This still can be a beautiful world, if we decide together to make it so
I am a Southern white working-class woman, and I was a worried child.
For all my young life, I’d been told that it was possible that God would send me to hell when I died. The first time I embarrassed my parents was when I insisted, at age 10, on being baptized even though I had already been baptized at age 6. I wanted to do it again because I was tormented with worry that I hadn’t believed correctly the first time. After I was baptized the second time I still wasn’t sure but said nothing about it.
When I was eleven and in the sixth grade, I found a child’s biography of Harriet Tubman in my school’s library. I think that the book may have been placed in the wrong school. It was 1959 in segregated Alabama, and it may have been intended for a Black school but somehow got mis-routed. I read it and even gave a book report on it, but though the violence against the child Harriet shocked me to my core, the meaning and import of her life escaped me. I kept waiting for the writer to explain why it was wrong for Harriet Tubman to have gone against the authorities of her day. No such explanation was given, and I was left with the impossible idea that those authorities, which I intuited were the same ones still in place in my world, could not be trusted. (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…)
Integrationist, Obstructionist, Communist Minister: Reverend Edward V. Ramage, D.D.
By Katherine Ramage, Ph.D.
Told here is a nuanced account of the little-known actions and convictions of my father, Rev. Dr. Edward V. Ramage, who took a leadership role in the civil rights movement in Birmingham, Alabama, in the early 1960s. It examines primary source material from the time – “An Appeal for Law and Order and Common Sense,” “A Call for Unity,” and the “Letter from the Birmingham Jail” – as well as the dates and sequence of events and key political circumstances to elucidate the all-important context for interpreting the actions and perspectives of a local white minister, Rev. E.V. Ramage, and a brilliant national strategist and outsider, Rev. M.L. King. (more…)
I can still see that moment, 63 years later
One day of 1963 that stands out for me is the moment I heard that 4 girls were blown up in the 16th Street Baptist Church. I knew one of them. We attended the Friendship and Action events together – in a group formed to bring together Black and white families in spite of Jim Crow segregation.
I can still see that moment, 63 years later. I was standing in front of our dining room table, staring out the window into our backyard. This was the table I slept under with a pillow on top of me so that if any of the bomb threats my family was receiving actually materialized, I wouldn’t be impaled by the glass from that window.
I live with survivor’s guilt. (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…)