State of Defiance: Challenging the Johns Committee's Assault on Civil Liberties

3. Ruth Perry: The Librarian Raises Her Voice

3 Ruth Perry The Librarian Raises Her Voice Ruth Perry sat rigidly in the witness box, clenching her fists and facing the television cameras. Her strained expression reflected not only the tension of a possible jail sentence but also the escalating effects of three years of threats against her life, her reputation, and her career. A few feet away, her would-be assassins smirked and jostled one another. It was February 25, 1957, and members of Miami’s White Citizens’ Council were eager spectators for the Johns Committee’s latest hearing. Council members had occupiedthe front rowsofthecourtroomsinceearlymorning.Theywereready for a showdown, but so were Ruth Perry and the NAACP.1 Perry was one of the local NAACP officials closely involved in the Miami chapter’s fight against the committee. She served the organization as an activist, journalist , and witness; she also foiled the Johns Committee’s strategy to portray the Florida NAACP as Communist influenced. • Fortunately, Perry’s early years prepared her well for civil rights work in the South, for she described herself as “not strictly Northern or Southern in [her] outlook . . . [but] a mixture of two viewpoints.”2 The granddaughter of a slaveholding Confederate officer who was with General Robert E. Lee at Appomattox, Perry grew up in both Ithaca, New York (home of Cornell University), and Williston, South Carolina, a town named for her father’s upper-middle-class family. She spent her summers in Williston but attended elementary through high school in Ithaca, where schools and churches were integrated.Herfather,FrancisMarionWillis,wasasuccess- 42 | State of Defiance ful dentist, and Perry grew up surrounded by educated people. Under her father’s influence, Perry developed a great love for books and respect for a variety of ideas. Dr. Willis was also interested in politics, and the Willises were among the very few Democrats in Republican-dominated Ithaca. Thus Perry’s childhood experience with divergent viewpoints provided good training for a future activist.3 Perry’s later strength of character also emerged from her strong relationship with her father. She admired him, and he encouraged her strong work ethic and perseverance. In a letter written shortly after Perry graduated from Drexel University in Philadelphia with a degree in library science , and just before she began her first job at Cornell University, Dr. Willis praised her for becoming a well-educated woman. (She had previously earned a degree in English from Converse College in South Carolina.) He concluded his letter by predicting the moral courage that his daughter would demonstrate in the future, telling her, “Later in life you will learn that character is everything.”4 Dr. Willis could not have been surprised when his daughter eventually married a soft-spoken, liberal man who admired Eleanor Roosevelt almost as much as Perry herself did. Walter Dean Perry, the son of an Ithaca family, was three years younger than his wife. By all accounts, theirs was a successful marriage, and Perry regarded him as her best friend. Although he did not attend college, Walter Perry was very well read. A professional horticulturist,hewasalsoanenvironmentalistlongbeforethetermentered the English lexicon. In 1940, the Perrys’ first and only child, Caroline, was born.5 In 1945, Perry and her family moved to Miami, and she began working for the Miami Beach Public Library as a cataloguer. In a very short time, she grew to love Florida and could not imagine living anywhere else. She and her husband shared their love of the state as well as their views on politics with their daughter. Perry believed that one of her duties as a parent was to create a better world for her daughter so that she could grow up free of prejudice. At Perry’s dinner table, serious discussions were a regular occurrence, particularly if they focused on current events or the Miami NAACP. With the full support of her family, Perry had joined the local chapter because she was “interested in the Constitutional rights of everyone.”6 As she later explained to a reporter: “Rather than scatter my Ruth Perry: The Librarian Raises Her Voice | 43 effort, I went into the NAACP to do what I could in one area. I feel very strongly that what I am doing (in the NAACP) I am doing for everyone.”7 The Miami chapter, founded in 1935, was the last one chartered in Florida ’s major cities, partly because of the difficulty of enrolling white members . Although all...