Deep South in the ’60s

Stephen Cranes” classic, “The Red Badge of Courage,” will always be one of my favorites because I lived through some of the experiences, sort of. Like many a boy born and raised in the Pacific Northwest, I felt stuck away in that corner of God’s Country and had the urge to travel. After doing so, most people realize what they had and return quickly, but I was not so lucky.

So a friend and I drove to Southern California in 1963, struck East from there, and after days of driving through the southwest wastelands, woke up on what seemed to be another planet, the lush green of Louisiana. We stopped for gas and a bathroom break along a wooded stretch of highway and I was confronted with my first “colored” only bathroom, jolting me into the realization of the segregated South.

I dropped my friend off in Jackson, Mississippi three days after Medgar Evers was assassinated in his driveway in that fair city, and drove on to Huntsville, Alabama. I was in that fair city for two weeks when I heard about the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church killing four little girls. So, after a couple more weeks, I moved to Birmingham, which up to that time was a hotbed of racial tensions after Martin Luther King had lead demonstrations.

After hearing almost daily reports of National Guard mobilizations and violence in the streets, Birmingham was relatively calm on the surface after the church bombing. It seems surreal how the cowardly destruction caused by a bomb, and the killing of innocents, can defuse generational tensions and cause people to stop and think seriously about what was happening in their lives.

For some reason I thought it would be safer to sleep over night in my car near a National Guard Armory. As dusk descended, I continued reading “The Red Badge of Courage,” immersed in the vivid detail and description of this war time classic. It was my first night in Birmingham, and I was almost certain that as I read, I could see Rebel soldiers advancing on my position, darting from tree to tree, outside the Armory fence, guarded by silent jeeps and personnel carriers. As night fell, my imagination was forcibly shut down when it got too dark and I had to close my book.

After an hour or so of sleeplessness, cars began driving into the darkened parking lot behind me, with their eerie headlight beams reflecting off the tall broadleaf trees, and then shutting down punctuated by a “Rebel Yell” or two. After a while I ventured out to view the mobilization, which turned out to be a teenage dance and my first real exposure to the “unwashed masses” of the Deep South. They turned out to be just like kids anywhere, except for this propensity to yell all the time.