Maturing

I was 13 years old in 1963, and a student at Homewood Junior High. I do remember the Sunday the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church was bombed. Innocent children were killed in God’s house, in a terrorist act.

Before this, I was going along with the crowd. My father told my mother, my sister and me not to go downtown that summer. Every nut in the United States was congregating down there. (more…)

Why was Marti so alone?

Why was Marti so alone?  Why did I and approximately 1,000 other students fail to join the righteous social revolution that swept Birmingham and America in May of 1963?  Speaking for myself, the reason was cowardice.  I was among scores, indeed, hundreds of students who thought George Wallace was a buffoon and the violent attacks on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his demonstrators were both unchristian and unconstitutional.  More than any decision of my college years, I regret my obedient decision to keep my mouth shut and to stay on campus, as ordered.  But I know that I cannot blame my failure on the college administrators who threatened us with expulsion.  Most students realized instantly that the college was copping out on its classroom ideals, but it was entirely our own fault that we did not defy our deans in the cause of justice.

Why was I so fearful?   (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…)