In The Shadows of Birmingham: The 1962-1963
Huntsville Civil Rights Movement
J. Brandon Curnel
© Copyright 2015 by Jonathan B. Curnel
All rights reserved.
Published in the Huntsville History Collection
with the permission of the author
March, 2016
1
DEDICATION
I dedicate this work to my parents, Melvin and Linda Curnel, who always fully
supported me and my endeavors, and to Dr. Sonnie Hereford III. Your bravery and will to
pursue equality in the face of adversity has inspired me and will inspire future
generations to come.
2
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I wish to thank Dr. Sonnie Hereford III and Sonnie Hereford IV for sharing
firsthand knowledge of events surrounding the Huntsville Civil Rights Movement. I
would also like to thank Hank Thomas. Not only are you are lifelong proponent of civil
rights and proud veteran of the Vietnam War, you brought the Civil Rights Movement to
Huntsville, Alabama. I thoroughly enjoyed your fascinating life story, including your time
as a Freedom Rider. Finally, to my wife, Nikki, and three daughters, Whitney, Lainey, and
Julia, thank you for providing me a non- academic, fun, and loving atmosphere after long
stressful days of battling the library stacks.
3
ABSTRACT
This essay examines the Huntsville Civil Rights Movement and what made the
movement both unique and an overwhelming success. The study analyzes the impact
Project Paperclip, the relocation of Nazi scientists, had on the Huntsville area and the
movement toward social justice. The study shows why Huntsville was a prime location
for a groundbreaking movement leading to Huntsville being the first desegregated city in
the state of Alabama and home to the first desegregated public school system in the
“Heart of Dixie”. This examination of events involving Huntsville concludes that because
of the influx of Nazi scientists and the businesses that followed, Huntsville was more apt,
compared to other cities in state, to accept a civil rights movement ultimately leading to
the achievement of integration.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
CHAPTER
PAGE
INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………………...6
I. No Ordinary Cotton Town………………………………………..……………...11
II. Inhuman………………………………………………………………………….26
III. The Sit-Ins Hit Huntsville……….………………………..………………..…….36
IV. Blue Jeans Sunday.……………………………………………………………….50
V. Huntsville Defies Wallace………………………………………………………..64
VI. The Huntsville Way………………………………………………………...……82
BIBLIOGRAPHY……………………………………………………………............87
5
INTRODUCTION
“I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I
say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever”.1
-Governor George C. Wallace
January 14, 1963
On a warm humid Alabama morning, an eighty-two year old man clasped the hand
of his fifty-six year old son and began a casual stroll down a sidewalk in the heart of the
medical district in Huntsville, Alabama. However, on this September 9, 2013 morning, it
was not a usual father – son bonding experience. The walk was a reenactment of one the
most historic days in the history of the state of Alabama. The two men, grayed with age,
were retracing the steps they took fifty years prior when, then six –year old, Sonnie
Hereford IV became the first African American student permitted to enroll in an Alabama
public school, thus ending a century of school segregation in the racially charged state.
Just as in 1962, there were no national media outlets present, only a handful of locals,
including this author, who viewed the recreation as a landmark achievement and
watershed moment in Alabama history. Truly, the Huntsville Civil Rights Movement had
long been placed squarely in the shadows of Birmingham.
This study will examine why Huntsville should be recognized for its unprecedented
achievements and why this former “cotton town” was unique. Additionally, we will
1
Townshend Davis, Weary Feet, Rested Souls: A Guided History of the Civil Rights Movement (New York:
W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1998), 47.
6
examine how the introduction of former Nazi rocket scientists to the area primed
Huntsville to become the first integrated city in Alabama during a time when violence
reigned across the region. This study will conclude that due to the inflow of transplant
workers, the unwavering leadership of the movement, and a firm commitment to
nonviolence, Huntsville’s successful civil rights movement stands above comparison.
For many Americans, the Civil Rights Movement conjures up mental images of
racial violence, police brutality, the Klu Klux Klan, powerful leadership among the
African American community, nonviolent marches, and triumph. During the struggle for
equality two states proved more uncompromising than any others; Alabama and
Mississippi. Historians and those who lived the experience still debate which of the two
Deep South states was more disinclined for change. In terms of historiography,
Alabama’s involvement in the overall movement predominantly focuses on three cities:
Birmingham, Montgomery, and Selma. Adding Huntsville to this list is long overdue.
Montgomery claimed national attention after the Montgomery Bus Boycotts, which
made Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. household names. The capital of Alabama
obtained further notoriety on May 20, 1961 when Freedom Riders, such as John Lewis
and Jim Zwerg along with John Siegenthaler, a representative of the United States
government, were badly beaten at the Greyhound bus terminal. Selma will always be
etched in the conscience of America. A nation watched on “Bloody Sunday” March 7,
1965 as Alabama state troopers pummeled a peaceful crowd marching as they attempted
to cross the Alabama River over the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Then there is Birmingham.
Birmingham, undeniably, was the most violent and most racist city in the United States.
Referred to as “Bombingham”, the most populated city in Alabama, witnessed eight
7
bombings alone in 1963, all “unsolved”.2 Included in the wave of bombings was that of
Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church which grotesquely claimed the lives of
four innocent elementary school girls.
Birmingham was the prime example of a police state. The leader of the
Birmingham Police Department was the infamous Commissioner of Public Safety
Eugene “Bull” Conner. According to Bull Conner, the violent use of “police dogs and
fire hoses was just standard police procedure for crowd control”3. The White House and
nation watched in disgust as the Birmingham Fire Department ripped the flesh off of
children, some as young as eight years old, with high pressure fire hoses. In the spring of
1963 the Children’s Crusade, also called the Children’s March, witnessed the arrest of
thousands of Birmingham children who were caged in animal stockyards at the
Birmingham Fair Grounds. The youth were subjected to the elements and given
minuscule rations of food and water. While Birmingham was receiving warranted
national media attention and pressure from the highest levels of government, another
major Alabama city already made significant and historic strides in arena of the Civil
Rights Movement. That city was Huntsville, Alabama, a name that rarely comes into the
discussion on the topic of civil rights in Alabama.
When investigating the movement in Huntsville, it is evident that enormous holes
exist within its historiography, because, for over fifty years, the Huntsville Movement has
been overshadowed by events in Montgomery, Selma, and Birmingham. Accurate and
authentic information on events in Huntsville is limited. Currently there are two
2
George McMillan, “America Spelled Backward” Life Magazine, October 11, 1963, 39.
3
Diane McWhorter, Carry Me Home: The Climatic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution (New York:
Simon & Schuster, 2001), 22.
8
published works on the subject. However, neither is dedicated solely to the movement in
its entirety. The two works are The Agitator's Daughter (2008) and Beside the Trouble
Waters (2011). In his autobiography, Beside the Trouble Waters, Dr. Sonnie Hereford III,
a leader of the Huntsville movement, with meticulous detail, chronicles many key events
of the movement. However, this book is a personal history. The same is found with
Sheryll Cashin, the daughter of movement leader John L. Cashin and author of The
Agitator's Daughter. To date, there is not one published extended work dedicated solely
to the Huntsville Civil Rights Movement.
When putting the Huntsville movement in historiographic context, we must
evaluate the historiography of the overall movement. Since a true start date to the Civil
Rights Movement cannot be agreed upon, the beginning of the historiography is also in
question. C. Vann Woodward’s, The Strange Career of Jim Crow must certainly be
mentioned as a pioneering work. Published in 1955 and coming off the heels of the
Brown v. Board of Education (1954) decision, Martin Luther King Jr. himself labeled
Woodward’s work as the “Holy Bible of the Civil Rights Movement”.4 In his essay,
“Freedom Then, Freedom Now: The Historiography of the Civil Rights Movement”,
historian Steven F. Lawson brilliantly outlines how scholarly work on the subject has
evolved over the decades. Initial works focused primarily on the movement’s leaders.
Over the next three decades the historiography expanded to broader topics and subtopics, such as Freedom Summer.5 The 2000s ushered in a new era of Civil Rights
historiography. Grandiose scholarship was apparent as historians produced some of the
4
Sheldon Hackney, “C. Vann Woodward, Dissenter,” Historically Speaking 10, no. 1 (2009): 31.
Steven F. Lawson, “Freedom Then, Freedom Now: The Historiography of the Civil Rights Movement,”
The American Historical Review 96 no. 2 (April 1991): 456-457.
5
9
best chronicled and detailed works on the subject to date. Included in this assessment is
Diane McWhorter’s 2002 Pulitzer Prize winner for non-fiction, Carry Me Home:
Birmingham, Alabama, the Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution and Raymond
Arsenault’s 2006 gem, Freedom Riders:1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice. The
Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) turned Arsenault’s account of the horrific treatment of
the riders into a documentary. The powerful film, which included numerous interviews
with the actual participants, won three Emmys and the prestigious Peabody Award. In his
1991 essay, “Freedom Then” Lawson asserted that the future of the subject’s
historiography would be rooted in the genre of local history.6 The final purpose of this
essay is to simultaneously add to the local history of the movement and contribute to the
overall historiography. The Huntsville Civil Rights Movement is too historically
significant and has been overlooked and overshadowed too long.
6
Ibid., 466-467.
10
CHAPTER 1
NO ORDINARY COTTON TOWN
Located in the Highland Rim region of the southern United States, Huntsville is
the county seat of Madison County, Alabama. The Highland Rim is, “the southernmost
section of the Interior Low Plateaus province in the Appalachian Highlands Region and is
the smallest and northernmost physiographic section in Alabama”.7 Historically, due to
its rolling hills, there is a presumption the area did not have the number of slaves, nor the
racial violence experienced in central and southern Alabama.
For centuries, the Tennessee Valley area was inhabited by the Cherokee Nation.
Soon after the Revolutionary War and independence, the country engaged in a movement
of expansion, including lands west of the Appalachian Mountains. From 1796 to 1817,
the territorial lands of northern Alabama changed ownership several times. The region
once belonged to colonial Georgia, was part of the Mississippi Territory, included in the
Louisiana Purchase, and ceded to the Tennessee Land Company.8 The first white settler to
put down stakes in the region was John Hunt, the city’s namesake. In 1805, Hunt built a
cabin on the banks of a small freshwater source known as Big Spring.9 Accompanied,
“by a man named Bean”, John Hunt, a native of Tennessee, discovered the fertile soil of
7
Horace Williams and Christine Garrett, eds., The Alabama Guide: Our People, Resources, and
Government (Montgomery: Alabama Department of Archives and History, 2009), 8.
8
Edward Chambers Betts, Early History of Huntsville:1804 to 1870 (Montgomery: The Brown Printing
Co., 1916), 5.
9
Ibid., 6.
11
the territory while tracking wild game down through Tennessee and into northern
Alabama.10 Hunt and Bean quickly spread the word of this untapped area with its
sparkling springs, virgin soil, and abundance of wildlife. By 1806, it was clear the
message was received as settlers poured into the region from, “Middle and East
Tennessee and Georgia”.11 Also arriving was a new class of settler bringing with him a
race of people unfamiliar to the area. Between 1805 and 1809, “wealthy and cultured
slave owners came into the county in large numbers” and soon outnumbered the rugged
self-sustaining pioneers like John Hunt.12
To slave owners, the area around Big Spring was ideal. The increasing price of
cotton made the fertile Highland Rim soil very profitable. Perhaps the most attractive
attribute for the cotton growers was the isolation of the expanse. If a slave acted on the
urge to escape, he encountered insurmountable obstacles. Neighboring hostile tribes
would re-enslave the escapee and often the captive would be treated harsher than his or
her prior white owner. Escapees, if discovered by whites in the vicinity, were returned to
their land of bondage.13 Having battled the increasing anti-slave sentiment in the North
and Mid-Atlantic Regions, migrant Virginia cotton growers welcomed the slave
environment of the Deep South. In 1811, due to the mass arrival of newcomer planters
and their slaves, Huntsville became the state’s first incorporated city. And within the
10
Ibid.
11
Ibid., 7.
12
Ibid.
13
Ibid., 10.
12
decade, “almost half of Madison County’s population was enslaved”.14
After the War of 1812, a surge in cotton prices occurred across the nation
including its outlying territories. Because of the rising prices, new cotton farmers
emerged, as seen with tobacco in Virginia and North Carolina two centuries before. The
potential revenue generated by increasing cotton prices caused a feverish land grab never
before witnessed in the northern part of Alabama. In 1818, the federal government
decided to put large tracts of Tennessee Valley land up for sale. The national government,
in 1818, outlined extremely lenient purchase policies, which encouraged buyers. Those
who chose to purchase land, “at public auction had to pay one quarter of the purchase
price upfront and the rest in three annual payments”.15 For the relocated cotton farmers
this meant they had ample time and possibly two harvests to pay for the land obtained
from public sale. Another strategy used by the government to entice customers was the
size of tracts offered. Although a mule was not part of the deal, the smallest tract of land
available to buy was forty acres.16 The 1818 federal land sale in Huntsville, Alabama,
according to one historian, “was one of the greatest speculative booms in frontier
history”.17 By year’s end, close to one million acres of Tennessee Valley lands were
purchased for an estimated seven million dollars.18 Indeed, the Huntsville area was
booming. However, the enormous amounts of lands and dollars changing hands, coupled
with the almost nonexistent regulations created a bubble primed to burst.
14
Daniel S. Dupre, Transforming the Cotton Frontier: Madison County, Alabama 1800-1840 (Baton
Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997), 2.
15
Ibid., 42.
16
Ibid.
17
Ibid., 43.
18
Ibid.
13
The year following the vast land exchanges witnessed two key happenings for
Huntsville; The Panic of 1819 and the arrival and departure of the state capital. The Panic
of 1819, America’s first peacetime depression, “shattered the prosperity and confidence
of the postwar years”.19 The economic downturn caused a rapid decline in cotton prices,
creating a devastating blow to those in the Tennessee Valley region who planted all their
hopes in dreams into the rich Alabama soil. The cotton farmers were left with overbearing
debts and resorted to the unthinkable; returning the land that a year earlier promised
financial security. Although felt throughout the nation, “the magnitude of losses in north
Alabama dwarfed those of other western regions”.20 In total, settlers of the area
relinquished more than 400,000 acres back to the United States government.21 Close to
half of all lands purchased during the land craze of 1818 was back in hands of the federal
government, including lands upon which a century and a half later the government would
build the Redstone Arsenal and Marshall Space Flight Center. In Huntsville, the financial
crisis trickled down from master to slave as witnessed in 1819 by Stephen Maltby of New
York who remembered, “I was at Huntsville” and “frequently saw slaves on and around
the public square with hardly a rag on them, and in a great many instances with but a
single garment both in summer and in winter; generally the only bedding of the slaves
was a blanket”.22
Daniel S. Dupre, “The Panic of 1819 and the Political Economy of Sectionalism,” in The Economy of
Early America: Historical Perspectives & New Directions, ed., Cathy Matson (University Park,
Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), 264.
19
20
Dupre, Transforming the Cotton Frontier, 55.
21
Ibid.
Stephen Maltby, “Testimony of Stephen E. Maltby, Inspector of Provisions Skaneateles, N.Y., who
resided sometime in Alabama” in American Slavery As It Is: Testimony of A Thousand Witnesses, ed.,
Theodore Dwight Weld (New York: The American Anti-Slavery Society, 1839), 41.
22
14
The exodus created by the Panic of 1819 included the state capital. Shortly after
the departure of visiting President James Monroe, the powers that be decided the center
of Alabama’s government needed to be moved from St. Stephens to Huntsville. St.
Stephens is located in the southwest corner of the state near Mobile and government
officials felt the capital need be located near the geographic center of the state.23 While
waiting for the statehouse to be constructed at Cahaba, the government was nomadic
carrying along with it Alabama territory and state records. Simply stated, because there
was no brick and mortar state constructed epicenter of government adorned with marble
Doric columns, wherever the governmental documents landed was the territory and
eventual state capital. On June 26, 1819 Huntsville’s first newspaper publication, the
Alabama Republican reported, “His Excellency Governor Bibb arrived in Huntsville on
Monday last. The Secretary of the Territory is daily expected and the public records, etc.,
have already arrived here, where they will remain while this place continues to be the
Seat of Government”.24 One of the first orders of business was statehood. An assembly
convened on October 25, 1819 and became one of the most significant meetings in the
state history. Confidently anticipating statehood, delegates selected United States senators
and established a Supreme Court. The Huntsville session of the Alabama Assembly was,
“the real beginning of Alabama’s functioning as an equal state under the Federal
Constitution” and on December 14, 1819 Alabama was, “formally received into the
sisterhood of States”.25 However, just like the excitement over the land settlement,
23
Jim Lewis, Lost Capitals of Alabama (Charleston: The History Press, 2014), 2.
24
William H. Brantley, Three Capitals: A Book about the First Three Capitals of Alabama: St. Stephens,
Huntsville, & Cahawba 1818-1826 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1947), 43.
25
Ibid., 48.
15
Huntsville experienced additional disappointment. Two days after becoming a state,
construction of a statehouse was complete and the working government pulled up stakes
and moved to the more centrally located area of Cahaba.
After the predictable and unavoidable loss of the capital and end to the Panic of
1819, population numbers rebounded with a fury. By 1822, “no town in Alabama had
greater populations”.26 The early 1820s saw cotton prices rise and stabilize and
Huntsville, like most of the South, had more than its fair share of individuals vying, once
again, to make a comfortable living in the harvesting of “white gold”. One man brought
with him a slave that became one of the most important figures in African American
History. Before Dred Scott filed suit in 1846 and took his case before the United States
Supreme Court, he was a field hand on the property where Oakwood University now
stands. Scott belonged to Peter Blow, a nomadic farmer who wanted to try his luck upon
the dirt of Huntsville.27 The Dred Scott decision allowed U.S. territories to decide for
themselves the issue of slavery, thus becoming a contributing factor to the American Civil
War.28 Although still a cotton town, Huntsville, with its rapidly increasing population,
began to diversify economically. One resident, Anne Royall left Huntsville during the
Panic. She returned in 1822 astonished. The shocked Royall remarked about the diverse
growth of Huntsville, “Its capital is considerable and its proprietors are thoroughgoing
business men”.29 In her Letters From Alabama, Royall inventories 1822 Huntsville as
26
Betts, Early History of Huntsville, 45-46.
27
Yoriko Ishida, Modern and Postmodern Narratives of Race, Gender, and Inequality (New York: Peter
Long Publishing, 2010), 218.
28
Dred Scott v. Sanford 60 U.S. 393 (1856).
29
Anne Newport Royall, Letters From Alabama: 1817-1822 (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama
Press, 2003), 152.
16
having saloons, several schools, two churches, a firehouse, two printing shops, twentyone lawyers, and eight physicians.30 The expansion did not stop there as issues of
Huntsville’s Alabama Republican, “reveal a wide variety of local industries including, a
beer brewery; a leather tannery; a watch and clock maker; manufacturers of boots, shoes,
hats, candles, and copper stills”.31 Clearly, Huntsville was fully recovered and headed
toward prosperity. Yet, the former state capital remained a town controlled by cotton.
As the decade rolled over to 1830, it appeared the business of cotton in
Huntsville had a rival. Foreshadowing its role as a pioneer, in 1830, one of the nation’s
first railroads, the Tuscumbia, connected the Tennessee Valley and the town of
Sheffield.32 Two years later the railway extended into Decatur, allowing a stage line
company from Huntsville to Decatur to flourish.33 It appeared the business sectors related
to transportation were in position to overthrow “King Cotton” as Huntsville’s primary
economic stimulant. However, cotton would not give up its stranglehold on commerce.
While the railroads quickly expanded, the state legislature, “chartered the state’s first
cotton mill, which contained three thousand spindles and one hundred looms, making it
the first cotton manufacturing facility of any significance in the southeastern United
States”.34 The name of the mill was Bell Factory. The fast flowing Flynt River powered
the mill which predominantly employed local slaves of all ages. Because the mill did not
30
Ibid.
31
Lewis, Lost Capitals, 58.
32
Ibid.
33
Ibid.
34
Ibid.
17
use steam and hand signals were inefficient, officials rang a large bell instructing workers
of their next move; hence the name of the mill.35 By the turn of the century, Huntsville
was home to ten textile mills, most in the state, including Lowe Mill and Dallas Mill.
In the years leading up to the American Civil War, Huntsville became more and
more urbanized compared to the rest of the state. In 1856, Huntsville’s transition from
town to city received a boost when the Huntsville Gas Light Company was established,
one of the first of its kind in the state.36 Due to its growing urbanization and proximity to
North Alabama railroads, Huntsville became a target for Union forces during the Civil
War. However, pro-Confederate sentiment was not the majority in the area. Most,
“preferred to remain neutral, but when that option was denied the hill folk opposed the
Confederate war effort at home or joined the Union army”.37 Because Huntsville was not
devoted in its support for the Confederacy, an irony considering the number of slaves and
cotton mills, the city was ripe for Union occupation. On April 11, 1862, Union forces
commanded by Brigadier General Ormsby M. Mitchel, and supported by infantry units
from Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio, successfully entered the city of Huntsville and remained
there as an occupying force for the duration of the war.38 Unlike many areas in the South,
Huntsville escaped the American Civil War virtually unscathed, whereas the landscape of
other areas lay in ruin. With war’s end and passage of the 13th Amendment, Huntsville
35
Betts, Early History of Huntsville, 49.
36
Lewis, Lost Capitals, 58.
Jeffrey D. Stocker, ed., From Huntsville to Appomattox: R.T. Coles’s History of 4 th Regiment, Alabama
Volunteer Infantry, C.S.A. Army of Northern Virginia (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press,
1996), xiv.
37
Deborah Story, “Union Forces Occupied Huntsville 150 Years Ago Today,” The Huntsville Times, April
11, 2012.
38
18
faced the daunting task of racial assimilation during Reconstruction.
Although Union sympathizers, the people of Huntsville did not take kindly to
“carpetbaggers” and “scalawags”.39 To combat this problem, many in the community
looked to a new and rising social group known as the Klu Klux Klan. Rooted in African
superstitions, many former slaves believed the white robed men were, in fact, former
masters who had risen from the grave to haunt their former captives. Before the
presidential election of 1868, the Klan rally organized a rally in Huntsville. More than
1500 hooded Klansmen, with horses in full regalia, marched through the downtown
streets of Huntsville generating fear and panic within the black community. Panic turned
to confusion and soon shots flew across the courthouse square.40 In Huntsville, the Klan
succeeded in driving out unwanted northerners, so the focus turned primarily to race.
In 1871, the Huntsville Klan, “committed ten more crimes than those of any other
county”.41 However, the racial violence was mild compared to other counties in the state.
Of the 49 racially charged crimes in committed in Huntsville that year, only six resulted
in death.42 The reasoning behind such acts of violence are numerous, but with a common
theme. Whites across the South expected the newly freed slave to act as he or she did
prior to emancipation. Late nineteenth century Southern African Americans targeted for
owning firearms and/or dogs, using “abusive” language toward whites, and most
The term “carpetbagger” was used to label northerners who traveled to the South during Reconstruction
in order to profit from the dire situation. ‘Scalawags” supported Reconstruction policies including racial
integration. For more on the topic explore Richard L. Hume and Jerry B. Gough, Blacks, Carpetbaggers
and Scalawags: The Constitutional Conventions of Radical Reconstruction. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University Press, 2008.
39
40
Betts, Early History of Huntsville, 119.
41
Ibid., 120.
42
Ibid.
19
inflammatory, being intimately involved with someone of Caucasian ethnicity.43 For
those of color who were accused of, or actually committed, crimes involving white
victims, the Klan often handled justice in and out of the courtroom.
Two examples of white vigilantism occurred in the early 1900s. On July 23, 1900
a thirteen year old white girl, Susie Priest, living in the Dallas Mill Village reported being
raped. She accused a local black man, which to the white community was the worst crime
conceivable. A mob formed and captured African American Elijah Clark. The crowd
presented Clark to the teenage victim, “who ‘positively identified’ him near the crime
scene” after which “the mob, led by the girl’s brother, hung Clark from a tree”.44 Four
years later a lynching in Huntsville had national implications. In September 1904, a local
African American, Horace Maples, was arrested on suspicion of murder. Yet again, the
white citizenry were outraged. A lynch mob appeared at the jail and set it ablaze hoping
to force Maples out of his cell and into their eager hands.45 The bloodthirsty horde was
successful. Maples fled the jail, was apprehended, and hung from a tree in front of the
courthouse.46 Unbeknownst to the gathering, along with Maples, the jail in Huntsville
also housed several federal prisoners who fled after the torching of the building. This
prompted a federal investigation that led to several of the mob members being identified
and federal criticism of the Sheriff Rodgers who, like so many before and after, turned a
43
Wyn Craig Wade, The Fiery Cross: The Klu Klux Klan in America (New York: Oxford University Press,
1998), 19.
44
Kristina DuRocher, Raising Racists: The Socialization of White Children in the Jim Crow South
(Lexington: The University of Kentucky Press, 2011), 136.
45
Christopher Waldrep, ed., Lynching in America: A History in Documents (New York: New York
University Press, 2006), 218.
46
Ibid.
20
blind eye to the happenings.47 The case went before Judge Thomas Goode Jones, who
was appointed by anti-lynching president Theodore Roosevelt. The case did not stop
racial violence, however Horace Maples was the last African American lynched in
Huntsville.48
The First World War brought economic growth to Huntsville. Textiles were
needed for more than 4 million men and women who served during the Great War.
However, the good financial times did not equate to increased racial tolerance. The 1920s
saw “textile depression” relegating many in area to unemployment and eventual poverty.
As the textile depression gave way to the Great Depression, jobs in the area became
increasingly scarce and racial competition and jealously became more pronounced. In
1933, historian Arthur Raper proclaimed, “In recent years a united effort has been made
by some of the poorer whites to run certain Negroes out of Huntsville”.49 One of those
targeted was ana African American businessman who purchased a grocery store from a
white man. Because the new owner did more business than his predecessor, “many of the
poorer whites felt that the Negro was ‘living too good for a nigger’.”50 Although race
relations were strained in Huntsville during the Great Depression, a glimpse toward
future events took place at one of Huntsville’s historically African American colleges.
Founded in 1896, Oakwood College, now Oakwood University, is an education
institution backed by the Seventh – day Adventist (SDA) Church. Oakwood originated,
47
Ibid.
48
Arthur F. Raper, The Tragedy of Lynching (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1933),
466.
49
Ibid.
50
Ibid.
21
“as the denomination’s only historically black college”.51 By 1931, African American
students from across the nation were enrolled at Oakwood. With them they brought ideals
including social equality. As enrollment numbers increased, so did student complaints.
The cause of the dissent was Oakwood’s student population was predominantly African American, yet the majority of the faculty and administration were white. This led to an
environment with, “heavy work schedules, low wages, and the inability to accumulate
academic credit due to the workloads”.52 Segregation was also the status quo on campus.
A former student from the 1930s remarked the, “practice of separating the races on
campus” created an, “overseer plantation relationship and many students felt insecure, as
if they were being watched continuously”.53 The students at Oakwood decided to let their
concerns be known. But first they had to organize. Organization became a key component
to the success of the Civil Rights Movement three decades later. Students formed a
committee known as the Excelsior Society and began laying out a plan of action. Among
the demands the protesters would present were: the appointment of an African American
president, the hiring of African American faculty members and support staff, and a shift
in focus from vocational training to a predominantly liberal arts education.54 On October
8, 1931, committee members and curious students met at the Bell Tower on campus. The
agenda was to establish mobilization including, “sealing off the campus from outside
forces, such as the Huntsville City Police, and the placing of monitors at the entrance of
Holly Fisher, “Oakwood College Students’ Quest for Social Justice before and during the Civil Rights
Era,” The Journal of African American History 88, no. 2 (2003): 110.
51
52
Ibid., 114.
53
Ibid.
54
Ibid.
22
each building to ensure the students were informed about the strike”.55 In response, the
university took an unprecedented step, creating a biracial committee to address the
student’s concerns. The “grievance committee” consisted of two white and two black
Oakwood faculty members.56 After several backroom discussions the administration
decided to compromise. The college offered the positions of bookkeeper and Dean of
Students to African Americans, but in return five of, “the most influential and prominent
strike leaders were expelled” and labeled “agitators”.57 The student movement at
Oakwood accomplished many things. One victory for Oakwood’s administrators was the
majority of those who fueled the movement were no longer on campus and would not
cause any further dissention. And a win for the students was a realization that nonviolent
protests could indeed render results.
The Great Depression initially overwhelmed the Huntsville area. Just like regions
across the nation, northern Alabama suffered economically. In Huntsville, labor strikes
intensified the situation. Because of the Depression cotton mills cut production, thereby
reducing work hours or eliminating positions altogether. The textile workers union
decided to hold a state strike conference, in which the vote was 40 to 42 for striking.58
Huntsville workers were the first to walk off the job as it was the largest textile hub in the
state. However, unlike most cotton towns, Huntsville’s despair was short-lived thanks to
the federal government and President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. Months before
55
Ibid., 115.
56
Ibid.
57
Ibid.
58
John A. Salmond, The General Textile Strike of 1934: From Maine to Alabama (Columbia: The
University of Missouri Press, 2002), 40-41.
23
the textile workers left their looms and spindles, the federal government created the
Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). The main purpose of the TVA was to build dams
along the Tennessee River in order to produce hydroelectricity. The New Deal project
was an enormous boost to Huntsville and its economy as it brought thousands of jobs to
the area.59
The outbreak of World War II was a watershed occurrence for Huntsville and its
future movement toward social justice and racial equality. Anticipating direct
involvement in the war, the federal government, “established the U.S. Army missile
research program at the Redstone Ordnance Plant (ROP) in 1941 on forty thousand acres
of former cotton land.60 The facility immediately impacted Huntsville. The agriculture
economy of Huntsville was still reeling from the Great Depression and Redstone offered
a solution. Yet, the prospects of prosperity attached to Redstone also challenged the status
quo of the Old South.
The people of Huntsville flocked to the newly created jobs at the ROP accepting
positions as, “civilian guards, machine operators, and line foremen” and “they entered a
new workforce in which labor organization was a constant fact of life, job training was a
necessary part of the workday, and female and black co-workers shared the morning
commute.”61African American workers did not enjoy the same pay and opportunities for
advancement as whites and Jim Crow still existed in and out of the federal installation.
However, African American workers, male and female made, “real gains during the
59
Lewis, Lost Capitols, 61.
61
Matthew L. Downs, Transforming the South: Federal Development in the Tennessee Valley, 1915-1960
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2014), 192-193.
24
defense emergency that would create a more solid foundation for the social and political
advances of the coming decades”.62 The Second World War completed Huntsville’s
transition from an agriculturally centered community to a thriving city built on the back
of a federally funded installations. Huntsville was no longer an ordinary Alabama cotton
town and a successful Civil Rights movement would prove it.
62
Ibid.
25
CHAPTER 2
INHUMAN
By the spring of 1945, World War II in Europe was all but over. From the West
the Allied forces of Great Britain and the United States, led by General Dwight D.
Eisenhower, were recovering from the Battle of the Bulge, but still gaining ground
toward the German capital. To the East, the Red Army under the leadership of Marshal
Georgy Zhukov was rapidly chasing the retreating German Army through Poland. Along
the way, the Red Army encountered and liberated several Nazi concentration camps,
including Auschwitz. What the Russians encountered at Auschwitz was discovered on
both fronts and can only be described as inhuman. Holocaust historian Yahuda Baur
disagrees, “The behavior of the Nazis was not ‘inhuman’. It was only too human. It was
evil, not inhuman, and was probably, in its concentrated form, the closest approximation
to what could be termed ‘absolute’ evil that human history has seen”.63 However, the
horrific nature of the Holocaust is undeniable.
During the moments when forces in the East and West were racing each other to
get to Berlin, another competition between Russia and the United States was underway.
Both the Soviet Union and United States were secretly rounding up German scientists.
The United States codenamed the program “Operation Paperclip”. Like World War II,
America emerged victorious prompting Joseph Stalin to declare, “This is absolutely
intolerable. We defeated Nazi armies; we occupied Berlin and Peenemunde; but the
63
Yehuda Baur, Rethinking the Holocaust, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 21.
26
Americans got the rocket engineers. What could be more revolting and inexcusable?”64
Among those scientists coveted by both nations was Baron Wernher von Braun.
Wernher von Braun (b. March 23, 1912 – d. June 16, 1977), “served Hitler as
head of the experimental guided-missile station at Peenemunde.”65 Von Braun’s most
significant contribution to the Nazi cause was the V-2 (Vergeltungswaffe 2) rocket, the
world’s first ballistic missile. Traveling at supersonic speeds, the V-2 was a, “long range
fin-stabilized rocket weighing 13.6 tons on launching and carrying a warhead of one ton
of amatol and ammonium nitrate”.66 Because of its unprecedented velocity and silent
descent, the missile was rarely observed making it all the more lethal. On November 25,
1944 the destructive capability of von Braun’s V-2 was put on display for the world to see
hitting a Woolworth’s store in the London suburb of Deptford. On that day a single rocket
killed 160 shoppers, “including passengers on a bus who, having been killed by the blast,
remained lifeless and dust-covered in their seats”.67 By war’s end von Braun was
indirectly, or arguably directly, responsible for more than 25,000 casualties.68
Undoubtedly, Wernher von Braun was a valuable asset to any nation’s military who
employed him.
By 1945, it was obvious to many of the German scientists, including von Braun,
that the end of the war was drawing to a close and Hitler’s dream of a Third Reich lasting
Clarence G. Lasby, “Project Paperclip: German scientists and the cold war,” New Scientist, January 20.
1972, 170-171.
64
65
Michael J. Neufield, Von Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War (New York: Doubleday Publishing,
2008), 3.
66
Bruce Barrymore Halpenny, Fighter Pilots in World War II (Barnsley, South Yorkshire: Pen and Sword
Books Ltd., 2004), 151.
67
Jorg Friedrich, The Fire: The Bombing of Germany 1940-1945 (New York: Columbia University Press,
2006), 112.
68
Ibid., 113.
27
a thousand years was demolished. With Allied forces cutting through Germany from all
sides, the scientists at Peenemunde had to decide whether to stay at the facility and be
captured by the advancing Red Army, or flee to the south to be picked by the Western
Allies, in particularly American forces.69 To use a colloquial phrase, this was a “nobrainer.” It was well known the Soviet Army was inflicting severe revenge on both
German soldiers and civilians. Upon hearing the news of Adolf Hitler’s death on April
30, 1945, Wernher von Braun sent his English-speaking brother Magnus to the American
position in order to establish a line of communication.70 Shortly after Magnus von Braun
surrendered himself to the Americans, Wernher von Braun and his Peenemunde team of
scientists allied themselves with the United States.
After interrogating and extracting the German scientists, the US Army shipped
the Peenemunde facility archives and remaining V-2 rockets to the United States and by
late 1945 von Braun was in Washington D.C., an extraordinary event little known beyond
the Pentagon and White House.71 From Washington von Braun boarded a train for his
new temporary home at Fort Bliss, a military base near El Paso, Texas. The Polish born
scientist and his team spent the next four years in Texas teaching their American
counterparts about the inner workings of rocket technology adding valuable contributions
to America’s Cold War effort. On December 9, 1946 Time published the first national
story about the von Braun “Rocket Team” introducing the German missile scientists as,
69
Brian Johnson, The Secret War (Barnsley, South Yorkshire: Pen and Sword Books Ltd., 2004), 184.
70
Ibid.
71
J.D. Hunley, The Development of Propulsion Technology for U.S. Space-Launch Vehicles, 1926-1991
(College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2013), 14.
28
“civilian workers employed by the United States War Department”.72 Immediate backlash
came with the publication as many Americans still resented their former German
enemies. Three weeks after the Time story hit the newstands, a group of prominent men
that included Albert Einstein sent the following statement to President Harry S. Truman:
“We hold these individuals to be potentially dangerous carriers of racial and religious
hatred. Their former eminence as Nazi party members and supporters raises the issue of
their fitness to become American citizens and hold key positions in American industrial,
scientific, and educational institutions”.73 The letter did not sway Truman and his
advisors. The situation at Fort Bliss carried on as usual. However, something had to be
done slowly to distance the German scientists from their Nazi past. The first step was
becoming American citizens. Before completing the naturalization process, von Braun
and his team had to be deemed legal immigrants. To accomplish this, they crossed the Rio
Grande into Mexico, visited the U.S. Consulate in Ciudid Juarez, and obtained a visa to
enter the United States.74 This loophole was referred to as “double crossing” the Rio
Grande.75
While von Braun and the Germans were hopping back and forth over the Rio
Grande in the West, Huntsville remained a segregated cotton town in the Deep South. The
environment in Huntsville after World War II was one of blatant racism. Dr. Sonnie
Herford III provides the following example: “A black mother could not take her daughter
72
Dennis Piszkiewicz, Wernher von Braun: The Man Who Sold the Moon (Westport, Connecticut: Praeger
Publishers, 1998), 15.
73
Ibid., 18.
74
Ibid., 61.
75
Ibid.
29
to the store and try on a new pair of shoes. The mother had to trace the child’s foot onto a
piece of paper, cut the outline of the foot, take the paper to the store, and insert it into the
shoes to check size. If a white customer knew of a black foot touching a shoe, they would
never shop at that particular store again and the shop owners knew it”.76 Dr. Hereford was
born in Huntsville in 1931 and is a life-long resident. For much of his life, he, like so
many southern African Americans knew nothing but Jim Crow. Dr. Hereford could not
have foreseen things would change and it started with the arrival of former residents of
Nazi Germany.
During the late 1940s and early 1950s, the federal government, with the
exception of Harry S. Truman’s desegregation of the military, left issues of racial
discrimination up to the states. In post -World War II America, the growing threat to
national security was not domestic unrest, it was spread of communism often referred to
as the ‘domino theory”. The theory became reality on October 1, 1949 when Mao Zedong
officially established the People’s Republic of China as a communist state. For the
Germans at Fort Bliss, this meant a move was in their future. The fall of China, and the
country’s rapidly signed pact with Russia, caused great distress among US government
leaders who feared, “a monolithic Communist power in the Eastern hemisphere”.77 The
communist concern prompted the Army to expand its weapons research and development
program. Compared to the facilities at Fort Bliss, Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville offered
a larger tract on which to build the military’s rocket development center.78 In April 1950,
the migration from Fort Bliss to Huntsville began. Those departing for the South
76
Interview with Dr. Sonnie Hereford III, Huntsville, Al. May 29, 2013.
John Catchpole, Project Mercury: NASA’s First Manned Space Programme (Hampshire, United
Kingdom: Springer Praxis Publishing, 2001), 16.
77
78
Dennis Piszkiewicz, Wernher von Braun, 65.
30
included, “130 members of von Braun’s team (there had been turnover in the original 118
man group, with some returning to Germany, others becoming employed by American
companies, and additions of others from Germany under Project Paperclip), over 500
military personnel, 120 civilian workers, and several hundred employees of the General
Electric Company, the Army’s prime rocket contractor”.79
Huntsville welcomed the scientists with open arms. Although former World War I
and II combatants, Germans were still white. In a 1997 interview, Dr. Hereford recalled,
“When Dr. von Braun . . . and his group (came) . . . there were celebrations and
welcoming committees and so forth, but none of our people were invited to
participate”.80 The rocketeers conformed to life in Huntsville easily. They, “enrolled their
children in the public schools, joined civic organizations, obtained library cards, and
hiked through the wooded hills north of the Tennessee River”.81 For African Americans
native to Huntsville, many for generations, this was a clear injustice. African Americans
could not enroll their children in any public school they saw fit and black schools,
although separate, were anything but equal. For example, Councill Hill School was
surrounded by the city dump on three sides, and without air conditioning hot, humid
Alabama days created a classroom stench that was almost unbearable.82 The school
offered its African American students no library, no cafeteria, and no laboratory, yet
79
Ibid.
Sonnie Hereford III interview with Monique Laney, “Operation Paperclip in Huntsville, Alabama,” in
Remembering the Space Age: Proceedings of the 50th Anniversary Conference, ed., Steven J. Dick
(Huntsville: NASA Publishing, 2009), 96
80
81
Dennis Piszkiewicz, Wernher von Braun, 66.
82
Hereford interview, May 29, 2013.
31
students like Dr. Hereford walked miles to get to the school.83 Huntsville did not provide
buses to the African American students of Huntsville, Ironically, black students forced to
walk for their education came to dread the site of approaching yellow school buses. It
was common for white students to target African American students walking to school.
Objects, such as rocks and tomatoes were thrown and, on occasion, the bus drivers would
purposely slowdown in order to give white passengers a better opportunity to hit the
walking target.84 That experience was not shared by the children of the scientists who had
developed weapons to kill white American soldiers.
Over the next decade, von Braun continued his dream of reaching for the stars.
For African Americans the idea of equality seemed an equally daunting task. In the mid
1950’s, the United States Supreme Court reduced the gap between discrimination and
social justice when, on May 17, 1954 the Court concluded, “that in the field of education
the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place” 85 As bold as the Supreme Court’s
decision was, it had little initial effect in the South. Public schools in Little Rock,
Arkansas were desegregated by using the 101st Army Airborne in 1957 and Alabama did
not see an integrated school until 1963. One year after the Brown v. Topeka, Kansas
Board of Education ruling, seamstress Rosa Parks sparked a movement in Montgomery,
Alabama that unfurled throughout the Deep South.
The Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955 made national headlines and elevated Dr.
Martin Luther King Jr. to the forefront of the Civil Rights Movement. However, the
83
Ibid.
84
Ibid.
85
Richard Kluger, Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board and Black Americans Struggle for
Equality (New York: Vintage Books Publishing, 2004), 793.
32
movement’s fundamental base was college students. On February 1, 1960 four students
from North Carolina Agriculture and Technical College started a sensation among
protesters called the “sit –in”. The students refused to give up their seats at the lunch
counter at the Greensboro, North Carolina Woolworth’s. Accompanied with boycotting,
the sit-ins had an effective economic impact. After weeks of dwindling profits, the city of
Greensboro succumbed to the inevitable and on July 25, 1960 the first African Americans
were allowed to sit and eat where they wanted in Greensboro.86 Word of the success
spread from campus to campus across the South and soon African American populations
of other cities, such as Nashville and Atlanta, were waging and winning the struggle for
equal rights.
The following year, 1961 was a watershed time period for Huntsville. During his
January 20th inaugural address, President John F. Kennedy proclaimed, “Let every nation
know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet
any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and
success of liberty”.87 This made southern African Americas contemplate their position.
The president made mention to, “nations all over the world, but made no reference to
Alabama, Mississippi, or Georgia”.88 What the president did allude to was the United
States commitment to the space program. For Huntsville this meant a future of economic
growth, government contracts, and an increasing populous. That spring, President
Kennedy reiterated and expanded the dedication to space exploration when publicly
86
Frederic O. Sargent, The Civil Rights Revolution: Events and Leaders, 1955-1968 (Jefferson, North
Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2004), 40.
87
Thurston Clarke, Ask Not: The Inauguration of John F. Kennedy and the Speech that Changed America
(New York: Penguin Books, 2011), 1-2.
88
Hereford interview, May 29, 2013.
33
announcing a pledge to safely land a man on the moon by the end of the decade.89 As
Huntsville was enthusiastic with anticipation, another event was unfolding that would
shape Huntsville’s future as well.
The headline read “Inhuman!”90 The photograph under the gripping headline was
that of a burning Greyhound bus. The Anniston chapter of the White Knights of the Klu
Klux Klan had targeted the Freedom Riders. Freedom Riders were a group of CORE
(Congress of Racial Equality) activists, black and white, old and young, and male and
female who boarded interstate buses scheduled to travel through the South. The purpose
was to challenge segregation laws along the way including bus terminal waiting rooms,
water fountains, and restrooms.91 While at the Anniston terminal the bus tires were
slashed to insure the bus could not reach its next destination before the mob could have
its way with the riders. The bus barely made it outside of Anniston’s city limits before the
flattened tires made travel impossible. Immediately an angry crowd descended upon the
bus. Members of the Anniston Klan held the doors together, while a Molotov cocktail
bomb was thrown through a broken window. Burning the riders alive was the goal of the
racially charged assembly, and if not for the explosion of the gas tank, the task would
have been accomplished.92 One passenger, John Henry “Hank” Thomas, lay next to the
burning bus, “coughing and strangling” when a man approached him questioning if he
John F. Kennedy, “Special Message to Congress on Urgent National Needs, May 25, 1961,” John F.
Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum. http://www.jfklibrary.org/Asset-Viewer/Archives/JFKWHA032.aspx [accessed January 12, 2015].
89
“Inhuman! Governor Refuses State Protection,” in The New York Amsterdam News, May 15, 1961.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/freedomriders/index.php/tag/media/359 [accessed October
25, 2014].
90
Information on the Freedom Rides is attributed to Raymond Arsenault’s Freedom Riders: 1961 and the
Struggle for Racial Justice. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.
91
92
Interview with Hank Thomas, Atlanta, Georgia November 11, 2013.
34
was alright and when Thomas affirmed he was, the gentleman struck Thomas in the back
of the head with part of a baseball bat.93 After healing in New York City, Thomas rejoined
CORE and the cause. Like so many other Freedom Riders, Thomas took the movement to
college towns across the South. After spending time in Louisville, Kentucky Hank
Thomas, a native of St. Augustine, Florida, traveled through Tennessee landing in the
“Rocket City” on January 3, 1962 where he initiated the Huntsville Civil Rights
Movement.
93
Ibid.
35
CHAPTER 3
THE SIT-INS HIT HUNTSVILLE
The racial atmosphere in Huntsville in the early 1960s can be described as
apathetic. There was not commonplace violence as experienced in Birmingham, nor the
organized demonstrations and boycotts that took place in Montgomery. Yet, Huntsville
was socially segregated. Movie theatres and restaurants were separated and even the “Just
Married” page of The Huntsville Times was not immune to Jim Crow. Dr. Sonnie
Hereford’s interest in equality swelled after his engagement and marriage to Martha
Adams in 1956. He learned the photograph of his bride would not be put in the local
newspaper’s Society Page. The editor informed Hereford, a prominent black physician in
Huntsville, that if he put Martha’s photo on the same page as a white bride, newspaper
sales would plummet. But if Hereford could find a newspaper that included photos of
white and black brides together, he would publish her bridal photograph. Hereford
remembered, “There is no telling how much money I spent on newspapers, and I could
not find one. Not in Alabama, Chicago, or New York”.94 There was a feeling in
Huntsville that something should be done, however, “it wasn’t something people talked
about frequently. They talked about what other people were doing, but I didn’t see
anybody stepping forward”.95 The movement in Huntsville was non-existent. The status
quo was significantly altered in January 1962, “that’s when a young man named Hank
94
Hereford interview, May 29, 2013.
Sonnie Hereford interview with Mike Marshall, “Local civil rights leaders reflect on 50 th anniversary of
the movement’s beginnings in Huntsville,” in The Huntsville Times January 8, 2012.
http://www.al.com/breaking/2012/01/on_the_50th_anniversary_of_the.html [accessed April 12, 2013].
95
36
Thomas showed up”.96
By the time the youthful Hank Thomas arrived in Huntsville he was veteran of
the Civil Rights Movement. Thomas was born into poverty in rural Florida and raised in
southern Georgia. As a teen Thomas got a taste of workplace discrimination. He was
relegated to the unyielding world of backbreaking labor for minimal pay.97 At 18, Thomas
left the South enrolling at Howard University in Washington D.C. While studying at
Howard, he became more involved as an activist and “engaged in civil rights actions in
the District, in suburban Maryland, and in northern Virginia”.98 In 1961, Thomas heard
about CORE and the Freedom Rides. At age 19, Thomas applied to CORE requesting to
go on the rides. The problem for Thomas was CORE set the minimum age for
participating in the rides at 21. He forged his mother’s name on the application and
CORE accepted him into the training program.99 CORE members were put through
rigorous exercises pushing their ability to remain nonviolent to its limits. Thomas
recalled being subjected to racial insults and physical “slaps” during the training
workshops, but he knew better than the rest that this was not the real deal.100 As an
African American growing up in the Jim Crow South, Thomas witnessed true racial
violence. Before the Freedom Rides departed, he was designated as an alternate rider, but
96
Jack Ellis and Sonnie Hereford III, Beside The Troubled Waters: A Black Doctor Remembers Life,
Medicine, and Civil Rights in an Alabama Town (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2011), 89.
97
Raymond Arsenault, Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2006), 68.
Derek Catsam, Freedom’s Main Line: The Journey of Reconciliation and the Freedom Rides (Lexington:
The University of Kentucky Press, 2009), 5.
98
99
Ibid.
100
Thomas interview, November 11, 2013.
37
a last minute illness to one of the original riders catapulted him into a seat on a
Greyhound bus and harm’s way.101 After the extreme violent incidents during the summer
of 1961, CORE members fanned out across the South to battle segregation and the tested
Thomas brought his passion for equal rights to Huntsville, Alabama. Huntsville was
chosen because of its two historically black colleges and diverse population, including
many northern transplant workers who migrated to the area for jobs at Redstone Arsenal
and Marshall Space Flight Center. For Thomas, this combination made Huntsville,
“unlike any other city in Alabama”.102
Shortly after New Year’s Day 1962, Thomas, accompanied by fellow CORE
member Richard Haley, arrived and began organizing. Haley was a field secretary for
CORE and helped organize local movements in Albany, Georgia and Tallahassee,
Florida.103 Recent events in Greensboro, North Carolina and Nashville, Tennessee had
shown the most willing group to rally together were students and Thomas went straight to
the well. College students were more easily recruited because they often did not have
jobs, and therefore did not have the fear of being fired by white employers. CORE’s first
two targets were Alabama Agricultural and Mechanical (A&M) University and Oakwood
College, where students organized protests 30 years prior to Thomas and Haley’s
appearance. The arrival of CORE to Huntsville created a buzz on campus. Frances Sims,
who legally changed her name to Washiri Ajanaku, was as student at Alabama A&M and
watched the CORE motorcade wind through campus with Hank Thomas on the
101
Ibid.
102
Interview with Hank Thomas, Huntsville, Alabama. August 6, 2013.
103
Glenda Alice Rabby, The Pain and the Promise: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Tallahassee, Florida
(Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1999), 139.
38
loudspeaker repeating, “Y’all come on out to the mass meeting tonight”.104 Ajanaku
recalled not being interested in civil rights until hearing Thomas’s booming voice that
day on campus and from that moment on she was 100% committed to the cause.105
Alabama A&M President Joseph Drake and Oakwood College President Garland Millett
labeled Thomas an agitator and threatened him with arrest if he so much as stepped foot
on campus.106 And at Oakwood there was a, “verbal and nonverbal policy calling for
nonparticipation coming from the college administration”.107
Along with hitting the colleges, Thomas was told he should meet with prominent
and successful members of Huntsville’s African American community, including dentist
Dr. John Cashin. Like Dr. Sonnie Hereford III, Cashin had reason to advocate change.
Both men had to attend medical schools outside of their native state of Alabama, as there
were no accredited in-state universities offering medical degrees to African Americans.
Furthermore, the doctors had to attend professional development seminars outside of the
state and, depending on availability of required seminars, in foreign lands.108 Cashin’s
desire for change was fueled by a Fayetteville. Tennessee police officer who severely beat
the dental student while on his daily commute to class.109 At one of the first “strategy
meetings”, Dr. Cashin suggested to Hank Thomas, “that they start at a bus station lunch
Washiri Ajanaku interview with Mike Marshall, “Washiri Ajanaku, one of the first two people arrested
in Huntsville’s civil rights movement, returns to her hometown,” in The Huntsville Times September 17,
2012. http://al.com/breaking/2012/09/washiri_ajanaku_one_of_first_t.html [accessed April 12, 2013].
104
105
Ibid.
106
Thomas interview, August 6, 2013.
107
Fisher, “Oakwood College Students’ Quest for Social Justice”, 119.
108
Hereford interview, September 9, 2013.
Sheryll Cashin, The Agitator’s Daughter: A Memoir of Four Generations of One Extraordinary AfricanAmerican Family (New York: Public Affairs Publishing, 2008), 115-116.
109
39
counter because the Supreme Court had recently clarified that the Constitution’s ban on
segregation of interstate travel carriers extended to travel facilities within the states”.110
This was an “odd” suggestion to someone (Thomas) who spilled blood and faced the
prospect of being burned alive while battling the issue of interstate bus segregation.111
After the mass meeting with students at Alabama A&M, four locations were targeted for
integration: “Walgreens, Woolworths, G.C. Murphy and W.T. Grant – places that were
happy to take Negroes’ money but unwilling to allow them to sit and eat a hamburger”. 112
On Saturday morning January 6, 1962 an estimated 75 students descended upon
the Heart of Huntsville Shopping Mall to demonstrate and participate in sit-ins. At the
behest of Hank Thomas and Richard Haley, protesters entered the establishments and
proceeded to sit and order at the all-white lunch counters. After ten to twenty minutes,
most of the demonstrators abandoned their posts without incident. However, two did not.
Frances Sims and Dwight Clark, a 16 year old local high school student, who would
become the “most arrested” protestor, refused to give in.113 At 12:15 p.m. police arrested
the two youths, making them the first two incarcerated during the movement. Police
could not arrest an individual for ordering at a lunch counter, but could detain
demonstrators based on the “trespass after warning” law. The law stated, “if any merchant
or any landowner had someone on his property and didn’t want him there, for whatever
reason, he could just call the police, who would arrest him and take him off the
110
Ibid., 131.
111
Thomas interview, November 11, 2013.
112
Cashin, The Agitator’s Daughter, 132.
113
Ibid.
40
property”.114 This was not Birmingham. Law enforcement officials did not want to fill the
jails the way Birmingham police officers had done with student activists a year later
during the Children’s Crusade. The Huntsville Police Department, “released any
demonstrator who posted an appeal bond”.115 According to former police officer Jack
Gold the arrested were not threatened or harmed and handcuffs were not used.116 To post
a real estate bond, “you had to own property worth a certain amount and you had to be
able to prove it by your last tax statement. This allowed you to put up $5000 for each
person arrested.”117Successful and financially able members of the African American
community, including Cashin and Hereford, continually acted as bondsmen for those
willing to sacrifice personal freedom for the betterment of the cause. The African
American community was not the only faction risking financial hardship in order to free
those incarcerated. Although a rarity, Caucasians participated in bonding out protestors,
including Dr. Virgil M. Howie, a native of Mississippi, and his wife.118 Howie’s
involvement did not go unnoticed. Howie, like most pediatricians, relied heavily on the
referrals of obstetricians. Newly birthed mothers often abide by the suggestions for
postnatal care from the people they trusted with the delivery. During the sit-ins, an
obstetrician who had referred several women to Howie over the years approached him in
one of the hospital’s dressing rooms. The doctor explained to Howie, “Hey, you’re gonna
be signing all these bonds for these niggers, I’m not gonna send you any more
114
Hereford and Ellis, Beside the Troubled Waters, 90.
115
Cashin, The Agitator’s Daughter, 132.
116
Interview with Jack Gold, Huntsville, Alabama. July 21, 2013.
117
Hereford and Ellis, Beside the Troubled Waters, 91.
118
Ibid.
41
patients”.119 Such was the atmosphere of generational racism, even among those who
vowed to uphold the Hippocratic Oath.
The adult black leadership in Huntsville was not privy to the planning of the sitins, however at the same time many felt a line of communication needed to be opened to
the local merchants and Mayor’s office. The arrest of the student protestors “galvanized
everybody”.120 Soon, the prestigious members of the African American community,
including Dr. Hereford, Dr. Cashin, and Reverend Ezekiel “Zeke” Bell called a meeting.
The delegation met with Mayor Robert Benjamin “Speck” Searcy Jr. Searcy naively
commented, “the Negroes and the white people had always gotten along well together.
They stand in the same line at the bank, they go to work, they come home, and they
should be law-abiding citizens. So there’re no problems; there’s nothing else to talk
about”.121 Mayor Searcy was correct the two sides had stood in the same lines, but could
dine at the same facilities, could not drink from the same fountains, and could not freshen
up in the same restrooms. There was plenty left to talk about.
After the conversation with Searcy, another meeting was called at the African
American First Baptist Church. During the assembly, participants decided to call the
organization the Community Service Committee (CSC) and elect officers. They
unanimously elected Reverend Zeke Bell as the first president of the CSC.122Another
point on the agenda was the formation of subcommittees, including ones on education,
119
Hereford and Ellis, Beside the Troubled Waters, 91.
120
Ibid., 90.
121
Ibid.
122
Ibid.
42
negotiations, finance, public facilities, and jobs and employment.123 The CSC elected Dr.
Sonnie Hereford III to preside over the subcommittee on education. This was a logical
choice because Herford’s son, Sonnie IV, was scheduled to enter public school, albeit
segregated, the next year.124 After all subcommittees were created and chairmen chosen,
Dr. John Cashin made a suggestion that greatly impacted the overall movement in
Huntsville. Cashin hinted, “We need a subcommittee on psychological warfare”.125
Cashin defended his rationale stating, “we need to try to outsmart the opposition because
they’ll do one thing and then another, try to pull something over on us, and we need to be
able to throw up a smokescreen now and then, make it appear like we’re gonna do one
thing when we’re really gonna do another”.126
Initially, the local media praised the lack of violence associated with the
demonstrations and pushed both sides to act calmly. The feeling among the white owned
businesses and newspaper was that, “if the merchants simply ignored those sitting-in, the
demonstrators would somehow realize the folly of their agitation and just go away”.127
The “problem” would not be dismissed and would not easily dissipate. White leadership
underestimated the involvement and resolve of the adult African American leaders. This
was not just a student movement in Huntsville. Three days after the Huntsville sit-ins
started, the Huntsville Times changed its passive position. On January 9, the title of the
article read, “It’s Time to Call a Halt”. The piece read, “We cannot believe that anything
123
Ibid.
124
Ibid.
125
Ibid.
126
Ibid., 90-91.
127
Cashin, The Agitator’s Daughter, 132.
43
like the majority of the responsible colored citizens either endorse or support the tactics
used. Such demonstrations do serve one purpose. They harm Huntsville’s position in the
highly competitive race for industrial and intellectual development”.128 With that article it
was clear white leadership in Huntsville was strongly concerned about the impact the
demonstrations would have on the ongoing research and developments occurring at
Redstone Arsenal and Marshall Space Flight Center, and how the negative publicity
would affect the rapidly growing economy.
The police department, led by Sheriff L. D. Wall, placed a 24 hour surveillance
detail on Hank Thomas, but did not want the unjust police violence witnessed in other
areas of the South.129 Due to expanding wealth the community was experiencing, local
leaders did not want Huntsville’s name smeared in the national media over civil rights.
On January 15th, Thomas opened his car and noticed a strange odor emitting from the
vehicle. Undeterred, he got into the car and drove off. Within a block he noticed a,
“burning sensation on the seat of my pants that grew and grew until I had to pull over
from the pain”.130 Thomas went to Huntsville Hospital, a segregated facility, where he
was told he could not be treated until a black doctor arrived. At Huntsville Hospital only
a handful of rooms were available to African Americans and they were not specialized
rooms. Emergencies from trauma to childbirth were all attended to in these few rooms.
And if white emergency rooms overflowed, the rooms were used relegating any African
American patients to waiting in the hallways. Although in obvious excruciating
128
The Huntsville Times, January 9, 1962.
Richard Paul, “How NASA Joined the Civil rights Revolution,” Air & Space Magazine (March 2014).
http://www.airspacemag.com/history-of-flight/how-nasa-joined-civil-rights-revolution-180949497/
[accessed July 6, 2014].
129
130
Thomas interview, November 11, 2013.
44
discomfort, Thomas had to wait untreated.131 When Dr. Sonnie Hereford arrived an hour
later he smelled Thomas’s coat immediately recognizing the stench of mustard gas.
Hereford’s olfaction was correct. The irritant was oil of mustard, a non-life threatening
caustic chemical that causes severe pain.132 Dr. Hereford admitted Thomas to the
hospital, coated him in soothing ointments, and provided heavily sedation, “because he
was almost delirious and wanting to climb over the side rail he was in so much
misery”.133 The Huntsville Times got wind of the occurrence and wanted to print a related
article. Although Hereford was a licensed physician, hospital administration decided to
assign two doctors, both white, to deduce the cause of Thomas’s affliction. The report
issued for the newspaper questioned whether Thomas had encountered a foreign
substance at all, only that the patient was lying comfortably in his bed with a thick white
substance (Hereford’s prescribed ointment) applied to the skin.134 The hospital forwarded
the report to the newspaper without Hereford’s approval or knowledge.
A similar, yet more violent, event took place a few day later. During the Civil
Rights Movement and all across the South, “segregationists regularly targeted white civil
rights activists for especially brutal treatment since they were seen as ‘traitors’ to their
race”.135 This sentiment reigned true in Huntsville as well. William Pearson, a student at
Alabama A&M, reported a situation to CORE field secretary Richard Haley who had ties
131
Ibid.
132
Hereford and Ellis, Beside the Troubled Waters, 92.
133
Ibid.
134
Ibid., 92-93.
135
Gregg L. Michel, Struggle for a Better South: The Southern Student Organizing Committee, 1964-1969
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan Publishing, 2004), 122.
45
with the African American newspaper Chicago Daily Defender.136 A white NASA
employee, Marshall Keith, entered the Huntsville Woolworth’s with African American
students: Bertha Burl, Mary Joiner, Leon Felder, and Pearson. Marshall entered the
establishment ahead of the others and ordered eggs, toast, and orange juice. Shortly after,
the four students entered Woolworth’s sat down and the lunch counter and were ignored.
Marshall gave the juice to Pearson and the eggs and toast to Felder. The Woolworth
manager scolded the waitress who he thought willingly served the unwanted patrons and
threatened to fire her if she served Keith again. The manager, a Mr. Trimmell, “turned to
Leon, who was busy eating eggs. ‘Want more salt and pepper?’ He tilted the shakers over
the plate, smothering the food with condiments”.137 Trimmell proceeded to pour ketchup
all over the counter in front of Burl and Joiner, who immediately began wiping up the
mess. Trimmell informed the ladies, “I have more ketchup than you have tissues”.138
Marshall and the students soon left and were followed out the door by the manager who
exclaimed, “you ate but you weren’t served” before grabbing the plate the African
Americans had eaten from and smashing it on the ground.139 It is not known who else
witnessed the event, or if Trimmell passed along a summary of the day’s happenings to
those who wanted to see segregation endure at all costs. It is certain Keith was targeted
for his role in the sit-in. In the middle of the night, “three Caucasian gentlemen went to
his house and knocked on the door under the pretense that they were having car trouble.
William Pearson, “Student Tells How CORE Staged Huntsville Sit-In,” Chicago Daily Defender (Daily
Edition) January 31, 1962, 6. Online archives accessed January 2015.
136
137
Ibid.
138
Ibid.
139
Ibid.
46
And when he unlocked the screen, they threw a .45 automatic in his face and said, come
with us”.140 Threatening death, unidentified kidnappers drove Marshall Keith just outside
of town to a wooded area where he was forced to strip and doused with the same
chemical, mustard oil, which was put in Hank Thomas’s vehicle seat.141 Like Thomas,
Keith was rushed to the hospital and treated by Dr. Hereford, who demanded the
administrators who questioned Thomas’s ailment come see the white man injured by the
same chemical.142 A verbal apology ensued, but no public retraction of the Thomas story
was ever published. Thomas tried to reach out to Keith but was told because of death
threats to his grandmother, Keith had quit his job with NASA and moved to New York
City.143
By mid-January 1962, the sit-in movement was gaining momentum and national
attention, something the white community desperately did not want. Northern African
American journalist Trezzvant W. Anderson sarcastically reported, “At last it has
happened! The famous “Missile City”-home of the mighty Saturn, the Redstone Rockets,
Dr. Wernher Von Braun, and the great Redstone Arsenal-has been hit by the sit-ins, and
23 Negro students of Alabama A&M College and local high schools were arrested last
week after the first seven days of demonstrations”.144 Not only was the media monitoring
events unfolding in Huntsville, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and national Civil Rights
140
Hereford and Ellis, Beside the Troubled Waters, 93.
Paul, “How NASA Joined the Civil Rights Revolution,” http://www.airspacemag.com/history-offlight/how-nasa-joined-civil-rights-revolution-180949497/
141
142
Interview with Sonnie Hereford III, Huntsville, Alabama. December 10, 2014.
Paul, “How NASA Joined the Civil Rights Revolution,” http://www.airspacemag.com/history-offlight/how-nasa-joined-civil-rights-revolution-180949497/
143
Trezzvant W. Anderson, “Sit-Ins Finally Hit Huntsville: 23 Students Jailed in Missile City,” Pittsburgh
Courier January 20, 1962, 14. Archives accessed February 12, 2015.
144
47
leaders were also keeping up with the city’s progress. James Lawson, who claimed
national recognition, during the Nashville Civil Rights Movement, reported to Dr. King
that the Huntsville Movement was a, “strong non-violent situation” and was focused on
the sit-in.145 Lawson listed the main problems associated with the early movement in
Huntsville were, “the clergy who do not provide forthright leadership” and “the problems
of coordination and administration (the movement does not have an office, P.O. Box
52)”.146 Lawson offered the following suggestions: “(a) A basic need for non-violent
training, discussion, analysis and study (b) the need to develop a primary blueprint of
action (c) write a basic propaganda leaflet to state what is going on (d) establish
negotiations (e) write a list of rules for demonstrators and (f) encourage worship”.147 In
addition to Lawson and King, activities in Huntsville grabbed the attention of
controversial Alabama Governor John Patterson. The top executive for the state,
Patterson claimed national attention for his outlandish actions and comments during the
1961 Freedom Rides. Segregationists severely beat travelers in Anniston, Birmingham,
and only a few blocks from the state capital building in Montgomery. Patterson
responded to the attacks with little compassion at a press conference boldly stating,
“When you go somewhere seeking trouble you usually find it. I lay full blame on the
agitators who come in here for the express purpose of stirring up such a thing. We can’t
James Lawson, “Report on the Workshop for the Huntsville Movement, March 5-7, 1962,” The King
Center Digital Archives, http://www.thekingcenter.org/archive/document/report-workshop-huntsvillemovement# [accessed January 25, 2015].
145
146
Ibid.
147
Ibid.
48
act as nursemaids to agitators”.148 In February, Patterson wrote State Superintendent of
Education W.A. “Bing” Lecroy about his apprehensions pertaining to Huntsville.
Governor Patterson explained, “I am very much concerned about the activities of certain
of the Negro students at the college in Huntsville. An organization known as CORE has
been operating in Huntsville……actions of these students at Alabama A&M bring
discredit upon the college and our State”.149 Patterson continued to boast, “I now have
men in the Huntsville area who are investigating these demonstrations and in due time
will give me the names of the students of A&M who are involved”.150 The Huntsville
Movement had other problems as well. Because the sole strategy appeared to be sit-ins,
many in the black community were bored and after “sitting in” day after day ceased
coming downtown.151 Compounding the problems laid out by Lawson, the dissipating
interest from the African American community, and the intervention of Governor
Patterson was the departure of Hank Thomas and Richard Haley who were, “forced to
withdraw in early February, when a state court issued a sweeping injunction prohibiting
CORE from conducting operations anywhere in Alabama”.152 In order for progress to be
attained, the void left by CORE had to be filled and the CSC was primed to do so.
148
Anne Permaloff and Carl Grafton, Political Power in Alabama: The More Things Change (Athens:
University of Georgia Press, 1995), 141.
149
Ibid., 151.
150
Ibid.
151
Hereford interview, September 9, 2013.
152
Arsenault, Freedom Riders, 493.
49
CHAPTER 4
BLUE JEANS SUNDAY
After the expulsion of CORE, “race relations in the ‘Rocket City’ remained calm
but unresolved”.153 German scientists in Huntsville were taking notice of events around
the South. Missile technician Wernher Dahm recalled, “We had some concerns here, not
so much about segregation…as open strife”.154 Open strife is exactly what Cashin’s
psychological warfare committee wanted to create, but non-violently.
Throughout the history of the United States and even before this country was
sovereign, one of the most effective ways to achieve change using non-violent maneuvers
was through boycotting. Whether British paper products in 1768 or Montgomery bus
tickets in 1955, time and again financial interruption of business proved a devastating
strategy which garnered the attention of the wealthy and government leaders. Another
proven non-violent method of protest was picketing and the CSC enacted both.
There was one major hurdle to overcome in order to boycott local merchants.
Thirty years before the arrest of Rosa Parks, the Alabama legislature passed the antiboycott law. Not only did the legislation outlaw boycotting, it made advocating
boycotting a criminal offense as well. The decades old regulation was passed, “in 1921 as
part of a series of statutes provoked by a bloody strike of Birmingham coal miners in that
153
William S. Ellis, “Space Crescent II: The Brain Ghettos,” The Nation (October 1964): 239-240.
154
Matthew Brzezinski, Red Moon Rising: Sputnik and the Hidden Rivalries that Ignited the Space Age
(New York: Henry Holt and Company, LLC., 2007), 90.
50
year”.155 During the Montgomery Bus Boycotts, Montgomery officials used this decree,
along with the help of an all-white grand jury, to arrest and indict several black leaders in
Montgomery along with Dr. King.156 The CSC knew announcing not to buy at stores who
treated African American shoppers differently could and would incite arrest, so they
decided to use business cards and flyers asking, “Are you shopping for freedom or
buying segregation?”157 For the CSC, the black community refusing to buy locally was
not enough. A broader economic demographic had to be targeted. The committee called
in Randolph Blackwell for guidance.
Born in Greensboro, North Carolina Randolph Blackwell (b. March 10, 1927 – d.
May 21, 1981) was a lifelong advocate of civil rights. In 1943, at the age of 16 he formed
the Greensboro National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)
youth council.158 Seventeen years after its founding, two members of the youth council
teamed up with two fellow North Carolina Agricultural &Technical State University
freshmen and made history sparking the national “sit-in” movement.159 In 1954,
Blackwell moved to Huntsville joining the faculty at Alabama A&M as an associate
professor of government. Ten years later Blackwell accepted the position of program
director for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and attained
membership in Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). When the
155
Sarah Woolfork Wiggins, ed., From Civil War to Civil Rights, 1860-1960: An Anthology from The
Alabama Review (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 1987), 509.
156
Glenn T. Eskew, But for Birmingham: The Local and National Movements in the Civil Rights Struggle
(Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 23.
157
Hereford interview, December 10, 2014.
Lynne Olson, Freedom’s Daughters: The Unsung Heroines of the Civil Rights Movement from 1830 to
1970 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001), 74.
158
159
Ibid.
51
Huntsville Sit-Ins began in 1962, Blackwell immediately became involved. At the
recommendations of Dr. Cashin and Dr. Hereford, Blackwell agreed to be a member of
the CSC. He recommended making creative posters and marching in front of stores that
would not serve, hire, or treat with dignity African American patrons. The committee
concurred. One rationale for Blackwell’s suggestions was he knew picketers in Huntsville
would have the support of local unions. Dr. Hereford stated, “He knew no labor union in
Huntsville, or the United States, would stand idly by as people, black or white, were
arrested for picketing as it was the foundation of labor union strikes. He also knew no
union member would cross through a picket line to shop”.160
In February 1962, pickets began in Huntsville. One of the requirements to be a
picketer was an unconditional commitment to non-violence. They only items picketers
were allowed to have on their person were “flags, bibles, and signs” and “not even a
fingernail file was allowed”.161 The more creative and to the point a sign was the better.
Some favorites of Dr. Hereford’s were: “I ordered a hamburger and they served me a
warrant”, “Khrushchev can eat here but I can’t”, and “Worried about freedom in Laos and
Berlin? We want freedom here!”162 It was not just dining establishments targeted. The
committee decide to broaden protests to newly opened stores that refused to hire African
Americans. One such instance occurred at the opening of the Sears at the Heart of
Huntsville Shopping Mall. Upon finding out the store did not hire a single black worker,
the CSC decided to picket the nationally known retail outlet. At the, “grand opening, we
160
Hereford interview, December 10, 2014.
161
Ibid.
162
Hereford and Ellis, Beside the Troubled Waters, 96.
52
took a crowd down there and surrounded the place. And guess what we discovered?
There were some white people who refused to cross the picket line”.163 Throughout
February and early March pickets, “poster walks”, boycotts, and sit-ins were everyday
occurrences, sometimes lasting into the night. The main contributor to this resolve was,
“young A&M students refused to be deterred,” and their primary goal was to, “keep
pressure on city leaders and break through the blackout that the Huntsville Times had
imposed after the first weeks of the movement”.164 During the early parts of the 1962
Huntsville Civil Rights Movement, the local media refused to report on the actions of the
movement.
The standard protesting practices were not the only strategies employed during
the Huntsville Civil Rights Movement. In some instances, a lighter methodology was
engaged. Members of the CSC knew of a female African American school teacher who
was gifted at vocal impersonations. Usually with more than one eavesdropper, the
educator would call local merchants posing a Caucasian. She would ask the store owners
or managers for their stance on the hiring of black employees and what they felt of their
African American customers.165 This gave the psychological warfare unit an invaluable
assessment on which stores to picket and/or boycott. Another comedic tactic involved the
movie theater. Just as most establishments, the “movies” were segregated. To combat the
problem, several African Americans would get in a single file line, three to five deep,
approach the ticket window, and try to purchase a ticket. When refused, the first person in
163
Ibid., 94.
164
Cashin, The Agitator’s Daughter, 134.
165
Hereford interview, May 29, 2013.
53
line simply went to the back of the same line, followed by the next rejected and so
forth.166 This carousel disrupted the flow white paying customers and angered many
movie goers. Yet, for all the innovative modes used, it still was not enough to get city
leaders to succumb to change.
By early spring it was apparent something needed to be done to rejuvenate the
movement. Many had picketed and been arrested without much publicity or gains. The
movement was stagnant and many participants began to drop for different reasons
including, fear of physical or psychological retaliation and/or being fired by the white
employers. What the movement needed was motivation and what better method could be
utilized than bringing to town the best civil rights motivator of the era, President of the
Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
By 1962, Martin Luther King Jr. was nationally known for his work during the
1955 Montgomery Bus Boycotts. King was an extreme advocate of nonviolence. At an
early age he was inspired by Mohandas Gandhi, leader of the Indian Independence
Movement. King committed to implementing, facilitating, and teaching Gandhi’s
nonviolent methods in the Deep South elevating the pastor into a leadership role. On
March 19, 1962 King arrived in Huntsville. Needless to say his arrival created a buzz
within the African American and Caucasian communities. His agenda included speeches
at First Missionary Baptist Church and Oakwood College. His first speech delivered at
First Missionary Baptist was to a crowd of approximately 300 people to which he spoke
166
Interview with Bobby Hayden, Huntsville, Alabama, August 17, 2013. Mr. Hayden would later go into
the Marine Corps and served on the President’s Color Guard to President John F, Kennedy. He stood hours
on end beside the flag draped coffin of President Kennedy as he lay in state.
54
in “general terms”.167 The second oration at Oakwood was of a different nature and to a
more diverse crowd.
Oakwood College’s student newspaper, The Spreading Oak, reported more than
2000 people attended Dr. King’s speech on the night of March 19.168 This speech was
different than the one earlier in the day. At Oakwood Dr. King explained how,
“segregation was on its deathbed and the only thing left to decide is how expensive of a
funeral they were going to give”.169 The speech also contained several elements within
the iconic “I Have A Dream” speech delivered on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on
August 28, 1963 , making the gathering one of the first groups to hear those now famous
words.170 King issued three challenges to the eager listeners: “(1) to develop a world
perspective, (2) to strive for excellence, and (3) to continue to engage in creative
nonviolent protests”.171 Dr. King also had a few choice word for the leadership and
attendees of Oakwood who advocated abstinence from the movement. Female members
of Oakwood’s choir remembered King, “praised their singing and musical style, while he
‘blasted’ the college administrators and nonparticipating students for not joining in the
civil rights struggle”.172 The number of locals attending King’s speech was significant,
but more important was the make-up of the congregation, which was assorted, “due to the
167
Hereford and Ellis, Beside the Troubled Waters, 103.
168
Fisher, “Oakwood College Students Quest for Social Justice”, 117.
169
Hereford and Ellis, Beside the Troubled Waters, 103.
170
Hereford interview, May 29, 2013.
171
Fisher, “Oakwood College Students Quest for Social Justice”, 117.
172
Ibid., 118.
55
presence of personnel from the federal Redstone Arsenal”.173
After the speech at Oakwood, King and his top aide Reverend Ralph Abernathy,
along with several members of the CSC, retired to the home of Rev. Ezekiel Bell.174 The
two Civil Rights leaders could not check into a hotel of their choice due to Huntsville’s
segregation laws, which local hotel owners were strictly enforcing. King’s stay at Bell’s
house was not publicized even within the African American community. Bell’s neighbor
Edwin Hill, who was also a member of “Zeke’s” church and a local school administrator,
recalled, “I didn’t know he was there, and most of us did not. They wanted it that way
because of security purposes”.175 At Bell’s house the “creative nonviolent protests”
mentioned hours before at Oakwood were discussed.176 Although by 1962 King had
obtained celebrity status, the arrival of the civil rights pioneer did not receive a single line
of text in the Huntsville Times. However, when white minister Reverend Billy Graham
held a spiritual rally at Redstone Arsenal his arrival headlined the newspaper.177 The local
media repression of equality was in full effect. The hopes King’s presence would break
through the media blackout were dashed.
The King speeches did not have the broader effects as hoped for, but it did impact
local efforts. It rejuvenated protestors and crowds began growing larger by the day.178
173
Ibid., 117.
174
Hereford interview, May 29, 2013.
Mike Marshall, “The House at 101 Whitney Ave. is Among Huntsville’s Strongest Connections to the
Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.,” in The Huntsville Times January 20, 2012. http://al.com/huntsville-timesbusiness/2012/01/post_56.html [accessed March 20, 2014].
175
176
Ibid.
177
The Huntsville Times, August 27, 1962. Archives accessed July 9, 2013.
178
Hereford and Ellis, Beside the Troubled Waters, 103.
56
With the renewed vigor of the movement and loss of revenue for local merchants, Mayor
R.B Searcy decided it was time to appease the CSC. One of the first demands by the CSC
was a biracial committee, which Searcy rejected believing no whites would serve on such
a committee. Even with numerous whites attending King’s speech, Searcy’s initial
inclination was correct. He agreed to appoint two white members to the biracial
committee, but because of fear of physical and economic retaliation, “the mayor informed
the CSC that he couldn’t find a single white citizen who was willing to serve”.179 It was
evident if the Huntsville Civil Rights Movement was going to be a success, strategies of
greater extremes had to be utilized and that crucial task was given to the CSC’s
psychological warfare unit.
Stories of the Huntsville protest received warranted attention from national, black
newspapers such as The Pittsburgh Courier and Chicago Defender, but a broader
audience was needed. A white audience was needed. When inquiries were made to AP
and UPI as to why the happenings in Huntsville were not receiving recognition, the
associations responded by questioning if the local paper carried the stories. When told
they had not, the CSC was told, “Well there’s your answer. If the local paper does not
carry it, we should we?”180 Something radical had to be done to force the Huntsville
Times to relent its position.
Dr. John Cashin, head of the psychological warfare subcommittee, hatched a plan
to have Martha Hereford, who was five and a half months pregnant “but looked nine
months,” and Mrs. Cashin, who had a four-month-old daughter named Sheryll, sit-in at
179
Cashin, The Agitator’s Daughter, 141.
180
Hereford and Ellis, Beside the Troubled Waters, 103 and Hereford interview May 29, 2013.
57
one of the local lunch counters and get arrested”.181 Both of the doctors’ wives were eager
participants. Like their husbands, they were intimately involved from the movement’s
origination. Joined by Frances Sims, the first female arrested during the protests, the
ladies entered the local Walgreen’s, sat down at the lunch counter, and ordered. The
waitress refused and called the owner, William L. Hutchins, over who informed the ladies
they were not welcome, would not be served, and had to exit the establishment.182 When
the women did not submit, local authorities were called. Minutes later police officers
arrived and, trying to avoid attention, scurried the ladies out the back door where
detectives encouraged Joan Cashin to find someone to watch her four year old
daughter.183 Wanting more effect, Cashin refused and the three adults and one child were
escorted, under the jackets of detectives, placed in the back of a “paddy wagon”, and
hauled off to jail.184
The possible aftermath the arrests of two doctors’ wives, one pregnant, could have
on the booming business of government contracts greatly concerned city leaders. The
mayor contacted the police station informing the officers they were to release Hereford
and Cashin, “on their own recognizance.” But when the duo found out the same courtesy
would not be extended to Sims, the two ladies refused to leave without her.185 Not
wanting the attention incarcerating a four month old and pregnant woman would stir, the
jail released the women, who refused to post bond. Nevertheless, because an appeal bond
181
Hereford and Ellis, Beside the Troubled Waters, 103.
182
Cashin, The Agitator’s Daughter, 141.
Ibid., 142.
183
184
Ibid.
185
Hereford and Ellis, Beside the Troubled Waters, 104.
58
was rejected they were summoned to an arraignment. While the trio were awaiting their
day in court another idea came to fruition.
The Nashville Civil Rights Movement, “was one of the most dynamic and
successful local movements in all the South”.186 Because of its achievements and
proximity to Huntsville, Dr. Sonnie Hereford III opted to travel to Nashville and speak
with one of the movement’s leaders. Dr. Edward Caldwell, who formerly had a medical
practice in nearby Decatur, Alabama, told Hereford about a boycott called “Blue Jeans
Sunday”.187
According to Dr. Hereford, the two biggest shopping days for African Americans
in the 1960s were Christmas and Easter.188 For obvious reasons Christmas was one of the
top two days, but Easter was due to church atmosphere of the time period. To the African
American community, Easter Sunday was the time of year when you showed off that new
suit or dress and, “would not dare wear a suit or skirt that had been seen on you
before”.189 Caldwell explained to Hereford that what they had done in Nashville was
refuse to buy new clothes for Easter. Church members wore blue jeans instead. As Easter
weekend approached, Hereford relayed his conversation with Caldwell to the CSC, who
decided to put the Easter Boycott into action. For the boycott to work two obstacles had
to be tackled: (1) In 1962 blue jeans were not a normal everyday attire, so many did not
own a pair suitable for church and (2) some felt the holiday, given its spiritual
186
Michel, Struggle for a Better South, 25.
187
Hereford and Ellis, Beside the Troubled Waters, 104.
188
Hereford interview, September 9, 2013.
189
Ibid.
59
significance, deserved a new outfit.190 The solution was simple. Instead of buying new
dresses and suits, ranging from $25 to $100, new $5 jeans would be bought, but not in
Huntsville. African American churches throughout Huntsville instructed their
congregations to purchase blue jeans from Decatur, Athens, or Florence.191 And when,
“several hundred A&M students wore blue jeans in the Huntsville Easter Parade to
protest, ‘the Negro’s inferior position in the South,’ the black press made sure the
Huntsville Blue Jean Easter was national news”.192 Historian Jack Ellis estimates city
merchants lost close to one million dollars due to “Blue Jeans Sunday”.193 Huntsville’s
economy paid a hefty price in order to keep its city, “separate but equal”.
The week of the Easter Boycott saw Martha Hereford, Joan Cashin, and Frances
Sims in court facing their arraignment. Again, the women declined to pay and were taken
into custody. The jailers were ordered to “encourage” the women to post bond and the,
“mattresses in their cells were removed forcing them to sit on bare springs”.194 The jail
and city leaders were growing ever more frustrated as media outlets began calling
inquiring about the situation and the CSC jumped in on the action. Members, including
the black school teacher who could mask her voice for that of a Caucasian, would call
asking, “Is it true you have mothers in jail, you have a pregnant woman in jail?”195 The
mayor reached out to Dr. Cashin and Dr. Hereford pleading with them to post bond for
190
Ibid.
191
Ibid.
192
Richard Paul and Steven Moss, We Could Not Fail: The first African Americans in the Space Program
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015), 132.
193
Hereford and Ellis, Beside the Troubled Waters, 106.
194
Cashin, The Agitator’s Daughter, 143.
195
Ibid., and Hereford interview May 29, 2013.
60
their jailed wives, to which the men responded, “when the ladies were ready to be freed
they would.”196
The story was becoming too significant for the local newspaper to further ignore.
Finally, the Huntsville Times relented and the headline read, “Trio of Negroes Chose the
Jail Instead of Bail”.197 With the local newspaper reporting the circumstances, the
national media picked up on the story and Joan Cashin’s father pushed news outlets in the
North to publish the story. Mrs. Cashin’s father, Marc Carpenter, was a wealthy New
Jersey doctor and had the means and connections to spread word of the ladies arrest. The
nationally circulated Afro American reported, “Dr. Carpenter complained from his Jersey
City home that while the federal government is spending millions of dollars in Huntsville
[Redstone Arsenal and Marshall Space Flight Center], local officials are still allowed to
flout the rights of colored Americans”.198 Although an exaggeration, Jet added,
“Prominent New Jersey medic Marc Carpenter will spend a small fortune in fighting the
arrest and conviction of his daughter, Mrs. Joan Cashin Jr., as a ‘sit-in’ at a Huntsville,
Ala., drug store. He will take the case to the U.S. Supreme Court if necessary”.199 What
most Jet readers outside of Huntsville failed to realize was the ladies were in jail by
choice. Their husbands signed numerous bonds freeing protestors during the movement.
Money was not the issue. Yet, the women remained in jail for three days before posting
bond.
Coincidentally, the day the ladies bonded out of jail, gubernatorial candidate
196
Ibid.
197
The Huntsville Times April 26, 1962. Archives accessed July 9, 2013.
198
Cashin, The Agitator’s Daughter, 143.
199
“New York Beat,” Jet, May 17, 1962, 64.
61
George C. Wallace was campaigning outside of the Madison County Courthouse in the
heart of the Huntsville Square.200 The CSC decided the political rally provided an
opportunity to voice their situation. When Wallace arrived blaring “Dixie” from the back
of a flat diesel platform, the CSC was already poster walking, singing, and chanting antisegregation slogans. The Wallace political team purposely parked across the street and
turned the music in hopes of undermining the CSC’s gathering.201 The strategy did not
work and the CSC employed a new tactic. Balloons with freedom themed attachments
were let go all over the square.202 That was not the last time Wallace and the African
American community in Huntsville faced off.
In June of 1962, the CSC vowed it was time to take the protests out of the local
sector and target NASA. Poster walks were schedule, not in front of the local Walgreens
and Sears, but at the gates of the Marshall Space Flight Center.203 The protests had their
desire effect. Wernher von Braun learned in June that Attorney General Robert Kennedy
had planned on visiting Huntsville, but due to the picketing going on in front of the
NASA facility Kennedy had opted to change destinations.204 Later in the month members
of the CSC, along with Joan Cashin’s boisterous parents, travelled to Chicago and New
York. The purpose of their trek was to stage pickets at the Midwest and New York Stock
Exchanges. In the metropolises flyers were handed out informing potential financiers, “to
invest in Huntsville, Alabama is to invest in segregation,” and “to bring in new plants and
200
Cashin, The Agitator’s Daughter, 145.
201
Ibid.
202
Hereford interview, May 29, 2013.
203
Richard Paul and Steven Moss, We Could Not Fail, 133.
204
Ibid.
62
businesses to Huntsville aids segregation and subjects additional employees to racism”.205
The Associated Press picked up on the story and ran it nationally. This measure was the
breaking point for white leadership in the “Rocket City”. The protest were, “happening at
a time of buoyant optimism for the city, when the economy was strong and sure to get
better if nothing happened to ruin it”.206 The prospect of losing wealthy government
contracts in the midst of a booming space race was a gamble city leaders could not afford
to take.
The decision was made that on July 9, 10, and 11 1962, the city of Huntsville
would stage, “trial integrations”. Lunch counters at Woolworth’s, Liggett’s, and
Walgreen’s, among others, would be the first places for the experiment.207 This time there
were no arrests or violence. The next day and for the first time African American
residents in Huntsville visited their choice of movie theater, drank from “white” water
fountains, ordered hamburgers from any desired locale, and played with their children in
public parks once deemed off limits. Consequently, in June of 1962, Huntsville, Alabama
became the first fully integrated city in Alabama. However, more work needed done.
There was still a place whites and blacks could dine together; school cafeterias.
205
Ibid., 134.
206
Frye Gaillard, Cradle of Freedom: Alabama and the Movement That Changed America (Tuscaloosa:
The University of Alabama Press, 2004), 187.
207
Richard Paul and Steven Moss, We Could Not Fail, 134.
63
CHAPTER 5
HUNTSVILLE DEFIES WALLACE
While African Americans in Huntsville were enjoying long overdue freedoms,
the public school system remained segregated. On May 17, 1954 the historic Brown v.
Board of Education Topeka, Kansas concluded and the United States Supreme Court
issued the following ruling, “We conclude, that in the field of public education, the
doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place.”208 Yet, by summer 1962, Alabama was one
of the nation’s remaining holdouts on the Court’s interpretation and Governor George C.
Wallace appeared steadfast in his assertion the state would continue being segregated,
“now, tomorrow, and forever”.209 In true Huntsville fashion, the city challenged George
Wallace and the policy of Jim Crow education.
When the von Braun team of former Nazi scientists arrived in Huntsville, the
German children were able, unlike native African American children, to enroll in any
public school their immigrant parents deemed acceptable. Ernst Stuhlinger, an original
member of Project Paperclip, recalled the German’s arrival in Huntsville, “Our freedom
began here. We could live where we wanted to, we could buy or rent houses, buy
property. We could send the children to any school we wanted to.”210 Like African
American children, the German youth were viewed as unequal. However, while white
children were subjecting their black peers with racial slurs and throwing rotten fruit at
Patricia Alberg Graham, Schooling America: How Public Schools Met the Nation’s Changing Needs
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 127.
208
209
Davis, Weary Feet, Rested Souls, 47.
210
Andrew J. Dunar and Stephen P. Waring, Power to Explore: A History of Marshall Space Flight Center
1960-1990 (Washington D.C.: NASA Publishing, History Office, and Office of Policy and Plans, 1999),
14.
64
them from city school bus windows, they regarded the offspring of the rocket scientists as
celebrities. Former Huntsville Mayor Loretta Spencer remembered, “I think we were just
in awe. I remember working real hard in physics class to beat Axel Roth, who later
worked for NASA,” and “I beat him by a point on the final exam, and I was really tickled
by it”.211 While the Germans were impressing their classmates, African American
students around the city were questioning why their schools had no libraries, science
laboratories, or school cafeterias.
After the arrival of the von Braun team, the population of Huntsville boomed
with arriving transplant workers. Many were from areas with integrated school systems.
Yet, in 1960s Alabama was still Alabama and public schools remained segregated. This
meant for African American parents living on Redstone Arsenal, their children had to go
to a local “black school” no matter the distance from the base. In 1959, The Crisis, a civil
rights magazine founded by W.E.B. DuBois in 1910, reported, “last year Redstone
Arsenal in Alabama, transferred 21 acres of land to the Huntsville, Alabama school
district as a site for the construction of an elementary school from which Negro children
will be excluded”.212 When Madison Pike Elementary School opened its halls for the
purpose of educating America’s next generations, it became the newest Jim Crow school
in the “Heart of Dixie”.
The news of Madison Pike reached Clarence Mitchell, director of the Washington
D.C. bureau of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
(NAACP). On March 3, 1959, Mitchell testified to the U.S. House of Representatives
Shaila Dewan, “When the Germans, and Rockets, Came to Town,” The New York Times December 31,
2007. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/31/us/31huntsville.html?_r=0 [accessed November 20, 2014].
211
212
Jim W. Ivy, “Along the N.A.A.C.P. Battlefront,” The Crisis 66, no. 4 (April 1959): 220.
65
Subcommittee on General Education, “If the military authorities had kept the land and
built a school on it, the present policies of the Department of Defense which required that
all children who are eligible to be admitted without regard to race, would insure that there
would be no segregation”.213 The fact remained the parcel of land was handed over to the
city of Huntsville and therefore, according to state policy, Madison Pike was “white
only”.
At a November 1959 news conference, United States Attorney General William P.
Rogers suggested, “Negro youngsters on the base should be permitted to go to that school
[Madison Pike]”, and because the school was constructed on federal property, the Brown
v. Board decision should be implemented and the school integrated.214 Alabama Governor
John Patterson quickly responded that challenging segregation at the school was, “the
opening battle of an all-out war,” and the state government would, “resist every step of
the way.”215 City leaders in Huntsville denied any knowledge of the struggle ensuing
between the federal and state levels of government explaining, "No member of the city
Board of Education or the City Council has received word of any effort to integrate
any school in the City of Huntsville school system, either from the Justice Department
or from the Defense Department.”216
Prominent civil rights leaders were taking notice of the happenings surrounding
the opening of Madison Pike. In a letter to Attorney General Rogers, Dr. Martin Luther
213
Ibid.
“"Rogers Says Steps Planned to Lift Redstone Race Bars," The Montgomery Advertiser November
19, 1959 in The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., ed., Clayborne Carson (Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 2005), 327.
214
215
The Tuscaloosa News, November 10, 1959.
216
Ibid.
66
King Jr. expressed it was, “unjustifiable for military personnel to be ordered around
various stations and then confront a denial of educational opportunities for their children
on the bases.”217 The quagmire created by the opening of Madison Pike was cause for
investigation by the Department of Defense. Yet, with a lame duck president, Dwight
D. Eisenhower, and the looming 1960 election, the schooling situation for African
American Redstone Arsenal employees was not high on the executive branch's
priority list.
By 1962, black civilians and military personnel grew weary of waiting for
integration. An army sergeant tried registering his daughter at Madison Pike only to
be turned away. The army family sought the advice of Baptist minister Norman J.
"Jim" Jimerson. On August 1, 1961 Jimerson, a native New Yorker, started his
new job as director of the Alabama Council on Human Relations. 218 Jimerson's
participation in the civil rights struggle was especially dangerous because he was
Northern and Caucasian. After the school board delayed ruling on the matter,
Jimerson was contacted by Florence Yates, mother of the schoolgirl rejected by
Huntsville City Schools.219 After waiting more than twenty days for the board to rule
on the Yates enrollment, Jimerson wrote Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara
about the situation. The response came from Army Special Assistant for Personnel,
Roy K. Davenport, who replied that, "pupil placement of military dependents
remained the responsibility of local public school officials," and "the Department
217
Martin Luther King Jr. letter to United States Attorney General William P. Rogers, November 19,
1959 in The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., ed., Clayborne Carson (Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 2005), 327.
218
Randall C. Jimerson, Shattered Glass in Birmingham: My Family's Fight for Civil Rights 1960-1964
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2014), 24-24.
219
Ibid., 25.
67
of the Army would not condone segregation in any situation affecting its personnel
and had eliminated segregation in “on-post” schools.220 Davenport found a loophole
and was using it. Since Redstone Arsenal had turned the parcel of land which Madison
Pike was constructed on to the City of Huntsville school system, the elementary
school was no longer deemed an "on post" school. Director Jimerson argued that
although the land was transferred to the local school system, it was procured using
federal funds and therefore should be subject to federal laws forbidding segregation in
schools.221 The Army told Sgt. Yates that, because of the little girl's safety, it was
in the Army's, and his best interest his daughter be schooled at the nearest “black”
school.222 The Army did not want an embarrassing situation where a soldier's
daughter was harmed because an attempt was made to enroll her in school. Yet,
Jimerson's efforts were not in vain. In January 1963, the United States government,
"asked a federal court in Huntsville to issue a court order forcing the city and county
school systems to end discriminatory education practices effecting black military and
civilian families working for the Army at Redstone".223 Echoing Jimerson's
sentiments, the government, "specifically noted $4.4 million in investments in
Huntsville schools and threatened the removal of federal funds if the schools
continued to obstruct integration”.224 Again, federal dollars and civil rights put the
leadership in Huntsville between a rock (et) and hard place.
220
Ibid.
221
Ibid.
222
Ibid.
223
Downs, Transforming the South, 237.
224
Ibid.
68
The African American civilian population unaffiliated with Redstone Arsenal
were also unsatisfied. By the fall of 1962, the movement toward equality in
Huntsville had momentum. Local dining establishments and public facilities were
integrated without the violence experienced in other areas of the South. It was time to
take the next step and challenge school segregation. Thirty-five African American
families signed a petition that would allow their children to attend any public
school in Huntsville. 225 The Huntsville City Schools Board of Education denied
the request. Over the next few months those who signed the petition were targeted.
Although it never occurred, some received threats of violence, while others were
subjected to the psychological struggle of wondering if their signature would be
grounds for firing by their white employers. By the time the decision was made to
take the case to federal court, only four of the original thirty-five families
remained steadfast. 226
Another case originating in Huntsville and finding its way to federal
court involved higher education. After his 1960 election, John F. Kennedy
appointed Vice President Lyndon Johnson as head of his National Aeronautics and
Space Council and President's Committee on Equal Employment Opportunities.
Johnson believed, "the root of racial injustice was southern poverty," and "that one
way to achieve racial integration was to create jobs”. 227 NASA officials in
Huntsville felt working with local colleges was a way to achieve VP Johnson's
225
Hereford interview, December 10, 2014.
226
Ibid.
227
Richard Paul, "How NASA Joined the Civil Rights Revolution," Air & Space Magazine (March
2014),http://www.airspacemag.com/ist/?next=/history-of-flight/how-nasa-joined-civil-rightsrevolution-180949497/ [accessed January 25, 2015].
69
goals. Oakwood College traditionally centered on the religious aspects of education
and Alabama A&M proved an additional hindrance. In Huntsville, "it quickly
became clear that the local black colleges were not going to be turning out NASAready engineers any time soon. Several contractors had promised to assist the
schools, ‘in improving their facilities, curriculum, and faculties,’ but the reality was
the schools, A&M in particular, just were not ready”. 228 The last alternative was
looking to the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH). However, like its big
sister, the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa (UA), the university did not
accept black students even when integration was the law of the land. According to
Brown v. Board, UAH admissions personnel could not reject a prospective student
based on race, but that did not deter university officials from finding other means
for rejecting an African American's application.
On June 12, 1962 the Army entered into an agreement with UAH, whereas
the government agreed to fund certain classes that would benefit the university's
engineering program. Tuition for employees of the Marshall Space Flight Center
and Redstone Arsenal would be covered by the contract. 229 To some in the African
American community, NASA paying for classes at UAH was a slap in the face.
Retired political professor and former Alabama A&M student Michael Smith stated:
This is one of the negative things they've done-they were (the ones)
228
Paul and Moss, We Could Not Fail, 137.
229
Marvin P. Carroll and Dave M. McGlathery v. Philip M. Mason (Director of the Huntsville Center of
the University of Alabama), Hubert E. Mate (Dean of Admissions of the University of Alabama), Eric
Rodgers (Dean of the Graduate School of the University of Alabama), and Frank A. Rose
(President of the University of Alabama, United States Northern District of Alabama (1963).
http://wvvw.justice.govicrt/foia/readingroom/bostonjfk/pdfs/036-ua-doc-part3.pdf [accessed February
9, 2015].
70
who helped found the University of Alabama here in Huntsville.
And I say negative because there was already a state supported
school in Huntsville and it's called Alabama A&M. And so you
now have this clash, this friction, this tension, between the new
white school and the old black school. So, that's one of the things the
Germans also did. Von ethnocentrism . . . from Germany to
Huntsville. And it was nothing out of the ordinary for him . . . to
advocate the opening of a Jim Crow school. So, the Germans
were not advocates of racial integration, as far as I know.230
For others, including members of the CSC, NASA’s involvement with UAH was an
opportunity to challenge segregation.
In December 1962, Joan Cashin mailed in her application for admission to
the University of Alabama in Huntsville. She was not the first African American to
challenge segregation within the University of Alabama system. Autherine Lucy,
"attended classes at the University of Alabama for three days in 1956 but was
expelled for alleged statements that she made about school officials.”231
Contradicting the original statement, the university said her expulsion was for her
own safety, yet the next month, "administration also expelled Leonard Wilson,
ending any further strides toward integration for the next seven years”.232 Cashin was
certain her application could not be denied based on academics alone as she held
230
Interview with Michael Smith, July 29, 2007 by Monique Laney in, "Operation Paperclip in Huntsville,
Alabama," in Remembering the Space Age: Proceedings of the 50th Anniversary Conference, ed., Steven
J. Dick (Washington D.C.: National Aeronautics and Space Administration Office of External
Relations, History Division, 2008), 102.
231
"Alabama Blocks Negro Admissions," The New York Times, December 5, 1962.
232
John M. Coski, The Confederate Battle Flag: America's Most Embattled Emblem (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 2005), 146.
71
degrees from Fisk and Columbia.233 However, the school found another way out of
integration. One month after sending in her application and two days after
Governor George Wallace's "segregation forever" speech, Cashin, "received a letter
in January 1963 informing her that the course had been canceled due to the 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”.234 Keeping with its media blackout of civil rights happenings in the
city, the Huntsville Times failed to report UAH's reluctance to integrate.
Two months after Cashin's denial letter and Wallace's inaugural speech, two
African American students, recruited by Dr. John Cashin, challenged UAH's admission
policies and were rejected on the basis of inadequate qualifications. This instance was
different from Mrs. Cashin because these two students were employed by the federal
government. Dave McGlathery was a mathematician at Marshall Space Flight Center and
Marvin Carroll was an electronics engineer on Redstone Arsenal.235 236 When speaking
to crowds about federal forced integration during his 1962 gubernatorial campaign
trail, Circuit Court Judge George Wallace pledged, "I shall refuse to abide by any such
illegal federal court order even to the point of standing in the schoolhouse door.”236
Wallace advantageously used the racial climate in Alabama, "for political expediency —
as if this somehow made it forgivable – and somehow, he always knew just when to
233
Cashin, The Agitator’s Daughter, 148.
234
Ibid., 148-149.
235
“Education,” JET April 11, 1963.
236
Dan T. Carter, The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the Origins of the New Conservatism, and the
Transformation of American Politics (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), 105.
72
quit”.237 Wallace explained to Louis Eckl of the Florence Times, "I started off
talking about schools and highways and prisons and taxes-and I couldn't make them
listen. Then I began talking about niggers-and they stomped the floor.” 238 Wallace, a
savvy politician, quickly learned matters of race was the best avenue to gain solid and
consistent political support from his white constituency.
Wanting to avoid a public spectacle accompanied with open defiance of
federal law by Governor Wallace, UAH administrators sought help from McGlathery's
employers. Dr. Ernest Stuhlinger, McGlathery's immediate supervisor and one of von
Braun's top aides, was contacted by UAH and encouraged to influence McGlathery into
withdrawing his application.239 Dr. Stuhlinger denied the university's request. Carroll
and McGlathery were supported by their employers, however von Braun, "cautioned
McGlathery that he might want to consider dropping his application if it appeared he
would become a martyr”. 240 Although Huntsville did not witness the extreme racial
violence as in Birmingham and Montgomery, it was still a city in the Deep South,
therefore justifying von Braun's circumspection.
In spring 1963, Carroll and McGlathery took their case to court. During the
judicial battle, Marvin Carroll decided to remove himself from the struggle and
237
Jeff Frederick, Stand Up for Alabama: Governor George Wallace (Tuscaloosa: The University of
Alabama Press, 2007), 62.
238
Carter, The Politics of Rage, 109.
239
Downs, Transforming the South, 238.
240
Ibid.
73
withdrew his attempt to enroll at UAH. 241 Carroll reapplied to UAH in 1965, but was
rejected for lying about a past crime on his admissions application.242 On May 16,
1963 the United States District Court for the Northern District of Alabama,
Western Division ruled against the University of Alabama and ordered McGlathery
admitted to the Huntsville branch of the college. 243 Along with the two federal
employees, another Huntsville resident was challenging the University of Alabama’s
segregation policy.
Vivian Malone, a native of Mobile, enrolled at Alabama A&M in 1961. In late
1962, Malone and James Hood sent in their applications, a twenty dollar deposit for
dorm rooms, and medical and academic transcripts to Tuscaloosa.244 Huntsville Civil
Rights leader, Dr. Sonnie Hereford III was responsible for administering Malone's
physical and delivering her medical records to the university.245 On December 4, 1962
University of Alabama President Dr. Frank A. Rose, "announced he had ordered
processing halted on all pending applications”.246 In April and May of 1963 suits
241
The historiography is not definitive as to why Marvin Carroll decided to remove himself from the
court case.
242
E. Culpepper Clark, The Schoolhouse Door: Segregation's Last Stand at The University of
Alabama (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 250.
243
Marvin P. Carroll and Dave M. McGlathery v. Philip M. Mason (Director of the Huntsville Center of the
University of Alabama), Hunert E. Mate (Dean of Admissions of the University of Alabama), Eric Rodgers
(Dean of the Graduate School of the University of Alabama), and Frank A. Rose (President of the
University of Alabama), United States Northern District of Alabama (1963).
http://www.justice.gov/crt/foia/readingroom/bostonjfk/pdfs/036-ua-doc-part3.pdf [accessed February 9,
2015].
244
245
246
"Alabama Blocks Negro Admissions," The New York Times December 5, 1962.
Hereford interview, May 29, 2013.
"Alabama Blocks Negro Admissions," The New York Times December 5, 1962.
74
were filed against the University of Alabama and on June 11, Governor George C.
Wallace provided American History with one of its lasting images of the Civil
Rights Movement as he symbolically blocked the doorway at Foster Auditorium.
With a showing of federalized Alabama National Guardsmen, Wallace stepped aside
and the University of Alabama became integrated.
Governor Wallace was scheduled to arrive in Huntsville the day following his
"stand in the schoolhouse door," but events in Tuscaloosa created a change in itinerary.
Hours after watching Vivian Malone and James Hood pass through the threshold of
Foster Auditorium, Wallace wired university president Rose explaining, "Due to this
illegal and unwarranted military occupation, I will not be present on the Huntsville
campus tomorrow. However, we will continue relentlessly our fight against forced
integration of the University of Alabama.”247 Wallace's threats of stern opposition did
not apply to the Huntsville campus. During the morning hours of June 13, 1963, two
days after Wallace's "schoolhouse door" fiasco and bold telegram to Rose, Dave
M. McGlathery, “drove to the extension center and quietly registered”. 248 Higher
education in Alabama was, henceforth and forever available to all races.
In the 1960s Deep South it was one thing for adults of different races to work
together, eat together, and learn together, but sending white children to integrated
schools was an entirely different animal. Whereas integrating institutions of higher
education caused no more than threats and symbolic "stands," k-12 integrated schooling
247
Frederick, Stand Up for Alabama, 63.
248
Wayne Greenshaw, Fighting the Devil in Dixie: How Civil Rights Activists Took on the Klu Klux
Klan in Alabama (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2011), 132.
75
faced more violent resistance. Hours after Malone and Hood registered in
Tuscaloosa, John F, Kennedy addressed the nation asking, "If an American,
because his skin is dark cannot send his children to the best public school available,
then who among us would be content to have the color of his skin changed and stand
in his place?”249 The powerful oration set off a wave of violence starting that night
with the assassination of Medgar Evers, a long-time activist in Mississippi. The
violence culminated on September 15, 1963 with the 16th Street Baptist Church
Bombing in Birmingham which needlessly claimed the lives of four elementary
school-aged African American girls. With a more liberal attitude and tolerant racial
climate, it was only logical Huntsville lead the way in public school desegregation.
On March 11, 1963, four African American families who remained determined
in their quest for educational equality filed in a Birmingham federal court suit against the
Huntsville Board of Education. The quartet named in the case were, "Sonnie Hereford
III, on behalf of Sonnie IV; Mrs. Sidney Ann Brewton, on behalf of her son John;
a beautician named Mrs. Odell Pearson, on behalf of her daughter Veronica; and Rev.
C. Piggee, on behalf of his son David.”250 The families were represented by NAACP
attorney Julius Chambers. As a renowned civil rights lawyer, Chambers later was
instrumental in winning Swann v. Charlotte Mecklenburg Board of Education (1971),
-
249
John F. Kennedy, "Report to the American People on Civil Rights, June 11, 1963," John F. Kennedy
Presidential Library and Museum, http://www.jfklibrary.org/AssetViewer/LH8F_OMzvOe6RolyEm74Ng.aspx [accessed March 2, 2015.
250
Hereford and Ellis, Beside the Troubled Waters, 114.
76
which mandated public schools provide busing for students promoting further
integration in public schools.251
Sonnie Hereford IV explained, the attorneys for the Huntsville Board of
Education argued four points: "(1) it would be dangerous for me to cross such a
wide street to get to the school; (2) such a thing had never been done before; (3)
admitting me (and three other black children) would completely disrupt the
Huntsville school system; and (4) officials had turned the state capital,
Montgomery, "inside out" and could not find a copy of my birth certificate.”252
Presiding Judge H.H. Grooms addressed each point of the school's contention.
Grooms immediately dismissed the first two points and turned the tables on the
school system asserting, "he found it difficult to believe that the Huntsville Board
of Education had such poor control of their schools that four young children could
completely disrupt the entire system". 253 The final issue of birth verification was a
matter of embarrassment for the school system's legal representatives. Indeed, they
had tried, with due diligence, to locate Sonnie Hereford IV's Alabama Certificate of
Birth. It never occurred to the legal team to explore whether or not the young
Hereford was born in another state, which was the case. Hereford IV was born
August 30, 1957 in Indiana. Upon hearing closing arguments, Judge Grooms, without
deliberating, ruled from the bench. With an authoritative voice, Grooms instructed
251
Douglas Martin, "Julius Chambers, a Fighter for Civil Rights, Dies at 76," The New York Times,
August 6, 2013. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/07/us/julius-chambers-a-fighter-for-civil-rights-diesat-76.html [accessed March 2, 2015].
252
Sonnie Wellington Hereford IV, "My Walk Into History," Notre Dame Magazine (Spring 2007),
http://magazine.nd.edu/news/9874-my-walk-into-history/ [accessed January 12, 2015].
253
Ibid.
77
the school board, "You go back to Huntsville, admit these four students to the four
schools that are involved, and by January 2, supply me with a plan for total
desegregation of all the schools in Huntsville and Madison County.” 254
The federal court's decision in Birmingham to uphold Brown v. Board in
Huntsville occurred in mid-August allowing for two weeks of nervous anticipation for
the Hereford family. The three months leading up to the court decision were witness to
dogs and fire hoses in Birmingham and the governor trying to personally block
African American students from registering for college courses in Tuscaloosa.
For Dr. Hereford it was a time of uncertainty. Herford recalled, "The threatening
phone calls intensified. One man woke me up at three o'clock in the morning and
told me I was dead and my son was dead too.” 255 For six year-old Sonnie Herford
IV, the weeks leading up to his first day of school were ones of "practice
integration".
Having a congregation which included federal employees of Redstone and
Marshall Space Flight Center, the Unitarian Church in Huntsville was, “the only
white church that supported the civil rights movement in our area”.256 Hereford IV
stated that after Huntsville schools lost the case over segregation, the Unitarian Church
created, "a `playschool' for me, three other black children and about a dozen white
254
255
Hereford and Ellis, Beside the Troubled Waters, 116.
Hereford interview, December 10, 2014.
256
Hereford IV, "My Into History," http://magazine.nd.edu/news/9874-my-walk-into-history/
[accessed January 12, 2015].
78
children. The purpose of the of the preschool was to enable us to get used to going to
school together — to show us children were just children.”257
As Labor Day and the opening of the school year approached in
September 1963, Alabama Governor George Wallace remained firm in his stance
against integration in public schools while, "throughout the South, African American
students were entering previously all white schools,” except in Alabama. 258 In
Huntsville, Wallace tried procrastination and force. Wallace convinced Huntsville
school officials to delay the opening of schools from Tuesday September 2 to
Friday September 6. 259 As the deadline approached, Wallace issued an executive
order closing the four schools schedule for integration and sent Alabama state
troopers to enforce the order. The Huntsville Board of Education, who fought
integration in federal court, responded by defying Wallace and directing all
schools opened and 24000 pupils reporting to class. 260 Although Fifth Avenue
School, Rison, Terry Heights, and East Clinton were set to open for class on Friday,
troopers stood in the path of ending Jim Crow schooling.
Accompanied by FBI agents for protection, Dr. Hereford and son, Sonnie
IV, approached Fifth Avenue School Friday morning and found, "a crowd of 150,
maybe 200 people, and the state troopers already there — ten or twelve state trooper
257
Ibid.
258
Phillip A. Goduti Jr., Robert F. Kennedy and the Shaping of Civil Rights, 1960-1964 (Jefferson,
North Carolina: McFarland and Company, Inc., Publishers, 2013), 218.
259
Stephan Lesher, George Wallace: American Populist (Jackson, Tennessee: Da Capo Press, 1994),
246.
260
"Huntsville Defies Wallace Order To Close School, But Troopers Bar Entrance," Toledo Blade
September 6, 1963.
79
cars, and each one with at least two officers standing beside it.” 261 The Herefords
turned around and returned home. Although Huntsville, with its high number of
Northern transplant federal employees, had a more sensible racial atmosphere, public
dissent still existed. In the "Rocket City," groups of angry parents, "shouted out at
black students that they were not welcome. Some openly sobbed at the specter of
desegregation; others vowed to withdraw their children as soon as possible and send
them to a private academy.”262 Other white parents at the four schools were
infuriated over the closing of the schools no matter the reason. As reported by the
Toledo Blade, East Clinton Elementary School experienced an intense confrontation.
After being told the school was closed, 25 women, "turned a deaf ear to an advisory
by a trooper that the school was closed and walked up the steps and into the building
with their children through the lines of troopers who yielded.”263
By Monday morning, Governor George Wallace acquiesced his stance on
Huntsville schools' integration. At 8:30 a.m. Monday September 9, 1963 Sonnie
Hereford III walked his son to school. There were no state troopers, only a handful of
people were present, “including the police chief and a few plainclothesmen and news
photographers.”264 Of the four city school systems blocked by Governor Wallace on
September 6, Huntsville was the only one unobstructed on September 9. The lack of
support for Wallace’s segregationist policies is directly traced to the more accepting
261
Hereford and Ellis, Beside the Troubled Waters, 118.
262
Frederick, Stand Up for Alabama, 71.
263
"Huntsville Defies Wallace Order To Close School, But Troopers Bar Entrance," Toledo
Blade September 6, 1963.
264
Hereford and Ellis, Beside the Troubled Waters, 118.
80
racial demeanors brought in by relocated federal employees beginning with Dr.
Wernher von Braun and his team of former Nazi rocket scientists. In a 1990 interview
with historian Stephan Lesher, 1964 and 1968 presidential candidate and former
governor of Alabama George C. Wallace explained he, "capitulated to the near
unanimity of public opposition in Huntsville, a city with thousands of parents
imported from many Northern and Western states to high-paying, high-tech federal
jobs.”265 When Sonnie Herford IV enrolled at Fifth Avenue School, 100 years of
Alabama (the last state to integrate) segregation in public schools ended.
Throughout that day the three other African American students successfully
enrolled: John Brewton at Eat Clinton, Veronica Pearson at Rison, and David Piggee
at Terry Heights. With the indirect assistance of former World War II enemies,
Huntsville, Alabama defeated inequitable Jim Crow legislation in spite of the fact
segregated schooling was vehemently defended by the state's top executive.
265
Lesher, George Wallace, 249.
81
CHAPTER 6
CONCLUSION
THE HUNTSVILLE WAY
The city of Huntsville, Alabama is a name that rarely comes into the overall
scholarship and historiography of the Civil Rights Movement. Yet, the Huntsville
Civil Rights Movement was one the most successful struggles for equality during the
history of social justice. Huntsville was the first integrated city in the state and was home
to the first integrated public school in the "Heart of Dixie". The accomplishments of
the African American community in the "Rocket City" and the uniqueness of why the
movement in Huntsville succeeded can be directly attributed the arrival of a team
of rocket propulsion scientist from post-war Nazi Germany.
When the United States defeated Adolph Hitler and the Third Reich in 1945,
a race between the Soviet Union and America commenced. Both superpowers
recruited, sometimes capturing, the best and brightest German scientists for the
purpose of elevating their own technological programs. The United States extracted
dozens of scientists out of post-war Germany under the mission name "Project
Paperclip". Among the scientists brought to the United State was Wernher von Braun,
mastermind the behind the infamous V-Rockets.
In 1950, the United States Army relocated von Braun's rocket team to a quiet
town in northern Alabama known as Huntsville. Once a capital of Alabama, Huntsville's
economy, like many areas in the Deep South, relied heavily on cotton. Huntsville
was also a segregated city with a white population believing in racial superiority to the
82
extent shoe store owners did not allow African Americans to try on shoes before
purchase. Members of the black community could not dine in the same restaurants as
their white counterpart. There was no integrated library or public park. However,
when the population exploded due to the presence of Redstone Arsenal and Marshall
Space Flight Center, the city of Huntsville was a prime location for the Civil Rights
Movement to succeed.
In 1962, fresh off the violent Freedom Rides, CORE sent members, including
Hank Thomas, to Huntsville. Thomas recruited members of the local black colleges to
challenge Huntsville's segregation policies. Many were arrested, but without a violent
police dictator like Bull Conner, there was no mass resistance. The city did experience
opposition, violent and nonviolent. Hank Thomas was subjected having his skin burned
by mustard seed oil purposely smeared in his vehicle, and white sympathizer Marshall
Keith, a NASA employee, was abducted from his home, stripped, and doused with the
same irritant as Thomas. That was the most extreme actions taken against protestors.
Most dissent occurred verbally. Organizers and picketers were subjected to racial slurs
and threats of harm and/or death. None of which came to fruition.
City leaders, after pickets at the New York and Midwest Stock Exchanges and a
boycott of Huntsville merchants on Easter, decided the possibility of losing immense
federal and dollars was not as important as sharing a water fountain or movie theater.
Therefore, in early July 1962, Huntsville, without the support of local media, became the
first integrated city in the state of Alabama.
Huntsville officials not only had to worry about the racial situation in
Huntsville interrupting their booming economy, the atmosphere of the entire state was
83
troubling. J.A. Barclay, the manager of Northrop, a global aerospace and defense
technology company, informed Governor Wallace that because of racial unrest in
other parts of the state, at least two engineers decided that Alabama was not the best
place to relocate.266 Barclay warned Wallace, “similar defections would impede the
task of ‘building sizable operations in Huntsville.” 267 Huntsville was, in fact, pressing
the state government to act in regards to civil rights. With the space race and Cold War at
its apex, Alabama could not afford to lose the money associated with matching and
pushing back the Soviet Union.
To put into historical perspective the impact the arrival the von Braun team
and ensuing federal contract companies had on race relations in Huntsville, historical
scholarship is directed to St. Joseph's Mission School as a prime example. On
September 3, 1963, six days before Sonnie Hereford IV became the first African
American student admitted to an integrated Alabama public school, twelve white
students, "enrolled in St. Joseph's Mission, a Black Catholic school in Huntsville, Ala.’s,
a Black neighborhood”.268 There was no opposition, no troops, no angry crowds, and no
challenge from the state executive branch. Elnora C. Lanier, former director of child
development at Alabama A&M, conveyed, "This quiet integration was able to occur
because Huntsville, a hub for space research and development, was one of the state’s
most progressive cities.”269 Lanier stated, "People moved here from all over the world"
266
Lesher, George Wallace, 198.
267
Ibid.
268
Phil W. Petrie, "Black Catholic School First to Integrate in Alabama," The Crisis
(November/December 2003), 13.
269
Ibid.
84
and, "Hardly any of the White families whose children integrated St. Joseph’s were
natives of Huntsville.” 270 In the state where the former capital of the Confederacy
once resided and where churches were bombed over integration, white families
purposely enrolled their children in an all-black school. That is the Huntsville way.
The story of the Huntsville Civil Rights Movement is one that should be
included on the overall historiography of Civil Rights and American History. There is
no denying Huntsville did not receive the national media headlines as did Birmingham,
Montgomery, and Selma. Nor did Huntsville have the disturbing nationally televised
violence witnessed in the aforementioned trio. The Huntsville Movement was a
relatively quiet happening. The national news rarely mentioned events and the
local media instituted a blackout, even failing to publish the arrival of Dr. Martin
Luther King Jr. to the city. Yet, Huntsville succeeded before any other city in the state.
That is the Huntsville Way.
While children were being bitten by German shepherds in Birmingham, African
Americans in Huntsville were playing with their kids at Big Spring Park. While
President Lyndon Johnson was signing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 African
Americans in Huntsville were two years into sitting and dining at any restaurant in the
city. While marchers were being beaten on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Sonnie
Herford IV was finishing his third year in an integrated public school. That is the
Huntsville Way.
Huntsville's road to equality is unlike any other in the Deep South. No other
town in the South had the arrival of former Nazi rocket scientists which led to a wave
of migration to the city and economic prosperity. No other city in the state had the
270
Ibid.
85
influx of Northern and liberal ideals that led to the integration of public facilities and
schools without violent mass dissention. The story of Huntsville's struggle for social
justice and racial equality has for too long been in the shadows of Birmingham and it
is past time the movement be removed from historical obscurity.
At 10 a.m. on December 16, 2014 an elderly man and his son arrived at a public
ceremony in Huntsville. With this author in attendance, Sonnie Herford III and Sonnie
Hereford IV together lifted a shovel filled with a symbolic mound of northern Alabama
dirt from its earthen home. This gesture symbolized the groundbreaking of the Sonnie
Hereford Elementary School. An African American who in his youth attended a
segregated school with no library, cafeteria, or laboratory nestled in the middle of the
city dump, will watch as a brand new state of the art integrated elementary school will
be constructed donning his name. Progress and change; that is the Huntsville way.
86
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