Contributed on July 27, 2007
By: mllomax
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United States

Memories of life in the South during the civil rights movement.

I was born in Los Angeles, California after World War II. My family owned a small weekly newspaper, The Tribune, which covered the local black community and the larger, national events that were reshaping African-American life, particularly the civil rights movement.

As a post war kid in Los Angeles, my life was privileged and removed from the harsh realities of segregation. I lived in an integrated neighborhood and attended integrated schools. Los Angeles had its share of racial prejudice, but our newspaper and standing in the community insulated me from direct discrimination.

Television provided my first introduction to the harsh world of segregation and second-class citizenship. I recall Emmett Till’s murder in Mississippi as the first event that brought home to me the violence and peril that were part of everyday life for blacks in the South. Till’s story was particularly powerful because we were both black boys raised outside the South, and I felt the terror of his brutal murder and my own vulnerability as a black boy who, too, could be killed for saying the wrong thing in the wrong place. Just trying to go to school could incite angry mobs, as I saw in the scenes of the Little Rock Nine integrating Central High School in 1957. I knew that being black in America was different, often dangerous, even if my life was sheltered and protected in Los Angeles.

Events of the South first intruded on my life in 1956, when my mother, Almena Lomax, who edited The Tribune, decided to go to Montgomery, Alabama to see first hand the bus boycott and to write about it for our paper. During the trip, she met Dr. and Mrs. King, Reverend and Mrs. Ralph Abernathy and other leaders of the Montgomery movement. A year later, Dr. King came to Los Angeles and visited our home, and I met him and listened while he and my mother talked.

My mother believed that the civil rights movement was the great story of her journalistic career, so in 1961 she decided to take her six children to Tuskegee, Alabama for six months while she covered more extensively the Southern Christian Leadership Conference that was then headquartered in Montgomery, twenty-nine miles away.

My mother wrote an article “Journey to the Beginning” and is her account of our trip south. It vividly relates our first direct encounters with segregation and the lessons we learned about how to adjust to its oppressive enforcement. But the article also shares the sense that mother had that the South was the place of our roots from which we had become disconnected and the place of our struggle as a race to gain our rights and to claim our humanity.

Though we only remained in Alabama for six months, my mother traveled back to the South frequently for the next six years and, in 1964, I returned to attend Morehouse College in Atlanta. So, the 1961 trip was my beginning journey to the South that has since become my home and is today so different because of the struggles waged in the movement of the 1960’s.

JOURNEY to the BEGINNING … by Almena Lomax

© The NATION, 1961 Used with permission

Latest census figures show that the northward migration of the Southern Negro has accelerated in the last decade. How and why one Negro mother and her six children migrated the other way is the subject of this absorbing narrative.-Ed.

I AM A Negro mother of six who last month moved her family from Los Angeles to the Deep South to live. The community we chose was Tuskegee, Alabama, which was the one indication to my friends and relatives that, in contemplating such a move, I was still sane.

Tuskegee is the town which many people think had its origin in the establishment in 1881 by the late, great Negro ex-slave and leader, Booker T. Washington, of one of the first schools for the freedmen, Tuskegee Institute. I chose it because, as an almost all-Negro community, it would soften the harsh realism of segregation for my children, who had been born, reared and schooled in the comparatively integrated atmosphere of Los Angeles. Further, it is a college town, and I reasoned that the ignorance which I know pervades the South, white and Negro, would be somewhat subdued there.

I thought the schools, in addition to being not so flagrantly segregated, would be better. I reasoned that, at the same time, I would find what I sought in the South: a “sense of community” which the neither-fish-nor-fowl, legally integrated but actually segregated existence of the northern Negro denies him, and which the synthetic suburbanism and mechanized metropolis of Los Angeles denies all of its residents.

These were some of the arguments I marshaled in support of my decision, and it required an argument, with friend and acquaintance, relative and disinterested observer, whenever I made my intentions known.

Before I “broke out” of Los Angeles early this year, I was to feel imprisoned, baffled and frustrated at every turn! It was as though the very gods were arrayed against me and the realization of my dream. Nonetheless, I had a private conviction – practicing atheist-agnostic though I call myself – that there was a private understanding between me and a god of the universe who exists in my mind, a god satisfied with the democracy of a lower-case “g,” that in going South, I was fulfilling myself and emerging into reality after six years in a dream world.

And so it came to pass.

BUT in between the dream and our setting down, with our innumerable parcels and bags, drowsy from the steamy warmth of the Greyhound bus, onto the cold, gray cement of the plain street of the plain town of Tuskegee, sans terminal, sans even a station call from the hard-faced bus driver – in between this journey’s end and the beginning, there is a six-year-story which must be told if you are to understand what begins here for me.

At night, lying on my cot borrowed from Tuskegee Institute until our furniture arrives, I grope back to the beginning through a maze where each turn is like a room where the mind might settle and say, “Here It began here.” But it did not begin anywhere except at the beginning, and somehow it seems necessary to work it out, both for myself and for those who might be interested in the phenomenon of a twentieth-century frontierswoman, a Negro woman whose “roots are not in the south,” taking her children by modern-day covered wagon overland 2,600 miles into the Deep South.

But who is to say that my “roots are not in the South”? Though, in truth, they are also in Africa, in France, in England, Jerusalem, in the Caribbean. I had an Alabama-born paternal grandmother whose hawk nose, chiseled lips and flashing black eyes proclaimed that more than the ghosts of the Cherokees, the Creeks, the Choctaws, the Chickasaws, lurk in Alabama’s tall, military pines which rank row on row like waiting armies in the thick forests which loom like forts around the town and road of this fertile state.

My mother, whose blue-gray eyes, auburn hair, fine white skin and thin features showed not a hint of Negro blood, was born in New Orleans, but spend her summers with dark-skinned half-relatives in Mobile, Alabama, and went there to Norman School and met my father and ran away to get married.

Down from Mobile on the Gulf of Mexico, in Galveston, I was born. So, although I was reared in Chicago and Los Angeles, who is to say my “roots are not in the South”?

Who is to say that those roots were not stirred six years ago when I alighted from a plane in a field of yellow and green dandelions at the old Montgomery airport, come to cover the federal court hearing into bus segregation, the dramatic highlight of the heroic and thrilling 366-day boycott of segregated buses by the Negroes of Montgomery?

In common with Negroes all over the country and people throughout the world who admire courage, I had been stirred by the Montgomery bus boycott as by no single event in Negro history. That was the year Autherine Lucy was stoned at the University of Alabama. That was the time of Emmett Till, of Gus Courts, of Lamar Smith, of Dr. G. W. Lee, lynch and near-lynch victims in Mississippi.

But none of these events stirred me like the story of thousands of Negroes “walking in dignity” where they had ridden so long under abuse.

It was as though a signal had been given and we had begun to rise.

“Tell them we are rising,” the steps of the walking Negroes of Montgomery seemed to say to Negroes of the world. And, indeed, from that day forward, it has been as if we truly had begun to rise.

FROM necessity, I had been in my career as a newspaperwoman what is known as an “armchair journalist.” I edited, and with my husband owned, a small, but noisy Negro weekly, the Los Angeles Tribune.

My husband and I wrote the Tribune, printed it, did job printing, fought for the rights and advancement of Los Angeles Negroes, engaged in politics, and had one baby after another, in the thirteen years of our association. My part was to write everything that appeared in the Tribune’s twenty-four tabloid pages (except the sports), “prime the pump” for enough advertising to cut its $1,200-a-week overhead, supervise the one-girl office, read the proofs, help our three-man shop with the composition and make-up of the paper, and with my left hand bring up the six who, at the time the Montgomery story broke, included a two-month-old baby.

With a load like this, all handled from home except for nocturnal, press-day and weekend visits to the office and print shop, I seldom ventured far for a story. Hence, “arm-chair journalism.”

I thought myself satisfied with this routine until Montgomery. I have to cover this story, I said deep inside myself. But upsetting the routine was frowned upon both by my husband and my conscience. And I knew, too, that if I expressed the wish aloud, I was as good as gone.

The interest of Tribune readers in my offbeat, emotional – but, they said, always provocative – writing was so great that they went to the length of offering to baby-sit or to pay my expenses to distant points for a story. My conscience had always compelled me to give something else to make up for my inability to give on-the-spot coverage of stories. That “something else” was – myself. And so my articles were invariably distilled through an intensely personal filter. It is practically impossible for me to keep myself out of anything I write today; and, as my eldest daughter frequently croaks, I “have an opinion about everything,” and I’m “not necessarily handicapped by lack of the facts.”

THE Montgomery boycotters marched exultantly from March into May, and as suddenly as they made their decision to march, I broke my halter. The Tribune of April 23, 1956, carried a front-page, black-face box:

OH I WISH I WERE IN DIXIE

The Tribune of April 30 carried another front-page, black-faced box:

TRIBBY IN DIXIE

Hardly was that issue on the street when my plane was setting down in Montgomery. I had put the paper “to bed,” with something left over for the next issue, and boarded a plane the night before in Los Angeles, with money contributed entirely by Tribune subscribers who subscribed for friends and over-subscribed their own accounts as much as five years to send me South.

As we walked through the underground tunnels leading to the runway gate at Los Angeles International Airport, my husband let me know that I was to operate “as per usual” – with the throttle wide open.

He was what you might call the uncomplaining sort.

When the doctor confirmed my third pregnancy, he had said, inexplicably, “The ideal family is one girl and one boy. We had that. Now you’ve gone and gotten pregnant with a third child. It sort of messes things up.”

That was the last overt criticism I was to receive from him.

Even after I had presented him with a neatly divided family of three boys and three girls, after two political campaigns (for the State Assembly and for the City Council) which I persuaded him to enter successively and unsuccessfully, throughout a running battle with the Los Angeles Police Department over its mishandling of Negro prisoners, despite the dozens of enemies I made and the thousands of dollars I was costing the Tribune in advertising and payola, he never uttered another word which might be regarded as censure, other than to suggest one day that he ought to wear a sign, as he walked to lunch past the row of bookie joints whose operations I had severely crippled, “Not responsible for the enemies my wife makes.”

But that night as we walked to my plane to Montgomery, I looked at him and was conscious of a distance between us. His usually bland eyes bore a look of reproach, and I read in them, “Why are you putting us to all this inconvenience for a bunch of walking jokers?” It was at that moment that a divorce was begun.

NEGROES have been likened in pulpit oratory to “all the colors of the rainbow.” They fall into all social, economic, educational, cultural categories. They come in all sizes and shapes, and in the usual four sexes – male, female and the in-betweens.

But the real touchstone of what they are is: “how they feel about the brother.”

And how they feel about “the brother” has nothing to do with blood, color, station in life, geography or education. Some of the whitest-skinned Negroes I know have the strongest feelings for the race. Some Negroes in whom the African strain runs absolutely undiluted despise all Negroes, including themselves.

Some poor Negroes feel nothing when an Athens, Ga., erupts like a volcano because of the appearance on a college campus of two innocuous Negroes. And I have known affluent, educated, Northern Negroes to cry at the picture of Elizabeth Eckford turning away from the troops blocking her way to an education in Little Rock, Arkansas, and walking bravely in her ballerina slippers and daintily billowing dress down the gauntlet of a howling mob.

I faced it at that moment: Montgomery meant nothing to my husband. He hadn’t heard the signal to rise. “The brother” meant nothing to him. He didn’t feel the emotion pulsing rhythmically under his skin when the halting, crippled words of a front-line fighter like Moses Wright, the ancient uncle of Emmett Till, were lined out like a hymn at a mass meeting:

I said to myself:
A man’s got to die,
He might as well go out the right way.

He could only say pedantically that it was all a part of the “struggle against man’s inhumanity to man.” But he could not exult in the struggle. He was, in point of fact, one of its victims; and they walk the streets of Harlem, the South Side of Chicago, the East and West Side and Watts and View Park and Leimert Park of Los Angeles, by the thousands – just as the dead lie row on row in the cemeteries of the world.

BUT these were thoughts which took shape months and years later as I struggled through the tortuous remaking of myself which follows divorce. For the moment, as I went toward my plane, I merely registered on my consciousness an impression of spiritual distance.

Montgomery, itself, continued the deep revolution inside me.

In no time I conceived the thesis, “Montgomery Is the Happiest City in the World” – the title of a series of articles I did on the boycott.

There, the concept came to me of a gentler Negro society than I had ever known in my years on the South Side of Chicago and the East Side of Los Angeles, or had ever seen in the Harlem of New York, the Rampart Street of New Orleans, Cleveland’s Central Avenue, San Francisco’s Fillmore Street.

Montgomery was happy, I wrote, because its Negroes had thrown off their chains and were standing tall and walking tall, like free men.

The elixir of self-determination which ran through them touched the whites, too, especially the women, who were tentatively friendly, gently sympathetic, smiling in the stores and on the streets where (Montgomery having been at the close of the Civil War a checkerboard of hastily staked-out homesteads) Negroes and whites live and traffic in juxtaposition.

And Montgomery’s Negro community was quite and peaceful – crime had miraculously all but disappeared – not only because the boycott made Negroes reluctant to be on the street at night, where they were prey to cruising gangs of white racist hoodlums, but because the very act of saying no to Jim Crow had released tensions which previously rubbed against each other and burst into sporadic violence.

The boycott occupied everyone’s thoughts, and there was so much joy over the success of it, the very simplicity of it, the easiness of it – just walking in freedom or thumbing a ride or riding in community in a car pool – that the May air seemed softer and sweeter.

There in Montgomery, and since arriving here in Tuskegee, where we shop unharrassed by white truculence in a Negro-owned, cooperatively established market, the thought occurred to me that Negroes are by nature a quiet people, our reputation for loud and boisterous living notwithstanding.

Stumbling over the red clay and brick sidewalks of Montgomery, I listened in wonder as housewives called softly, graciously and with unfailing courtesy and concern to one another from front porches. “How’re you today, Miz Gresham? How is little James? Did his cold get all right?”

The old women of Montgomery are sweet, their thin, soft hair framing gentle faces in which the red clay of Alabama’s soil seems to gleam; their lips set softly in patience, sweetness and strength, work-worn hands folded over the badge of womanly dignity – their purses. The young women are lovely, with a natural womanliness which rises to their men just as the Alabama dawn, sleepily and sensuously hugging the earth, is coaxed up by the warm strength of the sun.

“The men of Montgomery,” I wrote, with a sudden gladness, “are lovers.” And I got up from my improvised desk in the Montgomery hotel room which I shared with cockroaches as big as crickets, suddenly remembering one of Alabama’s sons whom I knew in Los Angeles, remembering him as invading my thoughts, looming up suddenly from nowhere, unbidden to my mind-- tall, slender, brown, with smiling eyes. Like death thought to have been left behind in a market place, I had kept an appointment with my destiny in Alabama.

I left Montgomery enamored of the South, but lost in a daydream of love which I then felt must have possessed me for at least three years, causing restless nights, vapors of sadness, delicate filigrees and traceries of unnamed happiness, the muskiness of strange emotions.

But life has a way of letting you play it by ear once – in your salad days.

You walk across a vacant lot, gay with wild flowers, cactus blooms, flowering weeds – pastels spring up like dime-store bargains in California – and see a young man with a certain something, and you say, “That’s the man I’m going to marry”; and you’re not surprised when you do.

You boast as a child, “I’m going to have six children”; and you would be surprised and affronted by life if you didn’t.

But after the first love, the first job, the first litter, you’re on your own, life begins to pitch ‘em low across the plate and just inside enough to be hard to hit.

Which was the way my Alabama went.

BUT THE dream persisted, and finally I decided I was in love with a geography and a way of life and a battle begun now in earnest by a people too long denied by their own; and so we started out for Tuskegee.

We were cruising along Highway 99, nearing Blythe in California, and on the four new Sears tires I felt so secure that I moved the battered 1953 Lincoln into an unaccustomed sixty, then seventy.

“Aw, come on, Mom. See if it will do eighty!”

“Hey, Mom, that man passed us. He must be doing ninety.”

“Holy cow, Mom – eighty-five!”

Yeah.

Like there was a snap, hardly audible, and then sounds like we were dropping tin cans along the road from beneath the hood. So I pulled over to the side and stopped.

That was as far as she went. There was a thin trail of rust back about fifteen yards. The engine had split. After a long, fruitless wait, in which our frantic waving and yelling went begging, the two “big kids” (thirteen and sixteen) set out to walk. “Those light can’t be over five or ten miles, Mom.” (They turned out to be thirty-four.)

They were picked up by two migrant workers on the way to Florida to find work. “Nobody stops for nobody on a California highway,” they sympathized.

A tow truck came out from Blythe, where the autopsy was performed and the diagnosis given: “New engine on this y’ere model, $500. Used one, ef’n you kin fin’ one down here in Bly-y-the, $350.”

We sold the car for $100 and bought bus tickets, with me contracting to hold “Poochie,” the baby, age four, whenever the bus was full.

Twenty-six hundred miles, as the Greyhound sprints up and across the desolate wastes of “Nawth” Texas, the equally desolate wastes of Arkansas, where even the parking space behind the bus terminals is “reserved for white cars”; across the sodden Mississippi into Tennessee, and down again into Mississippi – at night, thank God, when I could resist the children’s pleas to let them get out. The driver threw the huge bus through the mean little towns of Tupelo, Tremont, etc. as if he didn’t like the stop signs which loomed up suddenly at roadside, huge letters blazing, “MISSISSIPPI LAW. STOP” – like an extra dimension of the law, man. Like, like you ain’t kidding, Jack. They play it their way down here.

AND INTO Alabama, where even Birmingham, the dirty windows of its “Colored Waiting Room, Interstate Passengers” contrasting sharply with the gilt-lettered, gleaming-windowed “White Waiting Room,” looked good.

In Texas, we had run smack dab into the children’s first experience with Jim Crow.

We piled off for dinner in a town we hadn’t heard of before: Big Springs, Texas.

There it was, displayed inside the terminal in shocking, shabby, undemocratic, un-Christian, dehumanizing contrast, “White Dining Room – Colored Lunchroom”. All we glimpsed of the latter was a lone light bulb failing miserably to light mustard-colored walls.

“I’m not going inside there,” I snapped and led the way inside the bright and cheerful white dining room.

It was cafeteria-style, and we stepped right into the line.

A waitress rushed from behind the counter, flipping her apron as if she were about to shoo away some chickens.

“You can’t come in here,” she shrilled.

“Why not?” I asked, feeling, and yet not thinking about it, that I spoke out of a deep reservoir of inviolable right and courage.

“Because you ca-in’t, and that’s all,” she said in that flat, i-laced enunciation which is the Southern white’s dialect, and which is harsh with the severity he feels is called for from him in order to maintain the image of racial superiority, and thus lacks the relaxed amiability which softens Southern Negro speech.

“That place there is for you,” indicating the “Colored Lunchroom.”

“I am not going to eat in there,” I said, speaking very firmly and positively. “I will not be segregated.” I added severely, “you are violating the law.”

“How?” The waitress appeared genuinely puzzled.

“We are interstate passengers, and you have no right to segregate us,” I said. “There is a Supreme Court ruling which says you haven’t the right.”

I was conscious that my children’s eyes were on me. I had the feeling that I was speaking to them and for their futures, as well as in defense of our rights.

THE waitress looked back helplessly at a woman who stood behind a steaming dish, but who wore no uniform. The woman rushed forward. In a Mexican accent, and with a good deal more hostility than the waitress, she said: “Well, I don’t care. You won’t be served here.”

“Then,” said I, “we’ll just stand here until we are served.”

At this, she made a kind of helpless gesture and in a conciliatory tone, indicating a tray of prepared sandwiches, juices, milk and the coffee urn, said, “If you’ll just come over here, we’ll give you some sandwiches and something to drink.”

I knew I had scored a point or so; but I still was not willing to accept the compromise. Aware, however, of the plight of my fellow passengers, who were lined up behind my children, I stepped out of line, saying, “No. I want the same freedom of choice you give to anyone else. But I won’t stand in the way of anyone getting his dinner. We will just sit down here until we are served.”

With that, we sat down at the first table, the children moving obediently and as if they were stricken dumb.

Their reactions, registered absently on the retina of my memory, were interesting. Michele, the oldest, looked proud and triumphant, as if she had just completed a march to, say, the Speaker’s rostrum of the Mississippi State Legislature. Michael and Melanie, the usually voluble ten-year-old, looked slightly apprehensive, as if they were sitting on the edge of a smoking crater. Mia, the eight-year-old, seemed to gather herself about her, like an Indian folding his tribal robes, and sat slightly apart, but intently watching the proceedings (this reaction later became significant to me, in light of the further impact of segregation on this child). Mark, a busily inquisitive seven-year-old, fidgeted on his seat, with one leg draped unconcernedly in the aisle and -- as he was to do later in ever white waiting room we entered – thoroughly investigated the mechanics of everything within reach, just as though the racial crisis did not exist. “Poochie,” whose proper name is Lucius Walter Lomax, III, but who got his nickname when his father said he “wouldn’t wish that name on a dog,” is an outsize four-year-old with a monumental self-possession. He took it all in avidly, and later described it comprehensively to a soldier on the bus. “We were sitting there,” he said, “because the lady wouldn’t offer us any dinner.”

MEANWHILE, the food line moved silently forward, the silence broken only by a request for a dish or a drink. Then I got up and asked the woman behind the counter for the name of the manager, stating that I intended to sue. The woman without a uniform gave me her name and identified herself as the proprietor.

I sat back down and surveyed the diners. They all ate studiously, their faces empty. None looked our way, except a Jewish woman who had smiled at us earlier on the trip. Now she sat at the table closest to us and looked at us the whole time she ate, her face totally without expression.

I saw no other demonstration of interest by a white person, although Michele later said “that good-looking Marine officer” put his tray down when he reached the food and sat without eating at one of the tables until bus time. Michael, however, conjectured that perhaps it made the Marine “sick” to eat in a room where Negros were sitting.

Meanwhile, a young and obviously Northern-oriented Negro woman, who had been on the bus when we got on at Blythe, entered the dining room and approached us. “What’s the trouble?” she asked. I told her. She made the rather mysterious statement that “we paid more for our tickets than they,” indicating the whites, before turning around and going out. She passed up the Negro lunchroom and stood abut the terminal until bus time.

FOUR NEGRO men--including two servicemen, one in uniform, returning home to Birmingham from Okinawa – marched through to the Negro lunchroom without throwing a glance our way. (Later, on the bus, where they gave me their names and addresses and consented to be witnesses in a suit, they excused themselves on the grounds that had they done what we did, they would have gone to jail.)

At the phone behind our backs, the proprietor had been busy. Soon I glimpsed a tall man in a sombrero bearing down on us through a companionway beyond the steam tables. He had a face like a monkey wrench, features clamped down on each other, and a raw, wrinkled skin like that of a newborn.

I eyed him without too much concern. For some strange reason, I had no fear. One thought for myself strayed through my mind during our exchange and as he stood over me, and that was that maybe he might take it into his head to hit me or yank me up, and maybe I had better stand up because I was in a bad position to defend myself.

“What’s the trouble h’yah?” he addressed me.

“We have been refused service and are sitting here until we are served,” I answered.

Jerking his head in the direction of the Negro facility, he said, “Y’all eat in there.”

“I have no intention of eating in there,” I said. “Segregation of interstate passengers is against the law, I don’t intend to be Jim Crowed.”

He seemed to swell with exasperation and inarticulation “Well, you won’t eat in here,” he said. “Git on out of here and go on down the street some place.”

“You can’t tell me what to do!” I said in sincere affront.

The answer seemed to make him uneasy. Perspiration broke out on his forehead. He pushed his hat back and said in some confusion, “I was jes’ giving you some advice.”

“I didn’t ask you for your advice,” I snapped fiercely.

He turned abruptly and tramped off in his Texas boots, going behind the counter to use the phone.

By now, an audience had gathered in the waiting room. It was composed of the four Negro men, who had milk cartons or sandwiches in their hands, the Negro woman, and a group of local denizens, including a fat Mexican fellow, who watched us with an expression of delight.

Almost before the Texan hung up the phone, four policemen, looking ridiculously like Hollywood versions of Texas Rangers, materialized at the door. With the deliberation of cops “casing a joint,” two of them walked into the dining room, while the others prowled about.

I remember thinking, “Well, they could put us in jail.” Then I deliberately relaxed against the back of my chair and ignored them.

Melanie bugged her eyes as they passed by her and whispered, “Ooo, the cops.”

“So what?” I said, squelchingly.

“They could put us in jail,” she whispered back.

“So what? They can’t kill us,” I observed coldly.

“Can’t they?” Michele mocked, raising her elegantly plucked eyebrows.

I smiled and looked over at Michael, who was wearing his “I’m-with-you-all-the-way-but-why-do-you-always-have-to-make-everything-so-hard?” look.

The officers were talking to the woman proprietor, and I heard the whispered words, “You would have to sign the complaint.” Apparently she was reluctant to do this, for there were Latin-flavored protests.

The officers in the waiting room came to the window and looked inquiringly at their leader. They must have gotten the signal to sit tight, for they turned and continued to prowl about the waiting room. The grinning Mexican continued to grin encouragement. The other passengers finished eating and walked past us, their faces still blank. The Negro men stood now in that feigned indifference and relaxation affected by Negro men in the presence of tension. But you could see that they were alert and anxious.

The Negro woman paced a small rectangle nervously, her eyes on my children. You could see that she expected me to be led away to jail, and I knew she would step forward and offer to look after the children for the rest of the journey. I smiled briefly at a picture of the “fix” that would put her in. Then, noting that the whispers behind us had resumed, I found myself yawning as if I were bored.

Just then our bus was called. We arose and, as usual, counted heads. As we filed out, I stopped at the ticket agent’s desk for the address of the Greyhound Corporation, and announced our attention to sue. The agent, a woman, was surprisingly friendly. She apologized for the occurrence and expressed the wish that we would sue the woman, with whom, she said, “Everyone had trouble.”

But she disavowed Greyhound’s connection with the café. Greyhound, it seems, claims to be many different corporations, all of them independent of each other. It disavows control over terminals, although most terminals bear signs saying “Greyhound Bus Terminal,” or, in the larger cities, “Greyhound Post House.” In El Paso, the corporation tips its mitt with a sign over the wash bowls, urging that suggestions for improvement of the facilities, or complaints, be sent to the Greyhound Corporation in New York.

FROM mid-Texas, 90 per cent of the new passengers were Negro. Each one walked straight toward the back and did not sit until he head reached an empty seat beside a Negro.

From Texas on, the white passengers moved forward.

When we first boarded the bus in Blythe, we hoped to preempt the back seat, which is designed for five adults and roomy enough for six children. However, one corner seat was occupied by a Negro soldier and the other by a ten-year-old white boy, bound for Memphis with his grandmother and aunt.

The grandmother and aunt sat across from me, exuding hostility. But Donald chattered and played Monopoly with Melanie until the growing frigidness of his relatives penetrated even his mind. At the first stop in Texas, we got back on the bus to find that Donald and his kin had moved up front. “Hey, Donald, what gives?” called Melanie. “Oh, I just decided to move,” he said, and that was the last time Donald spoke to us.

My children sat at will around the bus until Fort Worth, while Michele reported that she was subjected to so many hostile stares up front that she no longer wanted to sit there.

Since the Supreme Court outlawed segregation of interstate passengers in terminals, the only protest I know to have been made against the bus lines’ continued practice of the evil was a sit-in and prayer demonstration staged by two Negro ministers in Greenville, SC., following discrimination in the waiting room there against Jackie Robinson.

Our own protest held out until 3:30 A.M. when we reached Dallas. I resolved to feed the children there, Jim Crow style, sans demonstration, since they had been twenty hours without food.

But my decision was made for me.

As the bus hurtled through the night, Michele’s buoyancy disappeared and, sure sign of severe mental depression in her, she left off plucking her eyebrows or trying out new make-up, and slumped, a mass of teen-age misery, in a corner of her seat.

At Dallas, I was the last off the bus, helping “Poochie,” who was protesting being awakened at that hour, and when I reached the terminal, my flock was far in front of me. Michele’s back was pathetically eloquent. It was held rigidly straight, conveying her hatred and contempt for the situation, but somehow it expressed also a bloody, bowed submission.

AT THIS point, perhaps I can dub in a description of the near-tragic and dramatic reaction of Mia, the eight-year-old, to our deepening encounters with segregation. All of the children, save Mark who is brown like me, are fair; but Mia and “Poochie” look exactly like white.

Save for when she was on the bus, where she was the sweetheart of all the soldiers, Mia’s remoteness from the segregated situation seemed to deepen and with it came a depression which was unlike her. I saw it, but didn’t think too much about it until we had reached our house in Tuskegee.

I then figured out that she was having difficulty accepting herself as a Negro – which meant accepting, as her lot in life, the jeopardies we had been meeting. I saw nothing to be gained by ignoring her problem, and so I asked her if she was having such a difficulty. Reluctantly, she admitted it.

Immediately a situation which had long mystified me at home in Los Angeles became clear. Mia had faced this problem alone ever since she had started school in Los Angeles, where she had been accepted as white by the white and Japanese children. When her friends found out differently, through the introduction of Mark on the scene, or when she brought them home, they were unwilling to accept the fact, and this confused her.

The picture of the cheerful child who started out for school every morning and walked home disconsolate and troubled every day, which had long plagued me, was cleared up.

NOW I explained to Mia that what she and all of us had done in Big Springs, and the suit we planned, would help end such humiliation for our race throughout the South. I explained that she was a Negro who had had many advantages over Negroes in the South, and that she should use those advantages to help improve the lot of all Negros and that this was what we were here in Tuskegee to do, as far as we are able.

Several days later, when she had started school, she came home and told me the story of Jane Addams and the founding of Hull House. Later, when she complained about the filthiness of the toilets and the smells in the halls, I told her that I would bring the matter to the attention of the principal and the PTA and would work to get them corrected. “Oh,” she said, “you’re going to be just like that lady at Hull House, helping the people down here.”

The next day she came home and said a boy had called her “dahlin’” in the hallway, and she had several friends and liked the Lewis Adams school (named for the co-founder of Tuskegee Institute) very much and didn’t want to change – though she still wanted those bathrooms cleaned up.

Our reluctant entry into the Jim Crow lunchroom in Dallas was the last pity we felt for ourselves for being Negroes. Inside the steaming room, hardly big enough for the row of stools at the counter, we began to meet the kindness, the warm personal concern, the rich, anxious love for children which contrasts so sharply in the Southern Negro with the harshness, the remoteness even from one another, the granite faces (plainly revealing the strain of maintaining their course) of the whites.

White people, even in the North, have become too unpleasant, too much at the mercy of their complexes, to be pleasant company, except as personal friends.

From Dallas to Memphis, to Birmingham, to Montgomery, we plunged into the Negro facilities gladly.

IN THE Dallas Jim Crow lunchroom, the children were exclaimed over; I was admired for my “courage” in traveling alone with “all those chir-ren” and looked at in friendly wonder when I said we had left Los Angeles, California to live in Alabama. And we brought the somewhat subdued atmospheres alive, “cabareting” by plunging coins recklessly in the juke boxes on all of the children’s favorite tunes and shaking our shoulders uninhibitedly in “The Twist.”

The only times the Jim Crow waiting rooms dampened our joy were when there were little children in them. Little Negro children are so inhibited in the South that it hurts anyone who loves children and knows the freedom they must have for growth.

Loved at home with a special warmth that encloses them like the womb to make up for the cruel blasts to be expected in the outside white world, they are taught, when outside the community, to sit close and still at their mother’s side. They never stirred in the waiting rooms, their young mothers silent, big-eyed and fearful, sheltering their abnormally still offspring with their bodies. The eyes of the older people who sit like gray stones piled on top of each other, are less apprehensive and not at all wondering, but knowing and watchful.

But when you can coax one of the children to speak, you are almost blindingly rewarded. Suddenly the immobility gives way to a lustrous smile, as if they knew all along that the world is full of people who are good and kind, and they were only waiting for someone to come along and prove it to them.

IN Montgomery, we had a layover of about three hours.

I knew that what we did – waiting the hours out by playing the juke box, eating scrambled eggs and drinking coffee and glass after glass of orange juice (20 cents a glass) – wasn’t done by any but the most friendless Negroes. We had friends in Montgomery who would have been happy, had we awakened them at two in the morning, to drive to the terminal and rescue us from Jim Crow, taking us home to breakfast and driving us to Tuskegee, only forty-two miles away.

But we didn’t want to be rescued from Jim Crow, not unless everybody were rescued with us, then and forever after.

I realized as I walked in and out of this Jim Crow facility and that, was snubbed by a ticket agent on the white side of the information booth in Birmingham, that Jim Crow eroded my dignity not a whit. As a matter of fact, I never felt so dignified, nor spoke so proudly, nor held my head so high.

Sitting over coffee in Memphis, while a waitress coaxed food into my children and neatly packaged the remainder and urged us to take it along, I resolved that never again would I remove myself from the fate suffered by the majority of my race, by “the brother.”

This is why the evil endures, I decided: Negroes with drive and education, who might have courage if they were challenged to discover it, quickly learn the ways and means of removing themselves from what the masses face. They go North and move in an area circumscribed by the maximum of personal liberty for a Negro; or they drive a car rather than use segregated public transportation. They go by air, which traditionally has been unsegregated, and use their wits to avoid any segregated situation from which money cannot protect them.

As here in Tuskegee, they send their teen-age children to New England to private schools and to the local Children’s House which, because it is operated for the children of the faculty at Tuskegee Institute, employees of the Veterans Hospital and others of the privileged class, is ostensibly not segregated, rather than to the public schools which remain not only “separate and unequal,” but ill-equipped and dirty.

They do none of these things particularly in opposition to segregation – they do little to end it – but because segregation is personally humiliating to them.

Negroes who lead, or can lead, who have any motivation at all toward bettering the world for mankind, need to go often into the teeth of Jim Crow and know it for its brutal, dehumanizing reality.

Then, and only then, will they acquire the sense of urgency to say with Lincoln, “Some day I’m going to hit this thing and hit it hard.”

Then, and only then, will they be involved, not only with “the brother,” but with mankind.