Birmingham Foot Soldiers by Nick Patterson

Author:Nick Patterson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
Published: 2014-04-14T16:00:00+00:00

In many ways, Casey’s family was firmly in the middle class, the group in the African American community that, by many accounts, took a less active role in protesting segregation. D-Day was Casey’s first real involvement with the movement.

“I’d never been to a mass meeting or anything like that,” Casey said. “That day, when I got on line, I was terrified! And then we walked down the street, and I saw the police, and I mean, I was totally petrified.” He was walking alongside Annie Cunningham, whom he described as “my classmate” (she described him as her boyfriend), and they were carrying the same sign.

“And the police said, ‘Give me the sign’ or something. He tried to snatch it out of my hand, but she was just holding that sign,” Casey said. “We were just that scared. That was the first time I had been approached by a policeman.”

Why was Casey so scared? It takes a long digression to explain how Casey remembers police harassment as an everyday occurrence that left him with abject fear:

They use to chase people just for the fun of it or abuse people for really for no reason. Good example—there was a guy in the neighborhood, Lionel Davis was his name. We called him Cool Breeze. He went to Parker [High]; he was supposed to have broken the [record for the] hundred-yard dash [although the organization governing high school sports wouldn’t give it to him]. But he was fast. The cops would just chase him for the fun of seeing him run. They would see him on the porch or something, and they would just mash on the brakes, and if they caught him, they would beat him. Twice I witnessed this.

Casey also told a story—to which many who had grown up under segregation attested—about Car 13, a Birmingham Police patrol car with the silhouette of a black cat attached to the trunk lid. The car regularly ran through black neighborhoods to intimidate people. “I saw it. It patrolled our neighborhood,” Casey said.

His family had their own business, which also brought harassment from the law. “We had a little sandwich shop,” Casey said. “We did pretty well with it. And back then, a lot of these little black businesses, they sold moonshine on the side. The cops would pull up outside. They’d come inside, look in the refrigerator, look in the bathroom, wouldn’t say a word. Just walk around the store. It was frightening.”

And Casey recalled what happened to people he knew who committed the offense of walking down the streets of their neighborhoods at night and encountered one of Bull’s officers.

“They catch you walking the street at night for no reason, they’d say, ‘Come here…Where are you going? Put your head in the window. I can’t hear you.’ They would roll the window up on your head and beat your head with a rubber hose. That was a known fact.”

The police of his youth were involved in petty, senseless violence, Casey remembered. “A domestic argument [occurred] in the neighborhood one day.

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