The Making of a Child Crusader
When I look back over the years of my life, I can recount so many experiences that primed me to become one of the children crusaders for the Civil Rights Movement. I am sure that my experiences were the same as thousands of other African American children, growing up in Birmingham, Alabama during the 1950s and 60s.
As I recollect and assemble my memories, I see them as a montage of snippets from various movies. These real life snippets were the events that helped make my contemporaries, and me, willing to risk personal injury, and jail, to bring about changes for a better life for our people.
If I were to make a movie draft of my life, it would include a sound track. (more…)
Arizona
Author’s note: I’ve used the old-fashioned, at-the-time-polite terms “Negro” and “colored” to describe the African Americans who appear in these stories. I hope you will understand I have no intention to offend anyone by my choice of those terms. For integrity’s sake, I’m merely using the vernacular of the time. (From The Newspaper Boy by Chervis Isom, 2013, page xiii)
He pointed to large, raised letters near the end of the dusty eight inch steel pipe. With one swipe, I brushed them clean. “Made in Belgium,” I muttered, as if he needed my translation. Then he stalked away. I studied the dozens of identical pipe stacked in the yard. The electric grinder he had given me, now hanging from my hand, seemed wholly inadequate for the job I had been told to do.
As I dithered, trying to figure out the best way to begin, I noticed the colored guy—they called him Arizona—watching me. His neutral face showed no emotion, but I knew he must have been amused to watch a college boy flounder in ignorance and incompetence.
How do I begin? I wondered. Is there a place to sit? If I sit on the pipe, will it roll? There must be a trick to this somehow. Arizona watched quietly. After a few moments, I looked at him. “You done this before?” (more…)
The whole truth
Mom had a long list of values to instill in us. Probably at the top of the list was: “Always tell the truth.” Just as I entered fifth grade, we moved to Birmingham, where that rule was about to get more nuanced: there was “the truth” and there was “the whole truth.”
Dad moved Mom and us four kids to Birmingham so he could join the civil rights movement. He may have been the only white man in the state whose fulltime job was civil rights. Mom and Dad had cautioned us not to talk about Dad’s work. With our teachers, neighbors, and friends, that piece of the truth could mean trouble. We navigated a fine line, technically never telling a lie but holding back most of what mattered to us. (more…)
Denise smiling back at me
I remember seeing Denise in the hallway on Friday September 13, 1963 at Center Street Elementary where her mother taught. I had just been promoted to the 4th grade and would miss Mrs. McNair terribly since I would no longer be in her 3rd grade class anymore. That Sunday morning was the same as usual with us kids at the dining room table reading the funny pages of the newspaper while waiting for my grandmother to get ready for Sunday School. Hearing a blast was not unusual because of the various steam and steel plants surrounding us, (more…)
A kind of “noblesse oblige” attitude
My family lived in Avondale, Alabama, until we moved to a farm on Lower Rocky Ridge (south Jefferson County) in about 1960. Our mailing address was Route 13, Birmingham, and I always considered myself as being born and raised here. I was just a little girl and was pretty sheltered from anything that was going on in 1963, but I do remember a few things. We had a maid who worked one day a week for my Mama. Her name was Lillie, and I have two distinct memories regarding her. (more…)