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.

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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.

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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

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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 sub- topics, 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.

5 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.

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

19 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.

20 Dupre, Transforming the Cotton Frontier, 55.

21 Ibid.

22 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. 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, twenty- one 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.

37 Jeffrey D. Stocker, ed., From Huntsville to Appomattox: R.T. Coles’s History of 4th Regiment, Alabama Volunteer Infantry, C.S.A. Army of Northern Virginia (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1996), xiv.

38 Deborah Story, “Union Forces Occupied Huntsville 150 Years Ago Today,” The Huntsville Times, April 11, 2012.

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

39 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.

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

51 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.

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

64 Clarence G. Lasby, “Project Paperclip: German scientists and the cold war,” New Scientist, January 20. 1972, 170-171.

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 “no- brainer.” 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. 77 John Catchpole, Project Mercury: NASA’s First Manned Space Programme (Hampshire, United Kingdom: Springer Praxis Publishing, 2001), 16.

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.

80 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

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

89 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/JFKWHA- 032.aspx [accessed January 12, 2015].

90 “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].

91 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.

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.

95 Sonnie Hereford interview with Mike Marshall, “Local civil rights leaders reflect on 50th 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].

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.

98 Derek Catsam, Freedom’s Main Line: The Journey of Reconciliation and the Freedom Rides (Lexington: The University of Kentucky Press, 2009), 5.

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

104 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].

105 Ibid.

106 Thomas interview, August 6, 2013.

107 Fisher, “Oakwood College Students’ Quest for Social Justice”, 119.

108 Hereford interview, September 9, 2013.

109 Sheryll Cashin, The Agitator’s Daughter: A Memoir of Four Generations of One Extraordinary African- American Family (New York: Public Affairs Publishing, 2008), 115-116.

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 sit- ins, 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.

129 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].

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.

136 William Pearson, “Student Tells How CORE Staged Huntsville Sit-In,” Chicago Daily Defender (Daily Edition) January 31, 1962, 6. Online archives accessed January 2015.

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.

141 Paul, “How NASA Joined the Civil Rights Revolution,” http://www.airspacemag.com/history-of- flight/how-nasa-joined-civil-rights-revolution-180949497/

142 Interview with Sonnie Hereford III, Huntsville, Alabama. December 10, 2014.

143 Paul, “How NASA Joined the Civil Rights Revolution,” http://www.airspacemag.com/history-of- flight/how-nasa-joined-civil-rights-revolution-180949497/

144 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.

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

145 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-huntsville- movement# [accessed January 25, 2015].

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 anti- boycott 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.

158 Lynne Olson, Freedom’s Daughters: The Unsung Heroines of the Civil Rights Movement from 1830 to 1970 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001), 74.

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.

175 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-times- business/2012/01/post_56.html [accessed March 20, 2014].

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. 183 Ibid., 142.

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 anti- segregation 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

208 Patricia Alberg Graham, Schooling America: How Public Schools Met the Nation’s Changing Needs (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 127.

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

211 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].

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.

214 “"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.

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-rights- revolution-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 NASA- ready 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 "Alabama Blocks Negro Admissions," The New York Times December 5, 1962.

245 Hereford interview, May 29, 2013.

246 "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/Asset- Viewer/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-dies- at-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 Hereford and Ellis, Beside the Troubled Waters, 116.

255 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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