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My civil rights march, 1965

                Out of the corner of my eye a glint of light that I almost dismissed as a corneal dysfunction or some sort of aberration moved upwards. Perhaps it was reflected sunlight bouncing around from the store front windows or the passing motorcycles during the early afternoon sun. It appeared only once in my peripheral vision and seemed to be moving in a steep arch, somewhat towards me. It was hard to see because the street was crowded and people were screaming from the side walk, chaos, confusion. When I dream about this incident I see the coke bottle traveling upward tumbling end over end in exaggerated slow motion. From the time I saw the glint of light a few seconds passed before I heard a loud crack; an almost sickening thud of something hard smacking against flesh just to my right.  A coke bottle hit the black man in the head who was walking next to me. The grip of his hand loosened and slipped out of mine. He went down like a sack of potatoes. A geyser of blood spurted from the hair line on his scalp. Kneeling down beside him I quickly looked in the direction of the sidewalk where I assumed the thrown bottle had come from looking for someone to blame. Clustered together laughing was a group of boys I had gone to military school with. One of them had played football for the college team and had surely thrown the bottle. He always seemed like a nice enough guy at that time and in that other place. Who would have ever guessed he was capable of assault with a coca cola bottle on a stranger? Coming from a family affluent enough to have a son at military school one would think he would have known better. That was just not the case at that point in time in the deep south. This was in 1966 and just a few years before at the military school I attended with this group of boys a huge cheer rang out from the parade ground where the entire battalion was marching when it was announced on November 22, 1963 that President John F. Kennedy had been shot. I turned twenty years old on this very same day. Announcements were quickly and adamantly made over the intercom that all celebrations had to immediately cease otherwise great penalties would be imposed on the student body and everyone would be very sorry. President Kennedy had become the focus for all the racist hatred that stirred the people in the south. The president became a target for the frustrations of the many angry southerners who were experiencing their lives being irrevocably changed in so many different ways. Caught up in a maelstrom of social upheaval that swept them away into uncharted territory; they blamed who they could. The children inherited their hatred at parental feet. As he twig is bent.....

               The start of the march was from the First African Baptist church in downtown Tuscaloosa, Alabama. A girl I was in the art department with at the University of Alabama came to my studio and insisted I go with her to march in a parade in downtown Tuscaloosa.  She said, “Anyone can march in the parade and it will be fun!” There was no mention of it having anything to do with civil rights or flying coke bottles. She was somewhat of a free spirit and thinking it might be interesting to march in a parade I went along. Probably I was invited because I had one of the few cars in the circle of friends I associated with and nobody wanted to walk downtown.  A group of us went; arriving at the church I lined up with the group of participants, most of which were black. I thought nothing of it and prepared to walk holding hands with the girlfriend I had come with. One officious looking black man pulled me away from the girl and guided me between two black men. The man on my right grasped my hand and we started to walk forward. I was curious as to why I had to hold hands between these two black men instead of my girl friend but still I continued. Later I realized he wanted the few whites to be spread out and not so clustered together so that we would look more numerous; this I can only suppose. I had never held hands with a black man (or any other man before, other than my father or perhaps one of my brothers) and the sensation was unsettling. His hands were exceedingly rough and he seemed not to like holding hands with me any better that I did with him.

                It is not as though I didn’t sympathize with the southern blacks and their plight. I did. Growing up in south Alabama I was raised with Negroes who worked in our house most every day of my life as cooks, housekeepers and babysitters.  I knew one in particular who was, I suppose my nanny. Her name was Bera and I truly loved her as much as any member of my family. She was there for me during the first 12 years of my life. She worked for my parents as far back as I can remember. She and I went fishing together and I cannot express how much I cared about her even though she was a hopeless alcoholic. Bera was discharged by my parents after falling out in the middle of the kitchen floor screaming about huge spiders on the ceiling one morning. There were of course, no spiders only a case of the D.T.s. That was the end of Bera’s service for our family. I did go find her one time after I was home for the weekend from college and saw her for a brief visit. She seemed as she always did and I felt that she still loved me.

                I wish I could say that I stayed and finished the civil rights march but I would be telling less than the truth. As retroactively noble as that would be, my parents would have never understood and would have probably disowned me for even being there. Controversy was something they never handled well. There was also the possibility that the recipient of the flying coke bottle was suppose to be me. Had the military school boy seen me in t he parade and thrown the bottle at me instead of the black man at my elbow? He would have certainly hated me for being in that parade. Returning immediately to my car I noticed splattered blood spots on my shirt. I do not know what happened to the man that was hit by the coke bottle and there is now no way to find out. I do not know if Martin Luther King was there for the march but I heard later that Bobby Shelton, the grand imperial wizard of the Klu Klux Klan was.  In the perspective of many, many years it is obvious he was neither grand, imperial nor was he a wizard. He was just an ignorant redneck, filled with hate and bigotry. I was a coward who left when the going got tough and the coke bottles started to fly. The boy from military school who threw the bottle probably never felt any recriminations for his deed. I did!

                Years later I was teaching in Columbia, Mississippi and my future wife was teaching in New Orleans; I went down for the weekend. One night while I was there we went for a night of celebration in the French Quarter. It was the occasion of the Sugar Bowl (Georgia Bulldogs vs. Arkansas Razorbacks, I believe) around New Years day and just for fun we went down to watch the activities. As we walked in a throng of celebrating people crowded onto Bourbon Street I saw a glint in the night sky and realized someone had thrown an empty beer bottle as high into the air as they could. It too came down (as gravity would have it) and cracked a man in the top of the head. He went down like a sack of potatoes as his female companion screamed hysterically.  When I, like everyone else pushed over to see what had happened his head was a geyser of blood, evacuating the wound at an alarming rate. His female companion cradled him in her arms sobbing and whimpering.

            Now as a man certainly in the last stages of what has unexpectedly become a long life; I am still expecting the see a third glint of light rising up towards heaven, sparkling in the sun. It will be coming from the hand of a thoughtless person and I fully expect it to be headed for me. It will be the third thing finally closing a paragraph of an inexplicable group of things that happened at different points and different places in my life. I cannot fully explain how or why.

*This was not the 1964 march the First African Baptist church in downtown Tuscaloosa that resulted in many arrests and much damage in Tuscaloosa but two years later.