Introduction

This chapter of David Wallechinsky's book Midterm Report, The Class of '65 is on this website for many reasons. Among them, the story of Pearl Thomas Mitchell's life as a civil rights activist illustrates just how powerful and important an armed citizenry can be (and is) for the cause of civil rights and freedom. You will also notice the unwavering commitment exhibited throughout this woman's activism now so sorely needed in the civil rights movement for the Second Amendment. Finally, we hope you see yourself -- in some way -- in Pearl Thomas Mitchell, and that your own increased participation in today's modern liberty movement will bear fruit that flies in the face of our 21st Century Redcoats.

If you find this tale of Pearl's life as a civil rights activist too lengthy, scroll down to the sections where quotes are bolded and enlarged to glimpse the role guns played in securing the civil rights for which she labored. Our hats are off to David Wallechinsky for interviewing Ms. Mitchell and telling this tale. Information about how to obtain his book can be found immediately below.

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THE ACTIVIST:
Pearl Thomas Mitchell

(This is a chapter from a book called Midterm Report, The Class of '65 (Chronicles of an American Generation) by David Wallechinsky. If this subject matter interests you, you can get the book from: Viking Penguin Inc., 40 West 23rd Street, New York, New York, 10010, U.S.A. Copyright David Wallechinsky, 1986.)

I have heard it said that what became known as “the sixties” didn’t really start until late 1966 or so, when the Vietnam War escalated dramatically and, with it, antiwar protests. In some areas of the country this was probably true, but for some people, particularly in the South, “the sixties” began much earlier.

“I don’t know why they are protesting,” said Edward Bailey, the white mayor of Demopolis, Alabama, on April 22, 1965. “We’ve integrated all the restaurants, cafés, public parks, theaters, and given them anything they wanted. When I asked them what they wanted, all they could answer was, ‘Freedom.’

The civil-rights movement, beginning with the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott in 1955-56, captured the attention of the media, not only in the United States but throughout the world. Camera crews and re­porters rushed around the South to spread the news of the latest sit-in, march, or demonstration. Many towns experienced this sudden and short-lived glare of attention. But after the press packed up and moved on, the citizens of these towns, white and black, were left behind with their conflicts and hostilities unresolved.

Such a place was Bogalusa, Louisiana, a muggy paper-mill town near the Mississippi border. It is my habit when visiting a new city. immediately to seek out the local health-food store and the local bookstore. This benign practice had sobering results in Bogalusa, where the paper business is dying, the population is declining, and many folks have to drive thirty miles or more to find work. There was a health-food store, but its shelves were bare except for some old dried fruit and a few bottles of vitamins. A new shipment of supplies was due “sometime next week.”

Next door was the bookstore, but it sold only used paperbacks. If Boga­lusans ever have a craving to buy a new book or a loaf of whole-wheat bread, they have to drive at least a half hour to another town to meet their needs.

In May 1965 most class-of-‘65ers were buying dresses, suits, and corsages for their graduation ceremonies and parties. At Central Memorial High School in Bogalusa, however, many of them were busy demonstrating for equal rights and integration, instead.

I found black Bogalusans quite willing to discuss the civil-rights movement. I was told repeatedly that if I really wanted to hear about what had taken place in Bogalusa in 1965, I should find Pearl Thomas. This turned out to be easier said than done. It took two months of persistent sleuthing to obtain the phone number of Pearl’s home in Oakland, California.

Initially, she resisted meeting with me. “White people have studied black people to death,” she said. Eventually she relented, and invited me to her house. When I arrived, Pearl was wearing jeans and a Jesse Jackson T-shirt. Over the door to her bedroom was a sign, a souvenir from Bogalusa, that read “Colored Women.” Her television set looked as if it had been hit by a tornado. She explained that her TV didn’t work well because she was always throwing things at it. “I buy old TVs at Goodwill,” she said. “And I keep a rubber brick next to my chair, so I don’t do too much damage.”

We settled down at her dining-room table and I asked her why she admired Jesse Jackson.

She replied without hesitation. “Jesse Jackson’s presidential candidacy gave hope to black children. I had to eat my words about him, because I had always considered him a self-serving person. I was suspicious. But he evolved and grew, and I became proud of him. I cried during his whole speech at the Democratic Convention. My heart went out to him.”

Pearl and I spent a few minutes exploring each other’s political beliefs, and then I told her that while in Bogalusa I had heard that one of the last lynchings in the United States had taken place just outside of town. I asked Pearl if she recalled the incident.

I was in the sixth grade going into seventh grade. This black man, Mack Charles Parker, was lynched, supposedly for raping this pregnant white woman. It was in the spring, in April. That was a gloomy day. It was dark, it seemed, at four o’clock. Everybody knew that it was going to happen. Everybody knew. Parents had their children in. You couldn’t find anybody on the streets that night. Everybody knew that this was going to happen. And they were totally helpless—couldn’t do anything about it. Sure enough, when the paper came the next morning—he had been taken out of the jail and he had disappeared. They didn’t find the body for days. They dumped him in the Pearl River. That touched me. It really, really touched my life, kept me in knots, not sleeping at night, depressed for weeks.

The Klan in Bogalusa had organized the whole bit. One of the big leaders was a store owner; we had to run him out of business because he was supposedly a big mover and shaker. Supposedly his maid had washed his clothes and there was blood all over them. Whether that was true or not, it was spread like wildfire in the black community. And people stopped patronizing him. It wasn’t a planned thing. It was word of mouth. He had progressed from a mom-and-pop-type operation to a big supermarket. And we shut him down without making any big fan­fare about it.

By this time I had seen the meanness in the whole process. There were separate drinking fountains; we couldn’t use the public library; we couldn’t use the public park. We had colored and white benches at the hospital. The doctors had two separate waiting rooms. There was a white cemetery and a colored cemetery.

My blood father died in an accident when I was seven months old. I lived with my grandmother on a farm for a goodly portion of my early life and probably would have lived with her longer except that my family thought that the schools were better in Bogalusa, and I was always considered very bright. My grandmother and my uncles taught me how to read. I started living with my mother when I was six. She was a domestic and my stepfather was a milkman until he was declared legally blind because of cataracts. My mother had ten children all together and I was second. My mother and stepfather didn’t hang out with the upper crust, if you will—if you could call anything in Bogalusa upper crust. You know, the teachers and the morticians and the preachers, and some of the Crown-Zellerbach workers. We always owned our own house, shabby as it may be, because that was important to my family.

We lived on what they now call the cul-de-sacs. We called them dead ends. The block I was on was all black, of course. But the next block was white. Out on the farm with my grandmother I didn’t come in contact with white people. The area was all black. Nobody ever told me that if somebody hit you, you weren’t supposed to hit them back. So when somebody hit me, I would hit back. The white kids would play with us and then the people in the neighborhood would tell you things like “You better not hit that white girl.” That was a problem because I never stopped hitting when they hit me. They were really poor white trash. I mean they were renting their houses. So we thought we were better, because all the people on our block owned their homes or at least were buying them. They were more outcast than we were.

We would exchange comic books and that kind of stuff, and in the summer we’d have real good softball games. That was okay, but there were some boundaries. I remember my mother used to send me and my brother to the store, and this white boy—he was much older than we were—he lived in that next block from us and he was just mean. Oooh, he was mean. And he was a baby. He was the only boy out of a whole bunch of girls. My brother was probably around nine and I was probably around seven. We went to the store very peacefully, and when we came back, his father told him to go out and beat up my brother.

He hit my brother and he kicked him. And my brother was afraid to hit him back. We went home and I told my mama what happened, and she said, “Well, the next time, just walk on the other side of the street.” That blew my mind. I said, “I’m not walking on the other side of the Street.” No. Not me. So I was constantly in trouble with the white kids. I think we had a little respect for each other because white folks knew I was going to fight. Simple as that.

A white girl worked at the corner store and she was friendly and would play. Talked with us and traded comic books, True Confessions and what have you, until white folks were around. One day I paid her and I touched her hand. And she said, “Oh, get that nigger off me.” I forgot myself. I was twelve years old. I jumped over the counter and we were down between the wall and the counter. And we went to Fist City. The man who owned the store was Italian. Well, they couldn’t very well make a big stink out of it because black people were supporting the store. Of course, I got into big trouble.

But I didn’t care, because a long time ago I decided I wasn’t going to be anybody’s nigger. It was just a decision I personally made with myself. And when anyone called me a nigger at that time, he was prepared for a fight. If had to go in white kids’ yards to get them, if they called me nigger, we were going to fight. I’d come home, my dress was torn off at the waist, hair all over my head. And I’d get into trouble—but I was going to have these fights. I just had an attitude.

I would not take that treatment from the black-run school either, because black people can treat other blacks as niggers, too. I think I had more control over white people calling me a nigger than I did over black people treating me as if I were a nigger. I resented the caste system. Color, basically, was the essence of the caste system. The businesses for the most part in the black community were owned by fair-complexioned blacks. The Creoles. And Ray Charles can see that I don’t look like any of that.

The summer after my junior year, Bogalusa celebrated its golden jubilee and they had a citywide essay contest for black students. I won the contest and got a trophy. In the meantime, things were happening around us. They had this bi-racial committee that the mayor had hand­picked. He had picked his boys and they were sitting around meeting and conferring.

One day we went to the café, the drugstore that had soda fountains and counters. We decided we would go in and order an ice-cream sundae. You would have thought that was the Second Coming. Within ten minutes the world knew it. I mean, the drugstore was closed immediately. They got us out of there and it was closed. Then the black leaders decided they would have to do something, because they could not keep us isolated from the rest of the world. Something was going to happen. But they were still meeting and conferring, meeting and conferring, and nothing was happening.

I was working for one of the black leaders at the time, one of the mayor’s boys. He owned the Dairy Palace, a malt shop, and I was a waitress. He was always telling me that progress was being made and things were going to happen. We had a couple of meetings in January 1965, and students were getting restless. So we set up what was supposed to be a “test day”—that was something that the mayor’s bi-racial committee had agreed to. We were going to “integrate” key restaurants in Bogalusa. We would go in all prearranged. The restaurant owners knew that we were coming and were asked to indulge these niggers for this one day. They weren’t going to do it again: It was just going to be this one-day thing. They had this whole thing set up. They had the transportation here, there, and everywhere.

My partner and I went to this restaurant over at the wrong side of town, and we were supposed to be able to call back in. Well, we couldn’t call back. And they were boiling grease in a deep fryer, and my heart was “thump, thump.” But finally somebody showed up and we got our sandwiches and we left. Well, they ranted and raved about how smoothly things went. I mean, they had had it their way, and that was supposed to be the end of integration in Bogalusa.

By this time, representatives of CORE had come into town and started scoping the place, if you will. Giving advice and what have you. I was in school and hearing bits and pieces and slipping out, going to meetings when I could, because my mother had not become involved at that point. This was about the time that Selma was taking place. There were those who were dying to get there, and slipping off. My mother never knew that a group of us slipped off to go on the march with Martin Luther King.

The first big march in Bogalusa was April 8th. Our meeting place was at the Labor Union Hall. We started up Sullivan Drive, and they stopped us after about four blocks, and turned all these students around. They had this unlawful-assembly thing and crowd control. Some of the adult leaders went to New Orleans and got an injunction. It seemed like the fact that the police turned back the students got the adults really angry, and suddenly you had old people who could hardly walk, who were hobbling out there to get in the march. In many cases, they couldn’t march all the way; they would march so far or would get in their car and come and join us. So April 8th became a real turning point in the whole thing.

The picketing began that afternoon. We got the court order saying we could. They got a concession that there couldn’t be too many people. I think there were two people who could picket each store. We picketed both sides of the Street from opening until the closing hour. There was always somebody there watching us. We would never be there alone. There was always somebody there with a gun. There was always a Deacon around.

I remember that night; it was my last night working at the Dairy Palace after I got fired. We couldn’t make a telephone call. The telephone system was shut down in the black community because Bob Hicks was trying to call Bobby Kennedy, trying to get some federal assistance in there. It was like a state of siege. So the next day all the people who could pick up a gun got their guns and they formed the Deacons. Now the Deacons did not start in Bogalusa. They gained notoriety in Bogalusa; they started in Jonesboro. Their guys were frustrated in Jonesboro because that movement fizzled very quickly. They came down to Bogalusa and that’s really where it was reborn.

So they got permits to carry guns. I mean, all these people got permits. And they would use them, and they would guard homes. On marches we had the FBI taking notes—that’s all they ever did was take notes. We had the Bogalusa Police Department, and we had the Deacons. We had our own special police force. Our marches were never nonviolent. Nothing we ever did was nonviolent from that point on. I mean, we learned from CORE how to fall and how to protect ourselves. But, see, that just wasn’t going to work.

I have the utmost respect for Martin Luther King. God rest his soul! But, see, there was something about somebody cracking me across the head, and me turning the other cheek, that just did not sit well with me. Those people were crazy. You know, they would have killed us. King never came to Bogalusa because he did not condone violence.

Some other students and I walked into the classrooms at the high school and called the students out to join us marching and picketing. We’d tell them, “If you’re black, you’re in it.” And we’d call them by name and we would embarrass them. We’d tell them, “You’re going to benefit from this, too.” We were threatened by teachers and the principal: “If you don’t leave, you’re gonna get in trouble, get suspended. Worse, you’re gonna get expelled.” So we got across the Street from the school, so that we were not on school property anymore. We called everybody out. Quite a few of them came, about 150. There were only about 500 in the school. And a lot of those who didn’t come left school and went home because they were afraid. We did what we wanted to do. We disrupted the process, and we gave them something to think about.

So the pressure was on the principal from the superintendent to keep those kids in line. At the time, I didn’t agree with him. I don’t agree with him now, but I do understand a little more. Principles sometimes are tempered and compromised by reality. White people were forcing him to have control over something that he normally had control over. He had always had control over his students. That was his little empire. Suddenly he had lost that control with that group of ‘65. Not only were there marches and demonstrations going on but there were more girls in my class graduating pregnant than there had been in the history of Central Memorial High School.

Incidents during the picketing did not seem to start immediately. The more we were out there, the angrier they became. The name-calling, that was really no biggie. “Nigger” had been used so much that it suddenly had lost its meaning. We were not supposed to say anything to them—we left that to the Deacons—because we were displaying a certain amount of dignity on the picket line. Now, if they would hit you, you’d forget dignity, you’d put that picket sign down, and you’d go for broke and kick ass. There were some acts of violence. I knew this woman—this store owner came over to tear up her picket sign, and she was not going to give it to him. She literally picked him up and threw him through his own window. Oh, yeah! She was a big woman. We believed in direct action. But, you know, some of these white folks were walking around patrolling the streets like the Wild, Wild West with guns on, you know, with the holsters.

I lived very close to the downtown shopping district, so I would put my picket sign down and go home. I never really thought about it. But one evening I was followed, so the Deacons stopped me from doing that. Somebody would always take me home. It never occurred to me because, see, I had a weapon. I had a broom handle that I had nicked down and put razor blades all on the side. I would always swing my stick, just walking home with my stick. But there always was that concern that if any of us were caught in isolated places and were identified as being active in the movement, we would be subjected to physical and sexual abuse. There were horror stories about women who were put in jail.

My mother had this thing where if I left home, I had to have a dress on. She figured if I had a dress on, I wasn’t going to do anything, because we wore jeans all the time. So anytime I left the house I had to pass inspection. I had learned to hide my jeans in a little bag at night on the corner. I would try to wear skirts so that I wouldn’t have to do anything but go in the alley, put my pants on and put my skirt in the bag.

But this particular day, two weeks before graduation, I was late because I was supposed to relieve someone on the picket line. I was picketing, and this policeman took his nightstick and pulled my dress up. As luck would have it, Time magazine and all the other magazines got this on camera. Well, I was more worried about the trouble I was in at home than I was about this. So I sneaked to school. By the time I got there, the FBI was waiting for me, so they could get the rundown on this incident. The teachers were so upset at me: “You’re gonna be in trouble.” “Why don’t you leave this mess alone?” And, “You’ve got an opportunity to go to school and be somebody.”

I said, “Hell, I’m already somebody! I was born somebody!”

During this time, my mother lost her job. She worked for the people who owned the Western Auto chain, and I caught picket duty one day there. So I picketed. I guess that was pretty arrogant or stupid on my part. Her boss said, “Your daughter is really going to hurt you, because these white people are not going to pay people and have their kids picketing.” They told my mother she was going to get fired. And she said, “No, you can’t fire me.” They said, “Well, why?” And she said, “I just quit.” And she quit, and she became really militant at that point.

That same day, some of us went to the segregated park. Well, I don’t know where those white people came from. There were no women. There were all these men. I think they were buried like moles in the sand. We were having a good time at the park and suddenly, out of nowhere, they came with their dogs and their sticks and their guns. It was unbelievable. I mean, women were fighting and struggling for their lives. This policeman hit me with this brass knuckle. And he was letting me have it, too. So I kicked him in the groin. Boy, my life wasn’t worth a plug nickel, you hear. It was going to take him a while to get out of pain, but in the meantime, it was hard for me to run in sand.

I ran to Mr. Sam Barnes of the Deacons. Mr. Sam opened up the car door and said, “Run, Pearl, run!” I dove in that car, and blood was shooting all down my face. He wouldn’t let them get to me. They took him and they beat him up. And really beat him. But he didn’t let them get to me because they probably would have killed me. I mean, there was just that much furor. They put him in jail and beat him up, and they kept him in jail for a while. He protected me. He sacrificed what could have been his life, because he had an idea what kind of abuse I would have been subjected to had they put me in jail.

Three days later was our graduation. We couldn’t even hold our baccalaureates in peace. They turned on the stereo at the Dairy Queen and played it all during the services. They threatened to shoot up the graduation. The Deacons were the thing that kept many people alive in Bogalusa. They told the chief of police, “You don’t have to protect them, because we will. They are going to have a graduation. So if you don’t want some dead white kids, you better keep their asses off that corner.”

During this time the national TV and the newspapers and magazines were there every day. We were trying to generate sympathy, so we were very definitely taught to be on our best behavior. But we were also told to protect ourselves. We were nine deep in the marches. The leaders tried to put the women in the middle and men on each side of them. The last four or five rows they tried to put men, so that women would be cushioned. The Deacons, of course, would be on either side. The counterdemonstrators were told not to get within so many feet of us. If one did, the Deacons would tell the police and the FBI that they better talk to him because if he crossed this line, it would be open season on him. We caught a couple of them across the line, and we had a field day on them down through the line.

You know how the media are. When they are sympathetic to your cause, they will never show anything that will make you look bad. So they would never have shown that, because they were generating sympathy. They’d show the policeman lifting my skirt or hitting me, but I don’t think they’d show where I was kicking him back. Here I was, a defenseless little black girl, being brutalized by this policeman. It wouldn’t have made good copy to show that I have been taught to defend myself. Later Bogalusa became old news to them and the riots in Watts and Detroit became focal points. But I think we had made our point.

It really, really got hot that summer, It was like all-out war declared on each other. A week after graduation they rounded us up while we were picketing. Forty-seven of us were arrested. They took us all to jail and we had a good time. We sang songs; we stopped the toilet up. The sergeant was stereotypical, fat and lazy, and he was begging parents to get us out. And parents had been told not to get anybody out of jail. We made him earn his money that day. Before the day was over, they dropped charges and let us out.

I had gotten a full scholarship for Southern University. Also my mom had worked for these white people, and they had met me and they were really impressed. One was a Southerner and one was from Minnesota. One was an attorney and one was a doctor. They liked my spunk and they had always been supportive of black education. They became sort of my patrons, if you will. They had always said that when I got ready to go to college, they were going to help me. Well, true to their word, they did.

I had to go to summer school. My mom didn’t make me, but she sort of strongly suggested I go to summer school, because there seemed to be this thing that if I didn’t go to summer school, I was going to get so caught up in the movement that I would never go to school. I would become a professional activist. So I went away to summer school at Southern in Baton Rouge. I would come home every chance I got and still participate in things.

It was at Southern that I first became aware of the Vietnam War, because guys who enrolled with me for summer school didn’t come back in September. Then you’d ask about one of them and kids would get letters from home saying that he was killed. I remember there seemed to be a disproportionate number of black people going, and I resented that. You don’t want us here, you don’t give us our rights, but we can go over and fight your stupid war. I became acutely aware of it and hated the racist system in America for it, because I ran around with a group of students at Southern who were activists like me. You know, we find each other.

We were not the respected student leaders, not the ones the administration could count on. We had our underground movement. We were into a lot of heavy philosophical discussions. The war was beginning to be the topic of discussion, and lots of things were still going on in Bogalusa and around the country. Sometimes the students would have these little movements, where they’d be concerned about food in the cafeteria. I have always been selective about my battles. I never got involved with the “We need better food” movements. I guess having been a trooper and veteran of the Bogalusa war, it seemed trivial to me. And it was so hard to get a lot of people to talk about the war in Vietnam. They always thought you were crazy. It seemed so far away; yet black men were dying by the thousands. While I was at Southern, the war was only important to a small group of us; at that time we were called weirdos.

Meanwhile, things were still hot in Bogalusa. The Klan had been real strong, but we reached a point in ‘65 where we weren’t afraid. They had tried to instill this fear in the black community about all these things that were going to happen. Nobody was afraid of them anymore because we had learned that they were cowards, and that the Deacons could deal with them. They weren’t going to go in anyone’s house because they knew that you were armed and everybody knew how to shoot. Their scare tactics lost their appeal.

So, in ‘66, while I was home for a semester break, we had a march where we wore white sheets and hoods. It was a riot. They had this stronghold for all these years and our march told them we don’t give a damn about your sheets, could care less about your burning crosses, and even less about your guns. That really dealt them a dirty blow. That was the last nail in the coffin. Actually, while I was away at college, the Klan had one more march. They had a loudspeaker playing “Dixie,” and when the black kids heard that they came running out and marched alongside and sang along. That must have been the really last nail in the coffin.

I majored in English in college. I wanted to be a lawyer. But one didn’t get encouraged to be anything other than a nurse or a teacher if you were a girl. Regardless of what color you were, you were going to be a teacher or a nurse or a secretary. I didn’t want to be a secretary, so I always felt that I’d major in English and I’d teach.

I was just getting ready to graduate from college, and I was doing student teaching, and had come in and taken a nap when the dorm just alarmed up. These girls started screaming. My roommates came in and said, “Pearl, King is dead!” And I said, “Such a sick, belated April Fools joke.” But my roommate kept crying, and she said, “No, Pearl, I’m not. . .“ One of my roommates had a TV, and we turned it on, and sure enough. I just wanted to drop out.

The next day, that Friday, the weather was beautiful, but it was one of the saddest days of my life. We had commemorative activities and chapel. Then we had a twenty-four-mile march to the Capitol. There were priests, rabbis, ministers, the whole bit. I just cried, because it was really hard. I didn’t cry until Friday, and then I cried for a lot of reasons. I cried for... I cried for me, I cried for everybody. I cried for the hate, the country, the world. It really, really got to me. And as we were praying, the twenty-four miles got to me. I’m really sorry about this, but I was also praying at the time to see if anybody had a car to give me a ride, because my feet were hurting. Reality stepped in. I said, “Oh, God, please let somebody come through with a car because I’ve got to walk twenty-four miles back to Southern from the Capitol.”

I tend to sleep when I get depressed. I went home because they let school out, and, basically, that whole week I just slept. Sort of like a zombie. King had never been my hero. I mean, I respected him and what he did, but Malcolm was my hero. Unfortunately, Malcolm didn’t live long enough so that they could understand how they could both benefit each other for the good of black people—because I think there was a place for both of them. Later, when Bobby Kennedy was killed, I felt that was the final nail in the coffin for us. There went my dreams, my hopes.

I graduated college in three years. It was a combination of wanting to help the family and just wanting to get out and go on and do other things. My mother still had six kids at home, and my father was on a limited, fixed income. I felt if I got a job, it would take some of the pressure off. I wanted to go to law school; if that didn’t work out, I was wanting to become a psychologist. And I did eventually get my masters in psych.

But first I taught for a year in Lafayette, Louisiana. Fifth-grade language arts. I really regret that. I missed being a near-adult. I suddenly had to become an adult, and when I was around kids my age, I didn’t know how to act, because here I was having to be at work at eight in the morning and taking responsibility for thirty lives every day. I wished that I had spaced it out and had enjoyed it more socially for a while. I thought I was socially maladjusted.

So I taught a year and ... see, Lafayette is one big caste system, like New Orleans. They believed they were as close to God as you could get because there was a disproportionate number of fair-complexioned ones there. They didn’t get involved in the movement. And, of course, idealistic Pearl, right out of college, it was going to touch you, because if you’re black, you’re in it. So my thing was signs on my wall talking about “I’m black and I’m proud,” and those people did not want to hear that. You know, we black people have collaborated in our own oppression. We have been very good collaborators, thanks to the white man’s mind-control game. White people have encouraged our sense of self-hatred.

So one day I decided that I was going to start wearing a natural. My hair wouldn’t act right, so I went and got me a wig. Big Angela Davis-type wig. And I cut me some African print and had me a dashiki made. It was a shirt, but dresses were real short at the time. And sandals were real popular at that time. The hippie sandals, as they called them. I put on big earrings and went to work. Well, hey, you would have thought World War Four had been declared. Those teachers would come into the room and they would be looking in. So the principal said there was a gas leak and closed the school down, because the superintendent happened to be on his way that day and the principal knew that before the superintendent got off campus, somebody was going to tell him that I was up there with all that hair. So he told me, “I’ll give you a good recommendation, but at the end of the year, you’ve got to go.” He told me that the South was not ready for me at that point. We weren’t ready for each other. The marriage would never work. I told him I thought so too, and I applied to various graduate schools throughout the country and chose California. I chose San Diego State because they were more persistent in their letters to me. I thought San Diego was a nice place to make the transition.

I entered the graduate program in counseling psychology. I chose counseling psychology because I like studying people. And I thought it was good discipline, like reading and a lot of writing. I still had that dream of going to law school. I thought each little step would be in that direction.

That first summer I was there, I applied for a job at this clothing store in downtown San Diego. I filled out my application and the owner said, “Why are you doing this? You’re obviously a very bright young woman. You’re too qualified to be working here.” He told me he had a lot of contacts at the school-district office and that I should apply for a teaching job and use his name. I did, and I got hired, but that didn’t start until September and this was in June. He was sort of liberal and involved in sort of radical things. He knew some of the people that were involved. So I got involved in various community-type meetings.

I found it funny that they were so far behind in terms of what we had done. They were talking about segregated neighborhoods and red­lining. I mean, in Bogalusa we didn’t live next door to white people, but we lived in the same neighborhood all of my life. So the mayor had appointed an interim city councilman, who was black, the first black city councilman, and he was up for election, his first campaign. I got the job being his office manager. I did that until school started.

But the big thing in San Diego—I guess that was true all over the country—was the antipoverty money. I had been led to believe that if you got an education, that was a key. But one of the real negatives of the money of Johnson’s Great Society was that suddenly an education became a burden, especially for black people. The money was ear­marked for community people and people looked down upon you, suddenly attacked you, if you were educated. I remember one of my white professors at San Diego State attacked me, along with some of the black militants who were in the class, and said that I had been raised very “bourgie,” you know, middle class. “How else can you justify being as young as you are and talking about getting a master’s?”

So-called militants were running various community education groups and I tried to volunteer, but there was always somebody there trying to put me down. You know: “You are one of these little rich black kids.” Then I sort of dropped out of it and concentrated on my education. I always did step to the beat of a different drummer, because I thought a lot of things they did were really trivial. I thought they were missing, in many cases, a bigger picture.

I met my husband while I was in San Diego. He was getting his doctorate from Cal. He had a very sharp mind. We were married in 1972. He did not like San Diego. After you’ve lived in the Bay Area, who would? So I completed my master’s and we moved up north. After I married him, I realized he was a white boy in black skin. That’s okay, but I didn’t think I was marrying a white man. He got hung up on trendy things. There was no substance there. He’s very bright—he has a scientific background. You know, we always tend to think of those who are good in math and science as being very smart. He could talk about a lot of things, and he was on top of the movement in Berkeley, and I was really impressed that somebody was actually doing something.

Much later I realized that this was just something to do, you know, like kids dabble in things like fingerpainting for a minute. I realized that he had no commitment to a real movement or to any social change. In short, philosophically, we were miles apart. We found that we couldn’t talk politics and we couldn’t talk sociology. So, animosity set in. We separated, and finally divorced in ‘79.

When we first moved to the Bay Area, I worked for a summer in a Bay Area school district. I’m glad I didn’t get a regular job because mediocrity seemed to have been the standard, and I don’t stand shoulder to shoulder with mediocrity. Either I would have burned out or I would have begun to accept their standards.

But I got a really good job in a neat district over in San Mateo County, where people were really into education. We had good, conscientious, hardworking teachers. I was a high-school counselor. We did some very good things in that school. It was an experimental school, as so many of them were in the late ‘60s and ‘70s. People wanted to be there, for the most part, and they gave it their all. We had good students—a little United Nations. We had everything there. So it was a neat place to be, for the most part.

But neighborhoods changed, and standards were not what they should have been for all kids. The change in color and the ethnic makeup had a lot to do with it. In many cases, when those parents moved to the suburbs they felt that they had given their kids all that they could give. I mean, they got them out of those inner-city schools in San Francisco, and they felt that that was enough. Their attitude seemed to have been “God damn it, all you had to do was go and those teachers would teach you.” That kind of thing. Parental involvement dropped off. And I had ideological problems with the new principal. So, after six years, it was time to leave.

I’m a risk-taker, so in ‘78 I quit the job; I took the plunge and went to graduate school. School of Education in Berkeley. I got fellowships, financial aid, and all that kind of other hustle. I worked as a research assistant. I always had two or three little hustles. It was never enough. So in ‘81 I went back to work full-time. I was a program director for a public-policy foundation for two years. Then I did campus public affairs for another foundation for six months. Now I’m with the Peralta Community College District in Oakland. I am working as a proposal writer, program development for the vocational school in the community-college district. Trying to get programs funded. That also means tightening up the programs and curriculum somewhat.

Now, in 1980, there was an incident that affected me deeply. To get a Ph.D. from the School of Education, you have to have an academic master’s that’s relevant to your work. Since I was getting my Ph.D. in policy analysis and administration, my counseling master’s was not relevant. So I had to do a lot of working. I had to get an M.A. equivalent. Mine is in political science. Again that craving for politics.

Anyway, they had this conference for public administrators at the Hilton Hotel in San Francisco. A friend of mine from Bogalusa, who was teaching at a black college in Alabama, came out for this conference and she said, “You know, that will be good for you since you’re dealing with policy.” So I went to the hotel with her on Sunday and then came back Tuesday evening because the black caucus was having something. We had a symposium for like an hour, and then we went to have a bite to eat.

And I went on over to the hotel, not only to see what was going on, to see if there were any internships available, but to pick up Diane, my friend. I went up on the second floor on the escalator, and they said there was a party up on that level. I knew it was not a party because black folks would never be that quiet, not at a party. Whatever they were having was over. So I turned around and came back. And I see these two brothers. They had suits on.

I said, “Oh, hi. You here for the conference, too? Because I’m looking for Chicken.” That’s what we called Diane. I didn’t know who the dudes were—didn’t know they were security and didn’t care. The guy looked at me and he said, “What are you doing up here?” I said, “Well, I’m looking for Chicken.” He said, “I don’t give a damn what you’re doing, you’re going to have to get the hell off.”

I thought he was just kidding. I said, “Don’t get so uptight.” Well, then, I get my attitude. I said, “Look, can’t you tell that I’m going down this escalator?” He said, “Well, get on down.” I turned around and I said, “Well, I can stop in the bar and have a drink, can’t I?” He said, “If you can afford it.” Phheww.

So I go down and I get me a glass of wine. The Hilton Hotel has some tables outside of the bar so you can watch what’s going on in the lobby. I sat there, so I could see Diane if she came. Finished the wine, and Diane didn’t show up. So I decided to go use the phone and call where I thought she might be, because she had a couple friends staying at the hotel. Nobody was in. When I got off the phone, the other security guard was leaning up against the elevator. I said, “What are you following me for? What’s your problem?”

And he said, “You ugly nigger bitch, we’re going to follow you everywhere you go.”

And I said, “Yo’ mammy,” and, “We’re going to send your no-talking ass back to Jamaica on that banana boat.” He was Puerto Rican or something. We had this confrontation.

I left the hotel. I called the next morning to file my little complaint with the chief of security. Well, the next night, I was back at the hotel because Diane was supposed to pick me up there. She called and said the car wouldn’t start—I had loaned her my car. I said, “You flooded it. Let it sit for a while and go back out and try.” The friends whose room I was in had to go to someone else’s room. I truck on down there and go down the steps, and the security guard who had stopped me the night before was standing there. He did not recognize me until I got down to the door. He whirled around and he went back to the desk. Diane never came. So I went back to use the phone, and that’s where the shit hit the fan.

He said, “You can’t come in here.” I said, “Well, why not?” He said, “You’re not a guest.” I said, “I have some friends who are guests.” I said, “You can’t tell me I can’t come in here.” So we shadowboxed on over to this big desk. I said, “Well, can I use the phone?” He said, “Use the one across the Street.” I mean, if you know where the San Francisco Hilton is, you know that is not a place you can after dark go and use the phone. It’s in the Tenderloin.

I went over, furious. I called and told my friends to come down and meet me. I got back to the hotel before they got down on the elevator. The security guard again stopped me and we went over to the desk of the night manager. I said, “Why are you treating me like this?” I said, “I don’t have to take this kind of treatment.” He said, “If you don’t like it, take it up with the legal department.”

I told him, “Sure as there is a God, Buddha, Jesus, Allah, or whoever you happen to believe in, you will live to eat those words!” I made him that promise that night. He then snatched my purse. I had my student ID, my driver’s license, and a fifty-dollar bill. He took the fifty-dollar bill and said, “Sure you’re a student at Berkeley, sure you are. What’s a student doing with fifty dollars?”

So by this time, this friend came down. He’s a doctor from Florida. The guard tells me that if I signed this little citation saying that I was either soliciting and/or trespassing, there would be no trouble. I said some foul things. I said, “I’m not signing this shit. I’m not going to do this.” He said, “Well, if you don’t sign it, we’re going to call the police.” I said, “Call the motherfuckers. Call ‘em.” I said, “Give me the phone; I’ll call them for you!’ And he said, “Just get her out of here.”

So we went back upstairs and then I called a taxi. I was so furious. I went home and sat up all night long. At 8:01 A.M. I was dialing fiercely. I called the chief of security at the hotel. He calls later that afternoon and he says, “Well, I’m sorry that the incident occurred, but you have to realize where you were. That’s the Tenderloin, and we have a lot of trouble with the prostitutes—black prostitutes. And that’s the price that some women have to pay, for protecting our guests. And I’m sorry.” He said the best he could do was to give me a meal on the Hilton. I said, “Hell, I didn’t tell you I was hungry.” I said, “Well, you’ve done what you had to do and now I must do what I must do.”

Funny, I was taking a course from one of the law professors: “Sex Equity, Public Policy, and the Law.” I called the professor and he found me an attorney, who subsequently got the assistance of another, and we filed this suit, which was later a class-action suit alleging that the Hilton had a pattern of treating black women that way. It happened in ‘80, and it was finally settled in ‘82. We got a consent decree. That means they didn’t admit to any guilt, but they agreed to change the things we had accused them of doing in terms of their training of security guards. They would be more courteous. And it was settled for fifty thousand dollars’ punitive damage.

Six weeks after that last day in court, I went to take my exams, and then everything happened so quickly. When the story hit the newspapers, the vultures came out, trying to sell me cars and all sorts of things.

I was disappointed in how people responded. I did buy this house, but I had given up the chance for more money, to get the structural change that was created by the class-action suit. I went through a real depression. I had been holding myself together for so long, and I guess you can’t crawl out from under it all until you really hit rock bottom. I saw a therapist for it, for about a year and a half. He often asked the question, Why did it bother me so much? And it took me a while to answer that. That’s the question he always started our sessions with:

“Why would it bother you? Those things happen.”

I told Tom, I said, “I made this decision a long time ago—I am not going to be a nigger. And as far as I’m concerned, they were trying to treat me like one.” They didn’t hit me. They didn’t beat me up. But they did hurt my feelings. I’m black. I have no problems with being black. But there’s a decisive difference between being black and being a nigger. I understand that difference, and I’m going to make sure that anybody that deals with me understands that. I’m going to demand that. And I don’t allow black people to treat me like a nigger either. My autonomy is very important to me, and as a result I have problems, often.

What I’ve done is, for my own protection, I have narrowed my circle of acquaintances. I, once upon a time, would argue with a sign­post. I still will argue, but I’m a lot more selective—I like a good one. Now I walk away. I’m learning to be tactful in my old age. I have superficial acquaintances where I don’t touch certain things because I know some people think I’m weird. But I have people that I can talk with. I guess some people would say that’s a snobbishness on our part, but, you know, we can talk for hours about various issues, and help each other sharpen our thoughts. We don’t always agree. As a matter of fact, sometimes we have some bloody ones.

For example, I got into this discussion last week with this acquaintance of mine. We were talking about an institution that was having problems, and I said, “You know black people have so far to go. We collaborate in our own oppression.” She immediately got defensive and said, “Well, you know, white people do it.”

I said, “God damn it, I’m so tired of us rationalizing our failures based on what white people do. There are those things that we have control of and this is one that we do have control of.” And I said, “A lesson that all of us should have learned is that there are two sets of rules in this society, one for them and one for us. And they have more opportunities to fail than we do. They’re given more chances to fail than we as black people are.” She said, “God, you are a radical.” I said, “No, I’m a realist.” I have friends who say that I’m a classic liberal and those who say I’m a populist. I hate labels. I draw from different sources to form my opinions, and issues determine the positions I take. Success for some is making money and having a fancy title by your name. But, for me, success is not the trappings of middle class. It is not “knowing my place.” It is knowing my rights and making sure they are not violated. Success, for me, is being educated rather than being trained.

I advocate that black people read Carter G. Woodson’s The Mis­Education of the Negro. It was written in the thirties, but it could have been written an hour ago. I personally feel The Mis-Education of the Negro should be a bible. That’s the bible that we ought to adopt instead of that other stuff that the white folks wrote. I can’t be overly critical of white people about certain things because I’m not white and I’m sure they do what is in their best interest, just as we must do. I know certain things they are responsible for, but not everything in our institutions can we lay blame. I think we have to start holding each other accountable for a lot more than we do.

Several times I’ve gone home to Bogalusa, I’ve taken books, particularly copies of The Mis-Education of the Negro. Most people don’t know what I’m talking about. There’s a sense of complacency there that bothers me. One of my professors asked me once, “What part of the world are you from?” I said, “South America.” He said, “I thought so. Whereabouts?” And I said, “South of the Mason-Dixon.” It is like Thomas Wolfe. You can never go home again. And that’s pretty literal for me. I was always different anyway. I was a reader and always tended to be a little out of step with most people in my high-school class.

There’s still a sort of insulation from the world—not understanding how close we are to a nuclear war, and not being concerned about the various threats to our safety. Not really being concerned about the environment, South Africa, and the insidious racism that is destroying our youth. Not even being concerned about the level of poverty. I think this country, it needs a nigger. Right now poor people represent America’s nigger and most poor people are black. They still have blacks as their official niggers.

It’s not just endemic to Bogalusa, or even small towns, because it happens here in the city, too. I could deal with it in Bogalusa for a couple of weeks. I can ha-ha-ha-ha-ha about things that we did, and what’s going on here, and where the party is going to be, and that kind of thing. But after a while, the intellectual climate is just not right, because there are so few people who dare to challenge the bullshit—like too many black males in special-ed classes because they are aggressive and white teachers can’t handle them.

I forget that not all of them were that involved in the movement, and it did not necessarily mean as much to them as it did to us. I mean, we took it personal. I still do. I was always amazed at how small that circle was when I got out of it and looked back in it. You know, Bogalusa is about the size of this living room, but there were people who were untouched by what happened. Those of us who were involved, we felt it was a great thing and that we were really on our way, and history was being made.

I do have regrets about the movement, though. The first one is the control that we gave up of our own destiny, that we, for whatever reason, traded off, by virtue of the outsiders coming in. It’s the arrogance with which those white people came into our community. They felt they knew everything and it was like “We’re gonna show you peons.” They even labeled some blacks as “Uncle Toms.” White folks just don’t have the right to make those assessments for me. I was never trustful of white folks anyway. They didn’t want to open their meetings with a prayer. And you just don’t do that. You know, in black communities, we pray. The other thing, white folks were calling the shots because invariably we got more media exposure and more protection when they were there. So it was like we were in bed together not so much by choice but out of necessity, and it still makes me sick.

I regret the way our institutions were destroyed, our schools. Remember, when schools were desegregated, it was like the white system came down on the black community with a vengeance. They totally destroyed our institution—they even took away our trophies. We, Central, had been a very good school, and it had been academically one of the best black schools in the state. Out of a class of a hundred, at least fifty of us have a year of college or more, and twenty-five or twenty-six are college graduates. So education was perceived as a way out, and that doesn’t seem to be the case anymore. Our churches and our schools were run by us. Now we have nothing left but our churches. We didn’t destroy property. We didn’t write on the walls. We didn’t carve up the chairs. We were proud of our school. I think that was true until Central was no longer Central—until integration. You couldn’t pay any of us to get off campus, where any adult couldn’t see us. 

And now you see twelve- and thirteen-year-old kids walking the streets during school time, because they see that the black community no longer has control over its own. I’m not advocating mandatory resegregation. I’m saying that there should be a choice, that if a black community wants an all-black school, that should be its option, to have one. In Bogalusa, I never heard of special education at Central. Now you’ve got black kids who can’t read. Whatever method those black teachers used, it worked. And now you’ve got half the black population being in special-education classes, especially black males.

I also think the movement led to a breakdown in respect for family and the extended-family concept that was so unique, because, suddenly, for the first time, you are put in a position to disobey your parents. When they say. “Don’t get involved,” you do. So it becomes easier and easier.

Now I’m thinking about getting pregnant. Suddenly the maternal instinct is there and I want to do it before I reach forty. I think I would have done it this year had I finished my dissertation. I do not have a father picked out, but I’m working on it. This seems cold and callous, but that’s exactly what it’s going to be. I would like a son, but I’m afraid to have a son because I’ve been told that I’m so strong that it would be bad for me to raise a son as a single parent. I don’t think so, but I worry about that sometimes. I think if I had a healthy baby, I would be happy regardless of the sex. .. . Soon as I get this dissertation completed.

One more thing about the movement. I wish there could have been less violence, less confrontation, but I don’t think it would or could have happened any other way. You almost had to be confrontational to get things done. People were so entrenched in their ideas. I think it’s tragic that it had to be done that way, but I think if we had been non­violent, many of us would not be walking around talking about it today. It’s much more civilized to sit down and talk about it, but then we aren’t living in a civilized world.

 

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