The Agitator's Daughter by Sheryll Cashin

Author:Sheryll Cashin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublicAffairs

The CSC did not rest on its laurels. Huntsville’s unfinished “race” business included public education, public swimming pools, and politics—realms still imbued with the ideology of white supremacy. On the education front, its members began at the graduate level. Mama applied to be admitted to a continuing education course on foreign affairs at the University of Alabama at Huntsville, a satellite of the state’s flagship university. Faced with evidence of her degrees from Fisk and Columbia universities, UAH could not deny her admission based upon a lack of qualifications. They found another excuse. A month after she applied, she received a letter in January 1963 informing her that the course had been canceled due to a lack of available speakers. The Carolina Times, Chattanooga Observer, Louisville Defendant, and Jet magazine saw fit to cover this episode as a transparent rebuff of a would-be integrator. The Huntsville Times was silent on the matter.

Two days before Mama received her rejection, George Wallace gave his inauguration speech in Montgomery. The scrappy little judge from Barbour County had won decisively in the Democratic primary—the only election that mattered in Alabama—by “out-seg’ing” the competition. On the campaign stump, he had repeatedly promised to defy any federal court desegregation order and personally stand in the schoolhouse door if necessary. He reaffirmed his purpose at his inauguration.

Some white people must have shuddered along with black Alabamians. Everyone remembered his most passionate statement: “In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth, I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny . . . and I say . . . segregation today . . .segregation tomorrow . . . segregation forever.” Between the lines, my father also thought he heard Wallace call for a volunteer militia that would aid the state in resisting school desegregation. He began to rethink the CSC’s education strategy because he believed in his heart that Wallace’s officially sanctioned volunteers would slaughter Negro schoolchildren if this was their first line of attack in desegregating public education in Alabama. He thought the safer strategy was to first desegregate higher education, and he wanted to deny Wallace and his legions the politically potent symbolism of massive resistance. If Wallace was determined to have his stand in a schoolhouse door, the most unfriendly stage for him would be the entrance to graduate education at UAH, because Dad and Police Chief Spurlock had shaken hands on Spurlock’s commitment to arrest anyone, including the governor, who attempted to obstruct a court’s desegregation order.

According to Dad, his suggested change of strategy did not go over well with Jack Greenberg of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. Thurgood Marshall had led the “Inc. Fund” to win Brown v. Board of Education and legions of other civil rights cases. He had chosen Greenberg to succeed him when President Kennedy decided Marshall belonged on the bench. Nine years after the Brown decision, every public school in Alabama remained segregated. Greenberg and other Inc.

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