Freedom in the Family: A Mother-Daughter Memoir of the Fight for Civil Rights by Tananarive Due

Author:Tananarive Due [Due, Tananarive]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Cultural Heritage, Women
ISBN: 9780307525345
Google: teNU8WWzAm8C
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2009-04-01T18:30:00+00:00

Seventeen

PATRICIA STEPHENS DUE

“Sticks in a bundle are unbreakable.”

—Bondei proverb

I had just been arrested again when I heard about the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham in September 1963. For a moment, I felt paralyzed with disbelief. As much as we’d been going through, I still couldn’t believe the people who opposed us could go to such lengths, bombing a church and killing innocent children.

Theater demonstrations had brought me to jail again. By now, mass demonstrations were becoming a more common sight across the United States. In addition to the demonstrations in Birmingham and the March on Washington, thousands of people were taking part in marches and pickets all over the South. Injuries against protesters were mounting, and jails were being filled to capacity.

In Tallahassee, students returning to campus after the summer break turned out in impressive numbers to be arrested in theater demonstrations, in wave after wave. First, on Saturday, September 14, about 200 of us went to the Florida Theatre to protest the theater’s segregation policies. I’d had a wisdom tooth extracted that morning, but I went straight from the dentist’s office to the Florida Theatre. Even though I never got my painkiller prescription filled, I didn’t give my tooth another thought.

This time, the movie showing was The Day Mars Invaded Earth, and I’m certain it must have felt that way to many white onlookers who gazed at the thronging crowd of Negroes. A photograph of that day clearly shows me and John at that protest. I am wearing my dark glasses, as usual, and there is a very determined expression on my face, and a crowd of students is behind me, clapping and singing in front of the theater. Many of the students there, like FAMU business and education sophomore Doris Rutledge (who would later become a lifelong friend), brought money to purchase a movie ticket, then remained to protest when refused. When police tried to disperse us based on the injunction issued the spring before against large-scale protests, some of the students opted to leave, but 157 of us were arrested, including me, Doris Rutledge, Rubin Kenon, and Calvin Bess. Doris has told me how a police officer struck the inside of her left leg with his nightstick while she was being herded into a police van. Nothing was broken, she says, but it was so painful that she was afraid she might lose the leg, and the bruise lingered a long time. She suspects that her leg never healed properly from the blow; she had never had leg problems before, but her left leg remained weak and has thrown her off balance in the years since. “I’m thankful I have this leg,” she told us at a civil rights reunion at my home in 1997, surrounded by activists who had stories of their own to tell. “It is a memory of trying to go someplace where everyone should have had a right to participate: going to a theater. I was beaten by a cop because that was all I wanted to do.

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