Deep South in the ’60s

I found when traveling to new places, one of the best ways to meet people was at church, so I made acquaintance with a Cumberland Presbyterian minister, his family and parishioners. (I had never even heard of the Cumberland Presbyterian Church before.) These folks invited me to stay at their house until I decided where my “quest” would take me, and I began a relationship that lasted throughout my stay in the South, thus more exposure to the “masses” in the Deep South, although these folks bathed regularly. This was an all-white congregation of people with deeply held religious convictions, whose faith had recently been challenged by blacks who were stepping outside their traditional societal roles, and they weren’t sure what to do.

My first job selling encyclopedias landed me in jail for a couple hours in a small town outside Birmingham, for selling door-to-door after dark, an ordinance with which I was not familiar. Fortunately, they gave me a cell by myself, while the “unwashed” down the hall wanted to know what I was in for, and when I said soliciting, I think they got the wrong idea. The manager was picked up an hour or so later, and there he found me lying on my bunk reading my sample encyclopedia. Shortly thereafter I found another job, which was as a manager trainee in a low priced dry goods store located in the middle of downtown.

I had since found lodging in a workingman’s boarding house, near the campus of Birmingham Southern College, providing more exposure to the “unwashed masses,” and I was hard at work preparing for the Christmas rush at the Top Dollar Store. It was a few weeks after the church bombing, which had served to quiet things down, when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas.

I was ordering lunch at a nearby sandwich shop when I heard the announcement of the shooting. A broad, and I believe unconscious grin, crossed the face of the young lady behind the counter who was taking my order, and the level of nervous chatter in the shop rose several decibels. White people laughed and joked with one another, in a kind of emotional release after several years of perceived harassment by the president and his brother Bobby Kennedy, then Attorney General, challenging their racial traditions.

The guys at the boarding house were hooting and hollering, with exclamations like, “They finally got him,” or “I wish it had been me.” After several days though most of them seemed to be quite thoughtful and introspective about all the violence, and as Kennedy was being buried, several were contrite about the manner in which he died.

A few days before the Draft Board found me to say my six-month draft deferment was up, I was asked to give the annual “young people’s” sermon at the church I had continued to attend. My message laid out the way I saw how the Bible taught about love, compassion and equality, closing with, “if you claim to be a believer in Jesus Christ, then social and racial equality must be part of your world view and belief system.”

A light of understanding seemed to go off in the eyes of some of the all-white congregation, while I saw a grimace of hate and rejection reflected in the countenances of others. The next day my draft notice arrived, so I quit my job, sold the little blue Simca that had brought me South, paid off a couple of bills and bought a bus ticket back to Seattle before the next weekend. So my tiny contribution to racial harmony in the Deep South was over and I was home before I could become a casualty of the racial strife of the ’60s. I later found out they were killing people for saying what I said in that sermon that Sunday.