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…)

“The bombing definitely had a lifelong impact on me”

I was born September 20, 1950, in Birmingham, Alabama. Birmingham was probably one of the most segregated cities in the country (there were no black police officers, firefighters, store clerks, bus drivers, bank tellers, store cashiers, etc.), but growing up, segregation didn’t mean a lot, because I lived in an all-black neighborhood, went to an all-black school and attended an all-black church. That was all I knew. I imagine our families did a good job shielding us from discrimination because we rarely came in contact with white people. I do recall when going downtown to the movies, we would have to go around to the back and go up some stairs that took us to the balcony, which was the only place we could sit.

The early 1960s was a very tumultuous time in Birmingham and across the country. The March on Washington had ended with Dr. King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech. In the spring of 1963, before Easter, protests which had begun in 1962 to desegregate public facilities intensified with a call to boycott downtown stores. Fred Shuttlesworth and some other local leaders called on Dr. Martin Luther King to assist. During the campaign, Dr. King was arrested. This led to his famous “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” speech. This also led to the “Children’s Crusade,” in which students were asked to get involved in the demonstrations, because many adults feared participating due to possible loss of jobs if arrested. I do recall some of the kids getting involved, including one of my classmates and friend Freeman Hrabowski. But I was not allowed to because my father, as a Birmingham Public School teacher, had been threatened not only of losing his job if he participated, but if it became known that children of teachers participated they still may lose their jobs. (more…)

We were saved for a purpose: To tell our story

In March 2025, Floyd Armstrong gave Kids in Birmingham 1963 an oral history interview about growing up in Birmingham, Alabama in “a civil rights family.” As the sons of a barber who was “committed to the struggle,” Floyd and his brother Dwight, as elementary school-age children, marched in the Birmingham Children’s Crusade and were jailed for several days in May 1963. That September, the Armstrong brothers were the first Blacks to integrate an all-white school in the city of Birmingham—Graymont Elementary School. They knew the civil rights leaders personally, including Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth and the NAACP lawyers who prepared them for the challenges they faced at that school. Just a few days after their historic action, on September 15, 1963, Klan members bombed the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, killing four young girls and sparking whites to murder two young African American boys. Floyd is certain, he says, that the violence was meant for his family, but that, “We were saved for a purpose: To tell our story.” (more…)

My friend Fate nor I would never be the same

In 1963 I was 13 years old and my family owned a grocery store (Ted’s Big Apple) and home approximately 3 blocks from the 16th Street Baptist Church (6th Ave). The morning the church was bombed I was outside playing in front of my family’s store on 15th Street and 8th Avenue. The blast shook the entire community of Fountain Heights and beyond. The blast and the ensuing emergency vehicles caused me to run the 2-3 blocks towards the sound of the blast. Along the way I stopped by my friend’s house (Fate Morris) and he and I ran to the 16th Street Baptist Church. (more…)