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Save Our History: Voices of Civil Rights Transcript
Speakers: Mekhi Phifer, Woman 1, Woman 2, Man 1, Patricia Stephens Due, Man 2, Gretchen Weber, Woman 3, Woman 3, Man 3, Bettie Dahmer, Man 4, Gene Young, Frankie Rogers, Man 5, Man 6, Man 7, Grace Booth, Kenneth Mullinax, Doxie Whitfield, Man 8, Woman 9, Man 9, Man 10, Adrian Dove, Man 13, Imogene Player, Rev. Adam Clayton Powell Jr., Michael Dizaar, George Wallace, Man 12, Woman 5, Hugo Owens, Woman 6, Man 13, Woman 7, Betty Bunce, Jacqueline Dash Ziglar, Morris Thompson, Hazel LeBlanc Whitney, Billy Roy Pitts, Ellie Dahmer, Man 14, Jean Desmond, Angie Buck
(Music)
MEKHI PHIFER: I’m Mekhi Phifer. As an actor, I know the power of the human voice, and the program you’re about to see contains some of the most powerful voices I’ve ever heard. In the summer of 2004, a group of journalists traveled for seventy days by bus around the country, on a mission to record stories from people who lived through the civil rights era, an era marked by intense emotion, turmoil, and change. The mission, called Voices of Civil Rights, is a project of the AARP, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, and the Library of Congress. Today we are proud to let you hear the words and see the faces of the people who lived through this difficult period in our history. Some of them have been waiting a lifetime to share their stories.
(Music)
(Music)
WOMAN 1: I remember being born in the segregated south of Memphis, Tennessee.
WOMAN 2: We lived back in Arkansas at this time.
MAN 1: In Hattiesburg, Mississippi –
PATRICIA STEPHENS DUE: Tallahassee, Florida –
MAN 2: Masonville, Kentucky –
GRETCHEN WEBER: This takes place in 1963 when I was eleven years old.
WOMAN 3: 1959 or 1960, it’s been a long time.
WOMAN 3: I consider myself a witness, living witness, for the civil rights movement. A lot of people talk about what they hear or what someone has told them, but I am talking about what I went through as an individual.
(Music)
MAN 3: In elementary and high school I kind of felt that there were two Americas, Black America and White America, and I just belonged to Black America.
BETTIE DAHMER: I had grown up in a segregated society.
MAN 4: So you realized very early that you just lived different lives.
WOMAN 1: It didn’t faze me when I young because I thought that was just the way it was supposed to be.
GENE YOUNG: We lived in our Black society and there was the White society.
PATRICIA STEPHENS DUE: No mingling of the races.
FRANKIE ROGERS: When I was a little girl, I used to walk along Madison Avenue holding my daddy’s hand and he’d always take his baby shopping and there was a restaurant called Piccadilly’s. You could always see White people sitting in a restaurant eating and the food looked absolutely scrumptious and it smelled good, like they had the neighborhood almost lit up. I know it had the street lit up. But I was like, why can they eat in there and I can’t? And dad would kind of snatch my hand and say stop staring in there. Daddy was a very proud man, you know, and he just didn’t want me staring and wishing. He used to say those things. Don’t stare and wish you could do things.
MAN 5: The only thing I knew was the Blacks would live right down the road that they were worse off than I was.
MAN 6: We lived on the top of the hill. The Blacks lived down at the bottom of the hill.
MAN 7: We had a wonderful Black woman who was our cook and maid.
GRACE BOOTH: A lady that my mother hired to come and clean –
KENNETH MULLINAX: And it was a wonderful lady by the name of Rosie and Rosie was like my mother. She played with me; she read to me; she cooked. I loved her. I loved Rosie. I still love Rosie. The city bus would take Rosie back home and as the bus got Rosie, I would kiss her on the cheek and she’d kiss me, and one day, right as the bus was leaving and Rosie had kissed me and I had kissed her, all of a sudden I saw my grandfather pounding on that glass window and he told me that I was not supposed to be kissing, to use his term, Negroes, that that’s not something that good White boys did and that it was wrong. And he grabbed me hard by the arm and spanked me and I cried and I ran out. My whole world was turned upside down because what I thought was right was now wrong and I was very, very angry.
(Music)
DOXIE WHITFIELD: We were taught at home that we were just as good as anybody else but in what we called the real world, we always knew that it was different.
PATRICIA STEPHENS DUE: Basically, I think that I was just protected by my parents.
MAN 8: We were kept in sort of a controlled environment.
BETTIE DAHMER: When we went to town, we didn’t eat in restaurants so therefore we didn’t go through the back door.
MAN 9: Our parents in the community tried to insulate us from those kinds of things.
WOMAN 9: We never knew that we were living really in a form of slavery for all of the things we were not allowed to do.
FRANKIE ROGERS: We were only allowed to go to places like the zoo on Thursdays – Thursdays was colored day – to the fairgrounds amusement park on Tuesday because that was colored day.
MAN 10: I remember asking my dad, I said “Dad, let’s go and see this movie at the Strand or let’s go see this movie at the – at the Malco.” He said “Son we can’t go down there.” I said “Why not?” He said, “That’s just for White people.”
ADRIAN DOVE: There was a separate theater and there was only one day a week that you could go.
MAN 10: “Just for White people?”
MAN 4: I loved to read and I couldn’t go downtown to the library.
MAN 10: And I said “What about the fairgrounds?” Same thing.
MAN 4: Why can’t I go there?
MAN 10: And I felt like if they’re advertising it on television, why can’t I go out?
ADRIAN DOVE: We were not allowed. It didn’t mean us.
MAN 2: Once you grew up and you began to read, you start seeing the White only and colored only signs.
PATRICIA STEPHENS DUE: Something so simple as a Dairy Queen and it had a White sign and colored. The colored had to go in the back.
WOMAN 5: The White water fountain was big and tall and then on the side there was this little attachment that looked like a toilet bowl.
MAN 13: You were getting all of these messages all of the time.
DOXIE WHITFIELD: Everything was separate. It wasn’t really equal, it was just separate.
(Music)
IMOGENE PLAYER: Santa would come to town on Christmas Eve and I remember our parents would always take us down to see Santa and he would come through downtown but downtown was roped off. Where we had the viewing area – the viewing area for Black people was different from where the White people could be. They could be lined up on both sides of the sidewalk for blocks down the street and we were all herded off in one little area.
(Music)
MICHAEL DIZAAR: Growing up for me, I had rules. We had do’s and don’ts. First of all, you don’t look a White man in the face. You hold your head down because the first thing he’s going to say “Are you eyeballing me boy?” You don’t say no to any request, even if it’s wrong. The best thing to do is do what they tell you to do and try to get away from them.
GENE YOUNG: Being disrespectful or letting’ someone to have been disrespectful for a White person could result in death. Your elders, your parents, told just to be careful around White people because this is what they would do to you if you got out of line.
MAN 2: I could walk into a room full of White people and within seconds, I could spot the ones that I needed to keep my eyes on.
MICHAEL DIZAAR: You know we couldn’t look at a White man and say, “Man, I don’t want to hear that. I mean, you lying.” “What did you say nigger?”
I used to see people just coming from church and the police pulled up behind them and stop. They get out. “Yes sir. Yes sir.”
MAN 1: A young White kid called my dad boy.
MICHAEL DIZAAR: I’m talking about my big muscle-bound, you know, my uncles and stuff, you know?
MAN 1: I wondered why, you know, he didn’t call him sir.
MICHAEL DIZAAR: “I’m sorry sir.” “Yeah you ought to be sorry. You’re a sorry nigger aren’t you?” “Yes sir.” Stuff like that.
MAN 1: And I asked my dad, “Why did he call you boy?” He said – and he said “That’s the way it is down here, son.”
(Music)
GRACE BOOTH: I remember distinctly seeing the little wooden clip-on sign that said for colored only and those were always placed toward the back of the bus.
ADRIAN DOVE: It was something you just sort of lived with. You saw it every day.
MAN 6: Blacks had to pay money in the front and then walk around to the back door.
MAN 12: And the bus may pull off while you’re going from one door to the other.
DOXIE WHITFIELD: And a lot of times when there were no more seats up front, the White passengers would come to the back and we’d have to still get up and give them our seats.
ADRIAN DOVE: I was about ten years old in 1944. Riding the streetcar home every day, we sat in the back and sat behind the sign. On this one particular day this White kid took the sign and he moved it all of the way to the back row and there was a door at the back on these streetcars so when I got to my stop, I pulled the sign off and stuffed it in my mackinaw and took off running. The kid yelled, “That nigger stole the sign.” And the driver came out, fired a couple of shots. I didn’t know if they were in the air or at me but I’m a sort of a pack rat and I still have the sign. I’ve held onto it. When I got home, my mother said, “You shouldn’t break the law. That’s not right.” And my father said, “If the law is saying that you’re something less than equal, that’s a bad law. Some laws need to be broken.”
(Music)
FRANKIE ROGERS: One day my mom and dad told me, said, “Frankie, one of these days it’s going to be better.”
MAN 4: You didn’t know how, you didn’t know when, but you knew that it had to change.
WOMAN 5: It just wasn’t right, so I just longed for the day that things would change.
WOMAN 6: It was about 1957, and my father took my sister and my brother and I down to the Portsmouth Public Library.
(Music)
HUGO OWENS: We had plenty of books in the house but there were special kinds of books in the children’s area of the library, I’m sure.
WOMAN 6: Dad went over and got a children’s book and put the book up on the desk to get checked out and the librarian said we couldn’t check it out.
HUGO OWENS: And when they told us that I wanted to know why. She said, “Well, colored folks can’t use this library because we have a little library,” the colored library they called it. I said, “Well now, I have been to that library and there we’re limited.” I said, “I look in here and you have books everywhere.”
WOMAN 6: They don’t have these kinds of books down there.
HUGO OWENS: I felt strongly.
WOMAN 6: He stared her down and then finally said “Come on. Let’s go.”
HUGO OWENS: So I took my children home and immediately got in touch with a law firm.
(Music)
WOMAN 6: And we didn’t really pay that much more attention to it until later when he told us that he had filed a suit against the city.
HUGO OWENS: We took it to court. The judge said, “You mean to tell me that some of the taxes that Dr. Owens pays goes to help your library and he can’t use it and his children can’t use it? I’ll tell you what, you have two choices. Lock the library up lock, stock, and barrel or open the library to any tax-paying citizens, Black or White.”
WOMAN 6: It was a feeling of triumph, you know. Like, yes, we can – we can make them do that.
HUGO OWENS: My, my, my.
(Music)
MAN 13: The school year for Blacks when I was a kid in the county school system was just four months a year, because Black kids had to be out to chop cotton and pick cotton.
DOXIE WHITFIELD: At our school, we had outdoor toilets, no cafeteria.
MICHAEL DIZAAR: They would send us way out to a schoolyard in the wood somewhere.
WOMAN 1: They had to pass by three White schools to get to one Black one.
WOMAN 7: Our schoolbooks were always outdated. When we got a textbook, it always had used on it because they were bringing the books from the White schools down to our schools.
DOXIE WHITFIELD: We had to pay a book fee for those books and I remember we didn’t have transportation to get us to school. Everybody walked to school and we would have to walk on the railroad tracks to keep the kids that were in the White bus, because they rode buses, from throwing spitballs out at us. I – we knew it was different.
GRACE BOOTH: When we first moved to New Orleans, I was nine years old and my mother wanted to register my sister and myself for school. We were told that we had to go to a notary to state that we were Caucasian. Now that was an odd experience. My mother actually had to pay a notary and had to parade us into this office. I remember standing there wondering, “Am I really White?” I assumed I was. I always felt that I was but I had never really had to think of myself in that context before. I was a little bit scared that perhaps somehow I wouldn’t make the cut. Maybe I would not be perceived as a White little girl. Evidently, I would end up in a different school away from my friends.
PATRICIA STEPHENS DUE: I thought it was wrong for us to be relegated to older books, old science equipment, and separate schools, but then in 1954 on May seventeenth, a naive ninth grader, I was very excited in Bilby. I was so excited that I thought in September 1954 it would all be over.
CROWD: Two, four, six, eight, we don’t want to integrate.
(Crowd chanting)
JACQUELINE DASH ZIGLAR: I knew that there was segregation that existed. I knew that the Whites did not want to associate with the Blacks, but I had no idea that White people hated Blacks as much as they did until we integrated the schools. I recall the very first day of school. A special bus had been designated for us and we were petrified. We were like little tin soldiers. I didn’t say anything to anyone. None of us talked. There were state troopers and policemen to escort us and to make certain that we would arrive to school safely.
BETTY BUNCE: I had been substituting for a year in the New Orleans public schools. So on a Friday afternoon in early November, I received a call to come to school, McDonogh nineteen, on the following Monday morning to teach a first grade class.
(Crowd chanting)
As we approached the school, police were blocking the intersections. Three little Black girls came up the front steps into the school escorted by three federal marshals. They really didn’t fully understand, I believe, first graders, what was going on.
GRACE BOOTH: I was very confused and actually a little scared about what I was seeing, that things would escalate to this degree with students, some of them whom I knew. I wrote in my diary “I’m so upset I can barely write. Today when I got to school at eight thirty, this is what I saw. Half of the school were across the street, wearing confederate hats, waving confederate flags, and singing. The principal and assistant principal were just standing on the steps, looking across the street at them. All during the day, kids came straggling in in a herd, all sorts of reports that the kids all went downtown to the city hall and beat up Negroes, had a regular riot, exclamation point.”
(Crowd chanting)
BETTY BUNCE: The parents and neighborhood people stood across the street and they jeered and hooted at these children and the federal marshals. This went on the entire school year.
JACQUELINE DASH ZIGLAR: I was placed on the very front row in the class and none of the students in the class would sit next to me. I could hear the students making comments about me and calling me nigger, and I sat there and I trembled.
BETTY BUNCE: One by one, two by two, and in groups, mothers came and claimed their children and proudly marched out the door.
MORRIS THOMSPON: I recall vividly walking the halls of Hall High School and to me, these huge White students standing at their lockers as we walked by, they would press themselves up against the locker and call “Here come the niggers. Here come the niggers.” And move out of the way so we wouldn’t touch them or brush against them. We’d go to our lockers together as a group so when you turned your back to look into your locker, someone else was watching you to make sure that no one hit you with a book.
JACQUELINE DASH ZIGLAR: I remember being up late at night crying and praying and asking God why is it that my classmates hate me so? I know that these people bleed and I bleed. They breathe and I breathe. They walk and I walk.
MORRIS THOMSPON: I used to wake up in the morning feeling fine until I remembered I had to go back to Hall High School and I would literally get sick to my stomach.
JACQUELINE DASH ZIGLAR: I don’t wish what I experienced on anyone, even my worst enemy. I was the first Black to walk across the stage and receive my diploma and I felt joy in knowing that I did not have to return to that school.
HAZEL LEBLANC WHITNEY: I was never able to vote in the state where I was born, beautiful Louisiana. This old gentleman said, “Can I help you?” He had a thick accent. I said, “Yes sir. I want to be registered.” “Register for what?” “I want to register to vote.” “What is your name?” And I gave it. “Where do you work?” “Madison Parish Junior/Senior High School.” He said, “You can’t register here today.” That gentleman turned my name over to the school board and my superintendent Mister Phillip was confronted with the idea that he had a teacher named Hazel LeBlanc, because I wasn’t married then, and that she was a Communist.
And then getting married, we moved to Mississippi and when my husband went down to vote, Reverend S. Leon Whitney, they said, “Okay, you’re a preacher. We’ll let you vote.” Once they found out that I was Reverend Whitney’s wife, “Well we’ll let you vote.” But then when I started talking with my teacher friends and I said to them, why don’t we all get in the car and let’s go down and register to vote, the men looked at us and said, “I’ll tell you what, I’m going to test you.” Right up he said, “You failed.” The next person, “You failed. You failed.” And later we found out that that guy had only finished the eighth grade. So it meant that there was no intent of registering anyone so then Medgar came on the scene with the idea that we’ve got to register to vote.
GRETCHEN WEBER: Medgar Evers was murdered on June of ‘63 and after his murder, there were a lot of memorial services throughout the country, and my father was a minister so he was doing what ministers do. He was presiding at a memorial for someone who had died. And then after that was when the harassment started at our home.
(Music)
Now living next door to us was a fella named Mr. Brugy and Mr. Brugy was a really rough sort of character. He was big and bluff and he had white hair and a bur haircut and a loud voice. He worked for the railroad, and he was a staunch supporter of George Wallace.
GEORGE WALLACE: And I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever.
GRETCHEN WEBER: And this led to many heated backyard discussions between Mr. Brugy and my mother, but he was also our neighbor and this became significant one night when they burned a cross in our front yard.
(Fire crackling)
I remember I was seated on the sofa, which was arranged across the wall that had the big front window in it looking out onto the porch and across the road. I glanced over my shoulder and as I did, I could see that front window just ablaze with the fire, the reflection, and out at the end of the sidewalk, there was this huge cross and it was burning. And they had laid that cross on our grass and they had swathed it with rags and then poured gasoline on it, and then erected it there at the end of the sidewalk where we caught the school bus every morning. And Mr. Brugy grabbed his shotgun and leaped in his car and he took off, trying to chase these people, and he chased them out into the country before he lost them. But for him that night, I believe the civil rights movement acquired a face and the face of that movement was the face of his neighbor.
(Music)
MICHAEL DIZAAR: We knew that the Ku Klux Klans were watching our neighborhood – in our neighborhood. We all were, you know, just frightened. They’d tell you right out “Don’t be out after dark, nigger.”
(Fire crackling)
HAZEL LEBLANC WHITNEY: And one day I was seated at the table with my family. My husband had just asked the blessing. The person came by in their car and they shot –
(Gunshots firing)
Da-da-da-da kind of shooting. So then it meant that we had to take the children away from the house but we couldn’t leave because if they ever shoot in your house and you leave, they’ve just won.
BILLY ROY PITTS: We just believed that Black people was a low-life people and they had no right to vote. They had no right to go to our school. You didn’t ask to join the Klan; you was picked out in a meeting. What I was doing, I actually thought that I was doing the right thing at that time. I really believed in my heart that I was doing the right thing.
ELLIE DAHMER: It was aimed at any Black person who ventured out against what was decided, what Mississippi and the other southern states decided, that a Black person should do.
(Music)
My husband Vernon was self-employed. He grew cotton as a commercial crop. He owned a small sawmill and a grocery store, and we had a gas pump at the grocery store.
BILLY ROY PITTS: They’d run a store by their home and they would register Blacks to vote out of the store.
ELLIE DAHMER: He would pick them up in our car, take them down to the courthouse to register, stay in the office where they took the test, and then he’d bring them back home. We were getting threats all of the time as we were going about our activities.
BILLY ROY PITTS: If you went against the Klan, they would get you back. These were people who got the job done. This was a militant clan. They had four things.
(Music)
(Crowd speaking in background)
(Fire crackling)
They had a warning. They would burn a cross in their front yard. That was the warning. And the next thing was to take somebody out to whoop them. That would be number two. See, they went by numbers.
(Siren)
Number three would be to burn their house down. And number four would be annihilation or to kill someone. So when the Imperial Wizard made the order on the Dahmer family, he called for a number three and a number four.
ELLIE DAHMER: There were two carloads of White men that came out of Jones County.
BILLY ROY PITTS: I was in the number one lead car and I knew what was supposed to take place. I knew what was going to come down. If anybody would come out of that house, in my view, it was my job to shoot them.
(Two gunshots firing)
ELLIE DAHMER: Four of them hit the store; four hit the house at the same time.
(Two gunshots firing)
BILLY ROY PITTS: We put the fire bombs in the house and on the outside of the house, fire bombed the vehicle, shot open the gas tank.
(Gunshots firing)
ELLIE DAHMER: The shots were coming in the house. They were shooting in. I yelled to him to get up. He got up and got the gun and started returning fire.
BILLY ROY PITTS: It was continuously nonstop shooting the whole time.
(Gunshots firing)
ELLIE DAHMER: Vernon was yelling to me “Try to get the children out while I hold them off.”
BETTIE DAHMER: Our house was on fire. When I saw my father shooting out of their bedroom window, I had no idea there were people that were mean enough and cruel enough that would want to kill me, a ten-year-old child.
ELLIE DAHMER: Bettie was screaming all of the time saying, “Lord have mercy, we’re not going to make it out of this burning house.”
BILLY ROY PITTS: I could hear children screaming and the voice of a man screaming out. I’ll never stop hearing those voices.
(Fire crackling)
BETTIE DAHMER: The house was pretty much engulfed in flames. I could still hear gunshots. My father eventually got out of the house.
BILLY ROY PITTS: The other man who was shooting, he made a remark. “I let him die. That’s what we come here for.”
BETTIE DAHMER: I remember my father sitting beside me and the skin was literally hanging off of his arms. I was crying because I was in excruciating pain from the burns that I had received to my arms and to my face. After a while, my aunt came and she took my father, myself, my mother to the hospital. We were in the same room, my father and I were, and he never complained the whole time. But his condition began to deteriorate.
ELLIE DAHMER: If you don’t vote, you don’t count in this world. Those were some of the last words he said. And later on that day, he died.
BILLY ROY PITTS: All he wanted to do was to be like other folks and be able to vote. He just wanted an equal chance at life, and I took that away from him.
(Music)
MAN 14: We were just at a time when Blacks were sick and tired of being discriminated against, rebuffed, denied, overcharged, you name it.
WOMAN 7: And when you get angry, fear seems to leave.
HAZEL LEBLANC WHITNEY: You get to a point where your life is not at the top of your list.
MAN 18: They want to kill me; they can go on and do it.
HAZEL LEBLANC WHITNEY: Before I’ll be your slave, I’ll be buried in my grave. That becomes real.
(Music)
REV. ADAM CLAYTON POWELL JR.: Let the drums roll. Hear the bells. Let the trumpets blare. There’s a new Negro now and he’s moving, and he says to you come on and join me but if you won’t, get out of my way because I’m coming through.
MICHAEL DIZAAR: The word got out; we’re going to let the kids march. We’re asking you, parents, to let your kids march. They want us to march. “What are you going to do?” “What are you doing to do?” “You going? You going?” My mother said, “Don’t get involved. Don’t – don’t get involved. If you go to jail I can’t get you out if you go to jail.” I had already made up my mind.
They gave us signs. I don’t know what the signs said. I didn’t care what they said. We had our designated line. We could only march one foot away from the building. I was tired of walking in this invisible line so I stepped out of the line. I said, “We don’t have to walk like this.” I said, “We’re going to march all over this sidewalk.” And I threw my sign up.
(Dogs barking)
The next thing I know, police started coming up to me with the dogs and when I would go to try to get back in line the police would grab me in the – in the collar. And the dog was coming after me. He acted like he couldn’t – couldn’t hold his dog back enough and the dog was pinching my pants, so I grabbed his hand.
“Take your hand off me nigger. Take your hand off me nigger.” And I just said, “I ain’t going to let that dog bite me.” He said, “Take your hand off.” I said, “I’m ain’t going to let that dog bite me.” I was like, Lord, why are you letting this happen to me?
(Dogs barking)
(Spraying water)
(Music)
GENE YOUNG: Each night you go to watch TV and there on the television screen was young people about my age being bitten by vicious police dogs and knocked over by high-powered fire hoses and they were all singing about this thing called freedom, and I didn’t have a clue what this thing about freedom was all about.
(Music)
I was baptized that day when I walked out of Lanier High School. My brothers had told me that there was going to be a walkout, but I didn’t have a clue as to what a walkout was going to be, but they told me at twelve o’ clock the next day I better walk out of the school. You have no fear as a twelve year old. You just have a sense that this is the most right thing to do be doing, but White law enforcement officials resented the fact that young Blacks had the audacity to come and challenge the system in the way that we did. And as a seventh grade student, for participating in a walkout, I was arrested and taken to the Mississippi State Fairgrounds and incarcerated in the livestock compound. I spent several days in jail there.
When I was released, we went to a mass meeting at the Masonic Temple and the auditorium was filled to capacity. And they asked me, because I was one of the younger ones to get arrested, to get up and try to encourage others to come out and join demonstrations. I was so short; I had to stand up in a chair to reach the microphone. I don’t know what I said that evening but the audience was on their feet applauding and cheering.
(Protestors yelling and screaming)
FRANKIE ROGERS: Things got very, very tense in the city. There’d been beatings. There’d been all kinds of things going on, and so my mom was really afraid for my safety. My mom said “Now don’t you all go to the march. It’s going to be too dangerous,” but my best friend in college at that time said, “Well I want to march.” And I said, “I do too.” So I said, “We’ll be right back Mom. I’m going to the store.” We turned the corner and hey, there were people that were getting ready to march. So Carol and I said “Alright we’re going to march”. Well about thirty minutes later, who would turn the corner but my mama. She had a finger that looked like it was six feet long and she crooked that finger and said, “Come here.” It’s not so much that she was anti-march. She was anti her baby getting hurt.
(Music)
JEAN DESMOND: 1960 or ‘61 in the winter time my daughter Jessica who was in her late teens borrowed her father’s car and she was planning to go between New York City where we lived and Washington to desegregate the restaurants along route forty. And she invited me to go and I thought it was a good thing to do, so I said yes.
There were about five hundred cars and we had to meet just north of the Maryland border. And from all over the big parking lot you heard voices. “We need a Black in our car. We need a Black in our car.” We had to have a Black in every car; otherwise, there was no point to the ride. I was so innocent and naïve that I didn’t realize I was putting myself in danger but what bothered me the most I think was the fact that I was the oldest person there. I was forty years old and these were all kids like my daughter and I was ashamed for my generation that they were not taking part in this.
(Engine revving)
We were told we could go into any restaurant we liked along route forty in Maryland and order coffee.
(Music)
The first one we went to a young White woman said, “I’m sorry. We don’t serve Black people here.” And we said, “We’ll stay until you do.” “Well then I’ll have to call the sheriff.” Only one person in each car was a spokesperson. Nobody else was to say a word and when she said, “We don’t serve Blacks here” I got furious and I started to say something and our spokesman said “No, no.” I’d forgotten, you know. I wasn’t used to – because coming from New York I wasn’t used to that.
(Siren)
And she called the sheriff and he handed her a piece of paper that was a Maryland trespass act and he stood there while she read it. But she was trembling. She was afraid. All of the people along that road were all terrified that we were going to be violent and it was a nonviolent ride. And when she finished we got up and left. So that was one we failed on. We must have hit I guess about twenty restaurants that day and at least four of them we managed to desegregate because they served us our coffee. That’s how we knew it had desegregated.
Now I’m eighty-five years old. I look back at these memories and I’m very grateful that I had the opportunity. I think it’s one of the best things I’ve ever done in my life.
(Music)
PATRICIA STEPHENS DUE: As I sat at the lunch counter people would come in with bats, with a gun, people to harass you. The police came and instead of arresting them, they arrested us. This arrest led to five of us spending forty-nine days in jail and this became the first jail-in in the nation. Of course, I was concerned about what could happen because you could get lost in a Florida jail. But I was also determined. I wanted to make a difference. I wanted to be free, and I would not pay for segregation. We could have paid the fine and we could have gotten out of jail. Instead we went to jail for forty-nine days. We were suspended from college, Florida A&M University. People all around the country wrote to us. People just could not believe that we could be sitting in jail because we went to get a sandwich. If I can’t be a first-class citizen, I’m already dead. How can you kill me when I’m already dead?
DOXIE WHITFIELD: I got out of nursing school in ‘63 and I went to Atlanta, Georgia and got a job at Graydon Memorial Hospital. If you split the hospital in half, everything on A and B was White. Everything on C and D was colored from the ground up. The day that Graydon Hospital integrated, everybody was afraid because we didn’t know what was going to happen.
I received one of the White patients. She was a post-op patient, had just been operated on that day. I put her in her room. Obviously, her husband was not happy. “I don’t want you taking care of my wife. I don’t want your seedy, Black hands on my wife. You leave my wife alone.” I didn’t pay him any attention. I was young. I knew I had a job to do. I was going to do it regardless of what, so I started to take care of her. It was at that moment that he picked me up, carried me to the door, and threw me down the hallway. I just rolled like a little ball down the hall. I was humiliated and I was angry. But I really knew that I probably couldn’t do anything because I would lose my job. So I just picked myself up off the floor, went back in the room.
He had pulled her IV out, disconnected her from everything, picked her up, put her in a wheelchair, and took her out of the hospital. I think it was about three weeks later I was sitting at the desk. I saw him coming through the doors and I said to myself, “Oh my God what does he want now?” I thought he was coming back to beat me up.
“Little lady,” I didn’t say anything at first. “Little lady I’m talking to you.” And I said, “Did you need something?” And he said, “I just wanted to let you know that I’m sorry for putting my hands on you. I should never have touched you. Because of what I did, I don’t have a wife. My wife died and my kids don’t have a mother.” And then he started crying. I saw these tears dropping on top of the desk. In my mind, I was saying, “It’s what you deserve because it didn’t have to be like this. You could have let her stay here. She would have still been alive because I would have taken care of her,” but I knew I couldn’t say that so I didn’t say anything. I just got up from the desk and left. That has stayed with me all of these years. It hasn’t gone away.
(Crowd speaking and shouting)
ANGIE BUCK: My father never reconciled with the fact that his father was murdered by White men. He never trusted the White man and he always told us to be on our guard. He would tell us “Never trust them. Never trust them.” And he always said, “You have to start with the color of their skin.” Sometimes my father was so bitter that if we brought African Americans home that were light skinned, he would say they were tainted.
And I’m appreciative of my mom for telling us and embedding in us that it’s not the color of your skin, it’s the content of your character. And not to judge a person unless you want to be judged the same way. And I think that that could be one of our saving graces for my siblings that we did not have that hardened heart. A lot of lives have been lost and sacrificed to get us where we are and, not to say that you should dwell on the past, but we’re learning from the past and we cannot take it for granted because if we do it would surely come back to haunt us. My father passed away three years ago and he never came to that reconciliation point with the races.
(Music)
BILLY ROY PITTS: I wish that I could live that part of my life over. My brother convinced me to go to the FBI and I did. I told them all of it over. I pleaded guilty in federal court to conspiracy. I was sentenced to five years in prison. I prayed on my knees for many a night that God would forgive me for the awful things I had done to the Dahmer family and to other people. It wasn’t just them. I often wondered what would I do if I met up with the Dahmer family. The day Dahmer Jr. walked into my cell at Hattiesburg, I didn’t know what to say or what to think when he walked in. He said “Billy Roy just take it easy. Don’t get upset.” He said, “I want to tell you something.” He said, “I’m speaking for my mother and I and the entire family.” He said, “We forgive you for what you’ve done.” It was like, you know, God had more than answered my prayers. The Dahmer family approached the governor and asked the governor for a pardon for me and he did. He gave me a full pardon. If someone had done that to me, had killed my father, I wonder if I could do the same thing.
MEKHI PHIFER: The stories you just heard are only a fraction of the more than a thousand already collected by the Voices of Civil Rights Project. If it weren’t for this ambitious effort and the generosity of the storytellers, these powerful oral histories might well have been lost forever. As it is, all of them now have a permanent home at the Library of Congress. You can find them now or tell your own story by going to . For the History Channel, I’m Mekhi Phifer. Thanks for watching.
(Music)
(Music)
[End of Audio]
From “Save our History: Voices of Civil Rights.” Adapted with permission.
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