Horrible
In June of 1963, my parents moved our family to Birmingham. I thought this was horrible because I would not graduate with my friends in Huntsville.
In September, I started my senior year at Ramsay and we had a different student in our class. Richard Walker was the only black student at Ramsay. (more…)
Nobody dared her to do it
Nobody pressured her. Nobody dared her to do it. Her decision was hers to make.
On April 24, 1963, in a watershed moment in her life, Birmingham-Southern sophomore Martha “Marti” Turnipseed chose to join seven black students who were sitting in for justice at a segregated Woolworth’s food counter in downtown Birmingham.
Little did she know that Birmingham Police Commissioner Bull Conner had spying detectives everywhere. (more…)
Easter Sunday 1963
Recollections of an 11 year old
Daddy asked the session of the church to support his stance that the doors remain open to anyone who wanted to worship within.
On Easter Sunday 1963 my best friend, and “blood sister,” Kathy, and I, with a concealed collection of snacks we had bought on our trip to the drugstore between Sunday school and church, headed up to the balcony as usual. Kathy and I did everything together, and we sat wherever we pleased in church since we were almost twelve. (more…)
Strength to pursue our ideals
In 1963, I was a senior at Shades Valley High School in Birmingham, Alabama. That was the year, a bright, intensely idealistic, not very savvy girl learned to retreat.
Put me in context. My parents were immigrants who left Europe with my brother during World War II to escape persecution because their ethnic background was Jewish. I was born in New York, and after years there and in Boston, my parents moved to Birmingham in 1953. I was seven.
My father felt he had behaved in less than courageous fashion in Europe on occasion, and he decided he would not hide his progressive views in Birmingham. He helped start the Alabama Council on Human Relations so that blacks and whites could meet together and communicate, a simple enough proposition which at the time was illegal according to Birmingham city ordinances. (more…)