Trailblazer
My maiden name is Diane Tucker and in 1963, in the spring of eighth grade, I was at Our Lady of Fatima Elementary School. I was so excited that I was rated as the number one student in the eighth grade with the highest grade average. I was a straight A student. I was a member of Our Lady of Fatima Catholic Church. With all the racial unrest in Birmingham at the time, my church, my community and my family grounded me and made me feel safe. Then Sixteenth Street Baptist Church was bombed and four young Black girls were killed, one of whom I knew. I felt like the world was ending. For the first time in my life, I was scared. (more…)
Were You There One September Morn?
1963 elicits a wave of memories. It was the year I turned “sweet 16.” Today, as I recall several significant events relating to Civil Rights of that year, I will share the utter isolation and lonely process of managing the aftermath of September 15th.
You see, in August, several weeks before the bombing of 16th Street Baptist Church, I accepted placement in the American Friends Service Committee’s program to finish high school in Connecticut.
I was the youth representative for my Sunday School at First Congregational Church on Center Street in Smithfield, 1.8 miles from the bombing. If I had been in Birmingham on September 15th, 1963, I would have been appointed to attend Youth Sunday at 16th Street Baptist Church. Four girls died in that bombing: Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, Cynthia Wesley, and Addie Mae Collins. Of the four, I knew Denise and Carole, and was a close friend of Cynthia. On that Youth Day Sunday it is likely that I would have been in the bathroom with the four girls, chatting, giggling, and “primping” in the mirror, as they were doing when the bomb exploded. (more…)
Ode to Chuck Clarke
The Clarke family home, located in the center of Birmingham, before it was replaced by the main intersection of freeway arteries in the city (next door to KIDS Storyteller Dale Long’s aunt), was always a warm gathering spot for the older Clarke siblings and me and my siblings as a child. I had piano lessons there every Thursday evening. My two Uncles from New York, who remained single and very popular in music for many years, would come home for the holidays each year and always traveled with their horn or mouthpiece. (My father defected from playing in New York to return to Birmingham to raise a family.) Jam sessions were instant.
I grew up with music always in the atmosphere. My father performed jazz as a second job. His day job was as a Claims Examiner for Social Security (he was a math whiz). He was a “trailblazer,” one of the first few Blacks hired in a professional position for Social Security. He routinely plucked out arrangements on our piano. On many approaching weekends I asked, “Where are you playing?” to see if I would be able to go. (more…)
Rocketed by the experience of growing up in Birmingham
Everyone knows the history, knows that Birmingham was aka [also known as] the most segregated city in the nation, knows that Birmingham was aka Bombingham, and if they don’t know the litany of events in 1963 — well, they ought to.
American history is yoked to civil rights history. It’s what we’re founded on, what we have grandly succeeded at and dismally failed at.
Birmingham is not just in the Heart of Dixie, it is smack at the heart of our Great American Paradox, a constant tug of war between civil rights and civil wrongs.
Birmingham was, as has been said, ground zero of the civil rights movement in 1963; it was also ground zero for my coming of age. (more…)
September 15, 1963: The Day our Driver Changed Course
Alert: This essay contains a racial slur used by some white people at that time to demean Black children as a group.
Our family lived on a wooded hilltop in the white suburb of Mountain Brook, protected from sleepless nights of bombings and police oppression plaguing Black families in the Magic City. My few glimpses of struggles for justice downtown were through safety glass windows of a 1959 Chevrolet station wagon that sported jet fins, a V-8 engine, and could haul up to a dozen kids.
On Mother’s Day 1961 when I was age twelve, Mama drove my siblings and me downtown to the Trailways station to pick up our cousin from Mississippi. There was no place to park out front. A crowd milled around, spilling out of the station. Mama noted how strange there were no officers or police cars anywhere. She double-parked. Leaving the engine running, she instructed my older brother, “Go in, find Stevie, grab his bags and bring him back immediately.” “Robert, climb in the back and open the tailgate window.” While my brother was inside, a half dozen white men toting tire irons, bats, and chains rushed toward the rear of the station, almost tripping over each other as if late for an event. Finally, my brother and Stevie emerged from the front of the station. I took Stevie’s suitcase, and the two of them piled in the middle seat. Mama scratched off before I could close the tailgate window.
The front page of the next day’s newspaper featured a circle of white men taking turns beating an unidentifiable victim on the floor. The article reported the Freedom Riders’ bus arrived at the station shortly after we had left. On the radio, Bull Connor told reporters he gave police officers the day off so they could visit their mothers on Mother’s Day.
In early May 1963, we picked up Stevie at the bus station with no problems. When Mama turned south toward home on a one-way street, police cars and firetrucks packed the avenue to our right. I looked through a gap in the blockade and hollered, “Mama, they’re shooting people down with firehoses.” (more…)