The Negroes Act The State Vs. The Student:
Reddich, L. D.
On the day this was received, the newspapers reported that L. D. Reddick had been fired from his faculty post at Alabama State College by the State Board of Education on the motion of...
...Accordingly, the Police Commissioner issued his order prohibiting the meeting and state, county and municipal forces were coordinated into a unified army...
...Several of the nine expellees were arrested as vagrants...
...On the third day, the collegians marched to the First Baptist Church for a rally and on the fourth day—over half of the student body participating—paraded to the Capitol steps for a brief ceremony...
...And all of this for what and against whom...
...Again, if the court officials had gained their offices by means of an election from which Negroes had been systematically barred, were such legitimately holding office...
...Professors and other motorists in the college area were given traffic tickets for minor and imaginary violations...
...A joint squad from Tuskegee Institute, forty miles down the road from Montgomery, and Alabama State College visited, first, the downtown public library, then the municipal museum...
...In response to such outbursts, the Reverend Mr...
...The two college men were so unimpressed that they lingered in the first floor corridors for a time, inspecting the portraits that hung there of Alabama's outstanding politicians of the past...
...At the museum, nobody interfered as the group spent half an hour looking at the art there...
...In the evening, they slunk away...
...The external pressures were complemented by internal pressures that the college administration exerted...
...Thus plans that had been so well kept at the beginning of the movement were now known to the police before they could be effectuated...
...This happened to be a rainy day and because of the inclement weather or for tactical reasons, the students called off their scheduled demonstration, thus leaving the Oak Park forces with no place to go...
...While the students and the policemen were lined up facing each other, one officer discovered a placard that was leaning up against the corner grill...
...They were not served...
...Impishly, they would march directly up to the very edge of the campus, that is to the city street and then as the police made ready to assault or capture them, the young people would turn their columns right or left, thus remaining on the campus out of reach...
...This seemed to be so appropriate to the situation that not only did the students laugh in derision but some of the policemen, warming up to the absurd situation, laughed too...
...Moreover, the legislature was not in session during the demonstrations and perhaps it feared to reconvene in special session, for the teachers of the state—especially the white ones—were in an uproar...
...The State's Attorney General echoed the Governor's sentiments by labeling the student demonstrations as "highly dangerous and inflammatory...
...The reaction of the politicians in power was immediate and massive...
...Even so, the college people may yield externally to brute force but psychologically they do not submit to it...
...Immediately, after the racially mixed lunchers were carted away by the police, inspectors appeared at the restaurant and found that it was a health hazard, that its beer license should be lifted and that the place should be closed down for a while altogether...
...Their families, too, were made aware of dire consequences of the "dangerous course" their children were pursuing...
...None appeared, so once more, shamefacedly, the assembled forces slunk away and tried to avoid the cameraman...
...Almost every day there was a new story of some Negro who was shot or, as the papers 225 put it, "had to be subdued while resisting arrest...
...Any associating of whites and Negroes on a basis of equality and friendship was to be rudely broken up...
...Everybody was found guilty...
...The students then slowly and reluctantly began to leave, moving on toward a nearby church where they had scheduled a mass meeting that would follow their placard parade...
...epithets...
...The whole discriminatory nature of "Alabama Justice" was thus brought out in the open...
...and black vs...
...community joined in to manifest publicly its backing of the student uprising...
...the book vs...
...The young "criminals" heard the judge rule that they were all guilty (except several who were accidentally passing on the street when the incident occurred...
...This time they came to a court session where a fellow student, who had made an error on his voter registration application, was being tried for perjury...
...I want to assure the citizens of Montgomery that we are prepared to take whatever actions that might be necessary to maintain and preserve the timehonored traditions and customs of the South...
...The police were not called in either instance...
...Actually, such luncheons for visiting groups had been held in that restaurant for years and nobody remembers the slightest objection on this score from anybody...
...He should have • Southern Christian Leadership Conference...
...The Reverend Fred L. Shuttlesworth, an alumnus of the college and head of the Alabama Christian Movement For Human Rights, termed the Governor's demand as "totalitarian in spirit...
...Thereafter, for about a week, they made some new thrust at Jim Crow each day...
...Reverting to his usual forthrightness, he declared that the college president "must straighten out the situation at Alabama State or the school board will find someone who can...
...They know it now as never before...
...Subsequently, technical and procedural grounds were cited for denying admission to the University...
...But it was too late...
...In court, they got an intimate view of the process of justice, Alabama style...
...The Negro attorneys subpoenaed the Police Commissioner, Sheriff, editors of both daily papers and extracted from them the admission that the local and state enforcing mobilization was greater than ever before...
...Abernathy charged that: "certain statements by public officials that were made over TV and radio, and reported to the press could be easily interpreted by lawless elements as an invitation to violence...
...Any college man out late at night could count on an encounter with the police...
...And in a matter of minutes, after the parade of banners and singing got going, the police were back in their places, lined up across the street from the campus...
...Moreover, since Montgomery was the seat of the student trouble, leaders of the state legislature expressed confidence that the city commission there could cope with the situation...
...Moreover, there were some hostile faculty members and some disagreements among student leaders over strategy...
...So, on appeal, the jury freed the white students but held their professor guilty...
...Eyewitnesses and photographs pictured the Capitol ringed by state guards standing three feet apart and city police stationed in military formation about the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church where the Negroes were gathered prior to their march across the street to the Capitol grounds...
...Also, there were a few spy suspects in the student body...
...For example, the Mayor was out of town when the snack bar visit occurred...
...Apparently, telephones were no longer channels of private communication...
...They could note that what the police said in court varied greatly from what they themselves knew to be true of the circumstances of their arrest...
...Accordingly, three days later the Chief Executive was reported to have softened his tone, explaining that what he said to the college president was not so much a threat but "by way of advice" and that he meant that only the "ring leaders" should be expelled from school...
...The third broadened the definition of "disorderly conduct," making it consistent with the state law, which covered almost every imaginable possibility of individual or group action that might be remotely interpreted as a "breach of the peace...
...After the young men were frisked and loaded in the patrol wagon, one of the policemen commanded: "Five of you nigger gals get in here," pointing to one of the squad cars...
...It should be added that the twin success of the law enforcing authority in thwarting the Negro meeting and at the same time holding back the white mob that would have assaulted the Negroes, provided the occasion for the defenders of segregation to seize the initiative and at the same time present themselves as impartial defenders of law and order...
...Whatever happens, they have won, for all of the guards in Alabama cannot make men believe in a system that they know is evil and corrupt...
...Jails, courts, police guns and badges have become symbols of a decayed social system now grown desperate and a bit absurd...
...On the opposite side of the street, the students of Alabama State College stood, some of them, with their books under their arms...
...The entire Negro community was under the hammer...
...The young people have discovered sources of strength and courage within themselves...
...224 None was physically abused...
...On the city side of the street, lined up shoulder to shoulder, stood policemen with their pistols, clubs, cans of tear gas, etc...
...Most of them had never been inside a jail or courtroom before...
...When the college president recommended to the State Board of Education that the students should not be expelled but placed on probation, the Governor—ex-officio member of the board—swept this aside and insisted that nine of the students be thrown out and that the twenty-four others receive suspended sentences...
...Neither was it possible any longer to hold meetings on or off the campus without the intrusion of policemen, detectives and investigators...
...Accordingly, three new ordinances were adopted to the end that the "power to curb demonstrations be given to the police...
...Moreover, investigators were photographing those who attended the meetings—especially anyone who spoke or otherwise had a significant role...
...The law enforcing agencies announced that they were prepared to deal with a large-scale demonstration for May 17, the anniversary of the Supreme Court's school de-segregation decree...
...They listened to the judge charge them with "breaching the peace" but did not hear one word from him on the right of peaceful protest...
...A Professor of Sociology from MacMurray College in Jacksonville, Illinois brought along his wife and his two-months-old baby with his class on a field trip to Montgomery...
...In a few moments, the whole block was filled with state, county and municipal "peace" officers and then ensued the scene described in the first paragraphs of this report...
...When he turned it over, it read: "It's a Shame...
...Supreme Court, if this became necessary...
...THE STUDENTS had made their first move the previous Thursday when some thirty-five of them filed into the snack bar at the county courthouse...
...For a short while, the young people watched in grim silence, then burst forth with their song: "We Are Not Afraid...
...None felt guilty or ashamed...
...If the message got through, no response was visible...
...Of course, more would come later...
...The Negro collegians were permitted to fill out applications that they were sure would never again see the light of day...
...The second authorized owners and managers of eating establishments to evict "trespassers...
...Fortunately or unfortunately, nobody stepped forward...
...the billet...
...Naturally this stimulated the student body to counterthrusts and so the battle was on...
...The experience was most enlightening...
...It was he who would ask that the college be closed down, called for and got new laws on the books and personally took a hand in directing the police as they were deployed in major encounters...
...Large scale demonstrations now were out of the question but were replaced by well-timed commando raids...
...As King was shifting his base of operation from Montgomery to Atlanta, apparently, the state of Alabama felt compelled to make one last desperate lunge for him, charging him with falsifying his state income tax returns...
...A white woman who was collecting funds for the Cancer campaign, reported that she saw Negroes "being entertained" in the home of a white family...
...THE DEPRESSING TREND of events was somewhat relieved by developments in the trial of Martin Luther King that came in mid May, Among other things, he had been charged by the local papers with directing the student revolt by remote control...
...No physical clash occurred for this time the students were careful not to step off state property...
...Libel suits were filed against the New York Times and NBC (National Broadcasting Company) was charged with "staging and directing" one of the student demonstrations...
...They interviewed and made friends with fellow inmates...
...He paused, walked up a few paces and repeated his vulgar challenge...
...THE EXPERIENCE at Alabama has shown that state power can break up a student campaign against Jim Crow...
...The superintendent of buildings and grounds, now aware of his great unpopularity, was conspicuous by his absence...
...Just as they were about a half block away, the police in cars and motorcycles intercepted the advance column, pushed it back from the sidewalk into the lawns of the residences there and arrested thirty-seven...
...In the later days, there was a complete blackout in the daily press of statements from the student spokesmen...
...Continuously, prowl cars and motorcycle cops, in pairs, would cruise through the campus —night and day—making noisy sounds with their motors and looking intently as though they were "casing the joint...
...Two students had already infiltrated the Capitol cafeteria...
...Many students attended the trial and were especially heartened by the skill and courage of King's legal staff...
...The next morning, bright and early, the students did put on their demonstration...
...Fraternization between the black and white defendants during the court recesses was broken up by the guards...
...A student committee said in a press statement: "We deeply resent the humiliating treatment to which the Governor has subjected the president of our college...
...Homes were entered without search warrants if more than a half dozen persons were noticed gathering there...
...Public officials, whose sworn duty it is to maintain order impartially, cannot afford to give the fringe element a green light to take the law into its own hand...
...On the day this was received, the newspapers reported that L. D. Reddick had been fired from his faculty post at Alabama State College by the State Board of Education on the motion of the Governor...
...On Tuesday, March 8, once again they sallied forth...
...The Montgomery Police Department is under instruction to enforce existing laws and to take whatever action that is necessary to suppress agitation and prevent violence...
...Nevertheless, the students were not done...
...Afterwards, they said that they should have gone upstairs to the Governor's office and "sat in" until he agreed to talk with them...
...The harassment was stepped up at all points...
...They knew that the sleuths would be there in numbers...
...On the next day, Friday, the thirty odd undergraduates who had been arrested on Tuesday, came to trial...
...They were demanding that the law makers do something about a threatened reduction in teachers' salaries because state revenues were falling below budgetary expectations...
...Students were cleared off their favorite hang-out corner, at the grill opposite the campus...
...One of these new laws prohibited all demonstrations, parades, processions, etcetera, except funerals...
...At first, this angered the cops, but after a while, they caught on and joined in the game...
...At a meeting of the State Board of Education on March 25, exactly one month after the snack bar incident, the Governor "demanded the firing of any faculty member of Alabama State College who encouraged student 220 protests...
...The police had just arrested some thirty odd of the collegians who, with their placards, had gotten about a half block from the campus on the way toward one of their mass meetings that was to be held in a neighborhood church...
...Since February 25, the students at Alabama State College have received an "education" that no course of study in the college could have supplied...
...One cameraman was roughed up while a police officer, nearby, deliberately looked the other way...
...a song vs...
...222 And so on through the week...
...They seated themselves for a while, then took trays and joined the line passing by the steam table, engaged the white women attendants in a polite dispute for service and finally, were not-too-brusquely ejected by the state house guards...
...At every turn, there stood the law, the courts, the police...
...They see through the fabrications, insecurities, fears and social ignorance of its "rulers...
...As soon as the Governor got word of the visit of the students to the courthouse snack bar, he telephoned the president of their college, denounced the students and demanded their expulsion...
...ALL THIS WOULD CHANGE when the adult Negro...
...As we shall see, the county executive officers expressed themselves more in deeds than in words...
...Automobiles were stopped and "investigated...
...All of this testimony was to the question of whether King could expect a fair trial in Montgomery...
...And so neither was quite certain on what to do...
...however, the nation-wide publicity made sensitive Montgomerians wince—especially since one of the visiting students was a girl from France who was at MacMurray on a Fulbright fellowship...
...Professor Ellsworth Janifer has given a vivid description of this ugly scene that may be read on other pages of this publication...
...During the pre-trial motions, King's lawyers moved that the courtroom and its facilities be desegregated, for, they argued, if the Supreme Court held that a Negro child could not secure an adequate education in a segregated school, how much more difficult must it be for a Negro defendant to receive a fair trial in a segregated courtroom and before a white judge and jury...
...They contradicted the police who said that they were "disorderly" or that they refused to obey any order of the policemen...
...However, the spirit of the student revolt continued, only slightly impaired...
...The following examples are merely suggestive of a long and terrible tale...
...The collegians saw the conditions of prison life with their own eyes...
...Thus the new city ordinances, buttressed by police and court action, now prevented any type of demonstration whatsoever in the city of Montgomery...
...Following the more traditional lines of open announcements, the Montgomery Improvement Association invited the Negro churches of the community to join in services on the Capitol steps Sunday afternoon, March 6. Apparently, this was just the thing that the enemy had been waiting for—something definite for which he could get set...
...Night clubs were raided...
...While waiting for the arrival of the paddy wagon, one robust policeman, who apparently felt so warm on the cool day that he did not need his jacket, raised his billet and yelled 223 out: "I want the meanest nigger in the crowd to step out...
...Upon the Governor's order, the State Superintendent of Education had begun a "full investigation of the school, faculty and students," reporting that "at least 11 members of the faculty have not been loyal to the school" or "Alabama laws," as one newspaper put it...
...The Reverend Ralph D. Abernathy, also an alumnus and head of the Montgomery Improvement Association, also criticized the Governor sharply...
...One girl said that she wished she had a photograph of herself standing in her cell...
...The issues were raised so sharply that the public as well as the judge and jury knew that the eyes of the world were upon the city and that the foundation was firmly established for an appeal to the U.S...
...The state law-making agency did nothing new for the sitters-in...
...The Police Commissioner, red faced, eyes blazing and mispronouncing the word Negro, declared over TV: "We do not intend to permit outside forces to create, provoke or otherwise incite any racial incident here in our city...
...The pressure of executive authority and legislation was constant but the most obvious use of state power came in the realm of police action, as supported by the courts and a network of investigators and inspectors...
...It had already enacted comprehensive Jim Crow legislation—especially a "catch all" disorderly conduct statute...
...THE LOCAL PRESS that had been less conscious of its social function in the beginning and at first had printed a few unfavorable stories about the behavior of the police and "white lawlessness," soon recovered its orientation and thereafter made heroes of those who stood against the student movement...
...APPARENTLY, THE LAW intended to accommodate the students fully, for early the next morning it was discovered that Oak Park, about three blocks from the campus, was the rendezvous for trucks and trailers, horses for the mounted police and other equipment sufficient to envelop, subdue and cart away the entire body of the college...
...The press played up the anticipated "purge" of "disloyal" teachers so strongly that in many parts of the country, it was assumed that 11 members of the faculty had been actually discharged...
...A passing stranger, coming unexpectedly upon this scene, might have assumed that such a show of force must have been meant for capturing or otherwise subduing something so terrible as "public enemy 219 number 1." In a sense, the stranger would not have been very wrong, for the full power of the city, county and state governments had been mobilized to crush what the politicians and others of the local power structure certainly felt was the most serious challenge that their Jim Crow way of life had yet encountered...
...We shall make every attempt to maintain law and order in Montgomery but I feel that I must warn the Negro people of this community that the tempers of the white citizenry of our city is [sic] being pushed beyond their power to control...
...Incidentally he was talking this way to some of the most attractive coeds...
...For each student, the fine was $200 plus costs of court...
...228...
...The college men and women started marching about the campus but were ordered away by the superintendent of buildings and grounds, who had elected to enforce a directive of the college president that no more meetings or demonstrations should take place on the school premises...
...They have come to look upon the society of which they are part with true sophistication...
...Not content with that, he summoned the president to his office and there, according to the newspapers, told him: "The citizens of this state do not intend to spend their tax money to educate law violators and race agitators and if you do not put a stop to it, you might well find yourself out of public school funds...
...This was intended to be a surprise move for when photographers of the daily press discovered the hideout, they were forcibly prevented from taking pictures of it...
...Nobody was jailed at this time for the city police, on second thought, realized that it was not their business to make arrests in the county courthouse and the sheriff realized that the courthouse was a public building...
...The hosts and guests were arrested but were freed by the courts when they insisted that the visit was for business and not social purposes...
...However, a statement was read for him over radio and TV and printed in the newspapers, no one apparently noticing or bothering to correct his verbal error: "I wholeheartedly endorse Governor Patterson's stand that College President Trenholm investigate the incident and expel any of the college students involved...
...It was a brutal and wide-sweeping campaign of official verbal abuse, new laws, investigations, police and court action...
...During the month of the more extensive student demonstrations, the Mayor would "flay" the student "agitators" from time to time but 221 it was the Police Commissioner who became the dominant figure in municipal affairs...
...227 Three visits were made by small groups to the local branch of the University of Alabama...
...226 known what he was doing...
...No charges had been presented to Reddick nor was he given an opportunity to answer the attack upon him that the Governor had made before the Board, and released to the press, prior to notifying Reddick of his dismissal "before sundown," June 14, because of past "Communist associations...
...At one of his press conferences, the Governor while praising the law enforcing agencies and the behavior of white Montgomerians, condemned "Negro agitators" and declined to criticize a group of white toughs who had paraded down the town's main street with midget baseball bats in hand, looking for Negro "agitators" and "demonstrators...
...white, for there were no white students nor any Negro policemen...
...Nervous librarians insisted that everyone who used the library had to have a "card...
...As soon as the Law heard this, there was a rush from the meeting to the squad cars and communication mikes...
...Since this date also marked the beginning of the Martin Luther King trial, the sheriff trotted out his mounted police to protect the courthouse from the expected rush of "agitators...
...Despite the pressures upon them, the collegians kept up their end of the struggle—and so did the Governor...
...The cost in dollars and cents, the loss of respect for law, lawmakers and enforcers, however, will be great...
...The Negro and white diners were segregated for transportation to police headquarters, jailing and even at the trial...
...And behind them for a half block were state and county law enforcement agents with several types of guns and about thirty squad cars, motorcycles, a patrol wagon and a fire truck...
...While eating lunch with several Negro students and officials of the Montgomery Improvement Association in the private dining room of a Negro restaurant, they were photographed, arrested and then convicted in city court of conduct "calculated to breach the peace...
...This has precipitated a storm of protest...
...The first picture of the student demonstrators that appeared in the newspapers also showed, standing before them, the county sheriff making an awkward gesture with his nightstick...
...After the stalemate dissolved and the police cars and motorcycles began to pull away, one of the student leaders shouted: "We'll be back tomorrow too and fill up the jails...
...Not only do the students know this, but it would seem that the enemy himself is beginning to suspect it...
...The students, however, picked up the cue and called a meeting for that morning...
...Again, the applications were received...
...The city commissioners—the Mayor, Commissioner of Police and the Commissioner of Parks—also repealed all specific segregation ordinances for these might be sitting ducks for the sharp-shooting Negro attorneys in federal courts...
...Only through the national radio and TV networks and northern newspapers was there a chance of getting the story of the suppression of civil rights out to the world...
...Here were the contestants, the protagonists in the all-too-real drama, reflecting in posture and gesture their cultural contrasts and their instruments and methods of warfare: enlightenment vs...
...High officials were in command...
...THE STATE POWER was thus able to fracture the student movement...
...So by prearrangement, at exactly 11 o'clock, a spokesman announced that a visit would be paid to the lunchroom of the Capitol at exactly 11 o'clock...
...All of the engines of state and local government—executive, legislative and judicial—were brought into play...
...This time, they were armed with placards proclaiming: "1960 not 1860," "9 down, 2,000 to go," "Who's President of ASC—Patterson or Trenholm?," "Alabama versus The Constitution," "Democracy died March 4, 1960," "We want Justice" and "It's a Shame...
...Strangely, the Negro students, in a related but separate trial and before a judge, without a jury, were found guilty...
...The police were massed to intercept any further advances of the students who were now pressed back on the campus which was state property...
...At the trial, eye-witnesses and residents of the neighborhood were astounded to hear police officials state under oath that the arrests were necessary because a hostile crowd of Negroes had gathered outside the restaurant, presumably to express their resentment of the mixed dining...
...Not even their letters to the editors were printed...
...Accordingly, the state power moved to silence this voice of objective reporting and criticism...
...This was the first time that mounted units had been used for a public disturbance and subsequently the Police Commissioner and the Sheriff had to admit under oath that this was the greatest accumulation of law enforcing strength that had taken place locally during peace time...
...This is the new line in some parts of the South: make the Jim Crow law general and avoid specific mention of race or color...
...Deputies from local and surrounding counties were recruited for reinforcement...
...And so the meetings petered out since there was little point in having a get-together in which nothing could be said or done...
...It developed that the state found itself involved in something much bigger and more difficult that it had bargained for...
...crudity...
...Seeing and hearing the Police Commissioner testify, they could observe his voice and manner and evaluate his statements and opinions...
...And so on goes the game of tag...
...However, city officials were almost as quick as the Governor with verbal abuse...
...The next day, to the surprise of everyone, the students—in augmented numbers—made a second visit to the courthouse...
...There were other strong though scattered reactions along this line...
...Attorney General to intervene...
...So widespread was the terrorization that Martin Luther King, of SCLC,* Walter Reuther of the AFL-CIO and Roy Wilkins of the NAACP, appealed to the President of the United States and the U.S...
...Clearly the students held the initiative, kept their intentions secret and left the enemy confused...
...Reddick is receiving wide support in his fight to have the dismissal order rescinded and an impartial hearing set up.—EDrroRs If a cartoonist wished to exhibit the essentials of the current racial war in Alabama, he would only have to picture the actual scene that took place Tuesday morning, March 8, 1960, at the intersection of Thurman and Jackson streets where the campus of Alabama State College faces the city of Montgomery...
...This was in the hall outside the snack bar...
Vol. 7 • July 1960 • No. 3
