You Can't Be Neutral

Anne Braden turned sixty this year. Many people who know her only by name or reputation often assume that she is older — that she belongs to that generation of 1930s radicals whose activism had its roots in the tradition of social gospel, the movement to organize labor, or the struggle for equal rights. But it was not the drama of the Great Depression and the halcyon days of American radicalism that nourished Anne Braden's commitment to social justice; it was the Cold War hysteria and the accompanying silence and chill of the 1950s. 

Anne and her husband Carl were catapulted into the headlines in 1954 when they bought a house in Louisville, Kentucky, and resold it to a black man named Andrew Wade. Within a few short months they were both indicted for sedition — attempting to overthrow the state government of Kentucky. 

It's hard now to even imagine the hysteria that could have prompted such a case; but not only was the McCarthy Era in full swing, the day of reckoning had also come to the South in the matter of school desegregation. Andrew Wade moved into his new house on May 15, 1954. On May 17, the Supreme Court handed down its historic Brown v. Board of Education decision declaring that separate but equal educational facilities were not enough. The Bradens, like others who had waited for the decision, were euphoric. Anne recalls, "I'll never forget that day. I remember when I heard it on the radio. You know we all thought we had won; this was the great victory and everything was going to be different. I thought the schools were going to be desegregated in the South in the next year." 

They had underestimated the massive resistance that followed the Court's decision. The night Andrew Wade moved into his house a rock was thrown through a window and a cross burned in his front yard. It was only the beginning of the harassment. Six weeks later his house was bombed, and in a bizarre turn of events the Bradens and five others who had formed the Wade Defense Committee were indicted for "conspiring " to blow up his house. 

Experienced newspaper reporters and writers, the Bradens took their case to the public. For two years, they crisscrossed the country speaking out against the hysteria, using the notoriety of their case to draw attention to the underlying issue of racism. Finally in 1957the case against them was dropped, but their lives were never quite the same. (Anne wrote a detailed account of their case in her book, The Wall Between, which carried an endorsement by Eleanor Roosevelt and Martin Luther King, Jr.) 

Anne and Carl went to work as field organizers with the Southern Conference Educational Fund (SCEF), and later became its co-directors. After Carl's death in 1975, Anne began working with the Southern Organizing Committee for Economic and Social Justice (SOC) and has continued to travel, speak, and write on behalf of struggles for social justice and equality all across the South. 

For almost 35 years now she has worked ceaselessly for "the Movement." She has marched on picket lines, used her powerful and articulate voice as a speaker at countless rallies and gatherings, and always, always, used her first love as a writer and reporter to document and organize. She seems never to tire, and long after most folks have gone to bed from exhaustion, Anne can be found in a comer somewhere involved in an intense conversation. 

When the Institute for Southern Studies began in 1970, one of its first projects was an effort to document the lives of participants from the progressive movements of the 1930s, in particular a series of interviews with surviving members of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union (see "No More Moanin," SE vol. 1, no. 3 & 4). 

But Anne Braden didn't belong to that generation, and she was so active I don't think any of us would have had the temerity to suggest she sit still long enough for an oral memoir. The assumption was that Anne and Carl would be around forever — and that an oral history interview was something you did when someone retired. It turned out to be a bad assumption. Carl Braden never retired; he died in 1975 without a full life history ever being taped. 

It wasn't until 1982 when Eliot Wigginton and I began working on a collection of interviews to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the Highlander Center that I got around to interviewing Anne. Throughout its history, Highlander has been a gathering place for an assortment of individuals who have risked a great deal in order to put their beliefs into practice. We wanted to produce a book that would look at the social history of the past 50 years through the lives of such people, a book that would both celebrate and acknowledge their role in social change. 

Thirty-six interviews were conducted, transcribed, and added to the Highlander archives. Somewhere between 25 and 30 of these will be published in a collection edited by Eliot Wigginton and scheduled for publication in the winter of 1986by Doubleday & Company. Most of these interviews range from one hour to four. Two of them are extremely long, 12 to 14 hours. One is the interview I did with Anne Braden; the other is an interview Anne Braden did with C.T. Vivian. 

The excerpt that follows is one portion of a 380-page transcript. There is neither space here — nor will there be enough in the book — to do justice to the life Anne Braden is living. Happily, however, we will be able to elaborate more in the forthcoming book. The material presented here focuses on Anne's early years in Anniston, Alabama, her years of intellectual awakening at college in Virginia, and her growing consciousness about social issues as a young reporter. 

— Sue Thrasher 

Family 

In terms of family, I'm descended from what my family always said was the first white child born in Kentucky — white as opposed to Indian. First settlers is the point, at Fort Harrod, Kentucky, which is now Harrodsburg. That was the first permanent settlement in Kentucky. By my mother's standards that's a sign of great prestige, that you got here first; that's very important to her. I always thought it was terribly unimportant and not too good because they killed the Indians. As a child I wasn't sure that was something to be proud of, even before I thought about the slavery thing, because later on, two generations, they were owning slaves. But it was important to Mother and she wanted her children to be aware of their history, so she would take us to Fort Harrod and tell us about these things. I thought it was interesting at the time. I did have that little concern about the Indians, but I didn't go through any great suffering over it. Of course, when I began to develop a few ideas of my own, it really seemed ridiculous to think there was any great thing about my ancestry, but after I got charged with sedition and everybody was saying, "Go back to Russia," I found it was very useful. I said publicly in every forum I could that I'd been here longer than a lot of other folks and they could go back to Russia if they wanted to! It was kind of useful in that period with the outside agitator bit. 

I've always been interested in this grandmother — five greats to me — who was the mother of the child I'm descended from. Her name was Ann Pogue, and I would love to know more about her. She brought the first spinning wheel into Kentucky over the Cumberland Gap, and she had five husbands — because they all kept getting killed by the Indians! One would get killed off and she'd marry another one. She had children by most of those husbands, which is why there are a lot of descendants; there's nothing exclusive about being descended from Ann Pogue! The husband that my family came down from was William Pogue and he was one that went off and got killed by the Indians. Her name when she died was McGinty — that was the last husband she had. 

I think she was very strong; in fact, I think most of those pioneer women were. What I always heard — and this must have been word-of-mouth come down in the family — was that she ran the fort. Not only did she bring in the first spinning wheel, she also set up the first school in the fort. She insisted that they have a school so the children could get some learning. She was apparently considered something of a tyrant by the men, even though they kept marrying her, because she insisted they stick around the fort and till the land. Their inclination was to go out and fight the Indians, but she wanted the land tilled so they would have com and whatever. So she became known as a tyrant in terms of making everybody fall to and work. I just really think I would have liked her. 

 

Anniston 

I was born in Louisville, Kentucky, July 28, 1924. My family on both sides came from Kentucky, but they moved to Mississippi when I was a baby. My father didn't have quite the blue blood credentials my mother did, but he came from a substantial family. 

The first place I really remember is Columbus, Mississippi, and I started to school there. I started kindergarten and they put me in the first grade, so I was always a year ahead of myself. When I was in the second grade, we moved back to Kentucky for a couple of years and then to Little Rock, Arkansas, for a few months, and then to Anniston. That's where I grew up, Anniston, Alabama. My father was a salesman for Allied Mills, which is a feed company; I don't know why they moved him around so much. He was always a salesman as far as making a living, but finally settled in one spot. I went through high school in Anniston, graduated in '41. I was in college exactly the four years of World War II: Stratford Junior College in Danville, Virginia, for two years and then Randolph Macon where I finished in '45. 

Daddy was a frustrated farmer. He really would have loved to have farmed all his life. Even before he retired, he bought a farm outside of Anniston and after he left Allied Mills, he was just constantly at the farm for years. Later on, after he finally sold the farm because it was so much work, he had half interest in an antique shop. He just simply couldn't retire; Daddy just worked like a dog all of his life. We have a joke in my family about the "McCarty drive" — that's my father's name, McCarty. The first person I ever heard refer to it was my mother; she said her husband and children all had the "McCarty drive" and if she had known about it 50 years earlier she would have run screaming in the other direction! She was a widow to Daddy's work for years. 

Anniston was a cotton mill town and also sold pipes — the Anniston Pipe Company made iron pipes. No steel mills like in Birmingham, but a lot of cotton mills. There was a right and wrong side of the tracks. There was a main street downtown, Noble Street; generally, east of Noble was the better off area, and west Anniston was where poor people lived, white and black but not particularly together. Then there was South Anniston where blacks lived and they had dirt streets. The whole town was so small you could drive it in five minutes — all of it — but it was definitely demarcated. 

When we moved to Anniston, Mother joined the Episcopal Church, and Daddy, whose family was Southern Baptist, joined one of the big Baptist churches. There were only two Episcopal churches in Anniston. One was a little church on the "right" side of the tracks and she put us in Sunday School there. I remember as a child wishing I went to one of the other churches like the Presbyterian or the Baptist because they had more children and sounded like more fun. But she put us in the Episcopal Church; the people there were from some of the "first families," which Episcopalians usually are.

My mother wasn't always pleased with some of the people I associated with, because she didn't think they were socially acceptable. I was real close friends with a girl who Mother didn't think I should run around with. There wasn't anything wrong with the girl's "reputation"; it was a matter of social position. I remember her saying, "When we came to Anniston I had to be very careful to establish a social position for you and Lindsay [Anne's brother] here in Anniston." That was the first time it ever occurred to me that people consciously worked for those things. In that day in the South, as you know, it wasn't money, it was your social position; it was your ancestry that made the difference. I had always assumed that I was among the "better" people. Now I didn't put it in those terms; it was just part of my life. That's the world I lived in. I had no idea one had to work at it until Mother said that she had to do certain things to make sure I had the correct social position in Anniston. 

I became deeply religious as a child and was worried that my family was not religious enough. I just really got wrapped up in religion. I can't remember exactly why or even when it began, but I read the Bible a lot and I read other things. 

There was a very interesting man who was minister of the church named Jim Stoney. He was a maverick, and I just adored him. He was very interested in poor people and he set up what was then called missions on the other side of town. He would have the children from the missions come to our Sunday School. Things like that were considered quite unusual. People just didn't mix up. I think he really tried to make the wealthier people in Anniston aware of what poverty was like. Somehow he managed to stay at the church and people liked him; they just thought he was a little bit cuckoo. 

Jim Stoney had two young assistants; one, I remember quite well, had an inclination to get the kids to discussing social issues. By the time I was in my teens, I was going to these young peoples' meetings on Sunday. I think the first discussion I ever heard about the "race question" or the "race problem" was at one of those meetings. I remember once — I think it was the first time I ever heard the word communist — I asked a question that was slightly questioning of segregation. I'm not even sure I knew the term segregation; I just knew that people lived apart. And this person came up to me afterwards and said I shouldn't say things like that or people would think I was a communist. And I didn't even know what a communist was! 

I had never been around poor people, just like I had never been around black people. But at the church, I would be with the children from the cotton mill villages, and would hear Jim Stoney talk, and I developed a feeling about religion as something that was supposed to do something about these things. There was enough of a caring atmosphere that I'm sure it influenced me. 

I'm not sure how much of it was a fear of going to hell, although the preachers I heard never preached fire and brimstone — you don't do that in the Episcopal church — or whether I was really concerned about these things. I didn't believe the Bible literally and I don't even think I believed in hellfire, but I knew that people had to be responsible for their fellow human beings, even before I quite understood who they were, you know. 

It was almost intuitive, you see, this awareness that the whole world wasn't in the comfortable world that I lived in. To a certain extent it was the noblesse oblige psychology — you had certain obligations because of your position in society, and you were supposed to be socially responsible. All the people I grew up with thought they were in a privileged position because they were actually better than other people and therefore it was God's will. I think when you grow up with that attitude and you have nothing to measure it by, in the normal course of events you are going to assume those things too. In that situation, anything in that environment that lets you know there is another world somewhere is potentially radicalizing. 

Looking back, you don't know what you superimpose later, nobody does. I've interpreted my own life differently at different times, but I've always thought Jim Stoney had a more humane and somewhat larger view of life than most of the people in Anniston. It was such a constricted world! What I got in the church, mostly from him, was the only window out. Most people wouldn't think of an Episcopal church in a little town as being a great opening to the world; yet, in a way it was, because there wasn't anything else. I think that's probably true of a lot of people who have come into the movement through religion. It was definitely the main factor in my life. 

 

Stratford 

Going to college was one of the big turning points in my life — not politically so much, but I think it led to politics later — because it was a tremendous intellectual awakening. 

There weren't but a few hundred people at Stratford. It was mostly in one big building that had white columns and beautiful ivy-covered walls. The dormitories were upstairs and classrooms were on the ground floor and in the basement. But that was about all it was. There was a dining room in the basement. There were a lot of rules in those days. We had to go to meals and sit at the same table with one of the faculty. That's how we got to know them. People didn't wear slacks as much then; we wore slacks some, but we had to put on a dress for dinner. You had to have your lights out at a certain time. I finally got around that. I'd work late at night in the press room when I got to working on the paper. The rules didn't bother me particularly because I figured that's the way all schools were. 

I won every honor in the world at Stratford because it was small. My second year I was editor of the paper, which was a good paper for a small college; it always won the prizes. I was vice president of the student body; then the student body president left during the middle of the year and I had to take over the presidency. I was kind of a big frog in a little pond. I had a chance to do things there I never would have had on a big campus; I couldn't have been editor of the paper probably, and I learned everything about putting a college paper together. I did a lot of drama; I was in all the plays. To graduate, to get a diploma in drama, I had to do a whole play by myself. So I did St. Joan. I did all the parts. I had to learn it all. I just got to do a lot of things I never would have on a big campus and developed some self-confidence, which I hadn't had that much of before. 

It was at Stratford that I really began to develop this "McCarty drive." I worked very hard. It's always been a little bit of a conflict for me, not particularly wanting to drive so hard, feeling I really don't take time to enjoy life, except I'm not sure, because what I really enjoy is the working. My freshman year I was rooming with a young woman from over in the tidewater of Virginia, and several of us were going home with her for Thanksgiving. At the last minute I decided not to go because I had some papers to write or something to do for the school paper, so I stayed there and the rest of them went. And I look back on that sometimes; it was the first time I made that sort of decision, that I'd stay and work instead of do something pleasant. It was a turning point in my life and I've been doing it ever since — not always sure that was the way to live but it's mainly the way I have lived. 

The other thing was I made some close friends at Stratford. Usually the friends I made were people I was working with on something and where you just get into a conversation late at night after the paper was put to bed. But it was also where I met Harriet Fitzgerald, who I think was the most profound influence in my life except for Carl. 

The dean of the hall was a woman named Ida Fitzgerald who lived there in Danville. Her father had owned the Dan River Cotton Mills, the one that Tom Tippett describes in When Southern Labor Stirs. They had a great big house right across the street from the college and every once in a while, Ida Fitzgerald would have some students over to her house for a cookout in the yard and I would go over. I always felt intimidated and was afraid to talk around her. I was still pretty shy. Her older sister, Harriet Fitzgerald, had finished at Randolph Macon. She was an artist by profession and by that time was living in Greenwich Village. Somewhere in there — probably late my second year — when we were over there having supper, Harriet was in town and I began to get to know her. Over the next year or two while I was at Randolph Macon I got to know Harriet very well, and she became sort of a role model for me. She was a generation older, I was about 20 then and she was about 40. I was doing a lot of looking and searching and she took an interest in me. She was the one who urged me to go to Randolph Macon. Harriet told me later that Ida had told her she had to meet me, that I was the most brilliant student who had ever been to Stratford and she had to persuade me to go to Randolph Macon Women's College. 

Harriet was part of that generation of women in the twenties that I call the earlier women's liberation movement who decided to seek careers instead of marriage. I remember her saying to me at one point, "You know, my generation couldn't do both, but yours probably can; we had to make choices." A lot of her friends all went off to be professionals of one kind or another. 

She was on the Board of Randolph Macon. Usually on those college boards they get people with a lot of money, and they have a few alumnae. She was an alumna and very active on the board for years, so she would come down to Randolph Macon a lot. When she'd have exhibitions of her art in New York they would then be shown at Randolph Macon, so we were in pretty close touch. I'd have these long conversations with her. She introduced me to a lot of things including Karl Marx and Freud; she was very much into Freud and that was the thing in those days. 

She was a good friend of Lucy Randolph Mason who worked with the CIO. Harriet moved in those circles. She was very pro-labor, very pro-Roosevelt, pro all those things that her cohorts in Danville were not. But she kept in touch with her roots certainly more than I did. She kept coming back to Danville and trying to shake up Danville and never cut herself off from her roots. 

Carl was obviously the most important factor in my life — and Harriet was, too. If I hadn't known Harriet I don't think I could have ever formed a relationship with Carl. Those two things go together. She was just a profound influence in my life and I think was the first person I was ever in love with. It was not any overt homosexual relationship; that would have scared me to death because that just wasn't accepted in those days as it is now. I'm talking about love in that she was what made life exciting and interesting. Exploring a world of ideas with somebody else just made the world more exciting. Compared to this excitement, the relationships I'd had with men were so barren. I had learned the lesson well that one must appear to have no brains in order to be attractive to men. Until I met Harriet, I had never experienced the excitement of real intellectual companionship; I didn't know such relationships existed. And, of course, that's the kind of relationship I found with Carl later. 

So far as I can remember, Harriet was the first person I ever sat and talked with who understood what the CIO was about and what the labor movement was about. She was the first person I ever heard who was actively working against segregation. Except, of course, what I heard through the prism of my world in Alabama. There were strikes in Anniston in the '30s but I can't remember very much about them. The Scottsboro case was going on, but things like that hadn't impinged on my consciousness at all. I heard about them but what I heard was that outside agitators were causing trouble. I heard as a child that Eleanor Roosevelt was stirring up people, and I wondered about that. I really didn't think about these things a lot; I just accepted them. I had no way of finding out what was happening. But something bothered me about the relationships of blacks and whites, and also economic questions. 

I really don't know when I began to wonder about these things. Looking back I have the feeling that I always knew something was wrong about some of this stuff. It was like . . . if you've ever done photography and watched a picture come clear in the developing fluid . . . it's there all the time and gradually becomes clear. I can't pinpoint any minute in time when I began to question, but looking back, I think I always did. 

 

Newspapering 

Between my freshman and sophomore years at Stratford, I went to a summer theater near Plymouth, Massachusetts. They had professional actors and actresses, but they had classes for young people and we could also be in plays. We traveled all over the Cape. It was during World War II; and everything was blacked out and we couldn't have any lights on the beaches. It was that summer I decided theater wasn't really the world I wanted. I was talking one day to one of the teachers who had been in the theater for years, and she said, "It's a hard life in the theater, and if you wouldn't rather be doing something in the theater — if it's nothing but sweeping floors — than anything else in the world, than a top job anywhere else, don't go into the theater." And I got to thinking about that. . . . 

And I decided I didn't really feel that way about the theater. I didn't have the passion she was talking about. But, I thought, that's the way I feel about newspaper work! I'd rather be sweeping the floor in a newspaper office, than holding the top job somewhere else. I like the printed word and I like to see things in print and I like to put things together — I just love that sort of work. So, somewhere along in there I decided that's what I wanted to do. 

So, the next summer after my sophomore year at Stratford I got my first job reading proofs at the Anniston Star. When I got my first check for $15 it was the strangest feeling; I thought, "Somebody is giving me money to do something I think is fun! There's something wrong about that." 

I worked at the Star the year I finished Stratford and the summer between my junior and senior years at Randolph Macon. Then I went back after I graduated and stayed over a year. Most of the men were away in the army, and because of the way they were short staffed I got all kinds of experience doing things a woman never would have gotten otherwise. And that happened for women in every field during World War II. I just did everything and covered everything in town — wrote editorials, even did sports which I knew nothing about. I didn't really cover sports events, but I would do the sports off the wire, and handle other stuff off the wire. I even wrote headlines. They just didn't have anybody there. 

The owner of the Anniston Star was old Colonel Harry Ayers. He was a character, a real institution around there! He was considered a liberal; you know liberals in those days didn't oppose segregation, but they talked about justice and more opportunity. Colonel Ayers was a New Dealer, a Roosevelt liberal. He would probably have been for all the New Deal legislation, things like the Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC). He was against the poll tax. I can remember writing editorials against the poll tax and my father saying, "That's ridiculous!" Old Colonel Ayers was a nice guy — sort of a character. He moved in political circles and had a lot of friends in high circles. 

The summer of '46, after I had been out of school for a year, I decided I needed to get a different sort of experience, so during my vacation that year I went to a number of different newspapers to interview for jobs. I interviewed with several newspapers, but I ended up going to Birmingham. I went there in the fall of '46 and left in April. I wasn't in Birmingham a whole year, because along in March the [Louisville] Times wrote that they had an opening in the news department and I decided to take that. By that time I had, in just a few months, gotten to know an awful lot of people in the [Birmingham] courthouse. That was all I ever covered. The courthouse was my assignment the whole time I was there. I did some general coverage, but mainly I spent my time in the courthouse. They had a little press room there, and I wasn't in the newspaper office that much. I would work from early morning till late at night. I would go to the courthouse early and phone in stories for the Birmingham News, which was the afternoon paper. After the courthouse closed I would go back to the newspaper office, or sometimes I'd stay there and write stories for the morning paper. It'd be nine o'clock when I'd get away. I didn't get paid any overtime. I was really exploited, but I didn't think I was because it was what I wanted to do. Nobody works those hours for newspapers now. But I still had the idea that if you like something, it doesn't matter how much you are paid, you work. 

 

Birmingham 

One of the things I remember seeing during this time was long lines of blacks at the [voter] registration office. They were veterans mainly, and there was an organized campaign to get them registered. None of them were being registered, but they would come down in organized lines to try and register. We never wrote that up, but they were there. 

There was a big hassle that year about the Boswell Amendment, an amendment to the Alabama state constitution that was designed to keep blacks from voting. Jim Folsom was running for governor and I had gotten to know him that summer during his primary campaign when I was still working for the Star. The day after the primary Colonel Ayers sent me out with a photographer to ask people why they voted for Folsom. He was startled as could be because he wasn't for Folsom and Folsom wasn't, you know, "socially acceptable." Colonel Ayers may have gotten friendly with Folsom later, but he was shocked then. I remember riding up and down the country roads around Anniston interviewing people for a story about where all the support for Folsom came from. I'll never forget this one farmer who said, "You go back and tell that editor of yours, that Harry Ayers, he's been writing editorials for years about how everybody ought to vote. Now we done went and voted and he don't like the way we voted and that's too bad!" 

The general election was that fall after I was in Birmingham, and I remember catching up with Folsom for an interview. It was kind of a scoop! Because I had met him during the primary before he was such a big shot, he was willing to talk to me. He tried to seduce me too. He did that to all the women though; those stories about him were true, you know! Of course, it was one of his downfalls. But, anyway, I got this story in which he came out against the Boswell Amendment, which was a big controversy. People had thought he would, but I finally got him to say so and we made a big headline out of it. So that was a big issue. 

It was in the primary where he startled everybody. He was running around campaigning with a band and all that. He always carried a wash bucket and a mop and said he was going down to Montgomery and clean out all those rich folks so poor people would have a chance. The crowds loved it! They just thought he was wonderful. There were about five people running in the primary, and he won with a landslide. Nobody expected it. The professionals hadn't expected him to get anything. The party organization thought he was a joke. But I had been traveling around with his caravan; I had been in the rallies, had watched the crowds looking at him like he was God, so I wasn't that surprised. 

I liked him a lot. He was a populist. From where I sat, he was good on the race issue. He wasn't as good as he seemed, but he was certainly better than a lot. He had some people working for him who came out of the old Southern Conference for Human Welfare — people who were much more radical and who didn't think he was perfect and didn't like some of the jokes he told, but still thought he was worth working for. I thought he was a sincere guy, and I still sort of think that. I don't know what he was trying to do by his lights, but I think he really thought he was trying to represent the poor people and he wanted to represent both black and white poor people. 

 

Running Away 

I had very little social life in Birmingham because I was working long hours and didn't particularly want it. I had a lot of college friends there, women who had gone to Randolph Macon, and I never even looked any of them up. I just wasn't interested in that world. Some of them were daughters of judges whose courts I was covering and I'd run into them occasionally, but I never looked up that world in Birmingham at all. I pretty much lived in the newspaper world. 

The whole impact of the courthouse on me was tremendous. It exposed me to a whole new world, different from the sheltered world I'd grown up in, and one where I could see close up the crushed lives. I remember one case where a black man got 20 years in prison because they said he had looked at a white woman across the road in an insulting way; the charge was assault with intent to ravish. I began to feel that everything was wrong in the society I lived in, began to realize what it does to people, how it destroys people — both black and white. And then there were just a number of instances. . . . 

I got very chummy with people around the courthouse because you do that as a reporter — that's the way you get news. If they like you they give you the news. I was chummy with the prosecutors; they considered me one of them. And the sheriff's deputies, I'd sit and talk to them and they would let me know when things were happening. One day this deputy sheriff — I can just see him now; he was really a nice enough guy on the surface — we were just sitting there talking and he said, "You know there's only been one murder in Birmingham since I've been working here that hasn't been solved." And I said, "Yeah?" I thought that sounded like an interesting story. "What was it?" He said, "Well, I'll show you." And he took me in a room and showed me a skull on the table. He said, "It never will be solved, because that man was a nigger and the man that killed him was white." He was kind of twinkling; he thought this was a nice little secret that he'd let me in on and that I would think that way too. I was just horrified! I looked at it and the skull just got bigger and bigger. I just turned around and ran almost to get out of there. I kept thinking about that skull, thinking about that skull; and thinking about that man because he had been chummy with me and all that. 

There were other things, but the morning that I think finally did it was . . . I always had to call the sheriff's office from home to see if there had been any big stories overnight. If there was I had to get right on down to the courthouse so I could get it in the first edition of the News. If there wasn't I would meet a friend for breakfast at one of those downtown cafeterias. Sometimes I didn't get time to call before I left home, so I would call when I stopped for breakfast. That morning I asked my friend to get breakfast for me while I called the sheriff's office. When I met him at the table he said, "Anything doing?" And I said, "No, just a colored murder." Which meant that I had time to eat breakfast; I didn't have to go to the courthouse to see about it because it meant one black had killed another black, you see. It just wasn't news when a black person killed another black person. They might put a paragraph about it in the paper but it wasn't anything to get excited about. Just as I said that — it was like a piece of electricity — a black waitress was putting our things on the table, and it suddenly dawned on me what I'd said. 

I didn't want to look at her, but I looked up and her expression didn't change. I can see her face now. Her hand sort of shook as she was putting down my coffee, but her face was like a mask. And it just came over me how awful this was, and I wanted to say, "I didn't mean that. I'm not the one who says it's not news, the paper says that. I didn't mean that it didn't matter that one of your people was killed; I'm not the one who says what news is." But I didn't say anything, because as I sat there, it suddenly dawned on me that I did mean it! It was like an octopus, it was getting me too. I knew if I stayed that I was going to become a part of that world, that you can't be neutral. You are either part of it or you are against it. And I didn't know how to be against it. 

It was that morning that I decided to leave! It was just this devastating sort of thing and I had to get away. It seemed like my whole world was just death and destruction. It was that skull.