Anniston, Alabama Civil Rights Observance 17Th Street Baptist Church June 24, 2016
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Anniston, Alabama Civil Rights Observance 17th Street Baptist Church June 24, 2016 HOW FAR THE PROMISED LAND? by William B. McClain Mary Elizabeth Joyce Professor of Preaching and Worship, Emeritus Wesley Theological Seminary Washington, D.C. On the warm early fall Sunday afternoon, September 15, 1963, the Reverend Nimrod Quintus Reynolds, my clergy colleague and one of my dearest friends, and I left our respective parsonages. His parsonage of 17th Street Baptist Church was at 1700 Cooper Avenue. He arrived to pick me up in his relatively new Bonneville Pontiac at the parsonage of Haven Chapel Methodist Church at 1504 Brown Avenue. We were on our way to carry out the agreed-upon arrangement to literally begin the first step in the process of the desegregation of Anniston, Alabama. As members of the Anniston Human Relations Council appointed by Mayor Claude Dear and chaired by the Rev. J. Philips Noble, who is here today, and who also became and remains a very 1 dear trusted friend and treasured colleague, Rev. Reynolds and I agreed on the plan that we would quietly and secretly enter the library that day, receive a library card, check out a book, and the so-called "integration" of the library would be a fait accompli. We told no one about the plan -- not even those closest to us! Yes, we had heard about and been shocked and saddened by the news of what had happened that morning in Birmingham. We knew that a bomb shattering 16th Street Baptist Church had killed Cynthia Wesley, Denise McNair, Addie Mae Collins and Carole Robinson, four little Black girls as they changed into their choir robes in the basement, preparing to participate in the Youth Sunday Service upstairs. One of the members said that those 15 sticks of dynamite that had been laid near the steps of the basement with a time delay of three minutes hurled those little girls into the air "like rag dolls." Yes, we knew! In fact, before we left the parsonage at Haven Chapel I used my keys to re-open the church so that Nimrod and I could go into the sanctuary and kneel at the altar and pray for the souls of those little girls, the grief and bereavement of their families, friends, church 2 members, and the sad duty of their pastor, our good friend and colleague, the Rev. John Cross, Jr. And then we moved ahead to carry out the "Anniston Plan. " We thought: "No, this was Anniston in Calhoun County, and not 'Bombingham.' We've had no fire hoses and dogs and Bull Connors here. This was Anniston near Fort McClellan where soldiers and their families had lived all over the world in multi-ethnic and racially diverse communities and the home of the Anniston Army Depot, a major federal weapons storage and maintenance site. This was Anniston! situated at the foot of Blue Mountain that the great newspaperman of Atlanta , Henry W. Grady, had named "the Model City... " Isn't that something like calling it "the Promised Land?" Maybe we had so easily forgotten that this was also a seed-bed of the Ku Klux Klan and the White Citizens' Council, the place of national attention because of the burning of the Greyhound bus station assault and the beatings of the Freedom Riders on Alabama Highway 202 just outside the City of Anniston [I believe about five miles away!] on Mother's Day, May 14, 1961, just two years earlier. Phil Noble's book, Beyonbd the Burning Bus, for which I wrote an essay Foreword, details all of this. 3 And then it happened. And it happened just like the racists hoodlums and vigilantes had planned it; just like a history of hate, white supremacy had expected to carry it out. It was no secret to them that two Black preachers were coming to "integrate the library." Two black preachers -- men who had earned Master's degrees from accredited and reputable theological seminaries -- not worthless bought mail-order degrees or certificates from some "fly by night" unaccredited, fundamentalist Bible college -- Not a certificate from the shadow fake Trump University! And here we were unable to go to the Anniston Public Library, own a library card, check out a book, let alone sit down and read and ponder what we read, and carry out our research. Just think, in a public library built from the money from Andrew Carnegie Foundation on the corner of downtown 10th Street and Wilmer Avenue, we could not use that public library. The old Negro spiritual says: "Oh, sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble..." But there we were as sacrificial lambs to be slaughtered, prey to a racist mob of some in the Anniston Star Newspaper said there were 100 who assaulted us and beat us with sticks, fists, and a length of chain. Nimrod was stabbed several times and bleeding more 4 profusely than I, and we tried to get back to the car -- I managed to get him into the passenger side seat, and I into the driver's seat -- but they had blocked the car in -- and I couldn't get the cart out. Just then I heard the bang or the pop of a shot and the devastating sound of shattering glass -- and the bullet that had been fired from the side of the car where I was seated lodged just beyond the nape of my neck into the headrest of the driver's seat. It was just then that I was able to get Nimrod out and into the streets and amazingly along came a woman named "Miss Dollie" and I have forgotten her last name -- somebody here may help me remember -- and she was kind enough to stop and let us into her car and take us to a segregated Anniston Memorial Hospital. Yes, it was more than a "library event," as the Anniston Star Newspaper continues to call it. It was a racist mob attack on two innocent Christian preachers seeking to start the process of justice to carry out the "Anniston Non-violent Plan" that President had called the Mayor to commend our peaceful non-violent plan. But for us it was two preacher-prophets still wondering: "How Far Is the Promised Land?" And that is why, when my dear friend, the Rev. George Smitherman, then the pastor of Mt. Calvary Baptist Church and I were 5 escorted into the library the next day, accompanied by the Rev. J. Philips Noble, Carleton Lentz, Miller Sprouill, and Attorney Charlie Doster, I had one book in mind that I wanted to check out after receiving the first Anniston Public Library card issued to a Black person. That book was by Walter Francis White, a graduate of my Alma Mater, Clark Atlanta University, and at the time the leading civil rights advocate as the Executive Secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. It was a book about race and lynchings, and race riots, and the ceaseless and valiant efforts of Black people to obtain justice, dignity, and freedom in an American democratic nation that called itself the "land of the free and the home of the brave;" "the land where the pilgrims trod," "the sweet land of liberty." Walter Francis White persuaded President Truman, with the help of his friend, Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt, to appoint a civil rights commission to lead to the desegregation of the armed forces and he created a legal division of the NAACP which brought Thurgood Marshall on to the national stage that led to the history-changing decision by the Supreme Court to desegregate public schools. He died almost a year after that monumental decision was handed down 6 by the Supreme Court and months into 1955 before Rosa Parks sat down and refused to get up from her seat on the bus in Montgomery, and she and Martin Luther King and others led the Montgomery Bus Boycott in Montgomery, Alabama. He had just finished the book before he died with the question on his heart: when will the race- baiting and brutality stop? When will Black people in Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Arkansas, Florida and the rest of the South and the nation end the necessity to speak of themselves as "voteless people" and therefore "hopeless people?" When will segregation and discrimination end? When will Black people in America receive the freedom promised? The book is entitled: HOW FAR THE PROMISED LAND? And that was the book I carried out of that library to be read by me in the next few days in my study at Haven Chapel Methodist Church! On that sweltering August day of the summer of our discontent, 18 days before the tragic event at 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, and our brutal attack at the Public Library in Anniston, Martin Luther King addressed us and our nation with a speech that is probably the most quoted speech in recent memory. Under the symbolic shadow of the signer of the Emancipation 7 Proclamation, President Abraham Lincoln, Dr. King reminded us of the promissory note of the Constitution which promised all American would be heirs to: "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." And in his unforgettably eloquent and sonorous voice, he reminded us of his dream, the American Dream where "each person would be judged by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin." That was not just Martin Luther King's dream. That had been the dream of generations of African American as long as they had been on the shores of America.