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281 note on sources A historical era as complex and controversial as the twentieth-century civil rights movement cannot easily be compressed into a single volume, nor understood from one specific vantage point. The “long” civil rights era in the United States surely dates from the first introduction of African slaves into Virginia in 1619, and it has evolved—and continues to evolve—in many forms. Historians can identify a series of civil rights time periods, but such distinctions are necessarily arbitrary. The common perception of the modern movement o#en focuses on the period between the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education (that segregated schools were inherently unequal and unconstitutional) and the rise of the black-power movement in the mid-1960s. This story is a personal account of one family’s experiences in a single community during only a three-year period within this brief time. My account presents the perspective of a family of white northerners living in a suburb of Birmingham, Alabama, from 1961 to 1964. My father, Rev. Norman C. “Jim” Jimerson, served from August 1961 until August 1964 as executive director of the Alabama Council on Human Relations. He was the only white person working full time in the field of civil rights in the state. This is his story. But it is also the story of our family: of my mother’s efforts to support Dad and to nurture and protect four (and soon five) children in an o#en hostile environment; of my coming of age as the eldest child trying to comprehend the powerful social forces at play during the civil rights struggle; and of my younger brothers and sisters as they sought their own understandings of what we were experiencing. We happened to live in Birmingham during some of the most tumultuous years of the era: the time of Bull Connor’s police dogs and fire hoses; of Governor George Wallace’s vow to defend segregation forever and his defiant pose blocking two African American students from entering the Univer- 282 note on sources sity of Alabama; of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Leer from Birmingham Jail” and his “I Have a Dream” speech during the March on Washington; of the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church and the deaths of four young girls; of the murders of other children and civil rights activists; of the assassination of President Kennedy; of the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Our family’s story recounts how we responded to these events, how the daily experiences of life in a segregated society affected concerned white people seeking social justice, how our childhood perspectives juxtaposed adult realities. This is a family memoir, not a history of the civil rights movement. It shapes and presents past experience in ways that, I hope, remain true to my emotional memory of events. These stories reflect the perspective of a young teenager trying to make sense of momentous events that profoundly affected me and my family. In trying to present this story as authentically as possible from my youthful perspective, I have chosen not to include detailed footnotes and references to each source of information used for historical background or fact-checking. Most of what I learned as a boy about the South and civil rights came from my father. I remember numerous conversations about civil rights activities and issues during dinner, or during family devotions in the evening. A#er fi#y years or more, I clearly cannot remember exact conversations— with a few memorable exceptions—but I have reconstructed the essence of such discussions based on both my own memory and documentary sources, including oral history interviews, correspondence, my father’s reports to the Southern Regional Council, newspaper and magazine clippings, and family papers. In 2003 I transcribed or copied many of these sources in a booklet I compiled for family members, called Peacemaker in Birmingham, 1961– 1964: Rev. Norman C. Jimerson and the Alabama Council on Human Relations . Copies of this booklet are available at the Birmingham Public Library, the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, and the Alabama Department of Archives and History. In writing this memoir I have quoted many of these documentary sources directly; in others I have recast them as conversations. I have taken some liberties in shaping the wrien language into conversational speech, but I have tried as much as possible to retain the authentic voices, mood...

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