While the World Watched (5 page)

One year Sixteenth Street Baptist Church formed a church tennis team. I immediately joined. Miss Effie Jewett McCaw, a single woman who taught school and later became a principal, served as our first tennis coach. The YMCA on Eighteenth Street South, although segregated, allowed us to practice on its tennis court. My tennis partner, Richard Young, and I, as well as other church youth, took tennis lessons there from Miss Effie.

Miss Effie loved the church children. A woman full of fun and life, she sat in the back pews of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church congregation on Sunday mornings and whistled the hymns while everybody else sang them. She reminded me of a little canary back there, her gentle whistle rising above the voices, organ, and piano. I have never known anyone since who could rival her “gift of whistle.” I adored Miss Effie. She never married or had children of her own; maybe that's why she took such a genuine interest in us.

I also looked up to Mr. John T. Smith, another church member at Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. Mr. Smith managed the public swimming pools in Leeds, Alabama, a small city about twenty miles east of downtown Birmingham. At that time, swimming pools, like everything else, were designated “whites only” or “coloreds.” Rather than fight the desegregation battle, Birmingham closed all its downtown city pools—both black and white. Even Memorial Park on the south side closed its “all black” pool, so during the hot, steamy Birmingham summers, children had no place to swim.

The whites-only swimming pool in Leeds remained open during those long, hot days when most neighboring cities had closed their public pools. For one week in June and the last week in August, Mr. Smith, the pool's black caretaker, closed the Leeds pool for cleaning, maintenance, and repairs. During those weeks, the church filled up its bus with children and drove us to the Leeds pool, where Mr. Smith met us and allowed us to swim. We'd arrive at the pool around nine o'clock in the morning and stay till four o'clock in the afternoon. Church mothers packed a bunch of food for us to eat—sandwiches, chicken, fruit, and cold drinks. Moms sat on the edge of the pool while their youngsters splashed and played in the cool water, keeping a close eye to make sure no youngsters drowned. The adults from church took every opportunity to encourage and compliment us. I can still hear them happily calling to us, “Oh! You do such a good job diving off the high diving board!” “Why look, Carolyn's not afraid to jump off.”

I often wondered about Mr. Smith and “his” swimming pool.
Do the white people of Leeds know that colored children from downtown Birmingham are splashing around in their swimming pool? Did Mr. Smith get special permission for us to use the pool those weeks?
I'll probably never know, but some of my most wonderful summertime memories happened at the “whites only” swimming pool in Leeds, Alabama.

As a child and youth, I had little contact with white people. Sometimes a white inspector came to our school and filled out a report sheet, or I might see white department store clerks when we bought various items. But it wasn't until I went to college that I actually had a conversation and interaction with a white person. Blacks and whites lived together in the same city, but we truly lived in
separate
worlds. As Eugene “Bull” Connor said in one of his classic malapropisms, “White and Negro are not to segregate together.”
[5]
I never questioned the Birmingham laws that illegally enforced segregation of public facilities—facilities that both black and white citizens paid tax dollars to build and support.

In reality, I was much more aware of places that were off-limits by Daddy's orders than by state mandate. Daddy made sure we obeyed his rules, but I don't remember his ever speaking about Birmingham's Segregation Racial Ordinances, let alone bringing a copy into the house. His strict rules were designed as an invisible form of protection for us, and in many ways they reflected Birmingham's segregation laws. For instance, he wouldn't let us ride the city bus. We did ride the school bus, but if the six of us needed to go anywhere else, either Mama or Daddy drove us.

Daddy told us never to cross the railroad tracks that led into North Birmingham. He gave us no reason, but he no doubt knew that Klan members such as Robert Chambliss and Bob Cherry lived in that part of town. I always suspected that Daddy, as an “invisible” waiter, learned more at the Birmingham Country Club about Klan activities than he ever wanted to know.

When Mama took us to the bargain basement sales in the Loveman's and Pizitz department stores, we never asked why we couldn't try on clothes. Mama would hold up a pair of jeans marked “irregular” to a brother's hips and try to ensure that each pair had enough leg length to last through the whole school year. She knew she couldn't return the jeans if they didn't fit. When we walked into Pizitz, we could smell the food and see the grand spiral staircase that led to the whites-only mezzanine café. We watched white people eating in the mezzanine, but we never asked why we couldn't go up those stairs. It was just the way things were.

Mama became acquainted with a kindhearted white woman who worked at the Parisian Shoe Store in downtown Birmingham. Mama watched for the sales and then gathered all us children every so often to buy shoes there. The salesclerk allowed my brothers, my sister, and me to actually
try on
new Sunday shoes, as well as Hush Puppies and penny loafers for school, before we bought them. When we went shoe shopping at Parisian's, Mama packed each one of us a freshly laundered pair of white socks. The white woman purposefully watched Mama take off our socks and slip a clean pair on our feet before we tried on the shoes.

When the new Jack's fast-food restaurant opened near our home, we begged to go there to buy French fries. My greatest desire was to walk into Jack's, sit down at the lunch counter, and order French fries with ketchup. Mama never told us that only white children could do that. She just said, “Children, we don't have money to spend on French fries! I can buy a week's worth of groceries for what we'd pay for those fries!” We took her at her word, and we hushed about it.

During those days I didn't think much about the signs that hung above water fountains, toilets, bus station waiting rooms, restaurants, theaters, and other public places. The truth is, our parents kept us close to home so we would have minimum exposure to the signs and to white people. By the time I could read, I learned I could use any things or places marked “coloreds,” and I could not use those things or places marked “whites only.” What I had not yet learned was the depth of hatred that mandated those segregation laws. It seemed that what people learned at their churches on Sundays about unity and love they placed on the shelf during the remainder of the week. We were engaged in a no-win hate war. But as long as we black people “stayed in our places,” our community was relatively safe.

One day while my mother shopped at Pizitz during a bargain basement sale, my little brother, Kirk, stood on his tiptoes and drank from a whites-only water fountain. A white man approached Kirk and told him he could not drink water from that particular fountain. My mother overheard the scolding and stood up to the man. “He can't read the ‘whites only' sign,” she said. “He's only five years old!”

I was aware of the signs, but my family never talked about them. I didn't feel angry or inferior because I had to use the toilets that were marked “coloreds.” Not until Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. came to our church and called the signs and other inequalities to our attention did I really start to notice them and their underlying message. Dr. King pointed to the drinking fountains and said, “See these signs? They shouldn't be here. These are the things we're trying to change.” Dr. King told us that we ought to be able to use the public water fountains in the city because “all water is God's water.” I couldn't have understood at the time that the signs were symbolic—and symptomatic—of deeper issues within our society. I would soon have a rude and painful awakening.

* * *

Being born halfway in and halfway out of the Civil Rights movement, I had questions: Was it an advantage or a disadvantage? Did God intend for me to be in the middle of the vicious struggle between blacks and whites during the 1960s? And if so, for what reason? At the time I couldn't see any blessing in those closed doors, but in the years since, I have learned that God makes no mistakes. All the things that happened to me were working together for good. I was caught in a particular moment of national history, smack in the middle of a city known as the nation's hotbed of racial injustice and violence. But even as young as I was, I felt that God was watching and that he would, indeed, bring good out of this situation. No matter how bleak things looked to me, I trusted God to work this out for the good of my community. I had to trust.

In the midst of everything, I had a strong fortress, a refuge from the violent world around me—Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, the sanctuary where I could freely worship God and find peace, safety, and security within its strong, comforting, brick walls. And I had the stained-glass face of Jesus in the window looking down upon me with his love, approval, and assurance of protection against the hostile world outside.

That is, until the morning of September 15, 1963.

Chapter 3

The Strong One

* * *

Carolyn . . . your name means “strong one.” Whenever you are called by your name,
Carolyn
, the person is also calling into your life the strength you own through your name.

My grandfather, Reverend Dr. Ernest Walter Burt

Few will have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation.

Robert F. Kennedy

“Three minutes,” the mysterious caller had said. As I placed the receiver back in its cradle, I pondered the call for a few seconds. Then I remembered I had not yet collected the adult Sunday school reports.

* * *

I took seriously my responsibilities at church. Reverend had entrusted me with adult-size jobs, and my grandfather had instilled within me long ago a deep sense of sacred honor in doing God’s work. My grandfather’s confidence in my abilities made me hold my head a little higher. Whenever my grandfather came to Birmingham, my bedroom became the guest room, and I gladly gave it up for him. He loved the lunches I prepared for him—usually tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches. He would compliment me as though I had prepared a gourmet meal.

My grandfather was an amazing man. He believed in giving his children and grandchildren names that meant something, like parents did in biblical times.

“Names have a purpose,” he explained. He told me that every time a person says my name, he or she is recalling the attributes of my name into my very lifeblood.

I later found out that
Carolyn
also means “little champion.” My schoolteachers and some family members referred to me as “stubborn.” But I like “little champion” (or perhaps “determined”) much better.

I didn’t understand the full meaning of my grandfather’s statement about the power of names until I grew up. And in remembering his words, I saw another aspect of who my grandfather was—a person who used every means possible to bring something positive and admirable into the life of a little girl of color who lived in the heart of racially segregated Birmingham. True to his occupation, he created teaching moments in everything he did.

* * *

Several years earlier, my “strong one” name had been severely challenged. It was August 1957, and I was nine years old. For the first time in my young life, I didn’t feel very strong. My grandfather pulled his car into our family’s front yard and honked the horn. Mama and I and the rest of the children ran outside. I peeked in the car’s backseat and saw my grandmother, Mama Lessie. Grandfather had placed her head on a bed pillow and wrapped her frail body in blankets. In the August heat, she lay very still, and I saw pain written across her face.

“I think it’s time we took Lessie to the hospital,” Grandfather whispered to my mother. “She’s been hurting and bleeding for a while now. I fear something bad is wrong with her.”

Grandfather and Daddy lifted Mama Lessie in their muscular arms, took her inside the house, and laid her on Mama’s bed. Not long after, Mama told them she felt we needed to call an ambulance. The ambulance took my grandmother to nearby Princeton Hospital, and we followed by car. I expected the nurses to put her in a clean room in the main hospital ward, where doctors could treat her and make her well.

They didn’t. They took Mama Lessie down the back stairs into the bowels of Princeton Hospital and placed her on a small bed. Other people of color lay down there, too, moaning and groaning in unrelieved pain.

“Why are they putting Mama Lessie in the basement?” I asked Mama.

“Never mind, Carolyn,” she said. “Just help us get her settled.”

I looked around the basement where my beloved grandmother lay on her back, still and quiet. It was a small, closed-in space, with sweating water pipes climbing across the walls and ceiling. Big drops of water fell onto the cold, brick-and-cobblestone floor.

“Carolyn, you’ll be staying here with Mama Lessie and taking care of her while I’m at work. After I get off, I’ll bring her supper, and you can go home and rest. But she needs someone to stay with her all the time down here, and since you are the girl-child . . . well, it’ll be your job.”

“Will we have to stay down here in the basement?” I asked.

“Yes, Carolyn, and I’ll depend on you to take care of her while she’s here in the hospital.”

It was a tremendous responsibility for a nine-year-old. I felt like a big girl, and I was proud I’d been asked to help. But I also felt afraid. I loved my grandmother. I wondered what the future held for her. And for me.

My hope for my grandmother’s recovery faded day by day as I sat in the basement of Princeton Hospital and watched her suffer. I sang the song I had heard so many times before at my grandfather’s church. The words always gave me strength and courage:

All along this Christian journey,

I want Jesus to walk with me.

I want Jesus to walk with me.

All along this Christian journey,

I want Jesus to walk with me.

In my troubles, walk with me.

When I’m dying, walk with me.

All along this Christian journey,

I want Jesus to walk with me.

I want Jesus to walk with me.

I had never seen Mama Lessie like this. She was only fifty-four years old, but she looked much older. To pass the hours, I counted the beads of water as they dropped from the pipes. Then I counted the redbrick squares on the floor and thought about my life with Mama Lessie and all the wonderful things I’d done with her and learned from her. I didn’t want any of that to end.

* * *

Born in Columbiana, Alabama, my grandmother had a gentle nature and soft-spoken ways. She never yelled at me—not once. She never punished me either. When I needed correction, she instructed me in a gentle and loving way, always teaching me lessons about life and love and God as she disciplined me. Mama Lessie was a good writer and organizer. She had the ability to sound out words and then write them down correctly. I have been told by family members that I inherited my gift of spelling from my grandmother.

My grandmother had told me I was precocious. I had no idea what that meant, but she said it with a smile on her lips and a twinkle in her eye. I spent most of the summers at my grandparents’ house while my mother took classes. Together each summer, Mama Lessie and I worked at the vacation Bible schools in Granddaddy’s two churches, as well as other churches that had only occasional guest pastors and no full-time pastors. We taught the children how to make pot holders out of yarn and how to glue rice, glitter, and tinsel to paper plates to make collages for their folks. We also created the final programs, held after each session.

When all the vacation Bible schools ended, I would watch Mama Lessie sew at her old sewing machine. She made clothes for her five daughters throughout their lifetimes, and she also made curtains for the windows and sewed quilts for the beds. Afternoons with my grandmother meant picking greens, cabbage, okra, and tomatoes in the small garden my grandfather planted in the backyard each spring.

“Why do you and Grandfather always eat so much cabbage and okra?” I asked her once.

Mama Lessie smiled. “It’s because we both wear dentures, Carolyn, and we raise and cook the things we can eat.”

Oftentimes, Granddaddy came home from work, put us grandchildren in the backseat of his car, and took us to pick wild strawberries and blackberries along the roadside. We’d take the berries back to Mama Lessie and eat them as fast as she could wash them.

Sometimes my grandfather took us into downtown Clanton. He had befriended just about everybody in that city, both black and white. He was the person folks called for advice, prayer, and practical help when someone got into trouble or ended up in jail. He was the one people went to when a baby was born or when someone in the community died or when a couple wanted to get married or when someone needed food or money. At that time in the South, black preachers represented God’s own voice and guidance. My grandfather was respected for two reasons: he was a preacher, and he had a college degree.

“Come meet my grandbabies!” he would call out with pride to Clanton’s barber or grocer or dry cleaner. Then he would call out our names, one by one, and introduce us to his many friends.

I especially liked those summers in Clanton when it was just Mama Lessie and me. She would walk me across the street to Miss Daisy’s beauty shop and sit me in the small room built onto the side of Miss Daisy’s house. Then she would stay beside me while Miss Daisy washed and pressed my hair and put real curls in it. Like my father, my grandparents never let me walk anywhere alone. Not even across the street to Miss Daisy’s.

“Things can happen to little black girls,” my grandfather once told me. I later learned that those “things” meant rape. This was one of the reasons he and my grandmother wouldn’t even let me walk across the street alone from their house to get my hair done. Mama Lessie told me there had been incidents of young black girls walking to the store or to a relative’s house who were picked up by a carful of white men, raped, and then abandoned. It was commonplace in the South—the greatest fear all black parents had for their girls. Most of these rapes were reported but went unpunished. My granddaddy wanted to protect me, to keep me safe.

“You’re our special granddaughter,” Mama Lessie often told me while Miss Daisy curled my hair. My grandmother made me feel so loved. At my home in Birmingham, I just felt like one of six kids. But at Mama Lessie’s, I was special—an individual, precious,
girl
-grand-
child
. She had, after all, raised five very special daughters of her own.

* * *

In the basement of Princeton Hospital during those long two weeks, I stayed by Mama Lessie’s side. Various doctors came down infrequently, pulling a small white partition around the bed to offer my grandmother some limited privacy. They checked her heart and took her blood pressure but didn’t do much to treat her actual illness. And no doctor ever spoke to the frightened little black girl who trembled in the chair beside the dying woman. I felt invisible.

Hired hospital help brought in food trays on a pretty regular schedule, but Mama Lessie never ate a bite. I kept looking into her face as I sat beside her, hoping she would talk to me. But she never said a single word during those weeks at Princeton Hospital. Not one word.

With each passing day, my fears grew, until they were as tall as the old apple tree my grandfather had planted long ago behind the garage at his Clanton home—the tree his children and grandchildren climbed to pick green apples. I was confused. No one told me why Mama Lessie had gotten sick or if she would ever recover and come home. During those dark days my name should have been “the timid one” or “the scared one,” not Carolyn, “the strong one.”

Mama Lessie became weaker and frailer with each passing day. At times I closed my eyes and fought hard to remember my two favorite photos of her—her wedding picture and her graduation picture.

* * *

My grandfather had married Lessie Lane sometime around her sixteenth birthday. In the lone, faded, wedding photograph, she is looking directly into the camera, her eyes serious and somber, her small body robed in a full-sleeved, polka-dot wedding dress. Her soft, dark hair is smoothed stylishly around her youthful face, with a slight puff of hair combed just so to rise from the top of her head. A large round medallion hangs from her neck. In her hands she holds an assortment of wildflowers—nothing fancy. Perhaps she stopped the buggy and picked them from a roadside field on the way to her wedding.

From Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” Speech

I say to you today, my friends, that in spite of the difficulties and frustrations of the moment, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.”

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slaveowners will be able to sit down together at a table of brotherhood.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a desert state, sweltering with the heat of injustice and oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

I have a dream today.

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

I have a dream today.

I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.

This is our hope. This is the faith with which I return to the South. With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.

This will be the day when all of God’s children will be able to sing with a new meaning, “My country, ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrim’s pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring.”

And if America is to be a great nation this must become true. So let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire. Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York. Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania!