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4. Bringing Freedom to the Rocket City
- The University of Alabama Press
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4 Bringing Freedom to the Rocket City I first heard about the sit-in from an old classmate named James Fields, who called me at my office. He told me that Rev. Ezekiel Bell, the pastor of a new Presbyterian church on Meridian Street who had just moved from Memphis, was inviting everyone to a mass meeting in support of students from Alabama A&M and Councill High. He said the students had just started a sit-in campaign at some of the downtown lunch counters and wanted to know if I would attend the meeting, and I said I would. The meeting was to take place at the [black] First Baptist Church downtown , which was one of the few places that could hold large numbers of people. The pastor was not a civil rights militant, but the fact that he was allowing his church to be used was significant. As best as I can recall, the plans for the meeting were made either on the day the sit-ins started, which was the first Wednesday of January of ’62, or the next morning. On both of those days, the students had gone into Woolworth’s and Sears in the Heart of Huntsville Shopping Center and occupied the lunch counter stools for fifteen or twenty minutes. The black community quickly mobilized in the students’ support, and how they did it says a lot about how black people back then were able to communicate and make decisions. They would get on the phone, and one person would then call another until everyone knew what was happening.Mr.Charles Ray— Charlie, we called him—had a van with a loudspeaker on top, and he would drive through the black neighborhoods telling people what was going on and that a meeting was going to be held and where it would be held, and that’s what he did after the students started their sit-ins. Mr. Ray was a cab company owner and a club owner, a man who’d mastered the art of making money and knew his way around the back streets.He was also a man who wanted to be free. He’d meet you on the street and tell you so. And he spoke from the street person’s viewpoint. I heard him get up at one of our Bringing Freedom to the Rocket City / 87 mass meetings later on—this was after several speakers had been describing the effects of segregation in very lofty language—and he says, “When I go downtown , and I’m trying on a one-hundred-dollar suit of clothes, and I happen to be taking a laxative, if the laxative kicks in while I’m trying on the suit, there’s nowhere for me to go. I can’t walk. I have to run.” So the people were itching to show their support for the students, and I agreed to attend the mass meeting with no hesitation whatsoever. When I had come back to Huntsville, I had wanted to get along with everyone, just like Dr. Donalson and Dr. Drake. I had tried to accommodate myself to the system, and my only political act had been registering to vote, which I did in September of ’56, just before I opened my practice. Henry Slaughter, one of my longtime friends, had gone with me to register and take the test. As I recall, there were questions about the Constitution and citizenship. But they couldn’t have been anything like what a friend of mine told me they had inTuskegee, where people with master’s and doctoral degrees were failing the test.1 There was a man in town named Mr. R. C. Adams, a Normandy veteran and house builder, who’d been conducting his own voter registration campaign for years. He was doing it almost every day, and he was doing it all by himself. He’d get in his car and go downtown, grab somebody by the arm and throw him in, take him over to the registration place, help him prepare for the test, and then vouch for him, which was required. And he’d sit there while the guy took the test. Whether you passed or failed depended on the examiner, and even if you passed, you still had to pay your poll tax, which many black people could not afford . As a result, there were just four or five hundred blacks in the county who were registered to vote. So that...