumed, Southern editors

stood silent as the alleged black rapists of a white woman

"were burned to death in Florida's electric chair," while

Taylor's assailants weren't even questioned. "The whole

country must be aroused to action," Gordon thundered,

"against this and other similar outrages against Negro

womanhood." 54

In New York City black activists, embroiled in their own

grassroots struggles against segregation, police brutality,

and housing discrimination, read Gordon's article and were

outraged. 55

They

heeded his call to arms by flocking to Harlem's Hotel

Theresa on November 25 for a mass meeting. Called by the

New York branch of the SCHW, and the SNYC's parent

organization, the National Negro Congress, the meeting

hoped to draw attention to the double standard of justice in

the South and "find ways and means of centering

nationwide attention on Mrs. Taylor's case and forcing legal

action" in order to "lay a basis for ending this southern

practice of degrading Negro womanhood." 56

Their allies in

Alabama provided crucial assistance.

More than one hundred people, representing middle-class

mainstays like the YWCA, the NAACP, and the National

Council of Negro Women, as well as leftist labor unions like

the CIO and the Negro Labor Victory Committee, came to

the emergency meeting. 57

Audley Moore, a spirited black

nationalist who had a long history of defending black

women from sexual violence, came as the Harlem

representative of the International Workers Order. 58

Prominent black Communists like Benjamin J. Davis and

James W. Ford, as well as leftist and Communist-affiliated

organizations like the International Labor Defense, filed into

the hotel and found seats. Reporters from the leftist Daily

Worker; the New York tabloid PM; the progressive West

Coast paper the California Eagle; and Adam Clayton Powell,

Jr.'s, weekly, The People's Voice, clustered around the dais,

pencils and notepads at the ready. Alabama SNYC delegates

provided local information about the Recy Taylor case.

The assembly of such an eclectic group of activists yielded

incredible results. After being briefed on the "Abbeville

Affair," participants agreed to partner with the Alabama

branches of the SNYC and the SCHW to form the Committee

for Equal Justice for Mrs. Recy Taylor. They chose delegates

who would immediately travel to Abbeville to investigate

the crime and report their findings at the Sixth All-Southern

Negro Youth Congress conference, to be held in Atlanta the

following week. There they planned to create a "Negro-

rights, Negro-white unity campaign throughout the South." 59

When the call for donations came, activists dug into their

pockets and contributed close to one hundred dollars.

Alabama Committee foe Equal Justice

P. O. BOX 1589. BIRMINGHAM. ALABAMA

Hon. Chauncey Sparks,

Governor of Alabama

State Capitol

Montgomery, Alabama

Dear Governor Sparks:

I wish to commend you for the action you have so far taken

on the Recy Taylor case of Abbeville, Alabama. As a citizen

of Alabama, I urge you to use your high office to reconvene

the Henry County Grand Jury at the earliest possible

moment. Alabamions are depending upon you to see that all

obstacles, which are preventing justice in this case, be

removed. I know that you will not foil to let the people of

Alabama know that there is equal justice for all of our

citizens.

Respectfully yours,

***

Rosa L Parks

Rosa Parks wrote letters, signed petitions, and sent

postcards in an effort to secure justice for Recy Taylor.

They agreed to use the money to flood the South with flyers

decrying white attacks on black women and promised a

publicity campaign aimed directly at the governor of

Alabama, Chauncey Sparks. 60

As one newspaper article put

it, "The phrase 'protection of Southern womanhood' had life

and meaning injected into it." 61

Almost immediately letters and postcards trickled in to

Governor Sparks's office. Known as the "Bourbon from

Barbour," Chauncey Sparks won the governorship in 1942

by promising to "padlock the state treasury" and keep the

federal government's nose out of Alabama's business. 62

Though he eventually started spending money on schools,

agricultural programs, and hospitals, he was no Franklin

Roosevelt liberal. A right-lipped and pragmatic conservative,

he was also an ardent white supremacist like other anti-tax,

anti-labor elite Democrats, known as the Big Mules, in

Alabama.

In 1946 Sparks helped lead a campaign to ratify the Boswell

Amendment, which made it all but impossible for most

African Americans and poor whites to register to vote. He

was George Wallace's first mentor and benefactor. In the fall

of 1945, Sparks

offered the skinny twenty-six-year-old a job as an assistant

in the attorney general's office, giving rise to Wallace's

storied career. 63

By mid-December 1944 hundreds of letters protesting the

rape of Recy Taylor poured in from all over the country and

stacked up on Sparks's desk. 64

"I've heard a great deal of

how the South prides itself on protecting its womanhood,"

Mrs. Gretchen Coon told Governor Sparks. "How do you

square this vaunted theory with the practice and the kind of

justice evidenced in Abbeville on September 3rd and

subsequently?" 6 ' A "friend of the South" tried to appeal to

Sparks's sense of racial duty, pointing out the irrational

defense of white supremacy while doing nothing to prevent

whites from having sex---coerced or otherwise--with black

women.

You are justly and earnestly striving for the purity of your

race, yet you openly permit a great many of your men to

freely cohabit with women of the Negro race. This is

encouraged by your laws. Ironically enough, the Negro man

does not seem as desirous of cohabiting with the white

woman as the white man is pleased with cohabitation with

Negro women ... The failure to indict the white men [who

assaulted Recy Taylor] says to the white youth of the South

that it is alright to have sexual intercourse with the Negro ...

[The rapists] in Abbeville Alabama ... have made your lofty

and noble principles of race and good clean society a joke. 66

Charles Collins, executive secretary of the Negro Labor

Victory Committee, a leftist labor union, agreed. "The rapists

are known, identified, and yet allowed to go unpunished in

your state," Collins argued. "This brazen denial of the simple

rights of humanity, exposes, more than ever, the emptiness

of the white supremacy advocates who employ the charge

of 'rape' in order to attack the Negro people." 67

Unsubstantiated charges of the rape of white women by

black men had been part of the Southern political culture for

decades.

Rumors of rape were rooted in Reconstruction-era

stereotypes, in which white Southerners portrayed black

men as the mythological incubus, a beast that attacks

women while they sleep, to disfranchise African Americans

and justify racial violence. Between 1880 and 1920,

Southern Democrats fueled rumors of "black beast rapists"

defiling pure, white womanhood, in an effort to "redeem"

Dixie from the grip of Republican rule. Most often these

campaigns amounted to one-sided racial pogroms, as white

supremacists used white fears of black male sexuality to

seize political control of the state and subjugate African

Americans. 68

Even after the white supremacy campaigns

secured state legislatures and sanctioned Jim Crow, rumors

of black-on-white rape conveniently surfaced whenever

African Americans asserted their humanity or challenged

white supremacy. "Any assertion of any kind on the part of

the Negro," as Southern historian W. J. Cash put it,

"constituted in a perfectly real manner, an attack on the

southern white woman." 69

During the 1940s, virtually any self-assertion among African

Americans conjured images of "amalgamation" and fears of

"social equality," a euphemism for intetracial sex. 70

In a rant

against wartime black activism, Mississippi senator

Theodore Bilbo, perhaps the most acrimonious

segregationist in Congress, argued that "every Negro in

America who is behind [civil rights] movements ... dream[s]

of social equality and inter-marriage between whites and

blacks." 71

Howard Odum, a prominent sociologist from the University

of North Carolina, argued that white fears of interracial sex

sat at the center of wartime racial tension. In his 1943

study, Race and Rumors of Race, Odum documented the

"weird, wild stories" whites told one another about blacks. 72

Whites, he said, worried that demands for black equality

heralded a bloody insurrection, similar to Nat Turner's

murderous slave rebellion in Virginia in 1831. 73

"Negroes are

buying up all the ice picks," whites told one another,

"waiting for the first blackout" to attack. Many whites

believed that blacks were also hoarding guns, stashing them

in

coffins and church basements, waiting for the right moment

to "turn the tables" and "overrule the South." 74

The most incendiary race rumors were about black men's

insatiable lust for white women. According to Odum, these

near-hysterical stories reflected white beliefs that rising

black activism indicated African Americans' "bold intention"

to achieve the hated "social equality." 75

Everyone had their own version of this story.

"Negro Men were all planning to have white wives," whites

whispered to one another in wartime North Carolina. "And

when all the white men have gone to war," they said, "the

white women will be left for the Negro men." 76

Another tall

tale traded among friends in Georgia told of a black man

who warned a white couple that they "better be necking

now because after the war we'll be doing the necking." 77

In

Louisiana whites warned schoolgirls to never walk alone

since there was apparently an "outbreak of Negroes

attacking white women." 78

Unsubstantiated rumors of black men attacking innocent

white women sparked almost 50 percent of all race riots in

the United States between Reconstruction and World War II.

In 1943 alone there were 242 violent interracial clashes in

forty-seven cities. 79

Beaumont, Texas, was typical of small

manufacturing towns reeling from changes wrought by the

war. As blacks and whites from surrounding areas poured

into the Gulf Coast town for defense jobs, racial tension

increased. Lack of housing and health care, overstretched

social service providers, and overcrowding on buses and

public transportation all threatened the segregated social

order. But it was the rumors that a black man brutally taped,

beat, and stabbed an eighteen-year-old white telephone

operator in Beaumont on June 5, 1943, coupled with reports

of a plan among black soldiers to "invade the city in search

of unprotected white women," that triggered a riot in the

tinderbox town. 80

When a twenty-four-year-old white woman claimed she was

attacked by a black man in her "victory garden" a few days

later, a mob of more than two thousand white men, mostly

bulky stevedores,

rampaged through the black neighborhood, beating

pedestrians and burning businesses. In their wake, they left

hundreds injured and three dead and destroyed more than

two hundred buildings. 81

The Beaumont riot was hardly

unusual; racial disturbances in Wilmington, North Carolina,

in 1898, Atlanta in 1906, Springfield, Illinois, in 1908,

Omaha, Nebraska, and Washington D.C., in 1919, Tulsa,

Oklahoma, in 1921, and Mobile, Alabama, in 1943 were all

sparked by rumored incidents of rape or manufactured

"rape epidemics" involving black men and white women. 82

Rumors about the mistreatment and rape of black women

by white men started plenty of brawls throughout the South,

too, but none caused as much violence and bloodshed as

the rumor that made Detroit explode in the summer of

1943. Three days of rioting left thirty-four people dead,

nearly seven hundred injured, and an estimated $2 million

in property damage. 83

During World War II, Detroit, like

Beaumont, teetered on the edge of racial cataclysm. Five

hundred thousand black and white migrant workers poured

into the Motor City, clashing over defense jobs, housing, and

access to transportation, public parks, and education. On

June 20, 1943, the temperature soared past ninety degrees,

and thousands of Detroit's working-class residents sought

relief on the beaches of Belle Isle. Throughout the day,

isolated scuffles broke out between black and white

picnickers who competed for grills and tables. These minor

skirmishes erupted into a full-scale riot after rumors that a

white Southerner had thrown a black mother and her baby

off the Belle Isle Bridge sent hundreds of black men

streaming into the streets to defend and protect black

womanhood. 84

The rumor that sparked the Detroit riot was one of many

sexual stories detailing the widespread mistreatment of

black women during the 1940s. The most oft-repeated tale

insisted that "white soldiers in the South were mistreating

Negro women." One rumor told of a white MP who "had

beaten the wife of a Negro soldier in a Georgia camp."

Another story, from Mississippi, described the beating of

black soliders while police attacked their wives and

girlfriends. There were also plenty of stories circulating

about black women who had been arrested and beaten by

policemen after protesting mistreatment on buses. 85

As a kind of cultural narrative, rumors of rape and

sexualized violence had enormous symbolic power and

political potency. Whites used outrageous racial rumors and

rape scares to justify strengthening segregation and white

supremacy. Meanwhile the stories of sexual subjugation and

racial terror that circulated among African Americans

exposed white hypocrisy about interracial sex and spurred

demands for equal justice and bodily integrity. Given the

tenuous social and political environment into which the Recy

Taylor story quickly spread, it was bound to spark similar

fears and anxieties, if not violent clashes.

Perhaps few understood this better than members of the

U.S. military. Thirty-three soldiers from "somewhere in

Belgium" put down their guns and picked up pens to sign a

petition addressed to Governor Sparks. They demanded he

use his gubernatorial powers to intervene in the case.

"Failure to act in any such case," the soldiers argued, "is a

matter of grave concern to everyone believing in the

principles of American democracy--the principle of the

equality of all before the law, regardless of race, color or

religion; particularly to those of us who face a ruthless

enemy to preserve that democracy." The failure to hold

white men accountable was irresponsible: "we are engaged

in a war for freedom," they insisted, "which requires the

united support of all Americans, Negro and White." 86

In a letter to Governor Sparks, Eugene Henderson, an

African-American merchant seaman, noted the irony of

America's role as defender of democracy abroad while it

denied justice at home. "I have risked my life many times to

deliver supplies to our armed forces and our allies," he said.

"My morale drops when I learn that a woman of my race has

been brutally raped by six white men and nothing done

about it." Why, Henderson asked, "isn't

Negro womanhood as sacred as white womanhood?" 7

Ernest Scott, president of the Transport Workers of America,

echoed Henderson's sentiments and feared that the "effect

of such lawlessness on the morale of our men in the armed

services ... cannot but be bad ... [T]he least we can do for

our servicemen and women is to assure them that while

they are fighting our country's battles ... their families back

home are safe." 88

Enough black troops were upset by the gang rape of Recy

Taylor that Charles S. Seely, the editorial director of the

Army News, felt compelled to urge Governor Sparks to act.

"If this pamphlet reaches any considerable number of

Negroes in our armed services, and I have no doubt it will,"

he warned Sparks, "it will greatly affect their efficiency ...

This of course will be very bad for the war effort," he

argued, "for it is senseless to fight fascism abroad if fascistic

influences are to be protected here at home." Seely asked

Sparks for a statement "that assures Negro soldiers that you

will see to it that the 'degenerate and ruthless persons who

attacked Mrs. Taylor are brought to justice and severely

punished.'" If Sparks would commit to a similar statement,

Seely argued, he could "publish it in all three of our papers

... This way," he insisted, "it will reach a great many of the

million or so American Negroes who are fighting for

democracy" and "help keep up the morale of the Negroes in

our services." 89

As the "Abbeville Affair" threatened America's war effort,

Governor Sparks worried about the negative publicity the

assault would have on his state. Mr. and Mrs. Scott McCall

told Sparks that the rape of Recy Taylor "was as bad as what

we would expect from the Nazis." 90

Julius Crane, the vice

president of the United Shoe Workers of America, demanded

Governor Sparks take "immediate steps" to try Taylor's

assailants "before Alabama is placed on Hitler's list as a

possible postwar refuge." 91

Perhaps Crane knew that Fort

Rucker, a military base just outside Abbeville, was already

home to German prisoners of war, who were often treated

better than African-American citizens. 92

Letters and petitions continued to pour in from concerned

Alabamians,

and Sparks worried that he faced "another Scottsboro," as

one correspondent after another called it. The governor

knew that in places like Birmingham, Mobile, and

Montgomery, where fierce labor competition, union battles,

and rabid racism created a volatile climate, the failure to

prosecute Recy Taylor's assailants could easily cause an

explosion. 93

Of course, prosecuting them also carried risks,

but Taylor's defenders seemed considerably better

organized than her antagonists. Just before Christmas,

Eugene Gordon from the Daily Worker teamed up with E. G.

Jackson, Montgomery activist and editor of the popular black

newspaper the Alabama Tribune, to confront Sparks. Inside

the imposing white marble capitol, where Jefferson Davis

pledged his loyalty to the Confederacy in 1861, Governor

Sparks reluctantly agreed to launch an investigation. Sparks

hedged, making no commitments to a just outcome. Still,

Gordon and Jackson sensed the governor's responsiveness

to outside pressures. In an article about their meeting,

Gordon reported that "the Governor ... agreed with his

Attorney General that they wanted no publicity. They wished

to make their investigations and decide on what action to

take, all without the Daily Worker or the Negro press saying

anything about the fact that the state's highest officers were

interested." 94

If Governor Sparks hoped to keep his decision a secret,

members of the Committee for Equal Justice proclaimed the

news far and wide. Talk of Sparks's interest propelled local

leaders into action, many of whom formed local branches of

the Committee for Equal Justice for Mrs. Recy Taylor. "I found

people in Birmingham, Montgomery and other Alabama

cities and towns," Gordon noted, "talking about the case as

a result" of the official investigation. "Young people," he

boasted, "were asking their churches to get in on the

case." 95

In Montgomery, Rosa and Raymond Parks joined E. D. Nixon;

Rufus A. Lewis; Johnnie Carr and her husband Arlam Carr,

Sr., both longtime NAACP members; E. G. Jackson; and Mrs.

Irene West, the wife of Montgomery's only black dentist, to

raise money for Taylor's defense. They organized mass

meetings, canvassed

neighborhoods, signed petitions, and sent postcards to the

governor and attorney general. 96

These networks--these

very people-- would lift Martin Luther King, Jr., to

international prominence a decade later, after their leading

organizer was arrested on a Montgomery bus. The

protection of the dignity of black women's bodies, begun in

a long twilight struggle in causes like the Abbeville crusade,

would alter the arc of human history, making the word

Montgomery an enduring metaphor for the power of

nonviolent direct action.

Montgomery was not the only city with a local chapter of the

Committee for Equal Justice. By January, the "Worker

reported that the "Taylor Case Is Now Nationwide," with

branches in sixteen states and Washington, D.C. 97

Distinguished activists, artists, and political leaders added

their names to the growing board of advisers. Such

luminaries included W.E.B. Du Bois; Mary Church Terrell, a

suffragist and founder of the National Association of Colored

Women; Charlotte Hawkins Brown, a popular clubwoman

and respected educator; Ira De A. Reid, a sociologist and

assistant director of the newly formed Southern Regional

Council; John Sengstacke, the publisher of the Chicago

Defender; Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes of Harlem

Renaissance fame; Lillian Smith, author of the controversial

interracial love story Strange Fruit; and Broadway

impresario Oscar Hammerstein II. Such an illustrious roster

raised eyebrows--especially among anti-Communists, who

suspected the Committee for Equal Justice was nothing but

a front for the Communist Party.

J. B. Matthews, one of the most well-known professional

anti-Communists who worked for the House Un-American

Activities Committee and named names for the Hearst

Corporation, warned the FBI that the Committee for Equal

Justice for Mrs. Recy Taylor (CEJRT) contained more than

"400 names" and was the "chief large-scale agitation of the

communists in the South at the present time." The

Communist Party, he said, was engaged

"in one of their typical agitational campaigns to exploit the

incident of Mts. Taylor's rape, just as they agitated for many

years on the subject of the Scottsboro case." 98

While

Matthews was correct that some members of the CEJRT

were Communists or "fellow travelers," it was not a front for

Communism. But its glaring spotlight on white men who

raped black women did smack of subversion. Exposure of

this historic relationship threatened to unravel the racial and

sexual status quo that held the segregated social order

together. For Montgomery's black activists, the prospect of

striking at the heart of the matter was invigorating.

"With the people, black and white, North and South

mobilized for a fight for justice around Mrs. Taylor," E. D.

Nixon told Earl Conrad, a reporter for the Chicago Defender,

"we now have the strength and power to do something with

it." Nixon lamented that cases "like this or cases almost as

serious as this are so frequent down here that we almost

take them as a matter of course. It's a question of choice

sometimes--which we can concentrate on for a fight." 99

Nixon was Montgomery's most outspoken black activist.

According to Roy Wilkins, he was "straight as a ramrod,

tough as a mule and braver than a squad of marines." In

addition to leading the Montgomery NAACP, Nixon served as

head of the Alabama Voters League. In 1944 he led nearly

eight hundred African Americans on a march to the

registrar's office, demanding the right to vote. His

fearlessness and constant agitation caught the attention of

the city's white newspaper, the Montgomery Advertiser,

which referred to him later as the "NAACP Mau Mau

Chief." 100

As president of the Alabama branch of the

nation's largest all-black labor union, the Brotherhood of

Sleeping Car Porters, Nixon was connected to militant

unionists who knew how to organize. Led by the powerful

and imposing A. Philip Randolph, the Brotherhood of

Sleeping Car Porters was one of the most successful labor

unions during the 1940s. In 1941 Randolph threatened to

bring his army of sleeping car porters to Washington unless

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt ended segregation in

defense industries. Fearing

global embarrassment on the eve of America's entry into

World War II, Roosevelt capitulated and signed Executive

Order 8802, creating the Fair Employment Practice

Committee. Randolph recognized Nixon's indomitable

energy and political talent early on and served as his

mentor for many years.

E. D. Nixon told the Defender reporter that he had "a dossier

of fifty cases of rotten violence against Negroes in Alabama

in the past couple years--we hardly know where to begin in

approaching this question." Since Rosa Parks lived next door

to Nixon, served as his personal secretary, managed his

union office, and did field work for the Montgomery NAACP,

she almost certainly prepared the file Nixon referenced. E.

G. Jackson, editor of the Alabama Tribune, sat next to Nixon

as the reporter from the Defender took notes. Nixon

provided grisly details of what he called "one horror tale

after another of white male degradation of the Negro

women of Montgomery and lower Alabama." "We have

numerous reports from our women," Jackson said, "of

assaults by white taxicab drivers ... The cabbies take them

into their cars at the railroad depot, but before taking them

home, drive them outside the town, and subject them to

attacks." Jackson and Nixon told the Defender that what

happened to Recy Taylor was hardly unusual--it was part of

a ritual of rape in which white men in the segregated South

abducted and assaulted black women with alarming

regularity and stunning uniformity. "We Negro men feel

powerless," Jackson confessed. "The weight of hundreds of

years hangs over us like so much iron ... [W]e would be

superhuman if we alone could lift it off of our shoulders." 101

During the 1940s, reports of sexual violence directed at

black women flooded into local and national NAACP

chapters. Women's stories spilled out in letters to the Justice

Department and appeared on the front pages of the nation's

leading black newspapers. The stories told how white men

lured black women and girls away from home with promises

of steady work and better wages;

attacked them on the job; abducted them at gunpoint while

they were traveling to or from home, work, or church; and

sexually humiliated and harassed them at bus stops,

grocery stores, and in other public places. John McCray, a

spirited advocate for black voting rights in South Carolina

and editor and publisher of the Lighthouse and Informer, the

Palmetto State's most important black newspaper, argued

that it was a "commonplace experience for many of our

women in southern towns ... to be propositioned openly by

white men. You can pick up accounts of these at a dime a

dozen in almost any community." 102

The stories followed similar patterns. In January 1940 John

H. Davis, a white man from Fayetteville, North Carolina,

lured sixteen-year-old Mary Poole from her home by

promising her a job "as a nurse girl for his wife." Instead, as

she put it, he "drove her to some woods" and "forced her to

submit." As he drove away, abandoning her in the woods,

he tossed her clothes out of the car window. 103

In May 1942

Sadie Mae Gibson, a twenty-three-year-old black

schoolteacher in Decatur, Alabama, was walking home one

sunny afternoon when Dan Olinger, a white teenager, forced

her into a clump of bushes and at rifle point raped her. 104

Two months later, as Rosa Lee Cherry, a black high school

student, walked home from church in Little Rock, Arkansas,

three uniformed police officers threatened to throw her in

jail unless she got in their patrol car. They drove her behind

a railroad embankment and sexually molested her. She

escaped after promising to "get them another girl." 105

Lila Belle Carter, a sixteen-year-old girl from Pine Island,

South Carolina, never escaped. She was abducted in

October 1945, on her way to the store for some rice. After a

white insurance collector raped her, he murdered her and

left her lying face down in a puddle of mud. 106

While most

victims did not share Lila Belle Carter's fate, the method her

assailant used--abduction--was quite common. Nannie

Strayhorn, a thirty-two-year-old mother of two from

Richmond, Virginia, accepted a ride home from two white

police officers in October 1946. Instead of taking her home,

officers Carl R. Burleson and Leonard E. Davis drove to an

isolated area outside town and took turns raping her at

gunpoint. 107

In Clio, Alabama, in 1948, a white man offered

Janie Mae Patterson, an eleven-year-old girl, some money in

exchange for help finding a well to slake his thirst. She

eagerly climbed into his car and promised to show him the

way. Instead of following the girl's directions, he drove to a

mill about five miles away, "took a blanket out of his car,"

and then "ravished the girl." 108

The sexual violence enacted and enforced rules of racial and

economic hierarchy. When Herschel Gasque and Charles

Berryhill, two white farmers brandishing guns, knocked on

Mrs. Mamie Patterson's door in Tuscumbia, Alabama, in

February 1948 to "collect a debt from [her] husband," she

refused to divulge his whereabouts. When she demanded

that they leave, they pushed Patterson aside and barreled

into her house, where they found her husband hiding.

Gasque and Berryhill, a "200-pound former professional

wrestler," brutally beat Patterson's husband, then turned

their pistols on her and slowly backed her outside into their

car. 109

In retaliation for Patterson's defiance, the white men

drove the mother of six into the woods, where "they both

raped [her]" and told her to "perform abnormal acts." 110

In order to reclaim their bodies and their humanity, African-

American women called on a tradition of testimony and

truth-telling that stretched back to slavery. "We colored

women are tired of such things," Mrs. Joy B. Jones

proclaimed in a 1947 letter to NAACP founder Arthur

Springarn. She attached a news clipping that described the

sexual molestation of a black girl by a white businessman in

Macon, Georgia. "Seems like all the money we pay in

organizations," Jones argued, "doesn't remedy the matter.

This man should be given the same conviction that a

colored man would have got." 111

Failure in the courts did not stop black women from

speaking out, decades before the women's movement.

These testimonies

helped bring attention to the issue of sexual violence and

often ignited local campaigns for equal justice and civil

fights. When James Lee Perry, a "well-to-do white oil dealer"

from Meridian, Mississippi, raped Ruby Atee Pigford, a black

teenager, he never expected her to report the crime. Even if

she did, he could be fairly confident that white authorities

would not take her complaint seriously. Perry lured the girl

away from home by promising her a babysitting job that

paid seventy cents an hour--good money at the time. After

picking her up on August 7, 1947, Perry drove Pigford to a

nearby roadhouse, instead of taking her to his home.

Angered by her refusal to accompany him into the bar, he

beat her until she was unconscious. He then raped her, tied

her to the bumper of his car, and dragged her bound body

through town. He dumped her, bruised and battered,

outside her home later that evening. 112

She told her parents what happened, and they told their

friends. By the next day, African Americans throughout town

demanded punishment for the crime. Edward Knott, Jr., the

secretary of the Meridian, Mississippi, NAACP, wired the

story to the Pittsburgh Courier and airmailed a letter to the

national NAACP office. Assistant special counsel Marian

Wynn Perry responded immediately. "We have discussed the

case here in this office in light of the conditions in

Mississippi and action which is possible there," she said. "It

is our suggestion that as much publicity as possible be

given to the case." Perry knew that accusing a white man of

raping a black woman in Mississippi, the most violent state

in the South, was dangerous, if not deadly.

In Mississippi, African Americans understood that their lives

"could be snuffed out on whim." 113

Aside from the daily

indignities of segregation, between 1943 and 1949, white

men in Mississippi castrated, mutilated, and lynched two

fourteen-year-old black boys for playing tag with a white girl

near the town of Quitman; murdered a dairy farmer, who

had used self-defense when his white employer attacked

him; killed Reverend Isaac Simmons and cut off his tongue

for refusing to sell his land; whipped Leon

McTate to death for allegedly stealing a saddle; and beat

Malcolm Wright to a bloody pulp because they didn't like the

way he drove a wagon. 114

"The only chance you have to secure redress for this terrible

attack," the NAACP assistant counsel asserted in the rape

and dragging of Ruby Pigford, "is by publicity and pressure

within the State of Mississippi, and you, of course, who are

in Mississippi, will know how much can be done." Perry

encouraged Knott and other concerned citizens to get the

local black newspaper, the Jackson Advocate, and its editor,

Percy Greene, on board. She also promised assistance from

the national office, which eagerly protested lynching but

rarely got involved in rape cases. After signing off, Perry

sent a picture of a bloodied and battered Ruby Pigford in her

hospital bed to the Pittsburgh Courier for an exclusive

report. 115

Perry seemed to understand that justice in the

Pigford case, like so many others, was unlikely. The only

feasible way to hold white men accountable for raping black

women--since Southern courts would not--was to draw

outside attention to the crime. 116

"If the state of Alabama does not handle [the Recy Taylor]

case in the way it ought to," E. G. Jackson thundered from

the pulpit of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in December

1944, "if the right-minded citizen[s] of the state do not

demand indictment in this situation, then ... the Negro

people will welcome and invite all of the assistance that

they can get from the North." 117

It was no idle threat. The

Chicago Defender called the attack on Recy Taylor "Dixie's

most blatant rape case." When the Defender argued that

the CEJRT had launched the "strongest campaign for equal

justice to be seen in a decade," they meant that Rosa

Parks's trip to Abbeville had grown into the most successful

national campaign for racial justice since the Scottsboro

trials, where Parks had first learned how to organize.

Prominent white Alabamians took the growing movement

seriously. Like Parks, they too remembered Scorrsboro. Mrs.

Margarer

H. Moss, president of Alabama's Federation of Women's

Clubs, wrote to Governor Sparks for advice. Fretting about

the effect the "northern press" and "outsiders" could have

on her beloved state's reputation, she offered the governor

some advice. "Some years ago, when visiting my brothers in

Washington," she wrote, "I found that many people knew

little of the conditions in our state beyond 'Stars Fell on

Alabama,' the football team and the Scottsboro case."

Fearful of "another misrepresentation of Alabama" caused

by the "delay and inaction of government in the Abbeville

affair," she asked Sparks for a statement promising equal

justice. That way, she said, "I can be armed with something

to say when rumors and mistaken information come to me."

For example, she said, "I am told, that the assistant attorney

general is quoted as saying that 'he hates niggers and

would as soon run over one in his car as to speak to one.' I

am also told," Moss continued, "that the case is being

discussed in the Negro National Press and committees are

being formed in a number of other states to see the matter

through. This all sounds so unnecessary." At least, she

added, they agreed that "the less publicity the better." 118

Governor Sparks hoped that promising a separate

investigation would hold back protests, but it did not stem

the tide of petitions and letters pouring into the governor's

office, especially after the Pittsburgh Courier ran the

erroneous headline "Sparks to Press Charges Against

Rapists Following Protests" in a front-page article two days

before Christmas. 119

As time wore on without any major

arrests or trials, Sparks became the protesters' number-one

target.

Instead of targeting Sparks, who followed through on his

promise to launch an investigation, the Committee for Equal

Justice should perhaps have directed national attention to G.

D. Halstead and Keener Baxley, the less visible but, in this

case, more powerful county and circuit solicitors, whose

intransigence kept the case bottled up. In order to get a

sense of what was going on in Henry County, Sparks sent

his private investigators, J. V. Kitchens and N. W. Kimbrough,

to Dothan, Alabama, on December 9, 1944,

to interview Halstead, Baxley, and Sheriff George H.

Gamble. While Baxley readily admitted that "in his opinion

the crime was committed as alleged by the victim," he

feigned ignorance about how to move forward. "No further

facts could be ascertained," he claimed, "because the victim

stated ... that she did not know any of the boys that she

claimed to have ravished her." Halstead seconded Baxley's

defense. He "had come to a block," he said, and did not

know "how any additional information could be obtained ...

It would be free-lancing," Halstead insisted, "as no one else

knew any of the facts in this case" and "neither of the

witnesses had identified the boys who were alleged to have

ravished Recy Taylor." When the investigators reminded

them that Recy Taylor had identified Hugo Wilson as one of

her assailants and owner of the car used in the attack,

Baxley grew visibly upset. He "would not consent for any of

them to be interviewed," Baxley stammered. 120

Baxley's

bluster did not scare Kimbrough and Kitchens, who had not

come to ask permission.

In Abbeville the next day, Sheriff George Gamble, who

claimed to have started an investigation immediately after

the crime was alleged, told the investigators that he placed

Hugo Wilson under a five-hundred-dollar bond. He also

assured them that he arrested "all of the boys except

Wilson" two days after the assault. Taking the investigators

aside, Gamble warned them that the "victim was nothing

but a whore around Abbeville" and had "been treated for

some time by the Health Officer of Henry County for

venereal disease." Gamble claimed he even had to put

Taylor in jail "once or twice ... upon written request from the

County Health Officer." To further discredit Taylor and

discourage the investigators from pursuing the case,

Gamble added that Taylor's husband "would not work and

lay around Abbeville practically all the time." He even

threatened to throw him "in jail and charge him with

vagrancy." 121

Will Cook, the former police chief and white store owner who

said he launched a search for Taylor after she was abducted,

told the investigators the same story Gamble had just

peddled. After

detailing his role in the search that night, Cook smeared

Taylor as a prostitute. She "was nothing but a whore around

Abbeville," he insisted. She worked at Fort Rucker, a nearby

army training base, he said, "but they ran her away from

there [after she] had given a number of soldiers ... the

clapp." 122

Other whites with whom Kimbrough and Kitchens spoke

contradicted Gamble's and Cook's stereotypical descriptions

of the Taylors. Mr. W. H. Carr, Recy Taylor's neighbor and

occasional boss, told investigators that Recy and her

husband "were good workers." In more than three years, he

said, he had "never seen any strange Negroes hanging

around their home." They "always stayed in their place,"

Carr said, and had "never been involved in any disturbances

of any kind." 123

Other white men in Abbeville corroborated

Carr's characterization of Recy Taylor as an upstanding,

respectable woman who abided by the town's racial and

sexual mores. Marvin White, L. D. Smith, Robert Sowell, and

M. B. Clark, all honorable white men in the community,

stated that they knew Taylor and "knew nothing detrimental

as to her character." Most folks, they said, "consider her

above the average Negro as to her conduct as a Negro

woman in the community." 124

Major L. A. Hamilton at Fort

Rucker told the investigators that there was nothing in

Taylor's file "regarding any misconduct of any nature." 125

Kimbrough and Kitchens soon found proof that Sheriff

Gamble was lying. Searching through the bonds filed at the

Henry County Circuit Court, they discovered that Gamble

never placed any of the assailants under arrest, not even

Wilson, who admitted having sex with Taylor. 126

After

confronting Gamble with the conflicting information, the

sheriff stonewalled. "It's a bad case," he said. 127

Despite Gamble's intransigence, Kimbrough and Kitchens

returned to Abbeville with the assistant attorney general,

John O. Harris, on December 18, 1944. When they arrived,

they contacted Sheriff Gamble, whose story quickly changed

in front of the governor's deputy. Gamble told the assistant

attorney general that he "never arrested [Taylor] or

committed her to jail for any

offense." Nor did he ever have "any trouble with her or her

husband." Taylor's reputation, Gamble now claimed, "is as

good as any Negro's in that community." While Gamble still

insisted he had arrested the assailants, Kimbrough and

Kitchens decided to go directly to the source and ask the

suspects what happened the night they picked up Recy

Taylor.

Almost all of them told the same story. Four of the seven

men admitted having intercourse with Taylor, but argued

that she was essentially a prostitute and a willing

participant. They took up a collection to pay her, they said.

All but two of them said Taylor got into the car of her own

volition and that there was no force or coercion used. Hugo

Wilson, whom Taylor and other witnesses identified on the

night of the crime, said he had had nothing to do with her,

denied being present, and claimed to know "nothing in the

world about it." Recy Taylor, he added, was a "damned liar,"

and so were the sheriff and anyone else who claimed they

saw him that night. Herbert Lovett, who cradled a shotgun

during the attack on Taylor, claimed he "was never arrested"

and "knew nothing of the affair." Furthermore, he said, he

was not with any of the other suspects that night and did

not know why his friends "would want to bring him into

something of which he knew nothing and was innocent." 128

Joe Culpepper's version of events corroborated Recy Taylor's

testimony in considerable detail. Culpepper said that he and

the other men "were talking about getting a woman" on that

September night and "rode out on the highway toward

Dothan ... We saw two women and a man walking along the

highway," he said, and decided to pull over. "All of them

except one got out of the automobile." Herbert Lovett, he

added, took his shotgun "down the road and was talking to

Recy Taylor." A few moments later, Culpepper said, "Recy

Taylor came to the automobile with Lovett behind her with

the shotgun in his hand." After turning off the highway,

Culpepper recalled that Taylor yelled, "Yo'all are not carrying

me to Mr. Gamble." When they stopped beneath a patch of

trees, Lovett forced her out of the car at gunpoint and made

her

undress. "She was crying and asking them to let her go

home to her husband and her baby," Culpepper said. When

it was over, he said, "someone ... put a blindfold on Recy's

face, got her in the car and put her out near a street light."

Culpepper added nothing about paying her, but when asked

directly by the detectives, he quickly corrected himself.

"Yes," he said, "they paid het money." He could not

remember who took up the collection, however, or how

much she received. 129

With the suspects' statements, Culpepper's admission of

coercion, signed affidavits from at least three eyewitnesses,

and Sheriff Gamble's recantations and lies, Governor Sparks

had enough ammunition to order a second grand jury

hearing. He appointed Assistant Attorney General William O.

Harris to lead the charge. After meeting with Harris to go

over the case, members of the Committee for Equal Justice

gathered to debate hiring a new attorney. According to

Pauline Dobbs, a SNYC worker present at the meeting, Harris

seemed "more concerned about the representative ... sent

by the Daily Worker to investigate the case" and the "deluge

of letters and telegrams received from northern pressure

groups" than he was about the "guilt of the criminals or the

crime itself." The whole "purpose of presenting the case to

the grand jury in Abbeville," Dobbs noted, "was to give the

defendants light sentences in order to close the case." 130

Dobbs was right to worry. The attorney general failed to

convince the jurors of Henry County that there was enough

evidence to indict the seven suspects when he presented

Taylor's case on February 14, 1945. With at least one

confession and corroborating testimonies among the

suspects, not to mention the sheriff's blatant attempt to

stuff the entire affair under the carpet, it seemed like a

relatively easy case to close. But the all-white, all-male

jurors sat stony-faced and silent. For a second time, they

refused to issue any indictments.

News coverage of the second hearing was more hostile to

Taylor. The Dothan Eagle repeatedly referred to Recy Taylor

as "the Taylor woman" and dismissed her testimony--

arguing that she

was essentially a prostitute. The Birmingham News

expressed concern, but not for justice or for Recy Taylor.

Instead, editors worried that the outcome would only aid

"those disposed to think ill of Alabama because of the

Scottsboro case." The Recy Taylor case, the News noted,

"was certain to become a cause célèbre" and "that is why all

Alabamians should be interested." Already, the editors

proclaimed, "this ugly business has drawn national

attention." The ghosts of Scottsboro haunted every

discussion. Residents of Henry County "ought to know by

this time what agitation for justice by disadvantaged

persons can do to bedevil the life of the state." 131

The

assistant attorney general told the Dothan Eagle there was

nothing more that could be done. "This case has been

presented to two grand juries in Henry County," he said, and

"both grand juries have not seen fir to find an indictment."

Harris argued that he made a "full disclosure ... and no facts

or circumstances connected with this case have been

suppressed." 132

Members of the Alabama Committee for Equal Justice were

disheartened by Harris's statement, which implied that the

state no longer planned to intervene on behalf of Recy

Taylor. It all seemed a little too tidy. E. G. Jackson, E. D.

Nixon, and Rosa Parks worried that the state's public

resignation put Taylor and her family in imminent danger.

Esther Cooper of the SNYC checked in on Recy Taylor after

the trial. Taylor "shows in her face the terror of her

experience," Cooper said. Taylor told Cooper that their mail

often arrived already opened and that she was afraid to go

into town. 133

Fearful of white retaliation, Parks, Nixon, and

other members of the Alabama Committee for Equal Justice

moved Taylor and her family to Montgomery, where they

provided an apartment and secured a job for her

husband. 134

Clara Hard Rutledge, who was one of a handful

of liberal white women in Montgomery who supported the

Taylor case and the bus boycott ten years later, helped to

organize other sympathetic whites. She told Earl Conrad,

the reporter for the Chicago Defender, that the "only

possible approach at the present time is letters to the

Governor." 135

Local members of the Alabama Committee for

Equal Justice followed Rutledge's

advice and redoubled their efforts to persuade Governor

Sparks to intervene. Henrietta Buckmaster, a historian and

the new chairwoman of the national Committee for Equal

Justice, also urged supporters across the nation to contact

Sparks and send money to the committee. "We can bring

these criminals to justice," she proclaimed, "because the

Recy Taylor case is the people's case." 136

Alexander Nunn, the white editor of the Progressive Farmer,

a conservative magazine, watched the case "with

apprehension" and worried that the failure to indict would

hurt Alabama in the long run. In a letter to Governor Sparks,

Nunn encouraged him to send the attackers to jail. "We had

a similar case," Nunn wrote, "though not so disgusting, in

my home county of Lee several years ago and the white

man, a taxicab driver, was set free at that time. I said then

and I say to you now, that for the good of both races, I think

I would punish even more quickly and severely, white men

for criminally attacking Negro women than I would Negro

men." Lest Sparks mistake him for a wishy-washy liberal,

Nunn reminded him that "no one in this state would be more

severe on a Negro in such cases than I would." Sparks

replied that his hands were tied: "Nothing further can be

done without a grand jury indictment. As you know, the

grand jury of any county is all-powerful in the matter of

criminal investigation and prosecution. No trial can be had

until a grand jury returns an indictment." 137

While letters

still urged Sparks to intervene, by springtime it was

apparent that the "people's case" was going nowhere.

As time passed without an indictment, Henrietta

Buckmaster and members of the executive board of the

Committee for Equal Justice quietly agreed to shift their

attention away from the Taylor case and "broaden the scope

of [their] work." 138

At the end of March, the CEJRT issued a

press release for a different rape case: "Another young

Negro girl has been raped under circumstances of almost

incredible brutality. This committee was organized to fight

for equal justice for Recy Taylor, but we cannot ignore

another such case." The press release referenced a recent

case in which three white men in Decatur, Georgia,

kidnapped

and raped a seventeen-year-old black high school girl.

Unlike the Taylor case, a grand jury indicted the assailants,

but an all-white jury acquitted the three men at their

criminal trial on March 23, 1945, after deliberating for only

six minutes. 139

In a letter to board members on April 2, 1945, Buckmaster

acknowledged defeat in the Recy Taylor case. It was time,

she said, to "put all [our] forces behind the demand for

punishment of the rapists of a 17 year old Negro girl in

Decatur." 140

Shortly thereafter they sent out flyers

screaming, "The Terror Spreads!" In Memphis, Tennessee,

the committee announced, "Two Negro girls were forced into

a police car, taken for a ride in the country and criminally

assaulted by two uniformed policemen." And in

Bennettsville, South Carolina, "a respectable Negro woman

was ordered off the streets by four white men and forced to

pay a five dollar fine." By referring to these very different

incidents as "terror," the CEJRT signaled its intent to wage

war not only upon the ritual of rape but also upon the

everyday assaults African-American women faced.

In a pamphlet promoting the committee's broader approach,

Buckmaster argued that despite the lack of a legal

conviction, the successful mobilization of activists across

the nation on behalf of Recy Taylor represented a major

victory. "Our hope of a free new world," she said, "our

passionate conviction that the day has almost come when

women everywhere may raise their children without fear

and love their husbands with assurance and be the

individuals to which their highest hopes and capacities

entitled them. This is what we're fighting for ... When we say

'Equal Justice for Recy Taylor,'" Buckmaster wrote, "we are

also saying Equal Hope, Equal Joy, Equal Dignity for every

woman, child and man the wide world over ... Is that too

much to ask?"

The announcement of the Committee for Equal Justice's new

aims came on the eve of the greatest red scare in American

history. 141

Coupled with the legal dead-ends it hit in

Alabama, the committee's ability to mobilize local people

and rally nationwide support slowed as Southern

segregationists combined white

supremacy and vicious red-baiting to attack African-

American activism as a Communist plot to destroy "the

Southern way of life." These bitter attacks forced the more

radical leaders of the Alabama branch of the CEJRT, like the

SNYC women, to seek shelter in other states or less tainted

organizations, where they continued to press for racial

justice. Mainstream black activists who were involved in the

campaign for equal justice for Recy Taylor, but were

otherwise not affiliated with the Communist Party, like E. D.

Nixon, Rosa Parks, E. G. Jackson, Rufus Lewis, and Johnnie

Carr in Montgomery, distanced themselves from their more

radical allies. In later years, they would use the international

Cold War as a political lever to expose the deep canyon

between the United States' boasts of freedom and

democracy and the brutal reality of segregation. But when

the Red Scare began, they did what was necessary to

survive politically and continue their assault on Jim Crow. 142

Although the struggle to secure justice for Recy Taylor did

not succeed in the short term, it was the largest and best

organized of many efforts to draw attention to the ruthless

heart of the racial caste system. Decades later, when radical

feminists finally made rape and sexual assault political

issues, they walked in the footsteps of generations of black

women. If they did not always know this, it was hardly the

fault of African-American women in the South, who testified

both in the nation's courts and in its newspapers that their

bodies were not their own. The Recy Taylor case brought the

building blocks of the Montgomery bus boycott together a

decade earlier and kept them in place until it became Rosa

Parks's turn to testify. When that boycott took off, no one

called it a women's movement, though many observers then

and since have noted the centrality of women in its ranks.

Even Dr. King credited "the Zeitgeist" when asked to

comment on the strange, spontaneous combustion of the

bus protest. But the Montgomery bus boycott was not a

prairie fire, or a rising tide, or a gear that tumbled in the

cosmos. It was another in a series of campaigns that began

when

Rosa Parks rode up to Abbeville in 1944 to gather the facts

in the Recy Taylor case, so that black women could tell their

stories.

Indeed, many of the African Americans who cut their

political teeth defending black women like Recy Taylor who

were raped by white men in Alabama in the 1940s brought

their experiences and organizational insight to other

struggles for dignity and justice in the 1950s and 1960s.

Like E. D. Nixon and Rosa Parks in Montgomery, they often

became pillars of the modern civil rights movement.

The national campaign to defend Recy Taylor highlighted the

power of sexual stories to mobilize communities and build

coalitions. African Americans throughout the country risked

their lives and livelihoods on behalf of black women's right

to bodily integrity. This cut to the heart of people's lives. It

was deeper than voting rights, deeper than the poisons of

stigma and exploitation, though those cruelties were also

fundamental to the racial caste system.

While the survivors of sexualized violence rarely received

justice in Southern courts, black women like Recy Taylor who

were raped by white men in the 1940s used their voices as

weapons against white supremacy. Their testimonies were a

form of direct action. Taylor's refusal to remain silent helped

expose a ritual of rape in existence since slavery, inspired a

nationwide campaign to defend black womanhood, and

gave hope to thousands suffering through similar abuses.

Because of the campaign for equal justice for Recy Taylor,

sexual violence and interracial rape became the

battleground upon which African Americans sought to

destroy white supremacy and gain personal and political

autonomy. That battleground is where the modern civil

rights movement began, though its roots were as deep as

the Atlantic slave trade.

As World War II came to a bloody close, another war was

about to begin on the buses in Montgomery, Alabama.

CHAPTER 2"Negroes Every

Day Are Being Molested"

AFTER SPENDING a hot July day in 1942 studying at

Alabama State Teachers College in Montgomery, Ella Ree

Jones decided to catch the earliest bus home. She felt ill all

morning and was in no mood for a fight. She boarded the

Cleveland Avenue bus, the same one Rosa Parks would

make famous thirteen years later, and quietly slipped into a

seat opposite the rear door, in the section reserved for

colored passengers. The bus filled to capacity as it rumbled

through downtown Montgomery. Glancing into his rearview

mirror, the bus driver noticed one white man standing. At

the next stop, he turned and glared at Jones.

"Girl, get up and let this passenger sit down," he said.

"I am sick," Jones replied. "And I don't feel able to stand up

for that man to sit down. Besides," she added, "I am over

halfway to the back of the bus."

Unwilling to engage in a debate about the subtleties of

segregation, the driver became agitated. "Do you want to

stand up," he shouted, "or do you want me to put you off?"

"Neither," Jones said.

Suddenly the bus lurched to the curb, and the driver

scurried out. He made sure he locked the back door before

he called the police. 1

The trapped black and white passengers collectively held

their breath. Granted police powers, bus drivers enforced

segregation with an iron fist. Many kept blackjacks and

pistols under their seats, wielding them whenever their

authority was challenged. It was not unusual for black

passengers to defy drivers, whose penchant for cruelty

angered even the most accommodating customers, but it

carried enormous risk. 2 The complaint records of the

Birmingham buses are riddled with reports of drivers

beating, shooting, and even killing black passengers. 3 When

Jones ignored the driver's direct order, everyone on the bus

knew she sat in the path of peril.

As the driver waited for the officers to arrive, a white man

carrying carpenter's tools walked over to Jones and pulled

out a shiny, sharp saw. Standing over her with the saw

drawn back, he told the student he had a "notion to slap

[her] brains out." Just then the driver returned, flanked by

two Montgomery police officers. Pointing toward Jones, the

driver sneered, "I'm going to teach you to do what the white

man tells you to do." The officers lunged and pulled the

student out of her seat and down the back steps, scattering

her school supplies. They grabbed her arms, twisted them

until she screamed, and pushed her toward the waiting

police car. When one officer loosened his grip long enough

to open the back door, she clawed his face with her

fingernails. "He threatened to kill me then," she recalled

later. "They cursed me all the way to City Hall."

When they arrived at City Hall, the officers dragged Jones

behind the building and beat her with a pipe until she was,

as she put it, "too weak to get off the ground without help."

She struggled to stand, but they kicked her repeatedly. As

she writhed on the ground, one of the officers grabbed

Jones's head between his hands and propelled it into the

brick wall. She collapsed and crumbled to the ground.

Clenching her arm, an officer pulled

her reward the back steps, then "twisted his hand in [her]

hair and picked [her] up off the ground by [her] hair." When

she was finally on her feet, the officers pushed Jones up the

stairs, poking her with a walking stick until she was in a jail

cell. "What am I being charged with?" Jones asked before

the officer slammed the door. "Suspicion," he said. 4

The police held Jones overnight, denied her medical

attention, and took her to court the next morning, where

she was fined twenty-eight dollars. Standing before a judge

in a bloodied and torn dress, she demanded to know the

reason for the exorbitant fine. "Case closed," the judge said,

and dismissed Jones with a flick of his wrist.

The next day Jones filed a complaint with the national

NAACP. Thurgood Marshall, a young attorney working for the

NAACP Legal Defense Fund, was appalled by the beating

and the trumped-up charges. Despite his age, Marshall was

the most celebrated black lawyer in America, having won a

number of high-profile cases, including the integration of

Missouri Law School in 1938. 5 His growing status as a civil

rights warrior led thousands of people to flood his New York

office with complaints of racial discrimination and police

brutality. "There is no question in my mind," Marshall said in

a letter about Jones to T. T. Allen, the president of the

Montgomery branch of the NAACP in 1942, "that we should

bring suit against the bus company, and take whatever

steps we can against the policemen." 6 Apparently the case

never went to court.

Thurgood Marshall's problem was that there were too many

cases and too few resources. Marshall and his colleagues

performed a cruel triage to determine which cases to

pursue. African Americans choosing to testify in racially

charged cases placed themselves and their loved ones at

great risk. Sometimes the victims scratched out shaky lives

among the downtrodden that could easily be caricatured to

discredit them. Sometimes the cases were heart-wrenching

but hopeless from a legal standpoint, given the realities of

judicial practices in a hard racial caste system. Finding

the right combination of strong documentation, brave

witnesses, sympathetic victims, and legal resources tested

Thurgood Marshall's legal and political acumen.

In a letter to his mentor, Judge William H. Hastie, the dean

of Howard Law School, Marshall asked for advice on how to

respond to the brutal mistreatment and sexual harassment

of two black women on a bus at an Alabama military camp

in 1945. The two women, Private Roberta McKenzie and

Private First Class Gladys Blackmon, boarded an empty bus

and sat down in the rear. When asked to stand so that a

white man could sit, they both refused, arguing that there

were plenty of seats remaining in the white section. The bus

driver grabbed his nightstick, walked toward the two

Women's Army Corps (WAC) members, and knocked off their

hats. He then slapped both women and, they alleged,

"punched them in the breast," while uttering profanities. 7

After he pushed them off the bus, they reported the attack

to the NAACP. In the midst of a "War for Democracy,"

Marshall knew that the beating of black WACs in uniform

would be explosive. "This is one of the worst cases we have

had in this office for some time," he said. It "looks like

dynamite to me." 8

Ten years later thousands of working- and middle-class

women, fed up with decades of abuse, took to the streets to

protest their mistreatment and demand the right to "sit with

dignity." The Montgomery bus boycott, frequently regarded

as the spark plug of the modern civil rights movement, was

actually the end of a drive chain that ran back into decades

of black women's activism. That supposedly "spontaneous"

event was, in fact, the culmination of a deep history of

gendered political appeals--frequently led by black veterans-

-for the protection of African-American women from sexual

and physical assault. Only by understanding the long and

relatively hidden history of sexualized violence in

Montgomery, Alabama, and African Americans' efforts to

protect black womanhood, can we see that the Montgomery

bus boycott was more than a movement for civil rights. It

was also a women's movement for dignity, respect, and

bodily integrity.

Rosa Parks left Alabama for the first time in 1946. Atlanta

was less than two hundred miles away, but it seemed a

world away from the rickety rural shacks that still dotted the

Alabama countryside. The New South city promised great

change and possibility for the future. Skyscrapers sparkled

against the sky and served as a backdrop for the bustling

business district anchored by the headquarters of Sears,

Roebuck and Coca-Cola. Streams of automobiles roared

through the city on viaducts high above the busy rail lines.

Airplanes took off and landed just outside town. Though

Atlanta was thoroughly segregated, it seemed to be the

perfect setting for an NAACP meeting dedicated to training

future leaders who would seize the opportunities of the

postwar period to wage war against Jim Crow.

Thurgood Marshall, known as "Mr. Civil Rights" since he

persuaded the Supreme Court to strike down the white-only

Democratic primary as unconstitutional in 1944, was the

keynote speaker. Though African Americans won some

concessions during World War II, there was much work to be

done, he said, listing the primary problems plaguing African

Americans throughout the South. Much of what he focused

on--police brutality, discrimination in public facilities, job

discrimination, and segregation--resonated with Rosa Parks,

who had reams of notes on such abuses in Montgomery. 9

But his final topic, the heinous treatment of returning black

veterans, was on everyone's mind that year.

For the approximately one million African Americans who

served in the armed forces, victory over totalitarianism

abroad meant little without real change at home. Having

helped topple Hitlet, black soldiers were not about to bow

before the Bilbos and Talmadges of the South. Instead, they

returned home with a new sense of pride and purpose and

often led campaigns for citizenship rights, legal equality,

and bodily integrity. 10

In small towns and cities across the

South, black veterans became the "shock troops" of an

emerging civil rights movement. 11

White Southerners responded to postwar black activism with

a wave of violence that reasserted white supremacy. 12

In

Birmingham, Alabama, police commissioner Eugene "Bull"

Connor directed a force that was responsible for untold

numbers of racially motivated beatings, bombings, and

murders in the years immediately after World War II. Within

the first six weeks of 1946 alone, uniformed officers

reportedly killed five black men, all veterans, because they

had taken part in voter registration drives. 13

On February

12, 1946, Linwood Shull, the chief of police in Aiken, South

Carolina, jammed his billy club into Sergeant Isaac

Woodard's eye sockets after the black serviceman, home

from a fifteen-month stint in the South Pacific, got into an

argument with a white bus driver. The beating permanently

blinded Woodard. After an all-white jury in Columbia, South

Carolina, acquitted Shull of any charges, white spectators in

the crowded courtroom roared with approval. 14

Fearful of black veterans' refusal to stay "in their place,"

whites in Georgia warned African Americans, especially vets,

to stay away from the polls in 1946. Since Thurgood

Marshall helped persuade the Supreme Court in Smith v.

Allwright to outlaw the white primary two years earlier,

strict adherence to the Court's ruling would have

transformed the political landscape. Whites across the

region turned to extralegal terror. In Greenville the Ku Klux

Klan planted a fiery cross in a black neighborhood, hoping it

was enough to scare away any potential voters. In Cairo

masked men fired shots at the homes of prominent blacks.

Throughout the state, white men nailed warnings and death

threats on the doors of black homes and slipped them inside

black newspapers. 15

On July 17, 1946--Election Day--veteran

Maceo Snipes walked past armed thugs patrolling the ballot

box to cast his first and last ballot. Later that night, four

white men dragged him out of his house and murdered

him. 16

A few weeks later, a white mob led by the Georgia state

police shot two black couples to death in broad daylight.

Roger Malcolm, one of the victims, had stabbed his white

landlord earlier that summer, allegedly because he showed

sexual interest in Malcolm's pregnant wife, Dorothy.

Dorothy's brother, George Dorsey, a veteran,

defended his sister's womanhood and his brother-in-law's

actions, insisting black men had the same right as white

men to protect their women. Enraged whites gathered on

July 25, 1946, beneath Moore's Ford Bridge. Along the

sloping banks of a river, a mob lined up the two couples and

peppered their bodies with bullets. 17

"Up until George went

into the army," Loy Harrison, one of the murderers, said

years later, "he was a good nigger. But when he came out,

they thought they were as good as any white people." 18

It did not take long for white Southerners to claim black

efforts to gain equality were a mask for more sinister, sexual

desires, an argument rooted in Reconstruction-era politics.

During the 1890s, former slaveholders and their Democratic

political allies used the rhetoric of black-on-white rape and

fabricated rape scares, as Glenda Gilmore put it, as "a

politically driven wedge powered by the sledgehammer of

white supremacy" to seize power from the biracial coalitions

of Republicans and Populists that swept elections in

Southern states. 19

Black activists in the post-World War II

period often joked that "the closer a black man got to a

ballot box, the more he looked like a rapist." 20

However,

African-American men did not actually have to vote or

threaten political overthrow to be accused of rape. As

Frederick Douglass noted nearly a century earlier, the myth

of the black man as a rapist was an "invention with a well

defined motive." 21

These ghosts were easily conjured in the

uncertain years after the war. Whites used rape as a catchall

charge to justify violence against African Americans and

undermine their political, social, and economic rights.

For example, in August 1946, police in Minden, Louisiana,

arrested and jailed John C. Jones, a twenty-eight-year-old

black veteran, and his seventeen-year-old cousin, Albert

Harris, for acting "uppity" after they protested an unfair land

deal. However, police claimed the two men were "prowling"

around a white

woman's window, though she refused to press charges.

After several days in jail, police released them into a mob of

armed white men. The mob drove Harris and Jones down a

country road, where they tortured and beat Harris until they

believed he was dead. Then the mob mutilated Jones with a

meat cleaver and a blowtorch. 22

When they were satisfied

with their work, the mob left the mangled men in a ditch,

ostensibly dead. 23

Jones died, but Harris managed to

survive and eventually identified five of the murderers in

court, though an all-white jury quickly acquitted them.

The brutal beating of Isaac Woodard and Albert Harris, the

murder of Maceo Snipes and John Jones, the lynching on

Moore's Ford Bridge, and dozens of other incidents across

the South in 1946 were designed, as one white man put it,

to "keep Mister Nigger in his place." 24

Walter White, head of

the NAACP, called the violence "a rabies of the spirit ... a

mob sickness." This disease, he said, was "a dread

epidemic" that was "rampant in our land." 25

In an effort to

end the violence, the national NAACP and forty other civil

rights groups formed the National Emergency Committee

Against Mob Violence on August 6, 1946, to focus national

and international attention on racist brutality. 26

The

committee met with President Harry Truman a month later

and urged him to use the power of the federal government

to end mob violence in the South.

They believed Truman would act, if only to boost the United

States' image in the world at the dawn of the Cold War.

Images of lynchings and racial violence scarred the front

pages of newspapers around the world, mocking American

ideals of democracy. The Soviet newspaper Trud pointed to

the "increasing frequency of terroristic acts against

Negroes," as part of an exposé on the "Position of Negroes

in the USA." 27

Segregation, a reporter for a Sri Lankan

newspaper noted, "is the greatest propaganda gift any

country could give to the Kremlin in its persistent bid for the

affections of the coloured races of the world." 28

Federal

action would not only shore up America's image abroad, the

committee assured Truman,

but would also give black voters in the urban North, whose

ballots could tilt the election in his favor, an incentive to

vote for Truman in the 1948 presidential election. 29

Truman responded with Executive Order 9808, creating the

President's Committee on Civil Rights (PCCR), on December

5, 1946. He hailed their report, To Secure These Rights, as

"an American charter of human freedom in our time" and a

"guide for action." 30

The report condemned lynching,

disfranchisement, and racial discrimination in public

accommodations, housing, and employment and issued

concrete prescriptions for change. Nearly a decade before

the Brown v. Board of Education decision, To Secure These

Rights asserted unequivocally that segregation was

"inconsistent with the fundamental equalitarianism of the

American way of life in that it marks groups with the brand

of inferior status." Most important, the report argued that it

was the job of the federal government to protect individuals

from racial violence and discrimination, something that

would not be codified until the Civil Rights Act of 1968. 31

At the 1948 statewide NAACP convention in Mobile,

Alabama, African Americans praised Truman's new

commitment to civil rights. But Rosa Parks, who attended

the meeting as a delegate from the Montgomery branch,

was more cynical. She knew sexual violence sat at the core

of white supremacy, and she feared a terrible backlash as

segregationists, whose anger had already been roused by

rising black activism, came unhinged. They viewed the

report as a federal attack on the Southern way of life and an

open invitation for interracial sex. Truman's actions,

segregationists argued, would lead to intermarriage,

"amalgamation," "miscegenation," and the rape of white

women. Led by Strom Thurmond from South Carolina,

Southern legislators raced to vilify the president. In a fiery

diatribe on the U.S. Senate floor, Mississippi's James

Eastland and his state colleagues accused Truman of

"turning over the government to the mongrelized

minorities." 32

In popular memory, Rosa Parks leaves the speechifying to

Dixie demagogues and Dr. King, but at the 1948 NAACP

convention in Mobile, Parks gave an impassioned speech

warning her colleagues to be wary of any federal civil rights

promises. With Southern Democrats like Eastland and

Thurmond threatening to bolt the Democratic Party, Parks

suspected that few, if any, of Truman's initiatives on civil

rights would become law. Besides, she argued, no matter

how promising the report was, it would not end the wanton

abuse and harassment of African Americans. "No one should

feel proud," she said, "when Negroes every day are being

molested and maltreated." Parks's fiery speech got her

elected secretary of the Statewide Conference of the

Alabama NAACP, a job she took on in addition to her work

for the Montgomery branch, the Brotherhood of Sleeping

Car Porters, and her employment as a seamstress. 33

The new state NAACP position expanded the scope of

Parks's work documenting racial incidents, discrimination,

and violence in Alabama. "There were many, many cases to

keep records on," she recalled later. 34

The failure to secure

justice for Recy Taylor in 1944--one of the first cases Parks

worked on as secretary of the Montgomery NAACP--weighed

heavily on her memory. "There wasn't much we could do,"

she admitted in her memoir. "The NAACP and the

Committee [for Equal Justice} managed to get Governor

Sparks to commence a special grand jury to investigate the

case--though that grand jury also refused to indict the men."

"Of course," Parks noted, "the opposite was true if a white

woman cried rape and accused a black man." 35

Parks clearly understood, as historian Timothy B. Tyson puts

it, that the "much traveled back-road between the races was

clearly marked 'one-way.' " 36

When white women violated

these Southern signposts, it was not uncommon for them to

sacrifice their black lovers to save themselves from the

stigma of violating the South's most sacred taboo. No one

traveling in Parks's political circles, for example, could have

failed to hear about the tragedy of Willie McGee.

McGee, a married African-American man from Laurel,

Mississippi, entered into a long sexual relationship with his

white employer, Mrs. Willamerta Hawkins, after she

threatened to cry rape if he refused her flirtatious advances.

Hawkins first propositioned McGee, who often did odd jobs

around her house, in 1942. "I was waxing the floors with her

in the house and she showed a willingness to be familiar

and let me have intercourse with her in the back room,"

McGee said. "After that, she frequently sent for me to do

work which gave opportunities for intercourse, which she

accepted, and on occasions after dark," he said, "she took

me in her automobile out to a place in the graveyard where

we had intercourse." 37

The illicit relationship smacked of

coercion from the start, but it turned brutal when word

leaked out.

McGee's wife, Rosalee, figured out what was going on when

Mrs. Hawkins surprised McGee as he and his wife walked

home from a movie theater. "All of a sudden," Rosalee said,

"Mrs. Hawkins come out of an alley, and she says to Willie, 'I

got my car over here.

[Image: An all-white jury in Laurel, Mississippi, sentenced

Willie McGee, a thirty-one-year-old father of four, to death

for allegedly raping a white housewife. The Civil Rights

Congress protested the decision and launched an

international movement to free McGee.]

Come on into my car with me.'" Rosalee protested, and

McGee told Hawkins to "go away." "This is my wife," he said,

shocked at the woman's audacity. "I'm with my wife!!"

"Don't fool with no Negro whores," Hawkins shouted, angry

at being rebuffed. 38

McGee reluctantly went with Hawkins, fearing the tragic

consequences of turning her away. "People who don't know

the South don't know what would have happened to Willie if

he told her no," Rosalee told a friend. "Down South you tell

a woman like that no, and she'll cry rape anyway. So what

else could Willie do?"

McGee finally broke off the relationship with Hawkins in

November 1945, just before her husband, Troy, discovered

the affair. After Troy and Willametta had a terrible fight, she

called the police to report that a black, kinky-haired intruder

had raped her. Within a few hours, police held McGee in

custody. 39

Nothing could have convinced white Southerners that

Willametta Hawkins seduced McGee or that they had had a

long-term sexual relationship. While it was perfectly

reasonable, if frowned upon in some circles, for a white man

to have a sexual relationship with a black woman, the

segregated social order strictly forbade white women and

black men from association, let alone sex. The chief justice

of the Mississippi Supreme Court called the suggestion of a

mutual love affair between a black man and a white woman

a "revolting insinuation" that he "could not entertain" or

"even consider in court." He sent McGee to the electric chair

without hesitation. 40

That McGee received the death

sentence for what was a relatively common, if covert,

practice among white men and black women underscored

the hierarchy of race and sex in the segregated South. It

also helped launch an international protest movement.

The Civil Rights Congress (CRC), a leftist legal defense and

protest organization, led the worldwide efforts to free

McGee. 41

[Image: On May 8, 1951, more than five hundred white men,

women, and children gathered outside the Jones County

courthouse in Ellisville, Mississippi, to cheer the execution of

Willie McGee.]

Despite three interventions by the U.S. Supreme Court and

overwhelming evidence of racial bias in sentencing in

Mississippi, officials readied the portable electric chair at the

Jones County courthouse and scheduled McGee's execution

for May 8, 1951. 42

Anne Braden, a white activist from

Louisville, Kentucky, who protested the public execution,

demanded that "no more innocent men ... die in the name

of protecting southern white womanhood. We have been

made a party to this injustice too long." 43

Willie McGee

understood the political purpose of his execution. "You know

I am innocent," he told his wife in a letter the night before

he was scheduled to die. "The real reason they are going to

take my life is to keep the Negro down in the South." 44

Near midnight on that fateful May evening, state officials

delivered two deadly currents of electricity to Willie McGee

as an ecstatic, almost all-white audience of five hundred

men, women, and children gathered outside. Troy and

Willametta Hawkins stood among their neighbors and

cheered McGee's death. 45

Willie McGee was not the first nor the last black man

executed for violating the South's racial and sexual rules.

On February 2, 1951, officials at the Virginia State

Penitentiary executed seven black

men convicted of raping a white woman in Martinsville two

years earlier. 46

On January 8, 1949, Ruby Floyd, a thirty-two-

year-old white woman, accused the seven black men of

violently raping her. The police rounded up some suspects,

and within a matter of days, seven men sat in jail. By the

end of January, the Martinsville Seven had been tried,

convicted, and sentenced to death. 47

As African Americans in Martinsville dealt with the shock of

"seven rapid-fire consecutive death sentences," they faced

the stark reminder that white men guilty of the same crime

almost never received the same punishment. The Pittsburgh

Courier highlighted this discrepancy on May 14, 1949, by

juxtaposing the front-page announcement of the Martinsville

Seven death sentences with an article detailing the rape of

a black woman by two white police officers in Richmond,

Virginia. The policemen, Carl R. Burleson and Leonard E.

Davis, who were tried and convicted of raping a black

woman in 1946, kidnapped the black woman, a waitress and

mother of two, then drove her to a construction site and

sexually assaulted her. Judge John L. Ingram found Burleson

and Davis guilty and sentenced them to seven years in

prison. The guilty verdict was surprising, but the paltry

sentence reminded black women that society did not

consider them worthy of the same protection afforded white

women. 48

During the late 1940s and early 1950s, "protection" of white

womanhood often meant shielding them from any kind of

contact with African-American men, sexual or otherwise. In

Yanceyville, North Carolina, the collision of race and sex was

so combustible in the summer of 1951 that even a glance in

the wrong direction could land a black man in jail. On June 4,

Mack Ingram, a forty-two-year-old black farmer and father of

nine children, walked through a tobacco field on the Boswell

farm to ask the white owner if he could borrow a trailer.

About seventy-five feet ahead of him walked the farmer's

eighteen-year-old daughter, Willa Jean Boswell, who wore

overalls and carried a hoe. Willa Jean screamed and began

running when she saw Ingram walking in the same direction.

She ran as fast as she could until she reached

her brother. Exhausted and clearly terrified, she informed

him that Ingram was "looking at her in a leering manner." 49

Her father called the police, who arrested Ingram later that

afternoon. At the trial two weeks later, Willa Jean admitted

Ingram never spoke to her; nor could he have since he was

always at least seventy-five feet away. Still, her father

argued, Ingram's "eyes were all over her."

A charge of "eye rape" was enough for Judge Ralph Vernon

of the Caswell County Recorder's Court to sentence Ingram

to two years of hard labor. According to the NAACP, which

launched a campaign to defend Ingram, it was "as fantastic

a story as has ever been enacted in an American court." It

ought to be "sold to Ripley's Believe It or Not," they said. 50

Although the charge of "eye rape" seemed utterly absurd, it

was deadly serious. "The big issue," according to the

Chicago Defender, "is the right of a Colored man to walk

across a farm road or walk the streets of Yanceyville"

without the fear of being killed or sent to prison "because [a

white woman] doesn't like the way he looks at her." The

North Carolina Supreme Court finally dismissed the case in

1953. 51

While the CRC, NAACP, and other organizations lost the

Martinsville Seven and Willie McGee cases, they helped

expose the South's legal double standards. At the same

time, they revealed to the world the South's tendency

toward hysteria when black men and white women crossed

paths, whether in a bedroom or a wide-open tobacco field.

Though McGee lost his life, his defenders worked to make

audible the "whispered narrative of consensual interracial

sex that had been the real story behind too many southern

lynchings." 52

Rosa Parks labored tirelessly on similar cases in

Montgomery, but one in particular haunted her. In 1952 a

white Montgomery woman cried rape after a nosy neighbor

caught her undressing with her sixteen-year-old black lover,

Jeremiah Reeves. Shortly thereafter Montgomery police

arrested Reeves and beat a confession

out of him. The lower courts found Reeves guilty of rape and

sentenced him to die. Reeves's mother, Parks recalled,

"brought the case to the NAACP." The Montgomery branch,

she said, "struggled for quite a few years" to save the young

man. 53

They challenged his sentence all the way to the U.S.

Supreme Court, to no avail. Alabama officials executed

Reeves in 1957. 54

"It was a tragedy he lost his life," Parks

said. "I tried to find some way of documenting that [the

white woman had] lied but I was never able to do so ...

[S]ometimes it was very difficult to keep going when all our

work seemed to be in vain." 55

Cases like Jeremiah Reeves's and Willie McGee's taught

African Americans, as Martin Luther King, Jr., noted in Stride

Toward Freedom, to "fear and mistrust the white man's

justice." "In the years that [Reeves] sat in jail," King wrote,

"several white men in Alabama also had been charged with

rape, bur their accusers were Negro girls." White men were

seldom arrested, and if they were, King said, "they were

soon released by the grand jury. No one was ever brought to

trial." 56

This was mostly true throughout the South, but

Montgomery seemed to get more than its share of what

NAACP leader Roy Wilkins called "sex cases." 57

Laboring patiently for the NAACP in Montgomery, Rosa Parks

felt that 1949 in particular was a "very bad year." "There

was a lot of white violence against blacks," she recalled.

"Things happened," she said, "that most people never heard

about." 58

Even if the stories never got their due in the

mainstream press, it was the misfortune and courage of a

number of unknown women who helped mobilize the

African-American community in the late 1940s around

issues of sexualized violence. These campaigns sparked

larger protests for dignity and bodily integrity that

culminated in the Montgomery bus boycott. The truly

decisive moment came in 1949, when two white police

officers attacked a young woman named Gertrude Perkins.

"Gertrude Perkins is not

even mentioned in the history books," Joe Azbell, former

editor of the Montgomery Advertiser, said, "but she had as

much to do with the bus boycott and its creation as anyone

on earth." 59

The moon illuminated the dark street as Gertrude Perkins, a

twenty-five-year-old black woman, walked home, a little

unsteady on her feet after a night of partying. It was after

midnight on March 27, 1949, when a squad car inched

toward her and stopped. Two Montgomery police officers,

their badges glimmering in the moonlight, told Perkins to

halt, then walked toward her. Smelling beer on her breath,

they accused her of public drunkenness and ordered her to

get into their car. When she refused, they grabbed her and

pushed her into the backseat. They drove to the edge of a

railroad embankment and dragged her behind a building,

where the uniformed men raped her repeatedly at gunpoint

and forced her to have "all types of sex relations." When

they finished, they shoved Perkins back into the car, then

dumped her out in the middle of town and sped away.

Alone on the dark roadside, terrified and shaken, Perkins

nevertheless mustered the clarity and courage to report the

crime. Instead of going home to her three children, she went

directly to Reverend Solomon S. Seay, Sr.'s, house. Seay

was the prominent and rotund minister of the Mt. Zion AME

Zion Church. A newcomer to Montgomery, Seay was already

regarded as one of the most outspoken black ministers in

town. She knocked on the door of the Holt Street parsonage,

where Seay and his family lived. Waking him, Perkins told

Seay the details of her assault through sobs and tears. He

could smell the alcohol and wondered if perhaps she was

lying. "If you're not telling the truth," he said, "you're going

to be in big trouble."

"I'm telling you the dying truth," she insisted. Seay decided

that even if she had had too much to drink, she did not

deserve to be attacked. "No white or black man," he said,

"had a right to rape her." Seay consoled Perkins and listened

as she spoke. "We didn't

go to bed that morning," he recalled. "I kept her at my

house, carefully wrote down what she said, and later had it

notarized." He sent Perkins's horror story to syndicated

columnist Drew Pearson, who let the whole country know

what happened in his daily radio address before

Montgomery's white leaders knew what hit them. 60

Early the next day, Seay escorted Perkins to the police

station so she could report the crime. She asked Mayor John

L. Goodwyn to arrest her assailants. He quickly rebuffed her.

Goodwyn, who also served as police commissioner, refused

to hold a lineup so Perkins could identify her attackers. He

denied her request to see a log of who was on duty the

previous evening. Goodwyn claimed that providing access to

that information would "violate the Constitutional rights of

the members of the Police Department as individuals." 61

As word of the attack spread, E. D. Nixon and Reverend

Seay, the leaders of the local Ministerial Alliance, the Negro

Improvement League, and the NAACP, organized the

Citizens Committee for Gertrude Perkins. Dozens of active

black citizens joined to demand equal justice and protection

for black women. 62

Mary Fair Burks, an English professor at

Alabama State, and her newly formed middle-class

organization, the Women's Political Council, may also have

been involved, since one of their early goals was to "come

to the defense of women who had been victimized by rape

and other physical assaults." 63

At the first meeting of the Citizens Committee, members

elected Reverend Seay chairman of the "investigating

committee." His job was to find the police officers who

attacked Perkins. When the meeting adjourned, members of

the Citizens Committee poured out of the YMCA and ran into

a wall of police cars and blinding headlights. Seay stepped

forward. "Why are you flashing your lights into my face?" he

asked. An officer stepped out of his car, grabbed his club

with one hand and pulled at his gun with the other, and

walked over to Seay. Without saying a word, he threw his

arm back and hurled the club into Seay's chest.

"You're under arrest," the officer said as Seay recoiled in

pain. Members of the Citizens Committee rushed around

Seay.

"Y'all ought to leave this man alone," someone said, "he

ain't doing anymore than you do ... trying to defend his

women." Police grabbed Seay, pushed him into their squad

car, and drove him downtown. At the jailhouse, the chief of

police recognized the minister. "Pull your hat off," he

ordered. "We gonna teach you that we run this town.

Niggers don't run it." The next day E. D. Nixon helped bail

Seay out and promised that the NAACP would defend him in

court. 64

As the ministers and the NAACP rallied around Seay and

Perkins, white officials publicly dismissed Perkins's case. The

mayor claimed Perkins's rape charge was "completely

false." He insisted that holding a lineup or issuing any

warrants would set a bad precedent since, as Goodwyn

argued, "charges of this nature, even though untrue ... are

often used to destroy goodwill between the races." 65

Besides, he added, his "policemen would not do a thing like

that." 66

Since black prostitutes had routinely serviced white

police officers in the past in exchange for allowing the

existence of brothels in Montgomery, perhaps Mayor

Goodwyn thought there was no need to resort to violence or

force for interracial intimacies. 67

Blacks in Montgomery knew better. The city's police force

had a reputation for physical and sexual violence. Police

brutality plagued the black community. The Perkins case

was just the tip of the iceberg. 68

E. G. Jackson, editor of

Montgomery's black newspaper, the Alabama Tribune, urged

action on the Perkins case and reminded readers of a similar

assault three years earlier.

In 1946, Viola White, an African-American woman who

worked at Maxwell Air Force Base, had refused a bus driver's

order to move out of her seat. The driver threatened to

physically remove her, but she would not budge. Finally he

called the police and asked them to arrest her. When the

officer arrived, he beat White into submission and took her

to jail. The next day a judge found White guilty of

"disobeying a bus driver." White was so incensed that she

hired a lawyer to appeal her case. Not long after she filed

suit, Montgomery police retaliated. One afternoon Officer

A. A. Enger seized White's sixteen-year-old daughter, drove

her to a cemetery, and raped her. As the officer thrust

himself inside her, she stared at his car and focused on

memorizing the tag number. The next day she reported the

crime. After many attempts, E. D. Nixon was finally able to

get a judge to sign a warrant for Enger's arrest. Instead of

detaining Enger or firing him, however, the police chief

decided to let him slip quietly out of town. 69

While E. G. Jackson recalled other unsolved crimes against

black women, the assault on Gertrude Perkins, he said, was

"one of the worst crimes ever committed in ... Montgomery."

"The head officials," he complained, were still "trying to

keep it quiet." 70

But nothing could silence the voices of

protest coming from the Citizens Committee for Gertrude

Perkins. Their public protests, sensational newspaper

headlines, and a flood of "inflammatory" pamphlets

garnered massive attention throughout the city. Even the

Montgomery Advertiser, the "white" daily newspaper,

followed Perkins's case for nearly two months, often

featuring the latest news on the front page. 71

Because of

the media attention, unrelenting protests from the Citizens

Committee, and the dogged determination of Perkins's

white liberal lawyers, John and Virgil McGee, the mayor

finally relented and brought the case in front of the grand

jury. 72

Reverend Seay accompanied Perkins to court on May 20,

1949, nearly two months after police assaulted her. Seay

waited outside the closed courtroom, where he could hear

county solicitor Temple Siebels berate Perkins with his

"roaring, shaking and loud voice." "Aren't you lying?" he

bellowed repeatedly. "No," Perkins said plainly. "I am nor

lying." 73

The fact that she did not say "sir" must have

unsettled Siebels, who continued to verbally assault her. His

bellicose style did not seem to rattle Perkins, who walked

out of the courtroom, according to Seay, "as calm as

anybody you've ever seen in your life."

Perkins's dignified self-defense belied white portrayals of her

as

a drunk and an "ignorant, almost illiterate black woman,"

but that did not stop Siebels from presenting her as a

prostitute. 74

"Reverend," Siebels said to Seay when he was

questioned in front of the jury, "did you know that Gertrude

Perkins was ... that she's just a common street woman?"

Seay argued that Perkins's character was not the issue.

"Whatever she [is]," Seay said, "she had rights that no man

had a right to violate." Besides, Seay argued, "since when

did policemen gain the special liberty, on or off duty, to be

entertained in such a fashion?" 75

Perkins's testimony and Seay's defense did not move the

all-white, all-male jury. Convinced that "there was no

evidence of rape in the Perkins case," the jurors refused to

indict anyone. In an interview with the Montgomery

Advertiser, the lead juror declared Perkins's testimony full of

"manufactured lies." Then, scolding the Citizens Committee

and the NAACP, he argued that "the publicity of this case

has not been helpful to the racial relations of the city." 76

In

order to stave off any protests, the editor of the

Montgomery Advertiser felt compelled to report that the

men serving on the jury were "prominently identified" with

Montgomery's different churches, including "five Methodists,

seven Baptists, three Presbyterians, and three members of

the Church of Christ." 77

"You could see what the point was,"

Reverend Seay stated in response to the newspaper's

reference to ecumenical diversity. Perhaps the editor hoped

this tactic would stave off any criticism of the verdict.

In an editorial designed to put any hard feelings to rest, the

Advertiser argued that "those colored people who have felt

humiliated or angered over the Perkins case can now abate

those emotions." It pointed to a similar case seventeen

miles north, in Wetumpka, Alabama, in which two white

men, John C. Howard and Jack Oliver, received forty-five-

year sentences for raping two black women, as proof that

African Americans could get justice in the courts. 78

"We

have no doubt," the Advertiser insisted, "had there been

evidence, the same would have happened here." After all,

the Advertiser continued, "the case ran the full process of

our Anglo-Saxon system of justice. What more could have

been done?" 79

Certainly Seay and other members of the Citizens

Committee would have preferred an indictment. White

people, Reverend Seay noted, "had not accepted black

people as really human." The lack of justice in the Perkins

case, he said, only "increased the resentment of ordinary

black people about how they were being treated." 80

Still,

many were pleased with the "groundswell of unrest" that

their protest yielded, including the fact that, according to

Seay, it was "the first time all the ministers in the city were

shaken up." 81

It would not be the last time, of course: when

Rosa Parks's arrest in 1955 stirred the black community into

a truly mass protest, Seay would be a pivotal leader. The

public outcry in the Perkins case was "a bold expression,"

Seay said, "on the part of black people in this town to say to

the courts and others 'We protest what is going on.' " 82

The Perkins protest did not occur in isolation. In February

1951 a white grocery store owner raped a black teenager.

Sam E. Green regularly employed Flossie Hardman, a black

fifteen-year-old, as a babysitter and frequently drove her

home at the end of her shift. One night, instead of taking

Flossie directly home, Green pulled to the side of a quiet

road and raped her. 83

Flossie immediately informed her parents of the assault.

Despite the odds of bringing Green to justice, they decided

to press charges. Meanwhile Rufus A. Lewis, a World War II

veteran and celebrated football coach at Alabama State

University, launched a campaign to bring Green to trial.

Backed by Lewis and many of his fellow veterans, the

Hardmans succeeded in bringing Green to court. But when

an all-white jury returned a not guilty verdict after

deliberating for only five minutes, African Americans

decided to take the matter into their own hands. Lewis led

the charge. 84

As one of the principal spokesmen for voter registration

efforts

in Montgomery, Lewis had enormous respect and support

within the black community; he belonged to the mostly

middle-class Dexter Avenue Baptist Church and was a

member of many of the "best" clubs and associations in

town. 85

Additionally, as the owner of Montgomery's largest

black funeral home, he was financially independent and not

easily intimidated by white economic reprisals. Lewis

parlayed his social and economic wealth into a spacious

brick clubhouse, named the Citizens Club. It functioned as

the headquarters for many of the city's community

organizations. Here Lewis taught veterans and others the

ins and outs of voter registration and created a safe space

where African Americans could "come and socialize" and, in

the process, get politicized. 86

Lewis knew that a large swath

of the black community was outraged by the attack on

Flossie Hardman and the unjust ruling. Since Green's

grocery store was located in a primarily black community,

Lewis figured an economic boycott could destroy Green's

livelihood.

Lewis organized the "Citizens Committee" to lead the

boycott. The committee brought together veterans groups,

the Women's Political Council, and the NAACP under the

banner of protecting black womanhood. The campaign to

shut down Green's store was a success. Within a matter of

weeks, African Americans delivered their own guilty verdict

by driving Green into the red. 87

The campaign established

the boycott as a powerful weapon for justice and sent a

message to whites that African Americans would not allow

white men to disrespect, abuse, and violate black women's

bodies with impunity. 88

Soon enough an even larger boycott

would be imaginable for the African-American community.

Many whites chose to ignore this message, notably the

city's bus operators, who snubbed, bullied, and brutalized

black passengers daily. Drivers shortchanged African

Americans, then kicked them off the bus if they asked for

correct change. Half-empty buses often bypassed blacks

waiting at bus stops. And bus drivers never

hesitated to use violence to enforce segregation. In a sense,

the ruthless beatings that Ella Ree Jones, Roberta McKenzie,

and Gladys Blackmon received when they defied Jim Crow in

the early 1940s represented relatively light punishment,

considering the price paid by Hilliard Brooks.

On August 12, 1950, Brooks, an African-American veteran of

World War II and neighbor of Rosa Parks, attempted to board

a bus driven by C. L. Hood. Hood refused to let Brooks on his

bus, claiming he was too intoxicated. Brooks put up a fuss

and demanded to be allowed to ride. Hood waved a police

officer over, then pushed the veteran off the front steps,

knocking him to the ground. As Brooks struggled to stand,

the police officer, M. E. Mills, pointed his pistol at Brooks

and, in the bright afternoon sun, shot him dead. Satisfied

with the assailants' claim of self-defense, the mayor cleared

them of any wrongdoing. 89

There were at least thirty complaints by African Americans

in Montgomery in 1953, indicating a growing sense of

impatience with the grim conditions on city buses. 90

Most of

these complaints came from working-class black women

who made up the bulk of Montgomery City Lines' riders,

over half of whom toiled as domestics. 91

With a median

salary of just $523 per year, domestics could not afford

automobiles and had no choice but to ride the city buses to

and from the white homes in which they worked. 92

Their

workplace could be just as dangerous: domestic workers

faced sexual and physical abuse by their white employers.

While domestics could and often did resist sexual

harassment and abuse on the job by quitting, they could not

easily find other transportation. They were stuck with the

buses. As black lawyer Fred Gray put it, bus transportation

was not "something optional, like restaurants." 93

African-American women constantly complained about the

atrocious treatment they received on the buses. Gladys

Moore remembered that Montgomery's bus operators

treated black women "just as tough as could be ... like we

are some kind of animal." 94

Jo Ann Robinson, an English

professor at Alabama State and member of the increasingly

militant Women's Political

Council, argued that mistreatment on the buses was

degrading, shameful, and humiliating. "Black Americans,"

she insisted, were "still being treated as ... things without

feelings, not human beings." 95

Bus drivers, Robinson

recalled, disrespected black women by hurling nasty

sexualized insults their way. Ferdie Walker, a black woman

from Fort Worth, Texas, remembered bus drivers sexually

harassing her as she waited on the corner. "The bus was up

high," she recalled, "and the street was down low. They'd

drive up under there and then they'd expose themselves

while I was standing there and it just scared me to death." 96

Aside from direct sexual harassment, drivers referred to

black women with contemptuous names like "black

niggers," "black birches," "heifers," and "whores." 97

Delia

Perkins remembered a driver who regularly referred to her

as an "ugly black ape." 98

In addition to slinging insults, bus drivers often slapped

black women who crossed them. They refused to stop at

every corner in black neighborhoods, allowed white children

to board before black adults, demanded blacks give up their

seats for whites, and forced them to pay their fare at the

front of the bus and then enter via the rear. 99

The latter

practice was designed to eliminate any chance that black

bodies might accidentally come in contact with white

bodies, thus removing the opportunity for any inadvertent

move toward "miscegenation" or "social equality." This was

especially important if black men boarded the bus when

white women sat in the front seats, but drivers imposed the

rule on black women as well. One black woman recalled that

a bus driver demanded she relocate "because a white man

could not sit opposite a colored lady." 100

Considering white

men's long history of "integrating" with black women, this

rule was particularly galling.

Georgia Gilmore, a plucky and spirited black cook, decided

not to ride the buses after a driver insisted she enter the

bus through the rear after paying her fare in the front.

Gilmore protested, but the red-faced, redheaded driver

hollered, "I told you to get off and go to the back, Nigger!"

Since the bus was her sole transportation, Gilmore

retreated. As she was about to enter the back door, the

driver slammed it shut and pulled away. 101

Such malicious

acts often resulted in injuries. "There had been several

reported incidents," Ralph Abernathy, a Baptist minister,

recalled, "of persons being caught in the doors ... [and]

dragged for some distance." 102

Verbal, physical, and sexual abuse maintained racial

hierarchy in an enclosed space where complete separation

of whites and blacks was all but impossible. A big arrow

pointing to the rear of the bus for "colored" and another

pointing to the front of the bus for whites provided some

guidance. But the Jim Crow line could vanish just as easily

as it appeared, as the racial composition of riders changed

at each stop. 103

"The bus driver could move colored people

anywhere he wanted on the bus," E. D. Nixon recalled. "If a

white person came into the bus and sat way back in it, no

Negro was permitted to stand or sit between the motorman

and that person." 104

As a rule, the first ten of the thirty-six

seats on a Montgomery city bus were reserved for whites,

no matter how many people were actually on the bus. 105

This frequently left black passengers, who almost always

outnumbered white passengers, in the humiliating position

of having to stand over empty seats.

This policy fueled resentment and anger among African

Americans, especially domestics and day laborers who

spent hours on their feet cooking, washing, and ironing for

white people. "You spend your whole lifetime in your

occupation ... making life clever, easy and convenient for

white people," Rosa Parks recalled, "but when you have to

get transportation home, you are denied an equal

accommodation." 106

Mistreatment on the buses, she

argued, emphasized the fact that "our existence was for the

white man's comfort and well being; we had to accept being

deprived of just being human." 107

Like sexualized

mistreatment, it was an all-too-familiar part of being a black

woman in Montgomery.

With abuses piling up like cordwood and memories of

previous crimes smoldering, a group of black women

decided to take on the bus drivers by demanding to be

treated like ladies. The Women's

Political Council led the charge. This militant women's group

was one of over fifty active and vibrant black benefit

associations, mutual aid societies, and social clubs in

Montgomery that stitched together the social fabric of the

African-American community. Professional black men

belonged to one or more of the traditionally black

fraternities like Alpha Phi Alpha, Kappa Alpha Psi, or Omega

Psi Phi, while small businessmen and laborers held

membership in the fraternal orders and benefit associations

like the Prince Hall Free Masons, the Knights of Labor, the

Elks, or the Knights of Pythias. There were also

neighborhood associations, church clubs, and political

organizations like the NAACP and its youth division, E. D.

Nixon's Progressive Democrats, and Rufus Lewis's Citizens

Club. 108

Black women of a certain class in Montgomery found

camaraderie in sororities like Alpha Kappa Alpha, Zeta Phi

Beta, Delta Sigma Theta, or Sigma Gamma Rho, or they

belonged to one of eighteen clubs that made up the

Montgomery City Women's Federated Clubs, including the

Crusaders, Anna M. Duncan, Excelsiors, Home Makers, Phillis

Wheatley, Cosmopolites, and Sojourner Truth clubs--most of

which featured junior versions for young women. In addition

to these civic, professional, and social clubs, many black

women belonged to societies affiliated with the more than

fifty black churches in Montgomery. 109

Meetings occurred in church basements, at women's homes,

at the black-owned Ben Moore Hotel, which had a large

ballroom and rooftop garden, or at any one of the dozen or

more lounges, bars, and clubs where blacks could drink,

dance, or eat a hearty meal. The most popular gathering

places were the Elks Club, the Reno Café, Pics Café, the

Afro-Club, Rufus Lewis's Citizens Club, Club 400, and the

Tijuana Club. 110

These clubs provided spaces where black

men and women, free from white surveillance and racial

domination, could work out community problems, organize

politically, or just relax.

The rich network of social and political organizations kept

Montgomery's class-divided black community relatively

connected.

In addition, they served as information hubs, where news

could travel easily from one neighborhood to the next. 111

The sheer number and diversity of organizations explains

the relative speed with which the 1955 boycott began; after

all, blacks in Montgomery were already organized. It only

seemed "spontaneous" from a distance.

Even though they were knit together socially, African

Americans in Montgomery rarely came together to protest

white supremacy en masse. With the exception of E. D.

Nixon and Rufus Lewis's voter registration efforts, Rosa

Parks's investigations on behalf of the NAACP, and the mass

mobilization on behalf of Gertrude Perkins and Flossie

Hardman, most clubwomen preferred to work on racial uplift

and charitable causes within the black community instead of

agitating for political and civil rights in the city at large.

Direct protests proved dangerous throughout the South, and

Montgomery was no exception. Few people were willing to

risk their lives or their livelihoods for something that

seemed as immutable as segregation.

And yet there were always a handful of fearless individuals,

like E. D. Nixon and Rosa Parks, who pushed for more direct

political engagement. Vernon Johns, the irascible and

outspoken preacher at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in the

1940s and early 1950s, regularly chastised his "silk

stocking" congregation for their apparent resignation to Jim

Crow. 112

But Johns was not an ordinary man. He seemed to

be hardwired to resist segregation. The preacher loved to

shock his congregants and scare white Montgomerians. In

response to the ruthless beating of a black man by white

police officers in the early 1950s, he posted "It's Safe to

Murder Negroes in Montgomery" on the church marquee.

The next week his advertised sermon title was: "When the

Rapist Is White." 113

One Sunday morning he stunned his

middle-class audience by beginning his sermon with a

horrific tale. "When my grandfather was hanged for cutting

his master in two with a scythe," he said, "they asked him

on the gallows if he had anything to say." "Yes," his

grandfather said, "I'm just sorry I didn't do it thirty years

before." 114

The

story was not true, but Johns had a point. He wanted his

flock to become as fearless as was his fictional

grandfather. 115

Johns's tactics made most of Dexter's members

uncomfortable, but Mary Fair Burks felt the call one morning

when Johns mounted another scathing attack on the

complacency of his affluent parishioners. Burks had waged

her own private "guerrilla warfare" by refusing to abide by

Jim Crow signs throughout the city. After a run-in with a

white police officer, however, Burks decided to broaden her

attack and form an army of women dedicated to destroying

white supremacy. She needed foot soldiers. "I looked around

and all I could see were either masks of indifference or

scorn," she recalled. Being a "feminist before [she] really

knew what the word meant," she said, she "dismissed the

hard-faced men." They "would take it over," she said, "and

women wouldn't be able to do what they could do." 116

Instead, Burks focused on the women in her church and

social circles, hoping she could convert them into activists.

"I played bridge with them," she reasoned, "bur more

important, I knew that they must suffer from the same racial

abuse and the indignity." 117

She left church that day with a

plan. Over the next week, she contacted fifty women. When

forty showed up for the first meeting of the Women's

Political Council (WPC) in the fall of 1946, she was

pleasantly surprised. 118

Burks started the meeting by

testifying about her run-in with a club-wielding police officer.

When she finished, nearly every woman at the meeting

chimed in with similar stories of brutalization. 119

In order to gain political leverage with the dry's leaders,

members of the newly formed WPC, many of them public

school teachers and faculty members at Alabama State

College, decided they needed to become registered voters.

After a number of them cleared the various hurdles

designed to keep the voting rolls lily white, they set up

workshops throughout the city to help others get registered.

The WPC set up "registration schools" in churches, where

they taught weekly classes on how to fill out voter

registration forms and, if necessary, on basic literacy. When

participants

were ready, WPC members accompanied them to the

courthouse and helped them fill out registration

applications, then returned a few days later to check on the

results. 120

More than anything, they taught ordinary women

how to assert themselves in front of white authorities.

By teaming up with Rufus Lewis's veterans organization and

E. D. Nixon's Progressive Democrats, both of which had

been active in voter registration efforts since the early

1940s, the WPC muscled its way into city elections. 121

By

the early 1950s, there were enough African Americans

registered to vote in Montgomery that they could easily tip

the scale in close elections. 122

Over the next few years, the

Women's Political Council grew as well. By 1955, it had three

chapters in Montgomery and more than three hundred

female members. During this remarkable growth period, the

WPC earned a reputation as the "most militant and

uncompromising voice" for blacks in the Cradle of the

Confederacy. 123

The militant reputation rested upon the WPC's new

leadership and new focus: mistreatment on the city's buses.

Mary Fair Burks handed Jo Ann Robinson, her colleague at

Alabama State College and a fiery advocate of human

rights, the reins of the radical women's organization in

1950, just a year after she moved to Montgomery. Despite

being a newcomer, Robinson easily fell in with

Montgomery's middle-class clubwomen, among whom she

quickly became a "much sought after dinner guest." 124

Born

and raised in Georgia, Robinson was no stranger to white

supremacy. As a middle-class woman with a vehicle, though,

she was unaware of the intricacies of the segregated

seating policies on Montgomery's buses.

Her introduction came at the end of her first full semester

reaching, as she was preparing to visit family for Christmas

in December 1949. Robinson boarded a near-empty city bus

and sat down in the fifth row, two rows behind the only

white woman on the bus, closed her eyes, and imagined

"the wonderful two weeks [of] vacation" ahead. Suddenly

startled by the bus driver's roaring voice, Robinson sat

straight up.

"If you can sit in the fifth row from the front of the other

buses in Montgomery," he bellowed, "suppose you get off

and ride in one of them."

Being a respectable, professional woman who was used to

being treated like a lady in the black community, Robinson

did not realize the driver was speaking to her until he pulled

to a stop and stormed over to where she was seated. 125

"Get up from there!" he yelled, drawing his arm back as if

he were about to strike her. "Get up from there!"

Robinson leaped to her feet, fearful of being beaten, and ran

to the front of the bus. She stumbled off the bus in a daze.

"Tears blinded my vision," she recalled, and "waves of

humiliation inundated me." 126

Recalling the shame and embarrassment she experienced

that December day, Robinson readily accepted the

leadership of the WPC. Utilizing the political leverage the

WPC had built up over the previous years, Robinson and her

army of militant women-- Mrs. A. W. West, Mrs. N. W. Burkes,

Mrs. J. E. Pierce, Georgia Gilmore, Mrs. Edwyna Marketta,

Ella Mae Stovall, Lettie M. Anderson, Mrs. Horace Burton,

Mrs. Ruby Hall, and Ella Mae Henderson, to name a few--

canvassed black neighborhoods. According to Robinson,

they gathered "thousands of signatures on hundreds of

petitions" that demanded the city do something about the

"shameful and deplorable one-sidedness" of the city's

segregated parks and recreation system. They repeatedly

confronted the city commissioners with complaints about

police brutality. In the early 1950s, Jo Ann Robinson led her

band of women warriors to directly attack abuse on the

city's buses. 127

In 1952 members of the WPC packed a public hearing

regarding a bus fare increase, where Zolena Pierce and

Sadie Brooks testified about their mistreatment on the

buses. One year later a group of WPC members stormed a

meeting with the City Commission, where Jo Ann Robinson

railed against the abuses heaped upon black female bus

riders and argued that African Americans should not have to

stand over empty seats when the black section was filled

and the white section was empty.

[Image: Members of the Sojourners for Truth and Justice--a

national black women's organization dedicated to the

protection of "Negro Womanhood"--pose for a photo with

celebrated athlete, singer, and actor Paul Robeson in 1952.]

Nor should they have to pay at the front, she said, and then

disembark and get on in the back. The WPC demanded that

black riders be treated with dignity and respect. 128

"We

were not fighting segregation," Mary Fair Burks pointed out,

"as much as abuses of Negroes." 129

Black women across the country spoke out against similar

abuses. Besides the WPC, no organization did this better or

more explicitly than the Sojourners for Truth and Justice

(STJ), a short-lived but important national black women's

organization dedicated to "the full dignity of Negro

womanhood." 130

Two African-American women, Louise

Thompson Patterson, a Communist and wife of William

Patterson, the head of the Civil Rights Congress, and Beulah

Richardson, a poet and Progressive Party activist from

Mississippi, organized the STJ in the fall of 1951. Patterson

and Richardson sought to unite black women across social,

political,

and economic lines in an effort to end white violence and

terror. "We will no longer in sight of God or man," the

women proclaimed, "sit by and watch our lives destroyed by

an unreasonable and unreasoning hate that metes out to us

every kind of death." 131

Speaking as mothers, wives, daughters, sisters, and

witnesses to sexualized violence, the members of the STJ

issued a pamphlet that assailed white supremacy and called

for a national meeting of black women in Washington, D.C.,

"We have seen our brothers beaten, shot, and stamped to

death by police [and] we have seen our daughters raped

and degraded, and when one dares rise in defense of her

honor she is jailed for life." 132

By inviting black women to

come "speak [their] mind" and issuing the call in the "spirit

of Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth," the STJ rooted

themselves in a "radical black feminist tradition of

resistance" and the tradition of testimony. 133

On September 29, 1951, more than one hundred African-

American women from fifteen states gathered in the

nation's capital to testify and bear witness to one another's

horror stories. Mary Church Terrell, the aged and sagacious

"dean of Negro women," presided over the weekend

gathering and encouraged participants to "fight for our

country" and make it "practice what it preaches." At the end

of the historic meeting, the STJ issued a proclamation

demanding the protection of "Negro womanhood" and

decrying black women's "second-class" status, which

"denies us dignity and honor." 134

As part of the campaign to protect black womanhood, the

STJ called for the immediate freedom of Rosa Lee Ingram, a

black sharecropper widow and mother of twelve who was

convicted and sentenced to death in the self-defense

slaying of a white man in Ellaville, Georgia, on November 4,

1947. 135

John Stratford, a sixty-four-year-old white

sharecropper who lived on the same property as Ingram and

her family, harassed Ingram for years. She finally fought

back after he tried to force her into a shed to have sex with

him.

[Image: Rosa Lee Ingram, a sharecropper and mother of

twelve, was sentenced to death for the self-defense slaying

of a white man in Ellaville, Georgia, on November 4, 1947.

The NAACP raised thousands of dollars to challenge the

conviction. Ingram was finally released from prison on

August 26, 1959. Ingram (seated) with sons Sammie

(center) and Wallace (standing) in an Albany, Georgia, jail

cell, 1948.]

"He never tried to rape me," she told a reporter," ... he just

tried to compel me." 136

Angered by her repeated rejections,

Stratford lashed out. Cursing her out, he grabbed his gun

and used the butt as a bludgeon. "I grappled with him," she

remembered, "and he dropped the gun. He choked me and

nearly tore off my sweater."

When Ingram's sixteen-year-old son, Wallace, heard the

scuffle, he ran to his mother's aid. "Please stop beating

mama," he begged. 137

Stratford persisted, and Wallace

picked up the gun. Wallace rammed the gun into Stratford's

head, knocking him to the ground. Rosa Lee and her son left

Stratford lying in the grass

and ran home, unaware that he was dead. Within two

months, she was on death row for murder. 138

The Sojourners for Truth and Justice rallied to free Rosa Lee

Ingram from prison and praised her for "defending the honor

of all womanhood." They argued that her willingness to fight

back against a white man's sexual and physical advances

was not a crime but instead was "the first step in ending the

indignities heaped upon Negro women everywhere in our

land." "weshallnotbe trampleduponanylonger," the women

declared. 139

Black women in Montgomery, especially those in the

Women's Political Council, could have adopted the

Sojourners' rallying cry as their own. When members of the

WPC, Rufus Lewis's Citizens Committee, and the Federation

of Negro Women's Clubs marched into another meeting with

the city commission in March 1954 and demanded better

treatment on the buses, city leaders again refused to budge.

Jo Ann Robinson was furious. As she heard more "stories of

unhappy experiences" on the buses, she decided to give

Mayor W. A. "Tacky" Gayle a piece of her mind. Robinson

fumed, Gayle recalled later; she said "they would just show

me," he claimed. "They [said] they were going in the front

door and sitting wherever they pleased." 140

Lest Gayle misunderstand the threat, Robinson sent him a

letter on May 21, 1954, just four days after the momentous

Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education that

banned segregation in public schools. In the letter, Robinson

spelled out exactly what would happen should Gayle and

the other city commissioners ignore the WPC's demands.

Since "three-fourths of the riders of those public

conveyances are Negroes," Robinson warned, "they could

not possibly operate ... if Negroes did not patronize them."

"More and more of our people are already arranging with

neighbors and friends," she asserted, "to ride to keep from

being insulted and humiliated by bus drivers." In addition,

Robinson pointed out, more than twenty-five local

organizations had begun

talking about a "city-wide boycott of the buses," and plans

were already "being made to ride less or not at all, on our

buses."

Perhaps the earth-shattering Supreme Court ruling gave

Robinson the courage to issue such a forceful warning. After

all, it appeared that Jim Crow was beginning to die a slow

but sure death. Maybe she was inspired by the spirit of the

Sojourners for Truth and Justice. More likely, however, she

had simply had enough. Threatening a boycott was perhaps

the only option remaining after requests to be treated with

dignity fell on deaf ears for more than a decade.

Ten years earlier Thurgood Marshall had warned that the

abuse and mistreatment of black women on public

conveyances was "dynamite." Just after Robinson sent her

letter to Mayor Gayle, a news report hit the black

community like a "bombshell." Claudette Colvin, a fifteen-

year-old high school girl, had been manhandled, arrested,

and indicted for refusing to relinquish her seat to a white

man. 141

CHAPTER 3"Walking in

Pride and Dignity"

CLAUDETTE COLVIN, A SPIRITED and studious tenth grader

at Booker T. Washington High School, boarded the Highland

Gardens bus near Dexter Avenue Baptist Church after school

on March 2, 1955. She had spent the school day studying

Harrier Tubman and Sojourner Truth, "black heroes and how

they broke down Jim Crow laws," as she put it. Each student

brought in articles about racial violence and discrimination.

Her class spent the afternoon talking about the bleak racial

conditions in Montgomery. By the time she boarded the bus,

Colvin was filled with resentment over the city's double

standard of justice. She plopped down in the rear section

reserved for "colored" passengers. 1

At the next stop, passengers climbed aboard and filled the

remaining seats--the first ten rows reserved for whites,

blacks in the back. Mrs. Ruth Hamilton, visibly pregnant, sat

down next to Colvin. A white couple squeezed into the last

two seats directly across from them. When the bus driver,

Robert W. Cleere, saw that the color line had been breached-

-black and white people could not sit across from one

another--he ordered Colvin and

Hamilton to stand in the aisle to preserve segregation.

Hamilton refused to give up her seat. Placing her hands on

her protruding belly, Hamilton told Cleere that she "was not

going to get up," because, she said, she "didn't feel like it." 2

Uncomfortable asking a pregnant woman to relinquish her

seat, the driver turned to Colvin and threatened to call the

police unless she moved. Colvin did not budge. Furious,

Cleere pulled the bus to the curb in the middle of the

downtown business district, locked the passengers in, and

walked away. He soon returned with two policemen. The

officers lumbered onto the bus and stood over Hamilton and

Colvin, staring down at the stubborn women. "Move,"

ordered one of the officers. A black man seated behind

Hamilton interrupted the standoff and offered Hamilton his

seat, which she accepted, leaving Colvin alone. The police

demanded to know why she ignored the driver's direct

order.

"It's against the law here," an officer reminded her.

"I didn't know that it was a law," Colvin shot back, "that a

colored person had to get up and give a white person a seat

when there were not any more vacant seats and colored

people were standing up."

Colvin had a point--the city law required passengers to

move only if another seat was available. Since all the seats

were taken, Colvin had every right to stay put. The officers

seemed genuinely stumped until she sat up and with

righteous indignation said, "I [am] just as good as any white

person."

A hush fell over the crowded bus. The driver and the two

officers stepped outside to consider their options. "We just

sat there," Gloria Hardin, another passenger, recalled. "We

didn't know what was going to happen but we knew

something would happen." Colvin waited quietly for Cleere

and the police. "I thought he would stop and shout and then

drive on," Colvin said later. "That's what they usually did." 3

Colvin's assertion of equality seemed to have pushed Cleere

over the line. He told the police to arrest her. Clambering

back onto the bus, Cleere pointed at Colvin. "I have had

trouble out of that thing before," he said. 4 The

police slowly walked over to Colvin, grabbed her arms, and

jerked her toward the aisle. She began to sob and pulled

against the officers, trying to remain in her seat. "I wasn't

getting up," she said later. "I couldn't. I had it in my mind

that it was wrong." 5

"You black whore," an officer shouted, then yanked her from

the seat and kicked her down the aisle toward the front of

the bus. The other officer dragged the weeping teenager

down the steps and pushed her into their patrol car. 6 Colvin

was terrified. "You just didn't know what white people might

do at that time," she recalled later. "I didn't know if they

were crazy or if they were going to take me to a Klan

meeting." When she heard one of the officers make a joke

about her breasts and bra size, she feared the worst. Stories

of ordeals like the one Gertrude Perkins endured at the

hands of the Montgomery police were common currency in

the black South. "I started protecting my crotch," she

remembered. "I was afraid they might rape me." 7

Deep history and day-to-day life in Montgomery gave het

plenty of reasons to be afraid. Away from the public glare

and in the backseat of a white man's car, anything could

happen. They could take Colvin wherever they wanted and

do whatever they pleased without fear of punishment. It

was the worst possible situation for a young black woman--

something generations of mothers had warned their

daughters to avoid at all costs.

Colvin tried to remain calm as the police drove her to the jail

and booked her for violating the city's segregation laws.

Furious that the teenager had defied them, they also

charged her with assault and resisting arrest. To drown out

the horror of being in jail, Colvin recited poetry and

scripture. "I recited Edgar Allan Poe," she recalled, " Annabel

Lee,' the characters in Midsummer Night's Dream, the Lord's

Prayer, and the Twenty-third Psalm." 8

Colvin may have asked the Lord to be her shepherd, but the

local trinity of Fred Gray, E. D. Nixon, and Jo Ann Robinson

planned her deliverance. News of Colvin's stand against

segregation and subsequent detention spread quickly

through town. "In a

few hours every Negro youngster on the streets discussed

Colvin's arrest," Jo Ann Robinson remembered. "Telephones

rang, clubs called special meetings... mothers expressed

concern ... [and] men instructed their wives to walk or to

share rides." 9 Almost immediately, blacks formed the

Citizens Coordinating Committee, led by Robinson, Rufus

Lewis, and Fred Gray, Montgomery's newest and youngest

black attorney. They sent out an appeal to "Friends of Justice

and Human Rights." They requested financial assistance and

called for an "unconditional acquittal of Miss Claudette

Colvin." 10

Martin Luther King, Jr., the baby-faced Baptist

preacher who had only been in town for a few months,

called the situation an "atrocity" that "seemed to arouse the

Negro community." He remembered later: "There was talk of

boycotting the buses in protest." 11

In fact, there had been

an explicit threat to boycott the buses by the Women's

Political Council nearly a year earlier. But fighting the city

was risky, if not dangerous. "People had everything to lose,"

Jo Ann Robinson noted, "and nothing to gain." 12

Committee

members shelved the boycott and decided to appeal to city

and bus officials directly, and if that failed, they reasoned,

then they would go to court.

The first meeting the Citizens Coordinating Committee had

with police commissioner Dave Birmingham and J. H.

Bagley, the manager of the bus company, went relatively

well. Birmingham, an amiable if demagogic populist,

frequently met with black constituents and often responded

to their complaints. In 1953, for example, Birmingham

acknowledged widespread police brutality in black

neighborhoods and appointed the city's first seven black

police officers--four men and three women--the most in the

state. Birmingham expressed deep concern over what

happened to Colvin and conceded that the driver acted

improperly. He and Bagley agreed that bus drivers ought to

treat all passengers with courtesy and promised to take a

look at the "Mobile plan," a seating scheme used in Mobile,

Alabama, in which there was no firm color line. Blacks filled

seats from the back of the bus forward

and whites from the front to the back until they met

somewhere in the middle. 13

With assurances that

Birmingham and Bagley would consider changing some of

the most humiliating practices on the buses, Jo Ann

Robinson and King left the meeting feeling optimistic. But

within a few days, as King recalled, "the same old patterns

of humiliation continued." 14

The second meeting was more confrontational. Backed by a

crowd of black women from the WPC and the Federation of

Negro Women's Clubs, Rufus Lewis and Fred Gray presented

petitions that demanded an end to mistreatment on the

buses to Mayor Gayle and a cadre of city and corporate

attorneys. Nixon had invited Rosa Parks, but she refused to

attend. The race pride that she had learned from her

Garveyite grandparents drew limits. "I had decided," she

said, "that I would not go anywhere with a piece of paper in

my hand asking white folks for any favors." 15

Parks's instincts proved correct. At the meeting, Robinson

urged complacent city commissioners to again accept the

"Mobile plan," but Jack Crenshaw, the attorney for the bus

company, quickly quashed the idea, claiming it would

violate the city's segregation laws. City attorneys backed

Crenshaw. The meeting ended in stalemate. Since the city's

leaders stubbornly sided with segregation, Attorney Gray

decided to take Colvin's case to court. Instead of asking for

a kinder, gentler Jim Crow on the buses, he would challenge

its constitutionality. 16

On March 18, 1955, Fred Gray, the twenty-four-year-old

attorney, stood before Judge Wiley C. Hill, whose first cousin

was U.S. senator J. Lister Hill, and defended Colvin, who

pleaded not guilty to all charges. A native of Montgomery

and a former student of Jo Ann Robinson at Alabama State

University, Gray returned to the Cradle of Confederacy after

law school to "destroy everything segregated that [he] could

find." 17

He wasted no time. Segregation ordinances on the

city buses violated the equal protection clause of the

Fourteenth Amendment, Gray asserted. Judge Hill quickly

overruled Gray's claim, swatting it away as if it were

a pesky fly. Gray pushed ahead. Colvin was innocent, he

insisted, because it was a crime to disobey a bus driver's

order to relinquish a seat only if there were other seats

available in the colored section. 18

Since more than a dozen

witnesses testified that no other seats were available, Gray

claimed Colvin had not violated the law.

Gray also produced witnesses who testified that Colvin was

calm and well behaved, rather than unruly and wild, as the

officers claimed. Under cross-examination, the bus driver,

Robert Cleere, admitted that Colvin was "not talking in a

rage" and was not "disturbing anybody on the bus." When

asked if Colvin ever hit the officers, Cleere had to admit he

"didn't see her hit them." 19

When circuit solicitor William F.

Thetford asked one of the police officers if Colvin "hit or

strike [sic] or scratched" him, the officer said simply, "No,

sir." Thetford seemed surprised by his witness's answer.

When he asked the officer again if Colvin caused a

commotion, the policeman could only say "She started

crying." But, he added, he "didn't hear her scream too loud"

and didn't remember her swearing. 20

Although Gray proved

Colvin did not violate any laws and was not unruly or

abusive, Judge Hill found her guilty of assault and battery

and charged her with violating the state rather than city

segregation laws, something Thetford had thrown in at the

last minute. Hill sentenced Colvin to indefinite probation. 21

When Gray appealed the decision in circuit court on May 6,

1955, Thetford dropped the state segregation charge, a sly

move that destroyed Gray's plan to use Colvin's case to test

the constitutionality of bus segregation. Despite the

solicitor's backpedaling and the lack of evidence, circuit

court judge Eugene Carter found Colvin guilty of assault and

battery, assessed a small fine, and declared her a juvenile

delinquent. 22

Stunned by the harsh decision, Colvin burst into tears.

Spectators and supporters who filled the courtroom, Jo Ann

Robinson recalled, "brushed away their own tears" as her

"agonized sobs penetrated the atmosphere of the

courthouse." 23

African Americans in Montgomery, Robinson

remembered, "were as near a

breaking point as they had ever been. Resentment,

rebellion, and unrest were evident in all Negro circles." The

unexpected verdict hit the black community, she said, "like

a bombshell." 24

Colvin was not the first woman to be arrested for violating

Montgomery's segregation code. She was, however, the first

to plead innocent and challenge the city in court. And she

had the support of all three hundred members of the

Women's Political Council. "Bless her heart, she fought like a

little tigress," said Irene West, an influential WPC member

and widow of a prominent black dentist. 25

Virginia Durr, a

well-known white liberal in Montgomery, told a friend that

Colvin's case "created tremendous interest in the Negro

community." African Americans were "fighting mad," she

said, adding that Colvin's arrest "may help give them the

courage to put up a real fight on the bus segregation

issue." 26

Jo Ann Robinson had been itching for a boycott for over a

year, and now she began laying the groundwork. The timing

seemed right; after Colvin's second trial, Robinson recalled,

"large numbers [of women] refused to use the buses ... for a

few days." These private protests convinced her that the

community was ready for action, bur she had to convince E.

D. Nixon, whose connections and expertise would be

necessary for any successful mass movement.

With Mary Fair Burks, her colleague from Alabama State,

and two carloads of women, Robinson led a caravan to E. D.

Nixon's house to sketch out plans for a citywide boycott. 27

Robinson and Burks told Nixon that they had found a "victim

around whom they could rally community support for a

general protest" and assured him they were ready to

mobilize the masses. Robinson told Nixon that they "had

already planned for fifty thousand notices calling people to

boycott the buses; only the specifics of the time and place

had to be added." 28

The women asked Nixon for his

support. 29

Nixon hesitated to endorse a general boycott before

meeting with Colvin and her parents. He asked Robinson to

give him some time. Nixon had followed Colvin's case. In

fact, the seasoned labor union operative had already

contacted Virginia Durr's husband, Clifford, a local white

attorney and former New Deal "brain-truster," to discuss

legal and political options. Still, he worried about using

Colvin as a symbol for the fight. A visit to Colvin's home

made his decision easy. Nixon arrived at Colvin's house in

the King Hill section of Montgomery, a lower-class black

enclave with tumbledown houses, unpaved streets, and

outdoor privies. When Colvin answered the door, Nixon saw

that she was pregnant. "My daughter," Colvin's mother

explained, "done took a tumble." 30

Nixon decided that

Colvin could not possibly serve as the community's

standard-bearer, nor be a good litigant.

For starters, an unwed pregnant teenager might be a

divisive symbol for a community where fissures of class,

religion, and color already presented tough challenges. Her

stomach was beginning to swell, Nixon argued, and her

mother was ashamed to have her appear in public. 31

But it

was more than Colvin's pregnancy and her parents' shame

that concerned Nixon. Colvin's dark skin color and working-

class status made her a political liability in certain parts of

the black community. Colvin's mother was a maid, and her

father did yard work. They lived in one of the poorest

sections of town, where juke joints rocked until dawn and,

Nixon acknowledged, "men would drink too much and get

into a fight." "It wasn't a bad area," Colvin said years later,

"but it had a bad reputation." 32

In some ways, Colvin's roots in King Hill could have made

her the perfect symbol for a bus boycott, since she was one

of thousands of working-class black women who suffered

humiliation and mistreatment daily on the buses. Though Jo

Ann Robinson was firmly rooted in the middle class, she saw

Colvin as a kind of black everywoman who would inspire

others. But Nixon refused. "She's just nor the kind we can

win a case with," he said. 33

Robinson

fumed. She "liked to have a fit," Nixon recalled. "She jumped

all over me." Bur he was resolute: "I'm not going to go out

on a limb with it." 34

"I've handled so many cases that I know

when a man would stand up and when he wouldn't," Nixon

argued. "You've got to think about the newspapers, you got

to think about public opinion, you got to think policies and

so forth, and intimidation." 35

His point was not easily

dismissed.

Despite her support for Colvin, who was a straight-A student

and a member of the NAACP Youth Council, Rosa Parks

believed that Nixon was right. Parks knew that Colvin had

stepped outside the bounds of respectable behavior for a

young woman in the 1950s. 36

"If the white press got hold of

that information," Parks feared, "they would have [had] a

field day ... They'd call her a bad girl and her case wouldn't

have a chance." 37

And Parks knew Montgomery. Even if

African Americans there were, as the historian Taylor Branch

put it, "willing to rally behind an unwed pregnant teenager--

which they were not--her circumstances would make her an

extremely vulnerable standard-bearer." 38

Without Nixon's

support, Robinson and her colleagues on the Women's

Political Council would have to wait for another arrest.

It did not take long. On October 21, 1955, police arrested

and fined Mary Louise Smith, an eighteen-year-old maid, for

refusing to give up her seat and stand in the colored section

so that a white woman could sit down. "I am not going to

move," she declared when the driver asked her to stand. "I

got the privilege to sit here like anybody else." 39

After

meeting Smith and her family, Nixon decided that she could

not be the boycott's symbolic heroine, because her father

had a tendency to drink too much and she lived in a "low

type of home" in Washington Park, a poor section of town

similar to King Hill. 40

A few days after her arrest, Smith's

father paid the fine, making a legal challenge impossible.

Colvin and Smith were victims of time, place, and

circumstance. By late 1955, black leaders in Montgomery

had little choice but to embrace the "politics of

respectability" amid the growing white backlash sparked by

the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. 41

Just four days after the landmark Supreme Court ruling,

Thomas P. Brady, a circuit court judge in Brookhaven,

Mississippi, and author of the segregationist manifesto Black

Monday, called on state legislators to build an organization

that would protect white supremacy by any means

necessary. Their response was the White Citizens' Council

(WCC), an organization designed to "counteract the NAACP

and other left-wing organizations." 42

The WCC quickly

spread throughout Mississippi and the Deep South,

especially areas where African Americans pressed for

desegregation of schools or public accommodations. In

Mississippi alone, the WCC counted twenty-five thousand

members in 1955 and nearly eighty thousand in 1956. 43

The

WCC recruited supporters by relying heavily on sexual scare

tactics and the paranoia that Brown would lead to "racial

amalgamation." Headlines in the Citizens' Council, the

organization's newsletter, warned that "mixed marriage,"

"sex orgies," and black men raping white girls were "typical

of stories filtering back from areas where racial integration

is proceeding 'with all deliberate speed.'" 44

In this environment, political respectability required middle-

class decorum. Shining a spotlight on a pregnant black

teenager would only fuel white stereotypes of black

women's uninhibited sexuality. Colvin's swollen stomach

could have become a stark reminder that desegregation

would lead to sexual debauchery. Smith's shaky social

status could raise the question of whether black citizens

merited equal treatment in the minds of whites and might

divide African Americans along class lines. If Nixon and the

WPC supported Colvin and Mary Louise Smith, they risked

evoking black stereotypes that could ultimately smother any

movement for change.

Respectability had been a staple of African-American politics

since Reconstruction, when whites used racist violence and

sexual abuse to shore up white supremacy. 45

Silence and

secrecy among black clubwomen at the turn of the century

helped counter slanderous images and kept the inner lives

of African Americans hidden from white people. This self-

imposed reticence, Darlene Clark

Hine argues, "implied that those [African-American women]

who spoke out provided grist for detractors' mills and, even

more ominously, tore the protective cloaks from their inner

selves." 46

In the wake of Brown, testimony and openness

were temporarily replaced with silence.

Testimony triumphed throughout the 1940s as African

Americans rallied around black women who had been

sexually abused, no matter their class status. Recy Taylor

was a struggling sharecropper, yet her case served as the

catalyst for a national campaign. In 1947 the NAACP and the

National Council of Negro Women--both solid, middle-class

organizations--stood by Rosa Lee Ingram despite the fact

that she was poor and had a dozen children. 47

Gertrude

Perkins was hardly a model of respectable womanhood, but

Montgomery's middle-class black ministers rallied to her

defense, risking their livelihoods, if not their lives, to help

preserve her dignity and bodily integrity.

Five years later, amid rising white opposition to Brown and

growing anti-Communism at home and abroad, African

Americans found themselves hemmed in politically. As

Southern McCarthyites equated black self-assertion with a

Marxist plot to destroy America, the WCC and the KKK

claimed desegregation efforts would lead to

"mongrelization" and "amalgamation." The powerful cocktail

of anti-Communism, white supremacy, and sexualized

propaganda and paranoia enabled whites to push aside or

even kill African Americans who asserted their humanity. By

February 1956, forty thousand white Alabamians, many

from Montgomery, joined the Citizens' Council crusade,

helping to launch the "massive resistance" movement. 48

Mayor Gayle and other city commissioners, not to mention

state senators, proudly proclaimed solidarity and allegiance

to the WCC as it became the "mouthpiece of southern

defiance." 49

E. D. Nixon undoubtedly sensed this hysteria

when he refused to raise a pregnant teenager up as the

symbol of the integration struggle. In mid-1950s Alabama,

he had to find someone whose class background, moral

reputation, and public record could withstand withering

white scrutiny and inspire African-American unity.

[Image: Rosa Parks at a desegregation workshop at

Highlander Folk School in July 1955, five months before the

Montgomery bus boycott began. Seated to her right is

Frederick Douglass Patterson, former president of Tuskegee

University, founder of the United Negro College Fund, and

supporter of the 1944-45 Recy Taylor campaign.]

Because she was so perfect for the role, it is tempting to

think that Rosa Parks's famous stand against segregation

was a planned protest. She was, as historian J. Mills

Thornton argues, "more actively involved in the struggle

against racial discrimination, and more knowledgeable

about efforts being made to eliminate it, than all but a tiny

handful of the city's forty-five thousand black citizens." She

knew Nixon was searching for a "plaintiff who was beyond

reproach" and was certain he would support her, since she

fit his qualifications of respectability. 50

But it is unlikely that

she planned a protest. Instead, when Rosa Parks had an

opportunity to resist, she seized it. Her decision to stay put

that fateful day was rooted in her history as a radical

activist and years of witnessing

injustice--from Recy Taylor to Gertrude Perkins to Jeremiah

Reeves. 51

She had grown up in the Garvey movement. She

and her husband had labored in the Scottsboro struggle as a

young married couple. In 1944 her investigation of the Recy

Taylor case launched a national crusade. For more than a

decade, her work with the NAACP, the Brotherhood of

Sleeping Car Porters, and other groups placed her at the

center of Montgomery's black freedom struggle. Her

decision to keep her seat on December 1, 1955, was less a

mystery than a moment.

Rosa Parks boarded the Cleveland Avenue bus on December

1, 1955, and slipped into a seat near the middle of the bus--

an area passengers referred to as "no-man's-land" because

it was not designated white or black. When the ruddy-faced

bus driver saw her seated there, he yelled, "Let me have

those front seats." Parks sat still. "Make it light on yourself,"

he shouted, "and let me have those seats!" Parks

recognized the driver immediately. It was James F. Blake, the

same operator who had mistreated her in 1943. She turned

to look out the window and ignored Blake's order. "I couldn't

see how standing up was going to 'make it light' for me,"

she said later. "The more we gave in and complied, the

worse they treated us." 52

When Blake stepped off the bus to call the police, Rosa

Parks remained calm, though she knew better than anyone

what kind of danger she faced. She had twelve years of

notes on nearly every case of racial brutality in and around

Montgomery. There was no way to be without fear, but she

held herself steady. As she waited, perhaps she conjured up

the spirit of her grandfather, who sat up many nights with a

double-barreled shotgun to protect their little home from the

Klan in Pine Level, Alabama. 53

Parks also recalled the ten days she had spent in the

company of the South's most active reformers at the

Highlander Folk School, a training center for labor and civil

rights activists in Tennessee. 54

Her experience at Highlander

in the summer of 1955 was a

highlight in her career as an activist and one of the first

times she said she did not "feel hostility from white people."

She had been reluctant to leave that interracial island, and

now she found herself stranded on a city bus, about to be

arrested--or worse. 55

Two white police officers, F. B. Day and D. W. Mixon, climbed

onto the bus and ambled toward Parks. 56

One asked why

she refused to give up her seat. "Why do you all push us

around?" she shot back.

"I do not know," the officer replied, "but the law is the law

and you're under arrest." 57

The officers picked up her purse

and shopping bags, escorted her to their squad car, and

drove her to the city jail.

News that her daughter was in jail must have sent shivers

down Leona McCauley's spine. Rosa's mother had been a

member of the NAACP since 1943 and had worked with her

daughter on the Recy Taylor case in 1944; she must have

known about Gertrude Perkins, Flossie Hardman, and the

other women who were abused in and around

Montgomery. 58

Parks was vulnerable every minute she was

in jail. When she finally called home, her mother

immediately asked, "Did they beat you?" 59

That these were

her first words speaks volumes about the context of Parks's

protest.

If E. D. Nixon shared Leona McCauley's fears, he kept them

hidden. Instead, he seemed positively jubilant. "That's it!"

Nixon shouted after he heard about the arrest, then picked

up the telephone to spread the good news. Johnnie Carr,

Parks's childhood friend and fellow NAACP member, was one

of the first people on Nixon's list. "Mrs. Carr," Nixon said

gravely, "they have arrested the wrong woman."

"Who have they arrested?" she asked.

"Rosa Parks!" Nixon replied, barely able to contain his glee.

"You're kidding," Carr said.

"No," he chuckled, "they arrested Rosa Parks. They arrested

the wrong woman!" 60

Unlike Claudette Colvin or Mary Louise Smith, Parks was the

perfect woman to rally around. "She was secretary for every

thing I had going," Nixon told reporters, "the Brotherhood of

Sleeping Car Porters, the NAACP, Alabama Voters' League,

all those things." Plus, he said, she could "stand on her feet,

she was honest, she was clean, she had integrity. The press

couldn't go out and dig up something she did last year, or

last month, or five years ago. They couldn't hang nothing

like that on Rosa Parks." 61

As long as Nixon could persuade

Parks to press charges, she could serve as the symbol of

segregation in court, and Nixon and attorney Fred Gray

could use her arrest to strike a blow at Jim Crow.

Only her husband stood in the way. In the 1950s this was no

small obstacle. Raymond Parks begged his wife to turn

Nixon down. "Oh Rosa, Rosa, don't do it, don't do it," he

pleaded. "The white folks will kill you." 62

Though his days as

a defender of the Scottsboro boys had passed and he no

longer held secret, armed meetings in the middle of the

night, he knew something about the risks entailed in

protesting white supremacy. He was certainly not ready to

sacrifice his wife.

When Jo Ann Robinson heard that Parks had been arrested,

she did not wait for Nixon's approval to launch a boycott;

nor did she ask Rosa and Raymond Parks what they thought.

Instead, she planned the kind of protest that members of

the Women's Political Council had been demanding. "The

Women's Political Council will not wait for Mrs. Parks's

consent to call for a boycott of city buses," Robinson

scribbled on the back of an envelope as soon as she heard

the news. "On Friday, December 2, 1955, the women of

Montgomery will call for a boycott to take place on Monday,

December 5." 63

Robinson quickly drafted a more detailed announcement,

called John Cannon, her colleague at Alabama State

University, and asked for access to the college's

mimeograph machines. Cannon agreed, adding that he had

been mistreated on the buses one too many times. 64

As

darkness fell across campus, Cannon, Robinson, and two

student assistants met in a basement office. There

they copied, cut, and bundled 52,500 flyers. Only the rising

sun and the fear of being caught chased them home.

The flyers announced the boycott, promoting it as an effort

to protect black womanhood:

Another Negro woman has been arrested and thrown in jail

because she refused to get up out of her seat on the bus for

a white person to sit down. It is the second time since the

Claudette Colvin case that a Negro woman has been

arrested for the same thing. This has to be stopped.

Negroes have rights, too, for if Negroes did not ride the

buses, they could not operate. Three-fourths of the riders

are Negroes, yet we are arrested, or have to stand over

empty seats. If we do not do something to stop these

arrests, they will continue. The next time it may be you, or

your daughter or mother. This woman's case will come up

on Monday. We are, Therefore, asking every Negro to stay

off the buses Monday in protest of the arrest and trial. Don't

ride the buses to work, to town, to school, or anywhere on

Monday ... Please stay off all buses Monday. 65

In the early morning hours, Robinson called her foot soldiers

in the WPC and told them it was time for their long-planned

protest. She explained the distribution routes they had

sketched out for delivering the announcement. Before

breakfast on Friday, December 2, Dr. Mary Fair Burks, Mrs.

Mary Cross, Mrs. Elizabeth Arrington, Mrs. Josie Lawrence,

Mrs. Geraldine Nesbitt, Mrs. Catherine N. Johnson, and a

dozen other women waited on street corners for Robinson

and her student helpers to hand over the huge stacks of

flyers. The women delivered the notices to schools and

storefronts, beauty parlors and beer halls, barbershops and

businesses. By midafternoon, "practically every black man,

woman, and child in Montgomery knew the plan and was

passing the word along," Robinson said. "No one knew

where the notices

had come from or who had arranged them and no one

cared." Just before she rallied her troops, Robinson called

Nixon to let him in on the news. This time he could not say

no. Of course, he had no such intention.

Neither did Rosa Parks. Despite her husband's pleas, she

decided that the benefits of a legal battle and a boycott

outweighed any personal risks. "There had to be a stopping

place," she said, "and this seemed to be the place for me to

stop being pushed around. I had decided that I would have

to know once and for all what rights I had as a human being

and a citizen, even in Montgomery, Alabama." 67

Parks told

her husband about her decision and gave Nixon permission

to go ahead with the legal case, both defying gender roles

as a dutiful wife, and defining them by agreeing to serve as

a model of dignified womanhood in court.

From that moment forward, Rosa Parks's history as an

activist and defiant race woman disappeared from public

view. Nixon and others promoted her as a model of the

middle-class ideals of "chastity, Godliness, family

responsibility, and proper womanly conduct and

demeanor." 68

She was the kind of woman around whom all

African Americans in Montgomery could unite. She was

"humble enough to be claimed by the common folk," Taylor

Branch notes, and "dignified enough in manner, speech, and

dress to command the respect of the leading classes."

Though Parks was far from a bruised blossom in need of

chivalry, her role as a symbol of virtuous black womanhood

was decisive in Montgomery as even the most reluctant

middle-class ministers rallied to her defense.

The day after Parks was arrested, more than fifty black

activists and community leaders gathered in the basement

of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church to hash out conflicting

ideas about Jo Ann Robinson's call for a boycott. 69

The

debate was fierce, with some ministers refusing to be part

of the boycott. But Parks's presence and her moving appeal

to the ministers to do something about the long-standing

abuse of black women in Montgomery brought unity.

Undoubtedly, members of the Women's Political Council

echoed her sentiments. Many of the ministers and political

leaders,

according to the historian Douglas Brinkley, "did not want to

be on record as abandoning a good Christian woman in

need." They decided to put aside their differences to

"embrace 'Sister Rosa'" by "promising to promote the one-

day boycott in their Sunday sermons." 70

Parks's iconic role

as the respectable, even saintly heroine played a role in the

wider political world and was crucial at the birth of the

boycott. Because it was the first Sunday of the month,

parishioners filled almost all the pews in Montgomery's

black churches. Ministers decried the arrest of Rosa Parks

and urged congregants to join in the one-day boycott on

Monday, December 5, and assemble afterward at the Holt

Street Baptist Church for further instructions.

Monday December 5, 1955, was a rainy, bone-cold day.

Robinson and others worried that the downpour would

dampen the one-day protest, but those fears quickly

dissipated as empty buses began rolling through

Montgomery's rain-soaked streets. Rosa Parks awoke early

and watched the normally packed Cleveland Avenue bus

whiz past her house without a single passenger. Parks felt

vindicated. "I could feel that whatever my individual desires

were to be free," she said later, "I was not alone. There were

many others who felt the same way." 71

Like Parks, Johnnie

Carr watched with satisfaction as the empty buses splashed

through intersections. She even decided to trail one in her

car. They "didn't pick up a single soul," she remembered

with glee. "They were just moving down the street empty." 72

When Parks and Carr saw the sidewalks clogged with black

women under dark umbrellas walking to work or waiting for

a ride, they were elated.

Montgomery officials, who did not share the excitement,

inadvertently boosted boycott participation. Surely, they

reasoned, the near-universal abandonment of the buses by

their happy Negroes must reflect coercion by agitators. The

city assigned police escorts to bus routes in black

neighborhoods in order to "protect Negro riders" from

potential "goon squads." 73

If any black women were

tempted to get on the bus that miserable Monday morning,

the sight of police with shotguns surrounding the buses can

only have strengthened their resolve.

Confident that the one-day boycott was going to be

successful, Parks readied to play her part in court. "I knew

what I had to do," she recalled. "I remember very clearly

that I wore a straight, long-sleeved black dress with a white

collar and cuffs, a small black velvet hat with pearls across

the top, and a charcoal-gray coat. I carried a black purse

and wore white gloves." 74

Her conservative, Puritan-like

clothing--and her memory of exactly what she wore forty

years later--indicated a keen understanding of the

importance of the politics of respectability.

Flanked by E. D. Nixon and her two attorneys, Fred Gray and

Charles Langford, Rosa Parks ascended the courthouse

steps with confidence and grace. Her elegant deportment

made quite an impression on the five hundred supporters

who crowded the steps of Montgomery's city hall, many of

whom were her charges in the NAACP Youth Council. 75

Mary

Frances, one of the girls in the crowd, saw Parks and

shouted, "Oh, she's so sweet! They've messed with the

wrong one now." 76

Frances and others began to chant

"They've messed with the wrong one now" as Nixon, Parks,

and her attorneys, both in their best Sunday suits, waded

through the throng of supporters and disappeared into the

crowded courtroom.

The trial lasted no more than five minutes. Judge John B.

Scott quickly found Parks guilty of violating the state

segregation law, despite the fact that she had been arrested

for violating the city's segregation ordinance. 77

He then

gave her a suspended sentence and fined her fourteen

dollars. As Parks turned and walked briskly out of the

courtroom, two policemen scurried to her side. She and

Nixon walked down a long hallway to the city clerk's office

to sign an appeal bond. Gray and Langford stayed behind to

file an appeal. The sight of police officers escorting Parks

sent the crowd into hysterics. They surged, crowding around

Parks so she could hardly move. "It was the first time I had

seen so much courage

among our people," Nixon recalled. Despite his excitement,

he urged calm. "Everything is all right," he said, gesturing

toward the heavily armed policemen who suddenly lined the

hall. "Keep calm because we don't want to do anything to

make that man use the shotgun." After Nixon signed the

bond and handed Parks to her husband, he turned to the

angry crowd and told them to go home. "Don't hang

around," he urged, "because all they want is some excuse to

kill somebody." 78

Parks asked her husband to drop her off at Fred Gray's office

to work the phones for the rest of the afternoon. Meanwhile,

Gray, E. D. Nixon, Ralph Abernathy, Reverend E. N. French,

and a handful of other ministers assembled in the basement

of the Mt. Zion AME Zion Church to hammer out a plan for

that evening's mass meeting. They needed a name and a

president for their new organization. Nixon suggested the

Citizens Coordinating Committee, a kind of amalgam of

titles from previous campaigns to protect black women like

Recy Taylor and Gertrude Perkins. Ralph Abernathy, the

young Baptist minister in town, wrinkled his nose at the

suggestion. "No, I don't like that," he said. "What about the

Montgomety Improvement Association?" "That sounds

good," Reverend French, pastor of the Hilliard AME Zion

Church, said. "I believe I can go along with that." Abernathy

then turned to Nixon. "Brother Nixon, you going to serve as

president, ain't you?" Nixon smiled. "Not unlessen you don't

accept the man I got in mind." 79

Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., was only twenty-six years

old, virtually unknown outside his upper-crust congregation

at Dexter Avenue Baptist. But everyone who met him knew

he was good-looking, intelligent, and eloquent. To Nixon,

however, the crucial fact was that King was not beholden to

anyone, white or black. "He didn't have to bow to the power

structure," Nixon recalled. "So many ministers accept a

handout, and then they owe their soul." 80

King had not even

had the opportunity to sell out.

"He had not been here long enough for the city fathers to

put their hands on him," as Nixon put it. 81

Although historians would later argue that Nixon wanted to

be president of the MIA and that Rufus Lewis, Nixon's chief

political rival, engineered King's nomination, Nixon and

other established leaders in Montgomery were not eager to

take on what in all likelihood would be a short-lived and

dangerous exercise. After all, their plans called only for a

one-day boycott. No one knew what would happen next, but

most were confident it would not include glory or fame. 82

Though they all knew a moment had come, no one

suspected that the moment had come.

Though Nixon was happy to let King head the MIA, he did

not shrink from bold leadership. When some ministers

suggested that their names remain secret to protect

themselves and their families from white retribution, Nixon

exploded in anger. "They was talking about slipping around,

didn't want the white folks to know," Nixon recalled. "How

you going to run a bus boycott in secret?" he demanded.

Then, using language that, as Nixon put it, "wasn't in the

Sunday school books," he chastised the timid preachers.

"How the hell you going to have a protest without letting the

white folks know? What's the matter with you people?" he

asked, flabbergasted by their cowardice. "Here you have

been living off the swear of these washwomen all these

years, and you have never done anything for them. Now you

have a chance to pay them back. And you're too damn

scared to stand on your feet and be counted." 83

Scolding

the black ministers for shirking their manly duties, he dared

them to rise up in defense of black womanhood. "We've

worn aprons all our lives," he said. "It's time to take the

aprons off... If we gonna be mens, now's the time to be

mens." 84

Nixon's tirade may have convinced the ministers to stand up

for black women, but it did not mean they planned to share

leadership with them. Indeed, Jo Ann Robinson and Rosa

Parks, the two women who made the boycott possible, were

not at the meeting where the Montgomery Improvement

Association was born and Martin Luther King, Jr., was chosen

as its president. Whether

Nixon and others simply forgot to include Robinson and

Parks or explicitly excluded them is not known. It was not

until the mass meeting that night that Robinson realized her

leadership had been subverted. "The men took it over," she

said. They had "definitely decided to assume leadership." 85

That night, December 5, 1955, more than five thousand

African Americans squeezed into the sanctuary, the balcony,

and the basement annex at the Holt Street Baptist Church.

A wave of bodies spilled out the double doors and clogged

six blocks of city sidewalks outside. Cars jammed the streets

surrounding the modest church, unable to move even an

inch. Volunteers set up loudspeakers so that the throngs of

people clamoring unsuccessfully for a seat could stand

outside and hear Nixon, Ralph Abernathy, Martin Luther

King, Jr., and other ministers make their debut as "mens."

The moment was electrifying.

King started slowly, speaking about the murky nature of

segregation laws, then began to rock the crowd with his

incredible oratory, bringing a steady stream of "yeses" and

"amens." When King praised Parks, the audience applauded

and cheered on their new heroine. "And since it had to

happen," King declared, "I'm happy that it happened to a

person like Mrs. Parks."

"Yes," the crowd shouted.

"Nobody can doubt the boundless outreach of her integrity,"

King said.

"Sure enough," someone in the audience yelled.

"Nobody can doubt the height of her character; nobody can

doubt the depth of her Christian commitment and devotion

to the teachings of Jesus."

"Yes!" roared the crowd.

"Nobody can call [Rosa Parks] a disturbing factor in the

community ... She is a fine Christian person, unassuming,

and yet there is integrity and character there."

The crowd, undulating in call and response, shouted, "All

right!" 86

Then, in the gospel tradition of turning one person's burden

into a shared experience, King spoke to everyone who had

been mistreated on the buses or humiliated by segregation.

"There comes a time," he began, his voice steady and even,

then rising, "when people get tired of being trampled over

by the iron feet of oppression." A roar of approval rolled over

the crowd. "There comes a time, my friends, when people

get tired of being plunged across the abyss of humiliation,

where they experience the bleakness of nagging despair."

As emotions swelled and the applause shook the rafters of

the old church, King reached a crescendo: "There comes a

time when people get tired of being pushed out of the

glittering sunlight of life's July and left standing amid the

piercing chill of an alpine November." 87

The amazing

thunder of sound--clapping, screaming, and foot stomping,

drowned King out.

He had touched a nerve. In those few sentences, King

captured the soul-deep sense of humiliation and

degradation that the mostly working-class audience of

maids, cooks, teachers, and day laborers undoubtedly felt.

The language King employed to describe the effect of

mistreatment on the buses--"abyss of humiliation" and

"nagging despair"--speaks to the way racial and sexual

subjugation conspire to steal a person's humanity. It is no

surprise that the audience erupted in raw emotion. King

then skillfully moved to control the anger and enthusiasm,

to remind the audience that they had the power--through

Christian love, faith, and unity--to overthrow the system that

had oppressed them for so long.

After King's momentous speech, Reverend E. N. French

stepped onto the pulpit and presented Rosa Parks to the

crowd. If there was one woman in Montgomery who could

testify to the decades of injustice under Jim Crow, it was

Rosa Parks. Not only could she speak about her own

mistreatment and abuse on the buses--something that so

many of the women assembled together shared--she could

also place her arrest in the long history of crimes committed

by whites against blacks, something of which she had

intimate knowledge.

Just before Reverend French presented Rosa Parks to the

crowd,

she asked him if the men in charge that night wanted her to

say a few words. French told her that she had "had enough

and [had] said enough and you don't have to speak." She

nodded and they walked toward the front of the church. "I

have the responsibility," Reverend French proclaimed to the

pulsating crowd, "to present to you the victim of this gross

injustice, almost inhumanity, and absolute undemocratic

principle, Mrs. Rosa Parks." 88

The audience erupted in

applause as she stood silent before them.

We can only wonder what Rosa Parks might have said that

night in front of throngs of supporters and fellow sufferers.

Perhaps she would have spoken about the abuses suffered

by Recy Taylor, Gertrude Perkins, Flossie Hardman,

Claudette Colvin, and so many of the women present that

night, conjuring up a collective spirit of defiance and self-

defense. She might have called on her decades of

experience defending ordinary black Alabamians from white

terror and her long struggle for human rights to remind her

peers of their long and continuing struggle for justice and to

push for mass action. Her testimony could have changed

the way she was received and forever remembered.

Because Reverend French and the ministers leading the

mass meeting that night silenced Parks, they turned her into

the kind of woman she wasn't: a quiet victim and solemn

symbol. From that moment forward Parks was sainted and

celebrated for her quiet dignity, prim demeanor, and

middle-class propriety, her radicalism all but erased as she

became the Madonna of Montgomery. She "looked like a

symbol of Mother's Day," L. D. Reddick, a history professor

at Alabama State, proclaimed, though Parks was neither a

mother nor, at just forty-two years old, matronly. 89

The

deliberate construction of Rosa Parks as a symbol of

virtuous black womanhood began that evening. Reverend

Abernathy said as much: "Mrs. Rosa Parks was presented to

the mass meeting because we wanted her to become

symbolic of our protest meeting." 90

Unlike Claudette Colvin and Mary Louise Smith, Parks's

respectability gave credibility to the nascent Montgomery

Improvement Association, minimized controversy, and

allowed

African Americans to claim the moral high ground in what

would become an all-out war against white supremacy. At

the same time, they protected themselves and Parks by

playing down her radicalism, which would have encouraged

opposition, if not outright violence, in an environment

poisoned by anti-Communist paranoia and the racist

rhetoric of White Citizens' Councils.

The presentation of Parks as a woman worthy of protection

enabled African-American ministers and male leaders, most

of whom had been resistant to the WPC's calls for a boycott,

to take credit for and assume leadership of the boycott. By

stepping forward, they could fulfill their manly duty to

defend black womanhood, a role that white supremacy had

denied them for centuries. Jo Ann Robinson, who

complained in her memoir about black men's inability or

unwillingness to protect black women from abuse and

mistreatment on the buses, understood the enormous

symbolism displayed at the Holt Street Baptist Church that

night when the leading black men of the community claimed

leadership and, as Nixon put it, removed their "aprons." The

ministers, Robinson noted, were finally "catching up with

their congregations." 91

If the ministers caught up with their congregations by

assuming the leadership of the MIA, black women, who filled

the majority of the pews that evening and every mass

meeting thereafter, kept the MIA and the bus boycott

running. Although newspapers focused on King as the

leader and ministers' names lined the MIA's letterhead,

Robinson made sure that she, along with Mrs. A. W. West, a

wealthy eighty-year-old widow and WPC member, and Rosa

Parks served on the executive committee. In fact, it was

Robinson, "more than any other person," according to King,

who "was active on every level of protest." 92

As long as WPC

members handled the day-to-day business of the boycott, Jo

Ann Robinson did not challenge the MIA's male leadership.

"We felt it would be better," Robinson said, "if the ministers

held the most visible leadership positions." 93

Robinson stacked the MIA staff with her own WPC members,

guaranteeing control of the boycott's daily operations.

[Image: African-American women were the backbone of the

Montgomery bus boycott. Here black women walk to work in

February 1956.]

She chose each woman carefully. Mrs. Erna Dungee, a

"sophisticated, socially involved woman," was the MIA's

financial secretary and worked for the boycott full time. Mrs.

Maude Ballou became Martin Luther King's personal

secretary. Ballou, a quiet and dedicated worker, earned

King's trust, Robinson recalled, by "never remembering"

any of his business. Mrs. Martha Johnson was the MIA's

secretary clerk. She assisted all the other leaders of the MIA

and "never got two persons' business mixed up." Mrs. Hazel

Gregory served as the general overseer of the MIA. She

knew "where everything was, never got anything mixed up,

and could get what was needed immediately," Robinson

remembered fondly. Gregory's position also included

"managing the business and taking care of the building

where the MIA was housed." 94

Only at the podium did

women take a backseat in the boycott.

The public face of the boycott belied the crucial role Jo Ann

Robinson played in making it a success. During an interview

with Rufus Lewis on January 20, 1956, Donald T. Ferron, an

oral historian from Fisk University, questioned the leadership

of the boycott in his notes. "The public recognizes Reverend

King as the leader," he wrote, "but I wonder if Mrs. Robinson

may be of equal importance. The organizational process is

being kept secret, as well as the organizers." 95

It was Jo Ann Robinson, not Martin Luther King, Jr., who

served as the chief strategist for the Montgomery

Improvement Association. She negotiated with city leaders

and bus company officials, edited the MIA newsletter, and

ferried African Americans to and from work for nearly 381

days, all while holding down a full-time teaching job at

Alabama State. "Few realize how much Jo Ann did," Fred

Gray recalled. Hardly anyone knew, for example, that "much

of the activity ... occurred at Jo Ann Robinson's house."

The enormous spotlight that focused on King, combined

with the construction of Rosa Parks as a saintly symbol, hid

the women's long struggle in the dimly lit background,

obscuring the origins of the MIA and erasing women from

the movement. For decades, the Montgomery bus boycott

has been told as a story triggered by Rosa Parks's

spontaneous refusal to give up her seat followed by the

triumphant leadership of men like Fred Gray, Martin Luther

King, Jr., E. D. Nixon, and Ralph Abernathy. While these men

had a major impact on the emerging protest movement, it

was black women's decade-long struggle against

mistreatment and abuse by white bus drivers and police

officers that launched the boycott. Without an appreciation

for the particular predicaments of black women in the Jim

Crow South, it is nearly impossible to understand why

thousands of working-class and hundreds of middle-class

black women chose to walk rather than ride the bus for 381

days.

[Image: Three police officers watch a group of African-

American women waiting at a carpool pick-up location. The

Montgomery Improvement Association set up an alternate

transportation system that utilized more than three hundred

private cars to carry thousands of passengers to and from

work each day.]

Women walked, Parks claimed in an interview in April 1956,

not merely in support of her bur because she "was not the

only person who had been mistreated and humiliated ...

Other women had gone through similarly shameful

experiences," Parks said, "some even worse than mine." 96

These experiences propelled African-American women into

every conceivable aspect of the boycott. African-American

women of means, professional women like Jo Ann Robinson,

and society women like Irene West brought their own gifts to

the boycott, even though many did not ride the buses. Erna

Dungee, MIA financial secretary, said women "really were

the ones who carried out the actions ... We organized the

parking lot pick-ups ... drove the cars," and did "the little

day-to-day things, taking care of the finances, things like

that. When all the dust settled," she told an interviewer,

"the women were there when it cleared. They were there in

the positions to hold the MIA together." 97

Class status did not dictate women's roles. More than any

single individual, the city's domestic workers put the

Montgomery City Lines out of business. "The maids, the

cooks, they were the ones that really and truly kept the

buses running," Georgia Gilmore recalled. "And after the

maids and the cooks stopped riding the bus," she added,

"well, the bus didn't have any need to run." 98

During the first few months of the boycott, Willie M. Lee, a

researcher from Fisk University, went to Montgomery to

figure out why so many domestic workers were determined

to stay off the buses. "I'll crawl on my knees 'fo I get back

on dem buses," one woman said while waiting at a carpool

dispatch center. Her friend agreed, "I ain’t 'bout to get on

dem buses ... I'll walk twenty miles 'fo I ride 'em." 99

Irene

Stovall, a mother and domestic servant, told Lee that she

was "never gon git back on dem ole buses" because the bus

drivers sexually harassed her. They "say nasty thangs and

dey talk under folks' clothes," Stovall said. "They ain't gittin

no more of my dimes." 100

A tall, stately maid named Mrs. Beatrice Charles told Lee a

long story about why she refused to ride the buses. She said

she was staying off the buses because the abuse black

women suffered had "been happening since [she] came

here before the war." 101

Bus

drivers "make you get up so white men could sit down," she

testified. "But we are sure fixing 'em now and I hope we

don't ever start back riding. It'll teach them how to treat us,"

she said. "We people, we are not dogs or cats." Then she

told Lee about a recent dispute with her white employer,

Mrs. Prentiss. When Prentiss asked her if she rode the bus,

Mrs. Charles replied, "I sure didn't."

Prentiss seemed shocked at the woman's brazen response.

"Why, Beatrice, they haven't done anything to you," she

said.

"Listen, Mrs. Prentiss," Charles replied, "you don't ride the

bus, you don't know how those ole nasty drivers treat us

and further when you do something to my people you do it

to me too ... I don't have anything in my heart but hatred for

those bus drivers." 102

Mrs. Prentiss attempted to mitigate her employee's anger

by arguing that she had "always been nice" and then added,

"I just can't see white and colored riding together on the

buses." "It just wouldn't come to a good end," Prentiss

proclaimed. Prentiss hinted at the underlying fears white

Southerners harbored after the Brown decision. Many

worried that bus integration was merely an entree to "social

equality" or interracial sex. For example, Sam Englehardt,

the local leader of the Citizens' Council, warned whites in

February 1956 that the bus boycott was "piddling stuff."

What protesters are really after, he insisted, was "complete

integration, even to intermarriage." 103

Beatrice Charles set Mrs. Prentiss straight about who

wanted to sleep with whom. "You people started it way back

in slavery," she said. "If you hadn't wanted segregation, you

shouldn't got us all mixed up in color ... Right now I can sit

on my porch and when it Starts getting dark, I can look

down the street by those trees and see colored women get

in the cars with policemen. And what about that colored boy

who had to leave town 'cause that white woman out here

was going crazy about him? So you can't tell me that it's

over." 104

By bringing up the issue of white men prowling

around black neighborhoods searching for black women,

and the double standard applied to black men caught with

white women,

Mrs. Charles gave voice to the sexual and racial components

of the protest movement.

When Mrs. Prentiss threatened to participate in the White

Citizens' Council's plan to starve the maids for a month, her

maid laughed. "I sure won't starve. You see, my husband is

a railroad man, my son and daughter have good jobs, and

my daddy keep plenty of food on his farm. So I'm not

worried at all, 'cause I was eating before I started working

for you." 105

Beatrice Charles spoke for many women who beamed with a

new sense of what Martin Luther King, Jr., called

"'somebodyness." Jo Ann Robinson articulated that

newfound sense of power and pride at a mass meeting in

late March 1956. "The whole world is watching the boycott,"

she said with glee. "The whole world respects us ... You go

downtown now and people show respect. Negroes are proud

now, they hold their heads high and strut," Robinson said. "I

have never been so proud to be a Negro." Martin Luther

King, Jr., often rhapsodized about a "New Negro" emerging

out of the black freedom movement who replaced self-pity

with self-respect and self-doubt with dignity. "In

Montgomery," he boasted, "we walk in a new way. We hold

our heads in a new way." 106

The fear that had immobilized African Americans for so long

seemed to disappear as the boycott continued into its

second month. This sentiment was audible at the many

carpool pick-up locations around Montgomery, where

domestics gathered to wait for rides from black volunteers.

Willie Lee listened in on many of these conversations,

recording them for posterity. "We got these white folks

where we want 'em," Dealy Cooksey, a forty-year-old

domestic servant, said. "Dere ain't nothing dey can do but

try to scare us. But we ain't rabbit no more," she warned,

"we done turned coon ... It's just as many of us as the white

folks and dey better watch out what they do." 107

Mrs. Allen Wright, a forty-five-year-old cook, agreed. "They

bit off more than they can chew when they put one of our

fine ladies in jail," she proclaimed. "Clyde Sellers {the new

police commissioner] might as well give up," she said,

'"cause we ain't gonna be pushed down no more. Our eyes

is open and dey gonna stay open." 108

At least one woman in the group threatened to meet white

resistance with violence. Whites "think they bad 'cause they

got guns," Willie May Wallace, a store maid, argued, "but I

sho hope they know how to use 'em, 'cause if they don't, I'll

eat 'em up with my razor." A white man "bet not come up on

me and hit me 'cause ... he'll be in pieces so fast he won't

know what hit him." 109

Then Wallace told Lee a story about

her confrontation with a white female co-worker. When

Wallace told her colleague that she was never going to ride

the buses again, the white woman "bristled all up lack she

wanted to hit me," the maid said. But "I told her ... a white

woman ain't been born that would hit me and live." Even

though the police may come, she boasted, "when they do

you'll be three D: Dead, Damned and Delivered." The maid

was proud to note that "that huzzy ain't did nothing but

spoke to me since den. When they fine you ain't scared of

em," she chortled, "they leave you 'lone. Son-of-a-

bitches." 110

At the weekly mass meetings, hundreds of African

Americans gathered to renew spirits and reenergize tired

bodies. Photographs of the crowds invariably reveal large

female majorities. Here they shared their stories of defiance

and testified about their degradation, transforming bitter

memories and shame into weapons of protest. Reverend

Robert Graetz, a white minister who became active in the

bus boycott, recalled that when women told their stories,

the "people would cheer" for their new heroines. The "maids

were the soldiers," he said. "They rallied the leaders." 111

At an evening assembly in March 1956, one woman stood

up and said she was with the protest because she had been

called a "nigger" on the bus.

[Image: African-American women filled the pews at weekly

mass meetings.]

Worse, she argued, "I was asked to give a white man a

seat," she said. "I am filled up to my bones, in this, it's way

down in my bones and when there ain't no protest," she

said, offering a profound defense of her humanity, "I'm still

gonna have it. I'm still gonna have my protest." 112

After her

moving testimony, the congregation sang the Negro

spiritual "Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen," translating

the troubles they had all seen into "Glory, Hallelujah."

Women at the mass meetings demanded that they be

treated like human beings, worthy of protection and respect.

The male leaders of the boycott made sure that women's

actions were celebrated in the community. One minister

praised a group of women whom he saw "walking in pride

and dignity." They "would do justice to any queen," he

declared. 113

Another preacher honored the "ancient" Mother

Pollard, a well-known elderly black woman, who refused to

accept a ride or an exemption from the boycott because of

her frailty. "My feets is tired," she said, "but my soul is

rested." 114

These weekly testimonies gave boycotters a

sense of worth and agency and united the "walking city" as

individual burdens were universalized and spread out over

the whole.

The mass meetings fostered a sense of community that did

not exist before the boycott. "Everybody walked together.

We rode together," Zelia Evans, a teacher at Alabama State

and WPC member, recalled. "There was a togetherness that

I hadn't seen before. We had suffered and sacrificed so

long," she added, "we were ready ... to support a

movement." 115

"It was the first time in the history of

Montgomery," Robert Nesbitt, the secretary for the Dexter

Avenue Baptist Church, recalled, "that all the ministers

threw away their little egos ... and united." 116

In order to fund the daily operations of the Montgomery

Improvement Association and finance the expensive

alternative transportation system, Montgomery's African

Americans had to raise enormous amounts of money. A fleet

of nearly three hundred private automobiles picked up

passengers at forty-two locations and ferried the former bus

riders around town. The city's black social clubs held dances

and sponsored activities to raise funds. Black churches took

up a collection every Sunday. The Federated Women's Clubs

threw parties to raise needed cash, and women went door

to door, canvassing neighborhoods for donations. Their

efforts paid off. Within the first few months of the boycott,

when donations from outside organizations like the national

NAACP were tare, members of the MIA raised a quarter of a

million dollars, primarily from local blacks. 117

The most consistent local fund-raiser was Mrs. Georgia

Gilmore, a nurse, midwife, and defiant mother of six, who

used her experience as a cook to raise money. Gilmore was

a "pretty, smooth-complexioned black woman as large in

kindness as she [was] in body," said B.J. Simms, leader of

the MIA's transportation system. But, he warned, "don't rub

her the wrong way. Would you believe that this charming

woman once beat up a white man who had mistreated one

of her children?" he asked. "He owned a grocery store and

Mrs. Gilmore marched into his place and wrung him out!" 118

Gilmore had a long history of standing up for herself and

fighting for justice. She refused to follow bus drivers'

demands and

insisted on being treated with dignity. A Montgomery

minister recalled Gilmore's reputation: "Even the white

police officers let her be," he said. "The word was 'Don't

mess with Georgia Gilmore, she might cut you.'" "But Lord,"

he reminisced, "that woman could cook." 119

When the MIA

announced its plan to boycott the buses for one day,

Gilmore immediately called her friends and enlisted their

talents for the boycott.

"What we could do best," Gilmore proudly declared, "was

cook." That day, Gilmore recalled, she and a handful of her

friends "collected fourteen dollars amongst ourselves and

bought chickens, bread and lettuce and started cooking ...

We made a bundle of sandwiches," she said, to sell at the

mass meetings at Holt Street Baptist Church. 120

From there

Gilmore and her fellow chefs began preparing and selling

full dinners, pies, and cakes. They called themselves the

Club from Nowhere.

The ambiguous club name was strategic: it helped

safeguard the women from "the police and laws" who,

Gilmore complained, "go around trailing our members and

giving them traffic tickets the way they were doing with so

many colored folk." And it provided anonymity when selling

their wares. Each day the women sold their savory

sandwiches and chicken dinners door to door and to hungry

downtown workers, black and white. "When we'd raise as

much as three hundred dollars for a Monday night rally,"

Gilmore explained, "then we knowed we was on our way for

five hundred on Thursday night." 121

When the call for collections came at weekly mass

meetings, Gilmore would stand up and shout, "We're the

Club from Nowhere!" and walk the women's profits up to the

front of the church. Gilmore's proud strolls to the collection

plate became one of the most anticipated weekly rituals. As

Gilmore strutted back to her seat, boycotters rattled the

church rafters with "dignified applause, foot stomping, and

exclamations of Aaaa-men, Amen!'" 122

The excitement and

support for the Club from Nowhere, Gilmore explained,

encouraged "other ordinary folks" to do "the same

thing in their neighborhoods--competing with us to raise

more than us." 123

It was hard to compete with the Club from Nowhere. They

raised "maybe a hundred and fifty or two hundred dollars or

more a week," Gilmore recalled. Inez Ricks, a black woman

who lived on the other side of town, was up for the

challenge. When she set up a competing women's club, the

Friendly Club, the rivalry heated up. The collegial

competition enlivened the meetings while inspiring other

women.

Gilmore and her Club from Nowhere "represented more than

the actual cash they contributed each week," B. J. Simms

insisted. "This fine woman and her team represented the

grass-roots type of support and enthusiasm that launched

the boycott and kept it moving to the very end." 124

Without

support from working-class women like Gilmore, the bus

boycott would have failed. And yet Gilmore, like all the

women who risked their lives and livelihoods to make the

thirteen-month protest possible, has been relegated to the

footnotes of history. "We made the world rake notice of

black folks in Montgomery," Gilmore said, but now "we're all

in the Club from Nowhere." Simms agreed. "Most of the

people who made indispensable contributions" to the

boycott, he argued, "were soon forgotten and today are

ignored as nobodies from nowhere." 125

Those "nobodies" made the Montgomery movement

possible by finding "ingenious ways to keep the boycott

alive." 126

Though ministers like Martin Luther King and

Ralph Abernathy filled public leadership positions, black

women were "the power behind the throne," as Erna

Dungee, WPC secretary and MIA finance manager, put it.

"We really were the ones who carried out the actions," she

insisted. 127

Like Dungee, Hazel Gregory insisted that it was

working-class women whose collective refusal to ride the

buses "made it work." "If you hadn't had those people, you

would not have been able to [succeed]," she said. 128

Besides serving as the boycott's foot soldiers, handling the

day-to-day business of the MIA, and leading local fund-

raising drives, black women helped keep the carpool

running. At least twenty-nine women worked as regular

carpool drivers or dispatchers. Ann Smith Pratt, a

hairdresser, was the chief dispatcher. She worked the ham

radio "directing taxi drivers and the church station wagon

crew to urgent pickups at thirty-two designated sites." 129

After Rosa Parks lost her job as a seamstress at the

Montgomery Fair on January 7, 1956, she often filled in as a

dispatcher, sometimes working from sunup to sundown. 130

And Alberta James was, according to her peers,

"unquestionably the best driver employed by the MIA

transportation committee." 131

Middle-class women who had their own cars, mostly black

but some white women, used their vehicles and their free

time to transport their less affluent neighbors. One of the

boycott's classic sights was when Mrs. A. W. West, an eighty-

year-old widow, rambled down the streets in her green

Cadillac limousine every morning between seven and eleven

in the morning "to chauffeur people about."' 32

"And that's

why," Virginia Durr, a white activist, noted, "Mrs. West was

called a queen." Mrs. West was regaled by other women for

her daily contributions. She was the kind of woman "who did

not have to do it," Durr said. "Because she could have

stayed at home and said that she was, you know, elderly.'" 33

Since black women provided the backbone of the boycott,

they were also the primary targets of white retaliation. Aside

from getting fired from their jobs, which was the most

common reprisal, African-American women walking to work

remained vulnerable to physical and sexual harassment.

Whites in passing cars pelted pedestrians with "water

balloons and containers of urine ... rotten eggs, potatoes

and apples." 134

Jo Ann Robinson was terrified when two

white men threw a brick through her window. Shortly

thereafter she saw two policemen pour acid on the hood of

her car. The next morning the car "had holes as large as a

dollar" all over its hood and roof, she said. 135

Armed whites

stood on street corners and jeered at the walking women.

[Image: African-American women were constant targets of

physical and sexual assaults during the modern civil rights

movement. Here, armed white men attack two black women

after a desegregation attempt in Montgomery, Alabama.]

"Look at dem red bastards over der watching us," a

domestic protested. "Dey got dem guns, but us aint skered."

"I don't mind dying," she said, "but I sho take one of dem

with me.'" 36

The fact that white men with guns could not force black

women back into their "place" indicated the sense of power

and pride the boycott aroused among African Americans. 137

King argued that this new sense of pride and power was a

crucial component of the movement. One "can not

understand the bus protest," King said later, "without

understanding that there is a new Negro in the South, with a

new sense of dignity and destiny." 138

Segregationists, however, had little interest in Negroes, old

or new. City commissioners, angered by the success of the

boycott and their inability to quell it, launched a city-

sponsored intimidation campaign on January 23, 1956.

Mayor Gayle called it his "get tough" policy. Denouncing the

MIA as a "group of Negro radicals," Gayle claimed he was

"tired of pussyfooting around" and ordered police to "break

up Negro car pools by diligent enforcement ... of all traffic

regulations" and to charge African Americans

waiting for rides at dispatch stations with loitering. 139

"Every black person would get a traffic ticket two and three

times a week ... There was no need arguing with police,"

Georgia Gilmore recalled. Gilmore alone received more than

thirty tickets. "We just took [them]" she stated. "Policemen

would give hundreds and hundreds of tickets every day to

black people." 140

One day after Gayle's "get tough"

announcement, he and Commissioner Frank Parks publicly

declared their support for and membership in the White

Citizens' Council. 141

The official announcement, Clifford Durr pointed out, "was

quite naturally taken by the denizens of the woodwork and

the underside of rocks to be a signal to come out and do

their worst." 142

Those "denizens" dynamited Martin Luther

King's home on January 30 and bombed E. D. Nixon's house

two days later. At an MIA meeting on February 2, members

of the executive committee decided to employ armed

guards for the homes of key individuals thought to be the

most vulnerable to attack. A number of women were at the

top of the list, including Rosa Parks, Erna Dungee, Jo Ann

Robinson, Euretta Adair, and Maude Ballou. Parks was

especially worried. "Some strange men have been coming

into my neighborhood inquiring about this woman who

caused all this trouble," she reported. Parks then asked for

the MIA to provide night watchmen. 143

She had reason to be afraid. On February 10, just over a

week after Rosa Parks helped Nixon's wife clean up the

mess made by the bomb, more than ten thousand whites

attended what they billed as the "biggest pro-segregation

rally in the United States since the Civil War." There

Mississippi senator James Eastland, a rabid racist, told the

cheering crowd that the prescription for a segregationist

victory was to "organize and be militant." 144

Other speakers,

surrounded by hundreds of Confederate flags, boasted that

they would "give the niggers a whipping" and teach Rosa

Parks a "harsh lesson." 145

By singling Parks out for special

punishment, Citizens' Council members implied that they

wanted to do more than physically abuse her.

[Image: Mayor Gayle's "get tough" policy backfired when

scores of African Americans turned themselves in for

voluntary arrest. Rosa Parks.]

[Image: Mrs. A.W. West.]

[Image: Jo Ann Robinson.]

Ironically, after they threatened her, Mayor Gayle and

Commissioners Sellers and Frank Parks promised to "hold

the line against Negro integration." 146

Gayle did everything

he could to hold that line, including turning a blind eye to

the Citizens' Council's public declaration of its intent to

"abolish the Negro race" with "guns, bows and arrows, sling

shots and knives." 147

While the WCC did Gayle's dirty work, the mayor harnessed

the city's institutional power to harass boycotters and shut

down the carpool system. On February 13 local prosecutors

summoned more than two hundred African Americans to

testify about who was behind the boycott. The special grand

jury, impaneled by Judge Eugene Carter, who had sentenced

Claudette Colvin nearly a year earlier, was charged with

investigating whether African Americans violated a 1921

statute outlawing boycotts "without just cause or legal

excuse." 148

On February 21 the grand jury returned

indictments against Rosa Parks, Reverend King, and eighty-

seven others, more than a dozen of whom were women. 149

[Image: Euretta Adair.]

[Image: E. D. Nixon.]

It was, according to Taylor Branch, "the largest wholesale

indictment in the history of the country." 150

Mayor Gayle's attempt to frighten boycotters with the threat

of arrest and jail time---something African Americans had

special reason to fear--backfired when a fearless E. D. Nixon

marched to the courthouse and turned himself in. "Are you

looking for me?" Nixon asked the sheriff. "Well, I am

here." 151

Parks followed Nixon's example, and soon

hundreds gathered around the courthouse applauding and

celebrating the bravery and courage of those arrested. "We

took the news as a joke, a pretense, an excitement for the

moment," Jo Ann Robinson noted. Outside the courthouse,

she remembered, "Negroes laughed, determined to stand

their ground. They were defiant, willing to go to jail, ready to

let Americans and the world know that they could not and

would not take any more."

[Image: Reverend Solomon Seay, Sr.]

[Image: Reverend Ralph Abernathy.]

Jail could not possibly be worse than death, many reasoned,

and African Americans were, according to Robinson, ready

"to die for justice and freedom." 152

The crowd grew larger

and more celebratory as more and more blacks voluntarily

turned themselves in, transforming the jailhouse, a place to

be feared and avoided at all costs, into a place of honor.

Sheriff Butler, clearly peeved by the "perversion of the penal

spirit," demanded silence. "This is no vaudeville show," he

shouted to no effect. 153

Watching the crowd mock the police, Jo Ann Robinson

realized the world she had always known had somehow

changed. The fear that had held black people down had

begun to evaporate. "If there was any nervousness or

uneasiness," she argued, "it was on the part of the

whites." 154

Whites seemed especially tense when scores of

black domestics descended upon the courthouse. "From the

alleys they came," B. J. Simms gleefully recalled. "Black

women with bandannas on, wearing men's hats with their

dresses rolled up. This is what scared white people." When a

policeman tried to get control of the crowd, the women

surged forward. "All right, you women get back," the officer

shouted as he reached for his billy club. Then "these great

big old women with their dresses rolled up," Simms recalled,

"told [the officer], 'Us ain't going nowhere.

[Image: Reverend E. N. French.]

[Image: Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.]

You done arrested us preachers and we ain't moving.'"

When the officer reached for his gun, the fearless women

dared him to use them. "I don't care what you got," one

woman said. "If you hit one of us, you'll not leave here

alive." 155

The public confrontation between black women and the

police in Montgomery was a long time coming. That night

black women served notice that they were no longer going

to be violated by or pushed around by white police officers.

They put their bodies on the line in defense of their

humanity, something anyone watching could see. The

standoff, the editor of The Christian Century argued in 1956,

"marked the first fateful assertion of their full dignity as

human beings." 156

On March 19 twenty-eight black women asserted their full

dignity and their right to protest abuse on the buses at the

only trial held after the mass arrests.

[Image: Fred Gray.]

Prosecutors tried Martin Luther King, Jr., for conspiracy and

held the other eighty-eight indictments in abeyance. They

believed that if they could remove King as leader of the

boycott, it would quickly fall apart. At first the defense

played dumb. Most witnesses feigned ignorance of King's

role in the boycott and some acted as if the boycott were

simply a figment of the prosecutor's imagination. Gladys

Moore seemed to take offense at the suggestion that King

starred the protest. "Wasn't no one man started it," she

insisted. "We all started it overnight." 157

Estella Brooks

testified that King had nothing to do with her decision to

stay off the buses. She told the judge she had not been on a

bus since August 12, 1950, the day a policeman shot and

killed her husband for arguing with a bus driver. "No one

told me to stop riding the buses," Gladys Moore said after

prosecutors tried to get her to blame King. "I stopped

because we had been treated so bad down through the

years that we decided we wouldn't ride the buses no

more.'" 58

[Image: African Americans gather outside the courthouse as

Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., stands trial for conspiracy.]

Finally, in what seemed like an effort to shame the judge

into ruling for the defense, King's attorneys "summon[ed] a

stream of Negro women to the stand to testify about

cruelties they had seen and endured on the buses." 159

Time magazine reported that the women eagerly testified,

often without any prompts. The black women, Time noted,

"began talking before defense lawyers asked their names;

others could hardly be stopped." 160

By detailing one

insulting experience after another, a group of core women

activists denounced the system that denied their humanity

on a daily basis. Almost all of them testified that they had

stopped riding the buses because white drivers had

humiliated them or abused them.

Martha K. Walker said she stopped riding because drivers

constantly heaped abuse upon her and her blind husband,

who was a veteran of World War II. Gladys Moore testified

that bus drivers treated women "just as rough as could be ...

like we are [not] human." Bus drivers, Georgia Gilmore

declared, mistreated people "positively for nothing." 161

Henrietta Brinson said the mistreatment was too much: "I

am just fed up with these bus drivers ... just fed up to my

neck."

They "don't want to treat us the right way," she said.

Referencing one particularly mean operator, she told the

court that he said, "All you niggers are pushing like a passel

of cows." She stared at the judge. "Cow," she said, "that's

what he called us." 162

Judge Carter sat in stony silence, completely unmoved. At

the end of the trial, he pronounced King guilty of conspiracy

to violate the 1921 law and ordered him to pay a five-

hundred-dollar fine or serve a year at hard labor 163

Like

Judge Carter, the national newspaper and magazine

reporters waiting outside for the ruling ignored the black

women's testimonies that detailed decades of mistreatment

and denied King's leadership in the boycott. Instead, the

media turned King into an apostle of civil rights. A reporter

for The New York Times recorded the time, down to the

exact minute, that King emerged from the courthouse. It

was 4:39 P.M. A throng of supporters erupted in cheers

when King emerged, many of them shouting, "Behold the

King!" and "Hail the King!" as though he really were

"Alabama's Modern Moses," as Jet magazine called him. 164

At Holt Street Baptist Church, where thousands of African

Americans gathered that night, ministers presented

Reverend King as a Christlike figure sent to Montgomery to

deliver blacks from their misery. "Here is the man," one

minister proclaimed when introducing King to the mass

meeting, "who today was nailed to the cross for you and

me." 165

While the exaltation of King fit into a distinctly black

Christian tradition, it obscured other leaders. "From that day

onward," Rufus Lewis recalled later, "Rosa Parks became a

secondary figure." 166

It was not just Rosa Parks, the radical activist, who was

written out of the story of the Montgomery bus boycott. Jo

Ann Robinson and her army of women in the WPC, as well as

the thousands of working-class women who made

Montgomery "the Walking City," were reduced to the

footnotes of history. While the media were partly to blame in

framing the story around King, other civil rights

organizations, in an effort to use Montgomery's success to

spark similar civil rights campaigns throughout the South,

recast the bus protest as a movement led by ministers.

[Image: Rosa Parks speaks with an interviewer as she

arrives at court with E. D. Nixon (center) and eighty-nine

other African Americans on trial for violating a 1921

antiboycott law.]

Shortly after the boycott ended on December 21, 1956, nine

months after the trial that turned Martin Luther King, Jr., into

a modern Moses, the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR)

published a comic book that cast King as a fearless freedom

fighter and experienced organizer who had led his people

out of bondage. In FOR's retelling of the bus protest,

Reverend King and his cavalry of militant ministers came to

the rescue of Rosa Parks, who refused to move from her

seat "because she was tired and her feet ached." The

cartoon features a nervous King, worried sick about Parks's

arrest, who stays up all night planning a response.

"Something ought to be done," King, visibly upset, says to

his wife. "Rosa is a good woman and not a trouble maker.

They had no right arresting her." A helpless

[Image: This Fellowship of Reconciliation comic book,

published circa 1957, gave rise to the myth of Rosa Parks's

"tired feet" and Martin Luther King, Jr.'s, heroic leadership of

the Montgomery bus boycott.]

Coretta, seated next to King, asks, "But what can we do?"

The next frame portrays King as an organizer, standing in

front of a roomful of men demanding a public response. "We

ought to protest," he says, pointing at the men, "and not

ride the buses for a day." In the next image, King stands

over a mimeograph machine with his shirtsleeves rolled up.

He and another man run off "a few hundred" copies of the

announcement calling for a one-day boycott. And the rest,

as they say, is history. 167

Unfortunately, this King-centric and male-dominated version

of events obscures the real history of the Montgomery bus

boycott as a women's movement for dignity. The focus on

King is so absolute that even today many historians

overlook the fact that it was four female plaintiffs, Claudette

Colvin, Mary Louise Smith, Mrs. Aurelia Browder, and Mrs.

Susie McDonald, who filed the lawsuit

that finally ended segregation on public transportation and

put teeth into the Brown decision.

On December 17, 1956, the United States Supreme Court

affirmed the U.S. district court's decision in Browder v. Gayle

that segregation, even outside public schools, violated the

due process and equal protection clause of the Fourteenth

Amendment. The ruling signaled the death knell of the

"separate but equal" doctrine established by the Supreme

Court in the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision. But it also

heralded something significantly more important. The

Browder decision determined more than where one could sit

on a bus. It was an affirmation of African Americans'

humanity. The Supreme Court, as Ralph Abernathy and

Martin Luther King, Jr., put it, "ruled that we have the right

to sit with dignity." 168

Response to the decision indicated its powerful emotional

impact. At an enormous mass meeting in Montgomery that

night, Reverend Solomon S. Seay, Sr., burst into tears at the

pulpit when he cried out, "God is on our side." A hush fell

over the ecstatic crowd when Reverend Graetz, the lone

white minister in the movement, walked to the front of the

church and began to read from Corinthians I: "When I was a

child, I spake as a child," he recited, "I understood as a

child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man I put

away childish things." The passage struck a nerve. Before

Graetz could finish his reading, the mostly female crowd

rose to their feet and cheered. "Several women," according

to the Montgomery Advertiser, "screamed with what

appeared to be religious ecstasy." 169

Graetz captured the essence of the Supreme Court victory.

Though even the biblical language was gendered, the

women in the audience that night understood that the

Browder decision signaled African Americans' arrival as full

human beings, as men and women worthy of recognition

and respect. While the legal ruling made segregation on

public conveyances unconstitutional, the boycott was never

just about integration. It was about what

Martin Luther King, Jr., later called the "thingification" of

white supremacy. 170

By walking hundreds of miles to protest

humiliation and testifying publicly about physical and sexual

abuse, African Americans--mostly women--reclaimed their

bodies and demanded the right to be treated with dignity

and respect.

The legal and moral victory over white supremacy in

Montgomery gave African Americans around the country a

sense of hope for the future, an inspirational and powerful

figurehead in Martin Luther King, Jr., and an organizing

model--nonviolent direct action, which they hoped to use

throughout the South to dismantle Jim Crow. Segregationists

intent on thwarting black advances launched their own war

to retain their position of power in the South. A swirling

storm of white resistance had been gathering since the

1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. As African

Americans in Montgomery returned to the buses and some

Southern schools took baby steps toward compliance with

the Brown decision, the "massive resistance" movement

thundered through the South. Drawing on whites' deepest

fears about integration and interracial sexuality, Citizens'

Council members and other die-hard segregationists used

economic intimidation, sexualized violence, and terror to

derail desegregation and destroy the developing black

freedom movement. Between the Montgomery bus boycott

and the student sit-in movement in 1960, African Americans

hoping to re-create the Montgomery experience faced the

forces of Jim Crow, sparking some of the fiercest battles for

manhood and womanhood of the modern civil rights

movement.

CHAPTER 4"There's Open

Season on Negroes Now"

theseventh-gradeteacherat Dunbar Junior High School in

Little Rock, Arkansas, dismissed her students early on May

17, 1954. News of the historic Supreme Court decision

striking down segregation in public schools had just hit the

airwaves, and she feared a violent white response. As

students streamed out of the all-black school, she urged

them to "pay attention to where you're walking. Walk in

groups, don't walk alone." "Hurry," she added. Melba Patillo,

a twelve-year-old African-American student at Dunbar,

wondered what all the fuss was about. Still, Melba was

happy to have the afternoon free. She gathered her books

and started on the route she had taken home for nearly six

years. According to her autobiography, published several

decades later, she meandered through a grassy stretch of

blooming persimmon trees and daydreamed about

becoming a movie star and moving to New York or

California.

The sound of rustling leaves snapped her back to reality.

She stopped and listened carefully, straining to see through

the thick flora. Suddenly a deep voice sliced through the

brush. "You want a ride, girl?" She could not see anyone.

[Image: Melba Patillo.]

Then it came again. "Want a ride?"

"Who is it?" she asked nervously.

"I got candy in the car," a man's gravelly voice sang out.

"Lots of candy." Patillo inched forward and saw a burly white

man coming toward her. She turned and fled in the opposite

direction, screaming for help and running as fast as her

black-and-white saddle shoes could carry her. "You better

come and take a ride home," he growled. "You hear me,

girl?" 1

He was a "huge" man, Patillo recalled later, built "like a

wrestler." He chased Patillo through the wooded path,

screaming about "niggers wanting to go to school with his

children and how he wasn't going to stand for it." Suddenly

Patillo tripped on her shoelaces and fell. As she struggled to

stand, he grabbed her shoulders, thrust her to the ground,

and flipped her over on her back. "He slapped me hard

across the face," she said in her memoir, then pinned her

down and began fumbling with his belt buckle. 2 "I'll show

you niggers the Supreme Court can't run my life," he said as

he reached under Patillo's dress and ripped off her

underwear. In her account, she scrambled out from

underneath him and started to run. 3

Melba Patillo arrived home, shaken and disheveled. She told

her grandmother that a white man attempted to rape her.

Patillo's grandmother, who loved to garden and read

Shakespeare and Langston Hughes, listened and then

quietly shuttled Melba to the bathroom and started a bath.

"You soak a while, child. When the water goes down the

drain, it will take all that white man's evil with it." 4 Melba sat

in the tub for what seemed like hours, listening to the

muffled voices of her parents and grandmother arguing

about whether they should call the police. When she finally

emerged, her family encouraged her not to feel ashamed

about the attack. Her father, Howell Patillo, an enormous

man who worked as a hostler's assistant on the Missouri

Pacific Railroad, reached for Melba and pulled her close. "We

ain't gonna call the law," he said. "Those white police are

liable to do something worse to her than what already

happened." 5 Survival sometimes required that silence

surround sexual violence, especially in an environment

poisoned by the fierce backlash to Brown. Eventually Melba

would tell her story of the struggle in Little Rock for students

across the country, but silence was not the only choice.

Between 1956 and 1959, sex and sexual violence sat at the

center of the freedom struggle, and African Americans

deployed different strategies to carry the movement

through a crucial and difficult transition, including

testimony, armed self-defense, and international pressure.

In the decade before Brown, African Americans in Little

Rock, Arkansas, and throughout the South had testified

openly about white attacks on black women. In the 1940s,

for example, Daisy Bates, the acclaimed freedom fighter

and leader of the Little Rock Nine, used the power of the

Arkansas State Press, the newspaper she and her husband,

L. C. Bates, owned, to call attention to the long history of

white-on-black rape. Like Rosa Parks, Bates was a militant

activist long before she orchestrated a showdown between

Governor Orval Faubus and the federal government over the

integration of Central High School in 1957. Her newspaper

became a

thorn in the sides of Little Rock's white and black leaders,

whom she pilloried regularly for failing to remedy the

injustices of Jim Crow, especially police brutality and the

abuse of black women. For Bates, rape was not just a

political and legal issue that required state and community

action, it was personal.

When Daisy Bates was just was seven years old, three white

men brutally raped and murdered her mother. Bates's father

blamed the attack on the "timeworn lust of the white man."

She was "not the kind to submit," he explained to his

daughter, "so they rook her." 6 Overwhelmed by guilt and

pain, he abandoned Daisy at a young age. She vowed

revenge. "Young as I was, strange as it may seem," Daisy

Bates wrote in her memoir years later, "my life now had a

secret goal--to find the men who had done this horrible

thing to my mother. "

[Image: Daisy and L. C. Bates and two police investigators

examine a Ku Klux Klan cross left in their front yard in

October 1956. Bates and her husband were targets of the

Klan years before the Little Rock crisis began because of

their vocal support for equality and justice for African-

American rape victims in their newspaper, the Arkansas

State Press.]

The whole ordeal left her feeling like a "little sapling, which,

after a violent storm, puts out only gnarled and twisted

branches." 7 When she became older, Bates decided to

transform her hatred and anger into positive action and

"make it count for something." 8 Over time the "little sapling"

became a towering oak: Bates became a fierce freedom

fighter and leader of the Little Rock NAACP and in 1952

president of the Arkansas State Conference of NAACP

branches. 9

As an outspoken advocate for African Americans, Bates, like

Rosa Parks, became known as the go-to person for victims

of racial and sexual violence in Little Rock. She listened to

them and scribbled notes, then placed their stories on the

front page of her newspaper. The State Press became

Bates's personal bullhorn, which she used to amplify

demands for justice and voting rights and call for an end to

the wanton sexual abuse of black women. Banner headlines

between 1941 and 1955 made the crime public, helped to

mobilize the black community, and alerted white officials

that crimes against black women would not go unnoticed.

For example, on July 17, 1942, the State Press published

photographs of two white Little Rock police officers who

raped Rosa Lee Cherry, a nineteen-year-old African-

American student at Dunbar High School. Daisy Bates even

printed a transcript of Cherry's grand jury testimony. This

helped secure public support for an indictment. Bares then

argued that a conviction was necessary to save the "great

state of Arkansas." Although the white policemen walked

free after their case ended in a mistrial, Bates's vigilance on

the Cherry case and others like it made it impossible for

white authorities to ignore crimes against African-American

women. 10

Her outspoken attacks on rape and other forms of

sexualized violence helped secure trials and, in some

instances, even rare convictions of white assailants who

attacked black women in Arkansas during the 1940s and

early 19505 11

By 1954, however, a veil of secrecy had descended among

African-American activists. In the years after Brown, more

than

half a million people opposed to integration and dedicated

to white supremacy joined organizations like the White

Citizens' Councils, the Ku Klux Klan, and the American

States Rights Association, and launched an all-out war

against the burgeoning freedom struggle. Death threats and

dynamite blasts shook civil rights advocates across the

region. The Patillos understood that the swirling storm of

resistance that segregationists unleashed after Brown made

silence about sexual violence a political imperative.

Segregationist leaders throughout the South urged "massive

resistance" to Brown. They recruited supporters by

denigrating the "traitorous" Supreme Court, while exploiting

whites' fears about integration and interracial sexuality. U.S.

News & World Report announced that many white

Southerners opposed Brown because they feared "eventual

amalgamation of the races--meaning miscegenation,

intermarriage or whatever you want to call it." Judge

Leander Perez, a political heavyweight in Louisiana, told

supporters that the goal of integration was "miscegenation."

"You make a Negro believe he is equal to the white people,"

he said, "and the first thing he wants is a white woman. And

that's why there are so many criminal assaults and rapes."

In a pamphlet titled You and Segregation, Georgia senator

Herman Talmadge argued that the Almighty "Advocates

Segregation," and warned that the "ultimate aim and goal of

NAACP leaders ... is the complete intermingling of the races

in housing, schools, churches, public parks, public swimming

pools and even in marriage." 12

The Brown decision, he said,

was "judicial tyranny" and "the greatest single blow ever ...

struck against constitutional government." "Resistance to

tyranny," Mississippi senator James O. Eastland told white

supporters, "is obedience to God." 13

Walter Givhan, an

Alabama state senator and ardent supporter of the White

Citizens' Council, argued that desegregation was simply a

ruse to "open the bedroom doors of our white women to

Negro men." 14

Demagoguery of "miscegenation" fanned followers' fears to

red-hot rage. Most did not explicitly advocate violence, but

their extremist rhetoric undoubtedly encouraged it. 15

[Image: Alabama state senator Samuel Englehardt, Jr., an

ardent segregationist and member of the White Citizens'

Council, promotes a "white only" anti-integration rally.]

Some politicians could not hold back. "A few killings now," a

Mississippi legislator boasted, could "save a lot of bloodshed

then." At a massive Citizens' Council rally in Alabama,

Senator Eastland cheered on the white mob that blocked

Autherine Lucy, an African-American woman, from attending

the University of Alabama in February 1956. He praised

them for not letting the "NAACP run your schools." Southern

whites, he told the audience, were "obligated to defy"

Brown. 16

When some whites responded by launching

campaigns of violence and terror, many of those legislators

stood silent, offering tacit approval while protecting

themselves from blame.

Other political leaders fully supported the White Citizens'

Council and its goals but worried that violence could hurt

the segregationists' cause. J. P. Coleman, the pragmatic

governor who led Mississippi between 1956 and 1960,

feared that defiance of federal law would hurt the state's

standing in the national Democratic Parry or provoke federal

intervention. Coleman hoped to achieve the same goals as

Eastland and other radicals through what he

called "practical segregation." 17

He pushed for the creation

of a state agency that would mirror the FBI's investigative

prowess and function as a public relations bureau. His goal

was to "keep racial conflict out of the press while quietly

and effectively managing the state's fight against

integration." 18

Coleman tested the effectiveness of the

newly formed State Sovereignty Commission in May 1956,

when four white men from Tylertown, a small village in the

Piney section of Mississippi, kidnapped a young black

woman on the eve of her wedding and gang-raped her.

It was just before dawn on May 13, 1956--Mother's Day--

when Ernest Dillon, a twenty-nine-year-old siding salesman;

his brother Ollie, a middle-aged construction worker; and

Olen and Durora Duncan, twenty-one-year-old cousins, went

looking for "some colored women." Wielding a shotgun,

Ernest Dillon approached Stennis Butler, a thirty-year-old

black sharecropper who was outside preparing for the day's

work. Dillon ordered him to take him and his friends to a

home with black women inside. Annette Butler, a sixteen-

year-old high school student, was in bed with her mother

when she heard someone pounding on the front door of

their two-bedroom home. Ernest Dillon introduced himself

as a policeman. "You're under arrest," he said to the girl, for

"sacking up with your boyfriend." When her mother

objected, Dillon raised the shotgun, grabbed the teenager,

and pulled her outside. He kept the shotgun trained on the

girl's mother as his brother pushed her into the backseat of

the car. Olen Duncan revved the engine and drove away,

leaving Butler's mother alone in the front yard. 19

The four white men drove Butler deep into the Bogue Chitto

swamp, where they took turns raping her. Olen Duncan

threatened to "cut her neck off if she resisted. "I followed his

instructions," she testified at the trial. When they finished,

the four white men piled into the car and left Annette

stranded in the woods. Wandering through the swamp half

naked, she stumbled upon a group of black fishermen and

ran to them for help. They led

her out of the woods and delivered her to the police. Sheriff

A. E. (Bill) Andrews took her complaint and then drove her

home to get dressed. 20

Later that day Sheriff Andrews

brought Olen Duncan in for questioning, and he willingly

signed a statement testifying that he had had "intimate

relations" with Annette Butler. "It was done with every

safeguard for the right of the defendant," Sheriff Andrews

said, "after [Duncan] had been repeatedly advised that

anything he might say could be used against him." 21

A few

days later District Attorney Michael Carr charged all four

men with "forcible ravishment and kidnap" and sent them to

the Magnolia jail to await trial. 22

Judge Tom Brady, a fierce white supremacist and one of the

fathers of the White Citizens' Councils, presided over four

separate trials in Pike County Circuit Court four months after

the attack. The assailants must have wondered what kind of

punishment Brady would impose since his public

pronouncements against interracial mixing were already

legendary. Time magazine called Brady the "prophet" of

segregation and his manifesto, Black Monday, the "Bible of

the White Citizens' Council movement." 23

When confronted

with real interracial mixing and actual rapists, not the

fictional black rapists he saw lurking behind every school-

desegregation case, Brady buckled under the weight of his

own racial prejudices. He appointed the "finest lawyers in

Mississippi" to defend the four white assailants. 24

Ernest Dillon may not have understood Brady's gesture,

since he pleaded guilty on March 26, 1957, to the lesser

charge of "assault with intent to rape." It was a risky plea

that left his co-conspirators vulnerable. On the other hand,

the plea bargain released him from trial and from the threat

of the death penalty or life imprisonment--the state's only

punishments for rape. 25

It also freed the jurors from having

to declare a white man guilty of raping a black woman and

defused any complaints of unequal justice or outside

criticism of the state. It is likely that Dillon believed he

would receive a minor sentence or even a suspended

sentence. Politically, the plea deal worked for everyone--

except, of course, Annette Butler.

On April 4 Olen Duncan, described by the McComb

Enterprise Journal as a "slender man with facial skin paled to

a dead white," surprised the packed courtroom by pleading

not guilty despite his previously signed admission. 26

His

declaration of innocence fueled a day of intense testimony.

Annette Butler took the stand and provided what the

newspaper called "lurid details" of the attack. She easily

identified Duncan as the driver and told the jury he was the

second man to rape her.

In an effort to portray Butler as a prostitute or at least a

juvenile delinquent, Duncan's attorneys grilled her about

her whereabouts the night before the attack. Butler told the

jury that she had accompanied her mother and cousin to a

juke joint called Willie's Penthouse and stayed out past

midnight. Defense attorneys then called George W. Wingo, a

local white man, to testify about the "general reputation" of

Butler. "It is not good," he said without hesitation. They did

not bother asking any African Americans about Butler's

standing in the community--even though they trotted out a

number of white men who testified that Olen Duncan's

stature was impressive. 27

Michael Carr, the district attorney, urged the jury to consider

Duncan's signed confession above all else. The girl

submitted to the four men not because she was easy, he

argued, but because the assailants "placed [her] in such

fear of severe personal injury and for her very life." Despite

Duncan's admission of intercourse and his friend's guilty

plea a week earlier, the all-white, all-male jury unanimously

acquitted Olen Duncan of rape. 28

On April 5, Judge Brady

declared a mistrial when Olen's cousin, Durora Duncan, also

pleaded not guilty and the jury deadlocked.

News of the acquittal and mistrial infuriated a group of

African-American women, who wrote an anonymous letter to

the McComb Enterprise Journal. They criticized the jurors for

acquitting "confessed rapists" and argued that "an alleged

'bad-reputation'" did not "excuse the criminal act which was

committed." "We

feel that no Negro Woman is safe within the bounds of her

own home," they said, "despite the fact that she is a law-

abiding citizen." 29

A group of black ministers made a similar

argument in a statement submitted to the newspaper: "It is

a dreadful thing to think our widows and their children have

no protection, that their homes can be invaded by men of

other races and that all the security of democracy is denied

them." 30

On April 5, 1957, Judge Brady sentenced Ernest Dillon to

twenty years of hard labor. Brady castigated Dillon for

bringing "bitter condemnation upon his community and

state and the entire South" for attacking Annette Butler. His

actions, Judge Brady told Dillon, "will bring further vitriolic

attacks on our region from those who hate the South."

Brady then scolded Dillon for integrating and declared him

unfit for membership in the white race. "No action could be

more in contrast with the beliefs of the segregationist," he

argued. Dillon had the "good fortune," Brady said, sounding

disappointed, "of having able counsel ... and prosecuting

attorneys who were willing to show leniency ..." 31

It was a

harsh way of telling Dillon that he would be a sacrificial

lamb.

The twenty-year sentence was nothing to sneeze at. It was

highly unusual, if not unheard of, in the Magnolia State. And

yet it served a political purpose. The trials and the lengthy

sentence blunted outside criticism of the state's long history

of racial terror. White leaders could point to Dillon as proof

that Mississippi did not discriminate. At the same time, state

senator Mayes McGehee, the chairman of the general

legislative investigating committee of the State Sovereignty

Commission, argued that the state's rape laws tied the

jury's hands--they simply had no choice but to acquit most

of the men. "There wasn't necessarily any prejudice

involved," he said. "Whether that had been a white girl

involved or a colored girl, a jury is very reluctant to pass a

death sentence or life imprisonment for that charge upon a

man." The sheriff, the district attorney, and the county

attorney, McGehee added, "made every possible effort to

get a conviction in that case." 32

Oliver Emmerich, the editor

of the McComb Enterprise Journal, echoed

McGehee's sentiments and argued that the people of

Mississippi think "such crimes are repugnant." "As with all

heinous crimes," he said, "it leaves broken, bleeding hearts

in its wake." "The world must know, and our people must

know," he argued, "that the law enforcement officers of this

area were alert and dutiful and that the evidence was taken

on the spot, without delay, and to the credit of the people of

Pike and Walthall Counties and Mississippi as well." 33

By

giving Dillon twenty years, Judge Brady and the Sovereignty

Commission sent a message: even the most vehement

segregationists still believed in law and order.

Except when they didn't. The lengthy jail sentence did not

stop whites from terrorizing blacks in Mississippi or

elsewhere. Citizens' Council members, Klansmen, and their

ilk harassed African Americans over the phone, on the

streets, and in public places. Hare mail peppered black

activists, and threatening calls kept their phones ringing

through the night. Rosa Parks, for example, constantly

received calls from angry whites who yelled "Die, nigger!"

whenever she or her husband picked up the phone. 34

Like

other blacks committed to the freedom struggle, Rosa Parks

lost her job and was blacklisted in Montgomery, as were her

husband and mother. After an especially vicious death

threat in the summer of 1957, Parks called her cousin in

Detroit sobbing. "Rosie, get the hell out of Montgomery," he

urged. "Raymond's right; Whitey is going to kill you." 35

Parks knew that harassment and economic intimidation

were not the outer limits of white terror. She packed up her

things and moved her family to Detroit in the summer of

1957, just as white vigilantes started bombing black homes,

churches, and businesses in Montgomery. Dynamite

damaged or destroyed the homes and churches of

prominent ministers and bus boycott leaders like Ralph

Abernathy, Robert Graetz, and Martin Luther King, Jr. In

Birmingham at least twenty-one bombings directed at

blacks between 1955 and 1958 turned the "Magic City" into

"Bombingham." In small towns and cities throughout the

South, white mobs beat and sometimes killed African

Americans--especially

those who advocated desegregation or voting rights--with

baseball bats, brass knuckles, tire irons, rusty chains, and

other implements of torture. In the Mississippi Delta white

men murdered three black males in 1955: In May whites

murdered the Reverend George Lee for registering voters. In

August, Lamar Smith, a sixty-year-old farmer, was killed in

broad daylight, apparently for voting in a primary and

teaching other blacks how to register. 36

Later that month, on

August 28, 1955, J. W. Milam and Roy Bryant murdered

fourteen-year-old Emmett Till in Money, Mississippi.

Till, a Chicago native in Mississippi to visit his uncle, Mose

Wright, accompanied a group of black teens and children to

Bryant's Grocery and Meat Market to purchase candy.

Unaware of the strict racial etiquette governing interracial

interactions, the black youngster allegedly flirted with

Bryant's young wife after purchasing some bubble gum.

Four nights later Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam kidnapped

Emmett Till, brutally beat him, and then shot him in the

head. They tied a metal cotton gin fan around his neck with

barbed wire and pushed him into the Tallahatchie River. A

fisherman spotted Till's body, and investigators pulled the

mutilated corpse from the river three days later. Jet

magazine printed photos of the gruesome remains,

exposing the savage and murderous side of segregation to

the nation and the world, and the NAACP launched a

national campaign for justice. Still, an all-white jury

acquitted Bryant and Milam of murder on September 23.

Four months later they admitted guilt to the journalist

William Bradford Huie for an article in Look magazine.

Bryant justified his actions and accused Till of wanting more

than bubble gum that August afternoon. "When a nigger

gets close to mentioning sex with a white woman," Bryant

argued, "he's tired o' livin.'" 37

The response to the article

was immediate. "There's open season on the Negroes now,"

one Mississippi man said. "They've got no protection and

any peckerwood who wants can go out and shoot himself

one and we'll free him." The NAACP demanded punishment

for the shocking deaths. It issued a

pamphlet, titled M Is for Mississippi and Murder, to publicize

the killings. 38

Besides murder, whites also used sexual violence as a

weapon of terror--and not always against black women. In

Union Springs, Alabama, about forty miles southeast of

Montgomery, Klansmen attacked Edward Judge Aaron, a

thirty-four-year-old African American, while he and his wife

walked along a country road on September 2, 1957. Klan

members berated Aaron, known among whites as a "white

folks' nigger," before they pistol-whipped him. "You think

any nigger is as good as a white man? You think nigger kids

should go to school with my kids?" they shouted. As the

men pummeled Aaron to the ground, one of them managed

to tear off Aaron's pants. Then he flashed a shiny razor

blade and grabbed Aaron's scrotum and pressed the blade

into his flesh, severing his testicles. 39

The castration of Edward Judge Aaron vividly illustrated

white fears that Brown would unleash the black beast rapist

of Reconstruction lore. The fear was so great that an

unsubstantiated rumor or an innocent glance, a

misconstrued gesture or an informal greeting between a

black man and a white woman, could end in murder. In

Montgomery, for example, a group of Klansmen heard a

vague rumor that a black truck driver was intimately

involved with a white woman. On a cold January night in

1957, three dedicated Klan members randomly attacked

Willie Edwards, Jr., a delivery truck driver who happened to

be in the wrong place at the wrong time. The Klansmen

walked Edwards to the edge of a bridge that stretched

across the Alabama River. Edwards swore he was innocent

and denied any interest or involvement in an interracial

tryst, but his speech fell on deaf ears. The Klansmen forced

Edwards to the edge of the bridge and made him jump to

his death. 40

African Americans were not always victims. In Richmond,

Virginia, on July 27, 1956, Rudolph Valentino Henry, a thirty-

one-year-old combat veteran, stabbed a white man for

harassing his wife. Henry and his wife, Carrie, were walking

home from a downtown movie theater when John Morgan, a

white city employee, whistled and honked his horn at the

couple as they passed in front of his parked car. "Who are

you whistling at," Henry asked. "Don't you know that's my

wife?"

"I don't give a damn if it is your wife," Morgan shot back. "If I

want to make a date with her I will." Morgan reached for

what appeared to be a gun, jumped out of the car, and a

fight ensued.

"They began to scuffle," Carrie Henry told the newspaper,

"and the white man had a grip on my husband and was

getting the best of him." In order to break loose, she said,

her husband "stabbed [Morgan] with a little clasp knife." "He

had to do something," she insisted. "It was his life or the

other man's." Finally Morgan backed off and turned and

walked away. "We thought he was going to get some help,"

Henry said, "so we ran across the parking lot and went

home ... We didn't know that he was dead until we read

about it in the papers." 41

The murder may have been a mistake, but the clash

between Rudolph Henry and John Morgan was part of a

larger struggle that had been brewing all summer. "It

happens every night," Rufus Wells, a writer for the

Richmond Afro-American, argued in an article titled

"Mashers Molest Women, Police Look Other Way." "After

sundown," Wells said, "certain colored neighborhoods in

Richmond become a happy hunting ground for white men

on the prowl for illicit romance." White men in "limousines

and Tin Lizzies," Wells reported, "cruise slowly around the

block and leer and whistle" at black women. The bolder

ones simply parked their cars and waited, he said, "ready to

proposition any woman who chances by." Wells argued that

these "wolves, mashers and sex perverts" roam the streets

and assault women with impunity. "They're getting worse

and worse," an older black woman argued. "One night last

week, a car containing three white men drove

slowly past the house three or four rimes. Finally they

parked a few doors away and two of them starred toward

my house. I got up and went inside and locked the door,"

she said. "They're getting so they'll snatch you from your

own porch." 42

She was one of many residents who argued that violence

would flare if police refused to protect black women. To be

sure, John Morgan was not the first white man to pay a price

for "molesting" black women that summer. Local African

Americans killed a thirty-one-year-old white man earlier in

the summer and severely beat another man in late August

for "accosting women in the vicinity." "They [the police] are

not going to protect our women," a local black man stated,

"so we have to do it ourselves. Every time we catch a man

molesting women we try to beat his brains out." 43

When Rudolph Valentino Henry stood trial for the "Wolf

Whistle" murder of John Morgan in front of an overflowing

courtroom on November 10, 1956, he pleaded guilty to

involuntary manslaughter. He did not intend to kill Morgan,

he said; he simply tried to defend his wife from attack.

Henry's lawyer, Martin A. Martin, a prominent attorney and

NAACP leader, placed the case in the long history of white-

on-black assault and argued that Henry had a right to

protect his family. A white police officer served as the key

witness. Detective Sergeant F. S. Wakefield of the Richmond

Police Department testified that he had received "numerous

complaints of white men molesting colored women in that

neighborhood." The judge must have recognized the

volatility of the situation and decided to suspend Henry's

sentence. "I'm mighty happy to be back," the former vet

declared after the judge issued his ruling. "I've been around

the world," he said, "but there is no place like home." 44

The public exposure of Southern white men's proclivity for

"night-time integration" did not stop the usual suspects from

railing against perceived threats posed by desegregation.

Citizens' Councilors and Klansmen busied themselves by

educating their progeny and protecting them from the

threat of race mixing. Though

their children were not yet afflicted by puberty or the

hysterical fear of black men as rapists--what W. J. Cash

called the "southern tape complex"--adults seemed to feel it

necessary to spell out the unwritten rules of white

supremacy. 45

"The racist," Southern poet and essayist

Wendell Berry wrote, "fears that a child's honesty

empowered by sex might turn in real and open affection

toward members of the oppressed race, and so destroy the

myth of that race's inferiority." 46

They created a pamphlet

for young whites called the Manual for Southerners, which

claimed that "if boys and girls share the school room, lunch

room, dances, sports, rest rooms and playgrounds, then the

boys and girls will want to date each other." Worse, the

booklet warned, "integration always leads the races to

marry one another." 47

Segregationists fought to keep their children insulated in

lily-white schools, but they could not control the growing

affection for African-American music among their youth.

Many whites greeted rock and roll as if it were "a guided

missile," as Eldridge Cleaver remembered, "launched from

the ghetto into the very heart of suburbia. It succeeded, as

politics, religion, and law could never do, in writing in the

heart and soul what the Supreme Court could only write on

the books." 48

Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, LaVern Baker, Little

Richard, and their interracial bands belted out blues,

ballads, and bebop over integrated airwaves, effectively

launching a revolution that rattled and roused teenagers

and shook up segregationists, who bristled at the idea of

their offspring listening to the new "jungle music." Dancing

was worse since, in their opinion, it would inevitably lead to

race mixing, juvenile delinquency, and sexual immorality. 49

Because black musicians performed in front of segregated

but sold-out crowds of screaming, ecstatic teenagers, it

became impossible to maintain a strict color line in the

South. As a result, many concerts inadvertently became

interracial dance parties, where black and white fans found

themselves pressed against one another. For example, in

the mid-1950s, black and white teenagers mobbed concerts

given by Fats Domino, whose songs "Ain't

That a Shame" and "Blueberry Hill" propelled him to the

head of the Top 40 charts. The petrified parents of white

teens picketed these concerts with signs that read "Rock

and Roll Breeds Integration" and "Ask Your Preacher about

Jungle Music." 50

One worried parent summed up their

complaint in a letter to Sam Phillips, the producer and owner

of Sun Records, which launched the careers of Elvis Presley,

Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison, and Jerry Lee Lewis. Rock and

roll, the parent informed Phillips, was "ruining our children.

These little kids are falling in love with niggers!" 51

Similar

complaints forced many venues to ban interracial dancing.

In 1956 the Louisiana legislature outlawed mixed-race

dancing entirely. 52

Asa Carter, a notorious anti-Semite and racial terrorist who

served as head of the North Alabama White Citizens' Council

and later became Governor George Wallace's speechwriter,

railed against "sensuous Negro music" in his magazine The

Southerner. 53

Rock and roll, he said, appealed to the "base

in man" and encouraged "animalism and vulgarity." It was

part of an NAACP plan, he warned, to "mongrelize

America." 54

Carter fanned the flames of interracial fear and

sexual paranoia around Birmingham in the weeks before Nar

"King" Cole was scheduled to give a concert at the Municipal

Auditorium on April 10, 1956. He printed pictures of Cole

standing next to adoring white females in The Southerner

above captions like "Cole and His White Women" and "Cole

and Your Daughter." In an accompanying article, Carter

insinuated that Cole had ulterior motives that any self-

respecting segregationist would recognize. "You have seen

it," he said, "the fleeting leer, the look that stays an instant

longer ... the savagery." 55

No one had to stretch his or her imagination to understand

what Carter was getting at. Indeed, the whole world

witnessed white reaction to the "fleeting leer" when whites

murdered Emmett Till in Mississippi the year before. The Till

slaying cast a pall over every interracial exchange, but Nat

"King" Cole did not expect to be attacked simply for singing

his songs, especially in front of a segregated audience. Still,

he went out of his way to

remove any hints of sexuality from his show and presented

himself as nonthreatening in style and demeanor. When the

footlights burst open and illuminated the stage, Nat "King"

Cole bounded forward and sailed through two songs.

Suddenly, a group of white thugs scurried to the platform,

leaped over the footlights, and knocked Cole to the ground.

Their goal was to push Cole out of the way and "take control

of the microphone and lecture the audience about

integration." 56

While Asa Carter's low-life allies literally attacked Nat "King"

Cole, more sophisticated segregationists pressed the issue.

James J. Kilpatrick, the elegant and conservative editor of

the Richmond News-Leader, told James Baldwin that he

regarded the Negro writer as a citizen, but that did not

mean he wanted Baldwin to marry his daughter. "You're not

worried about me marrying your daughter," Baldwin shot

back. "You're worried about me marrying your wife's

daughter. I've been marrying your daughter since the days

of slavery." 57

Baldwin's comment brilliantly captured the

cruel conundrums of interracial sex and sexual violence

between white men and black women in the South.

These fears gripped whites in the small town of Monroe,

North Carolina, in 1958, when an innocent kissing game

between black and white children became front-page news

around the world as hysterical adults cried rape and

demanded revenge. This single event reinforced Gunnar

Myrdal's observation a decade earlier that sex was "the

principle around which the whole structure of segregation ...

is organized." 58

Indeed, the "Kissing Case," as it became

known, exposed the power of sex in maintaining the South's

racial hierarchy and underscored the extent to which whites

would fight to preserve it.

Sissy Sutton, a seven-year-old white girl, and her two friends

must not have read the Manual for Southerners. If they had,

they would have known that playing a kissing game in a

ditch on an autumn afternoon with David Ezell "Fuzzy"

Simpson and

James Hanover Grissom Thompson, eight- and ten-year-old

African-American boys, was strictly prohibited. The three

girls had been minding their own business, watching a

group of black and white boys play cowboys and Indians on

October 28. "At first it was just boys playing," Thompson

later recalled. "We was just running through the water with

our feet first, acting crazy like kids." Sutton and her friends

joined the fun, and after a few boys drifted off toward home,

a white boy suggested they play a kissing game.

According to the rules, one of the boys said, each girl would

have to sit on a boy's lap and kiss him, "like on TV or in the

movies." 59

Though nobody knows exactly who kissed whom,

somebody seems to have kissed somebody.

Sutton told her mother about the game when she returned

home that evening. When Mrs. Sutton realized her daughter

had actually touched a black boy, she was furious.

Hysterical, she called the police and reported that Simpson

and Thompson had attempted to rape her little girl. Mr.

Sutton grabbed his gun, gathered up some friends, and

went searching for the prepubescent assailants. The

growing mob of angry men first went to Thompson's home,

where they threatened "not only [to] kill the boys but to

lynch the mothers." Mrs. Sutton insisted that she "would

have killed Hanover myself if I had the chance." 60

Later that afternoon police officers sported the boys tugging

a red wagon down the street, completely oblivious to the

growing mob of men searching for them. The officers

jumped out of the car "with their guns drawn," grabbed the

boys, and shoved them into the car. "We'll teach you little

niggers not to kiss white girls," one of the officers snapped.

When they arrived at the jail, Thompson recalled, the

policemen "threw us down and then started beating us."

They "hit us hard in the chest, call[ed] us all kind of names

... and talked about how they was going to lynch us." The

police put the boys behind bars and held them there for six

days as the Klan clamored for blood outside. No one

contacted their parents. 61

Even if the police wanted to call

the boys' mothers, they

would have had a hard time finding them. Both women had

holed up with neighbors after their homes became targets

of terrorist attacks. Evelyn Thompson fled after a carload of

angry whites sprayed her windows with bullets and masked

men burned a cross on her front lawn. The final straw may

have been when someone shot the family's dog and left it

dead in the front yard. 62

News reports of the illicit kissing game hewed closely to the

politics and prejudices of the color line. Some white

reporters derailed an attempted rape in which one of the

boys held Sutton down until the other could extract a kiss or

more. White officials argued that the boys were guilty of

"molesting three white girls." Even Governor Luther Hodges

insisted that Thompson and Simpson "had assaulted" the

girls. The Carolina Times, on the other hand, a black

newspaper, argued that the "crisis in Monroe ... had nothing

to do with assault or delinquency." According to Louis

Austin, the editor, the racial hubbub was the product of

white angst and shame, and that Thompson and Simpson

had not yet learned the "unwritten law of white supremacy"

that "white is right and God ... has made one race of men

superior to another." "No one but a bunch of numbskulls,"

he fumed, "with hearts full of the filthiest kind of dirt would

attach any significance to what children of six to ten years

of age do at play." 63

At a hearing on November 4, 1958, J. Hampron Price, a

juvenile court judge, found Hanover Thompson and Fuzzy

Simpson guilty of molestation and sentenced them to the

Morrison Training School for Negroes in Hoffman, North

Carolina, for "indeterminate terms." 64

The ridiculousness of

the charge and the harshness of the sentence, not to

mention the fact that Judge Price referred to the boys twice

as "niggers," convinced Robert F. Williams, the militant

leader of the Monroe, North Carolina, NAACP, to launch a

major publicity campaign. Williams organized the

Committee to Combat Racial Injustice (CCRI) with assistance

from Conrad Lynn and George Weisman, activists in New

York who had connections to the Socialist Workers Party; C.

K. Steele, president of the Tallahassee, Florida, NAACP and

head of the successful 1956

Tallahassee bus boycott; and Carl Braden, co-founder, with

his wife, Anne, of the liberal Southern Conference Education

Fund. Their plan was to remove the story from the narrow

confines of Monroe, North Carolina, and place it on a world

stage, shaming the state and ultimately the entire nation.

It was not difficult to sell the story outside the South. The

London News-Chronicle gobbled up the "Kissing Case" and

prominently placed it on the front page on December 15,

1958. With the paper's circulation of more than one million,

the story quickly spread. In Italy newspapers ran

sympathetic photos of Thompson and Simpson in juvenile

detention on the front page under headlines bemoaning the

excessive punishment: "He Will Grow Up in Jail." Similar

stories appeared throughout Europe; even the Soviet Union

and China ran the story, presenting it as a mockery of

American democracy. The CCRI hoped the "lever of

worldwide publicity and the fulcrum of Cold War politics

would lift them to victory." 65

At the very least, they knew it

would expose the South's growing racial and sexual

hysteria. But what they really desired was enough global

pressure to prod President Eisenhower or Congress to take

action. After two months of negative publicity at home and

abroad, Governor Hodges finally issued the order to release

Fuzzy Simpson and Hanover Thompson. The two boys

reunited with their mothers on February 13, 1959, nearly

four months after their arrest. 66

Domestic racial politics had vexed America's cold warriors

for many years, forcing the federal government at times to

intervene on behalf of African Americans in order to avoid

international embarrassment. For example, when Arkansas

governor Orval Faubus activated the National Guard to block

nine African-American children, including Melba Patillo, from

integrating Little Rock's Central High School in 1957, and

then removed them as an angry mob converged on the

school, the whole world took notice. 67

Televised images of

well-dressed black children surrounded by

straight-faced soldiers and angry, screaming whites

transported Jim Crow into homes around the country and

the globe, making Little Rock the "foremost international

symbol of American racism." 68

President Dwight Eisenhower, furious that Faubus had defied

both federal law and tolerated, if not encouraged, mob

violence in the streets of Little Rock, decided to let the

governor know that, as David Halberstam put it, he did not

"look kindly on frontal challenges by junior officers." 69

On

September 24, Eisenhower sent one thousand paratroopers

from the 101st Airborne Division into Little Rock, becoming

the first president since Reconstruction to use the military to

defend African Americans' constitutional rights. In a

televised address that night explaining his decision,

Eisenhower told the nation that the Little Rock crisis had

threatened America's position in the Cold War. "It would be

difficult to exaggerate the harm that is being done to the

prestige and influence, and indeed to the safety of our

nation around the world," Eisenhower argued. "Our enemies

are gloating over this incident and using it everywhere to

misrepresent our whole nation. We are portrayed as a

violator of those standards of conduct which the peoples of

the world unite to proclaim in the charter of the UN." 70

By

the next day the fierce and flinty paratroopers, from the unit

that had stood up to the Nazi Wehrmacht and the Chinese

People's Liberation Army, stared down the segregationists

and escorted Melba Patillo and eight others to class. 71

Federal intervention finally forced Governor Faubus to

integrate Central High School, but it did not stop

demagogues in Dixie from flirting with secession, passing

resolutions of interposition, and terrorizing African

Americans. On the contrary, the sight of federal troops on

Southern soil fueled massive resistance. That year Alabama,

Mississippi, Georgia, and Florida "nullified" Brown. 12

Overall,

eleven Southern states passed more than 450 acts and

resolutions in the decade after the controversial Supreme

Court decision in order to maintain "lily-white" schools. 73

Southerners' deep-seated fear of interracial sexuality

trumped their

enthusiasm for anti-Communism. Not even the threat of

international embarrassment stopped some segregationists

from enforcing their beliefs and biases with violence and

terror. The Southern Regional Council, a liberal organization,

reported more than 530 acts of segregationist violence and

economic intimidation against African Americans between

1954 and 1959. 74

Because of this backlash, direct action campaigns like the

Montgomery bus boycott waned, prompting the historian

Adam Fair-clough to call the period between 1956 and 1960

the "fallow years." 75

Even Martin Luther King, Jr., found

himself in a tactical conundrum. "No matter how many

cheers he received or how many tear streaked faces

assured him that lives were transformed," Taylor Branch

notes, "tomorrow's newspapers still read pretty much like

today's. Segregation didn't disappear." 76

The NAACP, legally

banned from operation in Alabama and starkly curtailed in

Texas and Arkansas, avoided confrontation with white

authority and instead sponsored legal cases, which slowly

crept through the courts. 77

The Southern Christian

Leadership Conference (SCLC), created in 1957 to parlay the

Montgomery success into a national movement, and the

Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), a mostly Northern

organization formed in 1948 to protest racial segregation,

had yet to come up with a strategy that would mobilize the

masses. Roy Wilkins, the head of the national NAACP,

recognized the threat posed by massive resistance. "The

race," Wilkins said, "is in a life and death struggle for all the

ground it has won since Reconstruction. Between the

ruthlessness of the South and the what-the-hell attitude of

the North, we could lose." 78

Although civil rights organizations confronted increasingly

hard sledding in the years after Montgomery, the "fallow

period" actually yielded a fertile crop of campaigns. As

Montgomery had in the 1940s and 1950s, these struggles

focused national attention on sexualized violence toward

African Americans and the sexual exploitation of black

women at the hands of white men. Reaction

to the Brown decision was sexually charged and it unfolded

in a Cold War context that confined civil rights movements,

yet made "sex cases" especially useful for organizing

purposes. Federal sensitivity to world opinion, and the

existence of a left-wing media that spotlighted black

women's testimony, brought the issue of white-on-black

rape to the forefront of the freedom struggle. Indeed,

Montgomery, Alabama, and Little Rock, Arkansas, were nor

the only places in which attacks on black women fueled

protests against white supremacy.

Often ignored by historians, a number of these campaigns

led to trials and even convictions throughout the South. For

perhaps the first time since Reconstruction, Southern black

communities could imagine state power being deployed in

defense of their safety and respectability as men and

women. This was clear in Tallahassee, Florida, where Betty

Jean Owens, an African-American college student, stood in

front of an all-white jury in 1959 and testified about being

kidnapped and gang-raped by four white men. "All eyes,"

Roy Wilkins argued, "will be upon the state of Florida." 79

CHAPTER 5"It Was Like All

of Us Had Been Raped"

onmay 2, 1959, fourwhite men in Tallahassee made a pact

(as one of their friends testified in court later) to "go out and

get a nigger girl" and have an "all night party." They armed

themselves with shotguns and switchblades and crept up

behind a car parked alongside a lonely stand of scrub pines

and blackjack oaks near Jake Gaither Park. When they

reached the car, Patrick Scarborough pressed his sixteen-

gauge shotgun against the driver's nose and ordered

Richard Brown and his companions out. Dressed in formal

gowns and tuxedos, the four African Americans reluctantly

stepped out of the car. All were students at Florida A&M

University (FAMU), where R&B crooner Roy Hamilton had

sent a "capacity audience ... into musical bliss" at the

Orange and Green Ball that night.

Scarborough forced the two black men to kneel, while his

friend David Beagles held the two black women at

knifepoint. 1

When Betty Jean Owens began to cry, Beagles

slapped her and told her to "shut up or she would never get

back home." Waving his gun, Scarborough ordered Richard

Brown and his friend

Thomas Butterfield back into the car and told them to leave.

As Brown and Butteffield moved toward the car and then

slowly drove away, Edna Richardson broke free and ran to a

nearby park, leaving Betty Jean Owens alone with their

attackers.

Beagles pressed the switchblade to Owens's throat and said,

"We'll let you go if you do what we want," then forced her to

her knees, slapped her as she sobbed, pushed her into the

backseat of their blue Chevrolet, and drove to the edge of

town, where he and his friends raped her seven times. 2

When the four armed white men in Tallahassee forced

Thomas Butterfield and Richard Brown to drive away,

leaving Betty Jean Owens at the mercy of their assailants,

the two black freshmen drove around the comer and waited.

As the blue Chevrolet disappeared down the street, Brown

and Butterfield hurried back to the scene. Edna Richardson,

the black woman who was able to get away, saw her friends

from her hiding spot, called out to them, and then ran to the

car. Hoping to save Owens, the FAMU students rushed to the

local police station to report the crime. 3

Similar situations in other Southern towns had often left

African Americans without police aid. Although the

Tallahassee police were not known for repression and

brutality, they were hardly friendly toward African

Americans, who made up nearly 40 percent of the city's

population. Frank Stoutamire, the chief of police, was a

genial if temperamental man who sold eggs out of the trunk

of his patrol car to blacks and whites and often ignored

violations of the county's ban on liquor. Russell Anderson, a

minister at FAMU, remembered that Stoutamire "stayed in

power by playing the races against each other." He would

"act like he was a friend of the blacks when he was around

them," Anderson said, but he "let it be definitely known that

he was a white man's man." 4

In 1937, for example, investigators implicated Stoutamire,

then the Leon County sheriff, in a gruesome double

lynching. Police arrested Richard Ponder and Ernest

Hawkins, two black teenagers, for robbing a downtown

business and threatening an officer with a knife. They were

in the county jail no more than a few

hours when four men with paper bags over their heads

kidnapped the youths at gunpoint. They drove them three

miles outside of town and riddled their bodies with bullets,

then left the scene littered with hand-painted signs warning

blacks to "stay in your place." Only Stoutamire and the

police chief knew who held the keys to the county jail, but

the investigation was quickly shelved. 5

By the time

Stoutamire became the chief in 1953, he relied more on

threats than on violence, but his policemen never hesitated

to enforce white supremacy. They issued bogus tickets when

it served their own interests, sent detectives to spy on and

infiltrate black organizations, and harassed African

Americans relentlessly. 6

Stoutamire and his officers were off the night Betty Jean

Owens was attacked. The officer on duty in Florida's capital

city that evening was Joe D. Cooke, Jr., an energetic

nineteen-year-old intern from Tallahassee who was majoring

in criminology at Florida State, the all-white local university.

Much to the surprise of the three black students, he called

for backup and eagerly agreed to look for Owens and her

assailants.

After a lengthy search, one of the students finally spotted

the blue Chevrolet and shouted, "That's it!" It was just after

four a.m.

[Image: Scene of the crime where four white men from

Tallahassee, Florida, kidnapped and taped an African-

American college student.]

[Image: Joe D. Cooke, Jr., an intern from Florida State

University, defied racial conventions when he agreed to

search for the white assailants of an African-American

college student.]

Deputy Cooke turned on his flashers and drove alongside

the car. Attempting to escape, the kidnappers led Cooke

"twisting and turning" through the dark, tree-lined streets of

Tallahassee "at speeds up to 100 miles per hour." One of the

white men suggested "dumping the nigger," but William

Collinsworth, a twenty-four-year-old married telephone

lineman, said, "We can't now, he's on our tail." Finally,

Collinsworth pulled his car to the curb, grabbed his shotgun,

and got out of the car. The young deputy drew his pistol and

ordered all four to line up against the car or, he Threatened,

"I will shoot to kill." 7

As they waited for assistance from Cooke's supervisor, they

heard muffled screams coming from the car. Richard Brown

and Deputy Cooke peered through the rear window and saw

Betty Jean Owens bound and gagged, lying on the backseat

floorboards. Brown tried to help her out of the car, but as

her feet touched the ground, she collapsed. Cooke drove

Betty Jean Owens and her friends to the local colored

hospital, while Deputy Sheriff W. W. Slappey arrested the

four white men and drove them to the jailhouse. 8

Laughing and joking on the way to the police station, the

four white men apparently did not take their arrest seriously

nor think they had done anything wrong. Collinsworth, for

example, worried less about the charges against him than

about the safety of his car. Deputy Sheriff Slappey revealed

his disgust when he handed the men over to Sheriff

Raymond Hamlin, Jr. "They all admitted it," Slappey said.

"They didn't say why they did it, and that's all I'm going to

say about this dirty business." William Collinsworth, Ollie

Stoutamire (the sixteen-year-old cousin of police chief Frank

Stoutamire), Patrick Scarborough, and David Beagles, whom

the Pittsburgh Courier called the "element which sports

duck-bill haircuts," confessed in writing to abducting Owens

at gunpoint and having "sexual relations" with her. When

Sheriff Hamlin asked the men to look over their statements

and make any necessary corrections, Beagles, a high school

senior and part-time service station attendant, smiled and

bent over the table. He made one minor adjustment before

he and his friends were hustled off to jail. 9

If the four white men did not take their arrests seriously,

students at FAMU, a historically black university that

anchored middle-class black life in Tallahassee, did. Many of

them were veterans of the Tallahassee bus boycott in 1956,

a Montgomery-inspired campaign that highlighted both

students' preference for direct action and their willingness

to rally behind the protection of black womanhood rather

than the plodding litigation favored by the NAACP. 10

White

authorities had charged Carrie Patterson and Wilhelmina

Jakes, roommates at FAMU, with "inciting a riot" after they

refused to move to the colored section of a city bus on May

26, 1956. As in Montgomery, the women who fueled the

boycott fought for the dignity of their personhood. They

were "real upset," Jakes said later, that bus drivers "were

treating us like criminals ... like we weren't human

beings." 11

A burning cross on the front lawn of their home baptized

them into the struggle and galvanized the black community

into action. A student-led boycott forced the city bus

company to shut down, five months faster than the boycott

in Montgomery. Despite economic

intimidation, constant police harassment, and violence,

African Americans stayed off the buses. At a mass meeting

in June, C. K. Steele, a Baptist minister who helped lead the

boycott, said that blacks would rather "walk in dignity than

ride in humiliation." 12

Steele had preached at Hall Street

Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, during the 1940s,

when the Recy Taylor and Gerrrude Perkins cases shook up

the ministers and mobilized community action. He arrived in

Tallahassee in 1952 and quickly became a community

leader. Steele's experience in Montgomery and strong

relationship with civil rights advocates in Florida and

throughout the South made him a natural mentor for the

FAMU students. "Without the students," he insisted, "there

would be no movement." "They are the militants--they're

your soldiers." The buses were finally integrated in the

spring of 1957, two years before the four white men armed

themselves to kidnap and rape Betty Jean Owens. 13

When FAMU students heard news of the attack on Owens

and the subsequent arrest of four white men, a small group

planned an armed march to city hall to let city officials know

that they were willing to protect black womanhood the same

way whites "protected" white womanhood--with guns.

Mainstream student leaders persuaded them that an armed

march was "the wrong thing to do" and patched together a

"Unity" demonstration only twelve hours after Betty Jean

Owens was admitted to the local colored hospital. 14

As the four white men sat in jail, fifteen hundred students

filled Lee Auditorium, where Clifford Taylor, president of

FAMU's Student Government Association, said he "would not

sit idly by and see our sisters, wives, and mothers

desecrated." Using language white men in power could

understand, student leaders professed their "belief in the

dignity, respect, and protection of womanhood" and

announced that they would petition the governor and other

authorities for a "speedy and impartial trial." 15

[Image: On May 4, 1959, more than one thousand Florida

A&M University students gathered on the university's

quadrangle to demand justice for Betty Jean Owens, who

was brutally raped by four white men two nights before.]

Early the next day more than a thousand students gathered

in the university's grassy quadrangle with signs, hymns, and

prayers aimed at the national news media, which sent out

stories of the attack across the country. The students

planned to show Tallahassee and the rest of the nation that

white men could no longer attack black women without

consequence. Student protesters held signs that declared,

"It could have been YOUR sister, wife, or mother." Some

students linked the attack in Tallahassee to larger issues

related to the black freedom struggle: two students held up

a poster depicting scenes from Little Rock, Arkansas, that

read, "My God How Much More of This Can We Take." 16

It was the deeply personal issue of rape, however, that gave

the students their focus. Patricia Stephens Due, a Miami

native and student at FAMU, remembered feeling helpless

and unsafe. "We all felt violated, male and female," she

recalled. "It was like all of us had been raped." Student

leader Buford Gibson, speaking to a crowd, universalized the

attack when he said, "You must remember it wasn't just one

Negro girl that was raped--it was all of Negro womanhood in

the South." 17

[Image: From left to right: Patrick Scarborough, David

Beagles, Ollie Stoutamire, and William Ted Collinsworth.]

By using Betty Jean Owens as a black everywoman, Gibson

challenged male students to rise up in protest and then

placed the protection of black womanhood in their hands.

Unlike white men who historically used the protection of

white womanhood to inspire mob violence, Gibson's speech

inspired students at Florida A&M to maintain their

nonviolent demonstration.

At about the same time, white men in Poplarville,

Mississippi, used the "protection of womanhood" as

justification for the lynching of Mack Charles Parker, a black

man who was charged with the kidnapping and rape of a

twenty-four-year-old white woman who could barely identify

him in a police lineup. Two days before his trial, a group of

eight to ten white men obtained keys to Parker's unguarded

jail cell, savagely beat him, and then dragged him

screaming down three flights of stairs. FBI agents located

Parker's bloated body floating in the Pearl River on May 4,

1959, just

two days after four white men gang-raped Betty Jean

Owens. The Parker lynching cast a shadow over Tallahassee,

brutally reminding the black community that white women's

bodies were off limits, while the bodies of black women were

fair game. 18

The accelerating media coverage, student-led protests, and

a threat to boycott classes at Florida A&M forced circuit

court judge W. May Walker, a white-haired former firefighter,

to call members of the grand jury into special session in

Tallahassee on May 6, 1959. More than two hundred black

spectators, mostly students, squeezed into the segregated

balcony at the Leon County Courthouse to catch a glimpse

of Betty Jean Owens and her attackers before they retreated

into the secret hearing. Still undergoing hospital treatment

for injuries inflicted during the attack and for "severe

depression," Owens was accompanied to the courthouse by

a nurse, the hospital administrator, and her mother. 19

Gasps and moans sounded from the balcony when, after two

hours behind closed doors, Collinsworth, Beagles,

Scarborough, and Ollie Stoutamire emerged and calmly

faced the judge. When they all pleaded innocent, making a

jury trial mandatory, African Americans roared with

disapproval. Dr. M. C. Williams, a local black leader, shouted,

"Four colored men would be dead if the situation had been

reversed. It looks like an open and shut case." Defense

attorneys for Collinsworrh and Scarborough argued for a

delay, insisting that public excitement threatened a fair trial,

but Judge Walker ignored their objections. For the first time

in Florida history, a judge sent the white defendants

charged with raping an African-American woman back to jail

to await their trial. Echoing the sentiments of the people

around him, a young boy traced "we want justice" in the

dust on the railing of the segregated balcony. 20

Justice was the last thing the black community expected. In

the thirty-four years since Florida began sending convicted

rapists to the electric chair instead of the gallows, the state

had electrocuted thirty-seven African Americans charged

with raping white women. Before this, Florida had led the

country in per capita lynchings, surpassing notoriously

violent states like Mississippi,

Georgia, and Louisiana. From 1900 to 1930 white Floridians

lynched 281 people, 256 of whom were African American.

Throughout its history, Florida had never executed or

lynched a white man for raping a black woman.

Florida's violent history included the "little Scottsboro" case,

involving Samuel Shepard, Walter Irvin, and Charles

Greenlee, black men accused of raping a white woman in

Groveland, Florida, in 1949. After the U.S. Supreme Court

overturned their guilty verdicts in 1951, Sheriff Willis McCall

picked up Shepard and Irvin from Raiford State Prison to

transfer them back to the county. On the way there, McCall

pulled to the side of the road and asked the two handcuffed

men to change the tire, then shot them both in the chest. "I

got rid of them," he told his boss over the radio, "killed the

sons of bitches." Walter Irvin survived the shooting, but

Samuel Shepard died that day. 21

In Tallahassee, memories of the "little Scottsboro" case hung

over the African-American community in 1954 when the

state electrocuted Abraham Beard, a seventeen-year-old

black youth accused of raping a white woman. Apart from

the race of the accused, the Beard case featured an almost

identical cast of characters as the Tallahassee case four

years later: an all-white jury had tried and convicted Beard

in the same courtroom where Betty Jean Owens faced her

attackers. Judge W. May Walker presided and William D.

Hopkins served as the state prosecutor. Harry Michaels,

Patrick Scarborough's attorney in 1959, served as Beard's

court-appointed attorney in 1954. Both the "little

Scottsboro" and the Beard cases revealed the extent to

which the protection of white women served as the ultimate

symbol of white male power and the foundation of white

supremacy. When African Americans in Tallahassee

demanded equal justice for Betty Jean Owens, that

foundation began to crumble. 22

News that four white men would actually face prosecution

for raping a black woman plunged both whites and blacks

into largely

unfamiliar territory. It not only highlighted the bitter ironies

of segregation and "social equality" but allowed African

Americans to make political use of them. According to the

Pittsburgh Courier, the rape case "is the worst headache the

Dixiecrats have ever suffered." All of their "arguments for

white supremacy, racial discrimination, and segregation fall

by the wayside," the Courier argued, and the arguments

against school desegregation seem "childishly futile." "Time

and again," another newspaper editor argued, "Southern

spokesmen have protested that they oppose integration in

the schools only because it foreshadows a total 'mingling of

the races.' The implication is that Negroes are hell-bent for

intimacy, while whites shrink back in horror." "Perhaps," the

writer argued, "as Lillian Smith and other maverick

Southerners have suggested, it is not quite that simple." 23

While prominent members of Tallahassee's conservative

white community expressed their shock and horror at the

rape, they continued to stumble into old narratives about

face and sex. The indictment helped incite age-old fears of

miscegenation and stereotypes of the "black beast rapist."

The historian William H. Chafe argues that "merely evoking

the image of 'miscegenation' could often suffice to ring the

alarm bells that would mobilize a solid phalanx of white

resistance to change." 24

For example, white women around

Tallahassee began to speak openly about their "fear of

retaliation," while young couples avoided parking "in the

country moonlight," as one said, "lest some Negroes should

be out hunting in a retaliatory mood." Reflecting this fear, as

well as the larger concern with "social equality," Florida

legislators, like other lawmakers throughout the South,

passed a series of racist bills designed to segregate children

by sex in order to circumvent the Brown decision and

"reduce the chances of interracial marriage." 25

The extent

to which the myth of the "black beast rapist" was a

projection of white fears was never clearer than when the

gang rape of a black woman conjured up terror of black-on-

white rape. The fact that the black community rallied

around Betty Jean Owens threatened white male power--

making the myth of the black savage a timely political tool.

[Image: State prosecutor William Hopkins.]

[Image: Judge W. May Walker.]

Black leaders from all over the country eagerly used the

rape case for their own political purposes as well. Most

focused on the lynching of black men in similar cases,

placing the crime against Betty Jean Owens into a larger

dialogue about the power struggle between black and white

men. As A. D. Williams, a black businessman in Tallahassee,

put it, "The white men are on the spot." Reverend Dennis H.

Jamison felt that the indictment of four white men indicated

a "better chance at Justice than any involving the races in

the South," but added, "still no white men have ever been

executed." Elijah Muhammad, leader of the Nation of Islam,

used almost the exact same language as white

supremacists, accusing the "four devil rapists" of destroying

the "virginity of our daughters." "Appeals for justice," he

fumed, "will avail us nothing ... We know there is no justice

under the American flag." 26

Nearly all the editorials in major black newspapers echoed

his sentiments.

Ella Baker, the spirited director of the Southern Christian

Leadership Conference (SCLC) and perhaps the most

important grassroots organizer in the South, felt that the

evidence in the Tallahassee case was so strong that "not

even an all-white Florida jury could fail to convict."

Reminding whites of their tendency to mete out unequal

justice toward black men, she warned, "With memories of

Negroes who have been lynched and executed on far less

evidence, Negro leaders from all over the South will

certainly examine every development in this case ... What

will Florida's answer be?" The New York Amsterdam News

called for equal justice, noting that the "law which calls for

the death sentence does not say that Negro rapists should

be punished by death and white rapists should be allowed to

live." The Pittsburgh Courier bet on acquittal, despite the

fact that the case "is as open and shut as a case can be." 27

At the annual SCLC meeting in Tallahassee a few days after

the indictment, Martin Luther King, Jr., praised the student

protesters for giving "hope to all of us who struggle for

human dignity and equal justice." But he tempered his

optimism with political savvy, calling on the federal

government to force the country to practice what it

preached in its Cold War rivalry with the Soviet Union.

"Violence in the South can not be deplored or ignored," King

declared, directing his criticism at President Dwight

Eisenhower; "without effective action, the situation will

worsen." King exploited a political context in which

America's racial problems were increasingly an international

issue. The BBC broadcast segments of the FAMU student

speeches condemning the rape and racial injustice, while

newspapers throughout Europe watched the case closely. A

black soldier stationed in Germany winced when a German

man mocked American rhetoric of democracy. "It is funny

that you are over here to protect us from the Russians," he

said, "when there is no one to protect your people from the

KKK and white Americans." 28

King exploited the chasm between rhetoric and reality to

highlight the injustice of Jim Crow. "It is ironical that these

un-American outrages occur as our representatives confer in

Geneva to expand democratic principles ... It might well be

necessary and expedient," King threatened, "to appeal to

the conscience of the world through the Commission on

Human Rights of the United Nations." This international

angle was a strategy shared by mainstream integrationists,

leftist radicals, and black nationalists alike. Audley "Queen

Mother" Moore, leader of the Universal Association of

Ethiopian Women, petitioned the United Nations Human

Rights Commission in person to end the "planned lynch

terror and willful destruction of our people." She tied issues

of race, gender, sex, and citizenship together by demanding

Justice Department assistance for Betty Jean Owens's tape

case, an FBI investigation of the Mack Charles Parker

lynching, and basic voting rights. 29

Robert F. Williams, militant president of the Monroe, North

Carolina, chapter of the NAACP and leader of the defense in

the 1958 "Kissing Case," insisted that African Americans

stand their ground and defend themselves. The Parker

lynching, the Tallahassee rape case, and two local cases

where white men stood accused of attacking black women

inspired Williams to defend racial pride and black

womanhood. On May 5, 1959, Williams and a group of angry

black women converged on the Union County Courthouse to

hear testimony in two trials. Georgia Davis White, a maid at

the Hotel Monroe, accused Brodus F. Shaw, a white railroad

engineer, of bearing and kicking her down a flight of stairs

after she allegedly disturbed his sleep. The judge dismissed

the charges against Shaw, even though he did not show up

for court. That same day white jurors giggled while Mrs.

Mary Ruth Reed, a pregnant black sharecropper, testified

that Lewis Medlin, a white mechanic, attempted to rape her

in front of her five children. In an effort to get help, she

scooped up her youngest child and ran across a field. Medlin

knocked her down and pummeled her until a neighbor

finally heard her screams and called the police. In court,

Medlin's attorney argued that he had been drinking and was

"just having a little fun." Then, turning to the white jurors,

the attorney pointed to the woman sitting next to Medlin.

"You see this pure white woman, this pure flower of life?" he

said. "... This is Medlin's wife ... Do you think he would have

left this pure flower, God's greatest gift," he asked, "for

that?" Reed burst into tears as the jury broke for

deliberation. Less than ten minutes later they returned a not

guilty verdict. 30

The black women with Williams were furious. Before the

trial, they had wanted to "go and machine gun [Medlin's]

house," but Williams had urged them to let the courts

handle it. "We would be as bad as the white people if we

resorted to violence," he told them. Since the judge and jury

had virtually laughed Reed out of court, the women blamed

Williams. "I had kept the black men in the community from

killing this man," Williams said bitterly. The shocking

indifference of the verdict enraged Williams. "We didn't have

as much protection as a dog down there," he said later,

"and the Government didn't care about us." Turning to the

reporters left in the courtroom, Williams demanded a

response. "We cannot rely on the law," he said. "We get no

justice under the present system. If we feel that injustice is

done, we must right then and there on the spot be prepared

to inflict punishment on these people.... If it's necessary to

stop lynching with lynching," he argued, "then we must be

willing to resort to this method." 31

Williams's exhortation set

off a national controversy, culminating at the 1959 national

NAACP convention where the executive secretary, Roy

Wilkins, suspended Williams for his stance. Williams

defended his position by citing the tragedy in Tallahassee.

"The young prom escorts of the co-ed who was kidnapped

and raped at gunpoint by four white men in Tallahassee," he

insisted, "would have been justified in defending the girl had

they had weapons." "We as men," he stated to the

delegates, "should stand up as men and protect our women

and children." 32

Roy Wilkins shared Williams's gender and race politics but

not his methods for achieving justice. In a letter to Florida

governor

LeRoy Collins, a moderate segregationist with national

political ambitions, he invoked the lynchings of Mack

Charles Parker and Emmett Till, noting that the victims' skin

color alone kept them from receiving a fair trial and that

their deaths created political embarrassment at home and

abroad. "Full punishment has been certain and swift in cases

involving a white victim and a Negro accused," he said, "but

the penalty has neither been certain nor heavy in cases

involving a Negro victim and a white accused ... For these

reasons," Wilkins threatened, "all eyes will be upon the state

of Florida." 33

On June 12, 1959, at least four hundred people witnessed

Betty Jean Owens face het attackers and testify on her own

behalf. Owens approached the witness box with her head

bowed. She wore a white embroidered blouse and a black-

and-salmon-checked skirt. Gold earrings drew attention to

her close haircut and sharp cheekbones. The African-

American press cast her into the role of respectable

ladyhood by characterizing her as a middle-class coed

"raised in a hard-working Christian household" with parents

devoted to the "simple verities of life that make up the

backbone of our democracy." Unlike white women, who were

often able to play the role of "fair maiden" before a lynch

mob worked its will on their alleged attackers, Betty Jean

Owens had to tell her story in front of hundreds of white

people in a segregated institution. She knew that the four

white men who raped her might go unpunished. 34

Rain pattered against the courtroom windows as state

prosecutor William Hopkins asked Owens to detail the attack

from the moment she and her friends left the Florida A&M

dance. "We were only parked near Jake Gaither Park for

fifteen minutes," she said, when "four white men pulled up

in a 1959 blue Chevrolet." She identified Patrick

Scarborough as the man who yelled, "Get out and get out

now," as he poked the shotgun into her dare's face. When

Owens began to cry, David Beagles pressed a "wicked

looking foot long knife" to her throat and forced her down to

the ground. He then pulled her up, slapped her, and said,

"you haven't anything to worry about." Owens testified that

Beagles pushed her "into the car and the boy with the knife

then pushed my head down in his lap and yelled at me to be

quiet or I would never get home." "I knew I couldn't get

away," she said. "I thought they would kill me if I didn't do

what they wanted me to do." 35

She continued with the horrible details. As the car pulled off

the highway and into the woods, "the one with the knife

pulled me out of the car and laid me on the ground." Owens

was still wearing the gold and white evening gown; they

tugged at her dress and, she testified, "pulled my panties

off." She then told how each one raped her while she was

"begging them to let me go." "I was so seated," she said,

"but there was nothing I could do with four men, a knife,

and a gun ... I couldn't do anything but what they said."

Owens testified that the men eagerly watched one another

have intercourse with her the first time around but lost

interest during the second round. "Two of them were

working on raking the car's license plate off," she said,

"while the oldest one" offered her some whiskey. "I never

had a chance to get away," she said quietly. "I was on the

ground for two or three hours before the one with the knife

pushed me back into the car."

After the men collectively raped her seven times, Owens

continued, Stoutamire and Beagles blindfolded her with a

baby's diaper, pushed her onto the floorboards of the car,

and drove away. When she heard the police sirens and felt

the car stop, she pulled the blindfold down and began

yelling for help. After police ordered the men out of the car,

Owens recalled, "I was so scared and weak and nervous that

I just fell on the ground and that is the last thing I

remember." 36

Betty Jean Owens then described the physical injuries she

sustained from the attack. "One arm and one leg," she said,

"were practically useless" to her for several days while she

was at the FAMU hospital. A nurse had to accompany her to

the grand jury hearing a few days after the attack, and she

needed medication for

severe depression. She also had a large bruise on her breast

where the bodice stay from her dress dug into her skin as

the four men pressed their bodies into hers. Asking her to

identify some of the exhibits, her lawyer William Hopkins

flipped open the switchblade used the night of the attack,

startling some of the jurors. Immediately the three defense

attorneys jumped up and called for a mistrial. "By flashing

the knife," they argued, "Mr. Hopkins tried to inflame the

jury and this prejudiced their clients' constitutional rights to

a fair trial." Judge Walker denied their motion, signaling

Hopkins to continue.

When asked whether she consented, Owens clearly told

Hopkins and the jury, "No sir, I did not."

"Was it against your will?" Hopkins asked.

"Definitely," she replied. 37

Defense attorneys grilled Owens for more than an hour,

trying to prove she consented because she never struggled

to get away, and that she actually enjoyed the sexual

encounter. "Didn't you derive any pleasure from that? ...

Didn't you?" attorney Howard Williams yelled repeatedly.

Williams kept pressing her, "Why didn't you yell or scream

out?"

"I was afraid they would kill me," Owens said quietly.

She showed signs of anger when Williams repeatedly asked

if she was a virgin, attempting to characterize her as a

stereotypical black jezebel. Owens retained her composure,

refused to answer questions about her chastity, and resisted

efforts to shame her. The defense made a last-ditch effort to

discredit Owens by arguing that if the young men had

actually raped her and threatened her life, she would have

sustained more severe injuries. 38

Proceeding with the state's case, attorney Hopkins called

the doctors, both black and white, who had examined

Owens after the attack. They told the jury that they found

het in a terrible condition and that she "definitely had sexual

relations" that caused injuries that required a five-day

hospital stay. Richard Brown, Thomas Butterfields, and Edna

Richardson took the stand next. They all corroborated

Owens's testimony, adding that after the attack,

Owens was "crying, hysterical, and jerking all over." Brown

testified that Scarborough pointed the shotgun into his car

window and ordered him and Butterfield to kneel in front of

its headlights. Defense attorney John Rudd, a city judge who

had been especially rough on African Americans during the

1956 bus boycott, asked Brown on cross-examination

whether it was a "single or double barrel shotgun they

pointed into your car?"

Brown replied, "I only saw one barrel, sir."

Laughter rolled down from the balcony, upsetting Rudd. "I

cannot work with this duress and disorder at my back, a

boy's life is at stake here!"

Judge Walker called for order and reprimanded the

spectators. 39

When the prosecution finally rested its case at eight-thirty

p.m., defense attorneys moved for a directed verdict of

acquittal, claiming the state failed to prove anything except

sexual intercourse. Judge Walker denied the motion and

insisted the defense return the next day to present their

case.

Amid a sea of people in the tiny courtroom, David Beagles, a

towheaded eighteen-year-old high school student with a

crew cut, sat rigidly on the stand, pushing a ring back and

forth on his finger as he answered questions from his

attorney. His mother buried her head in her arms as she

listened to her son tell the jury his side of the story. Beagles

testified that he had a knife and Collinsworth had a shotgun.

The four of them, he said, were out "looking around for

Negroes who had been parking near Collinsworth's

neighborhood and bothering them." When they came upon

the Florida A&M students, Beagles admitted holding the

switchblade, but then said he put it away when he saw they

were dressed in formal wear. He admitted that they ordered

Brown and Butter-field to drive away, but insisted that he

"asked the girls to get into the car." He denied the rape,

arguing that Owens consented and even asked them to take

her "back to school to change her dress."

Under cross-examination, Beagles admitted that he "pushed

her, just once ... not hard," into the car; that he said, "If you

do

what we want you to, we'll let you go," and then blindfolded

her with a diaper after the attack. Defense attorney Howard

Williams then asked Judge Walker to remove the jury, as

Beagles detailed the confession he made the night of the

crime. Williams argued that when police officers arrested

the young men, they "were still groggy from a night of

drinking," making their taped confessions inadmissible.

Under Hopkins's cross-examination, however, Beagles

admitted that his confession was entirely voluntary and that

he actually looked over the written statement and made an

adjustment. 40

Patrick Scarborough, a twenty-year-old who was AWOL from

the air force, admitted that he was married to a woman in

Texas and testified that he had intercourse with Owens

twice. He emphatically denied using force, despite the fact

that he acknowledged that there was one shell in the barrel

of his shotgun and two in the magazine. When Hopkins

questioned him, Scarborough admitted that Owens pleaded,

"Please don't hurt me," but insisted that she offered "no

resistance." He denied kissing her at first, and then said he

kissed her on the neck while he had sex with her. 41

Defense attorneys tried a series of contradictory approaches

to win over the jury. First, they focused on discrediting

Owens instead of defending their clients, because the

prosecution repeatedly drew self-incriminating information

from them. Then they tried to use each man's ignorance to

prove his innocence, highlighting their low IQs and poor

educations. When that failed, they detailed the

dysfunctional histories of each defendant. Attorney Harry

Michaels told the jury that Patrick Scarborough's juvenile

record was the result of a sorry childhood. His mother died

when he was born, Michaels told the jury, his father

committed suicide shortly thereafter, and his grandparents

reared him.

Similarly, character witnesses for William Collinsworth

described his sordid home life and drinking problem. Nearly

every member of Collinsworrh's family took the stand,

spilling sorrowful stories about their poverty and

dysfunction. His sister,

Maudine Reeves, broke down on the stand and had to be

taken to the hospital. His wife, Pearlie, told the jury through

sobs and tears that he was "nor himself when he was

drunk," but when he was sober, "you couldn't ask for a

better husband." She failed to mention on the stand what

her letter to the judge made explicit: that her husband

regularly beat her.

Unable to achieve any real sympathy, defense attorneys

switched gears and attempted to portray their clients as

reputable young men who were incapable of rape. Friends

and family members lined up to testify that these young

men "were good boys" and that defendant Ollie Stoutamire

in particular had dropped out of school after the sixth grade,

but had "nothing but pure and moral intentions." 42

Finally, the defense appealed to the jury's prejudices in both

more and less predictable ways. Owens was a jezebel, they

insisted, and could not have been raped. But attorneys for

Collinsworth blamed his actions on the "Indian blood"

pulsing through his veins. Pensacola psychiatrist Dr. W. M. C.

Wilhoit backed him up when he argued that "it is a known

fact that individuals of the Indian race react violently and

primitively when psychotic or intoxicated." When

Collinsworth added alcohol to his "Indian blood," Wilhoit

argued, "he was unable to discern the nature and quality of

the crime in question."

The attorney for Stoutamire, City Judge John Rudd, blamed

"outside agitators." The defendants are "being publicized

and ridiculed to satisfy sadists and people in other places,"

Rudd yelled during closing arguments. "Look at that little

skinny, long legged sixteen-year-old boy. Does he look like a

mad rapist who should die ... Should we kill or incarcerate

that little boy because he happened to be in the wrong

place at the wrong time?" 43

In their summations to the jury, defense attorneys S. Gunter

Toney and Harry Michaels followed Rudd's lead. "The crime

here is insignificant," they said. "... The pressure, clamor,

and furor are completely out of proportion." Pointing to

Scarborough, Michaels told the jury "his motives, intentions,

and designs that

night were wholesome, innocent and decent." The fact that

Owens could "have easily walked ten feet into the woods

where nobody could find her," Michaels said, proved that

she consented. Waving her gold-and-white gown in front of

the jury, he pointed out that it was "not soiled or torn,"

which he said proved no brutality was involved. Finally, he

called for an acquittal, arguing that the jury could not

possibly convict on the basis of "only one witness-- the

victim, and confessions that admitted only one fact--sexual

intercourse." Sitting in the segregated balcony, Charles U.

Smith, a sociologist at Florida A&M University, gasped when

he heard Williams yell, "Are you going to believe this nigger

wench over these four boys?" 44

In his closing argument, prosecuting attorney William

Hopkins grabbed the shotgun and Betty Jean Owens's prom

dress and appealed to the jury for a conviction. "Suppose

two colored boys and their moron friends attacked Mts.

Beagles' daughter ... had taken her at gunpoint from a car

and forced her into a secluded place and regardless of

whether they secured her consent or not, had intercourse

with her seven times, leaving her in such a condition that

she collapsed and had to be hospitalized?" Betty Jean

Owens, he said, "didn't have a chance in the world with four

big boys, a loaded gun and a knife. She was within an inch

of losing her life ... she was gang-raped SEVEN times."

"When you get to the question of mercy," he told the jury,

"consider that they wouldn't even let that little girl

whimper." 45

Restless spectators, squeezed into every corner of the

segregated courthouse, crowded back into their seats when

jurors emerged after three hours of deliberation with a

decision. An additional three hundred African Americans

held a silent vigil outside. A. H. King, the jury foreman and a

local plantation owner, slowly read aloud the jury's decision

for all four defendants: "guilty with a recommendation for

mercy." The recommendation for mercy saved the four men

from the electric chair and, according to the Baltimore Afro-

American, "made it inescapably clear that the death penalty

for rape is only for colored men accused by white women."

[Image: African Americans and whites outside the Leon

County Courthouse in Tallahassee eagerly await the verdict

of four white men accused of raping Betty Jean Owens, a

black college student.]

A. H. King defended the mercy ruling by arguing that "there

was no brutality involved" and insisted, implausibly, that the

decision would have been the same "if the defendants had

been four Negroes." 46

Judge Walker deferred sentencing for

fifteen days, cleared the courtroom, and sent the four white

men to Raiford prison.

African Americans who attended the trial quietly made their

way home after the bittersweet verdict. The Pittsburgh

Courier reported that "throughout Negro Tallahassee, there

was resentment that the rapists had not been given the

death sentence." The verdict cast a pall of gloom, the article

continued, "thick enough to be cut with a knife." Betty Jean

Owens's mother told reporters that she was "just happy that

the jury upheld my daughter's womanhood." Reverend A. J.

Reddick, former head of the Florida NAACP, snapped, "If it

had been Negroes, they would have gotten the death

penalty." "Florida," he said, "has maintained an excellent

record of nor veering from its pattern of never executing a

white man for the rape of a Negro," but he acknowledged

that the conviction was "a step forward." Owens showed a

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