The White League and My Great-Grandfather

This has happened before—that sick feeling deep in my interior where words do not exist to describe it. Usually, it was caused by something like seeing a bill of sale from one of my enslaver relatives about selling a child. Or buying one. This time it hits closer because I am named for the man about whom I have just learned participated in the White League. The man is my great-grandfather, and he is part of me. In today’s language the White League would be described as a white supremacist quasi-military terrorist organization. It started in 1874 in the South to intimidate freedmen into not voting and prevent the then Republican Party from getting power.

What a shock this morning, Christmas only two days past, to get an email from Ancestry.com with a “hint” about William Marshall Richardson—a newspaper clipping from 1874 about the formation of the white supremacist group in the Louisiana Parish, New Iberia, where he lived. His name was in the list of original members in the article. Articles about the Grande Assemblée de la Ligue Blanche were also printed in Louisiana’s French newspapers.

I thought I knew a lot about my great-grandfather. This latest revelation shocked me. I had heard of the White League but knew almost nothing about it until now. (more…)

Birmingham: Trauma and Sorrow

I am a little older than most of this group, Kids in Birmingham 1963. I moved to Birmingham from a suburb of New York City in 1946 at the age of five. My parents had bought a house on Southside and did not have a car. I was soon taking a city bus downtown by myself for various reasons. On the buses, I noticed the disparity between what white people had to do to ride the bus and what Black people had to do. I learned I was white from riding the buses. They had movable signs inserted in bars across the backs of the seats that said White on one side and Colored on the other, and I knew I was to sit in the white section. I had known about the maternal side of my family being enslavers for as long as I can remember, it always troubled me. After graduating from Ramsay High School and attending St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland, for one year, my then-husband and I were married in 1960 in the Unitarian Church. He and his family had been attending the church since the late 1950s. We along with other members of the church soon became involved with the African Americans’ brave struggle for their civil rights.

The year 1963 is seared into everyone’s memory. (more…)

Birmingham’s Black radio DJs were like little gods in our lives

In this segment of an expansive oral history she gave in October 2025, Ann speaks of the Black radio stations that broadcast some of her father’s sermons and of the celebrity DJs, who were “like little gods in our lives.” Peering from an upstairs window of the parsonage, Ann could see two Black radio stations, including WENN, where renowned DJ Paul “Tall Paul” White would later give a shoutout to Ann’s brother Luke Beard, who had been his classmate at Parker High.

Bull Connor threw our father in jail

In this segment of an expansive oral history she gave in October 2025, Ann Beard Grundy speaks of the time, when she was 4 years old, that Bull Connor threw her father in jail for refusing to cancel a planned meeting of the Southern Negro Youth Congress. Because their mother protected her children from learning where their father was during this absence, it wasn’t until Ann was an adult that she heard from her older brother about what really happened and read about the court case on this incident, Taylor v. City of Birmingham.

A Second Chance to Act

Growing up in Birmingham in the fifties and sixties was idyllic, which is probably very hard to imagine, given the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown school desegregation decision in 1954, the Montgomery bus boycott in 1956 and all of the tumult of the ’60s. But, I was in high school before our church member, James Armstrong, a barber with an independent income that insulated him from white factors, filed his lawsuit to permit his young sons to integrate the Birmingham public schools, in 1963. Their sister was in my homeroom class at the time the courts ordered their admission. However, there were many other events unfolding in our lives and the race issue was not always uppermost in our thoughts. Many times it was the furthest thing from our minds. Life in the black community was full, varied and dynamic.

Although Birmingham was a large city for the South and I’ve always considered myself as having grown up in an urban setting, for we were only a mile from the downtown business district, the atmosphere of our neighborhood was actually quite rural. (more…)