The Education of a Black Radical

A Southern Civil Rights Activist's Journey, 1959-1964

D'Army Bailey

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2009
• eBook ISBN: 9780807146118
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

"A strong, uncompromising voice that dreams of a better America, Judge Bailey has experienced the ugliness of both racism and fear. Yet he has not stepped back. What a wonderful life to share." -- Nikki Giovanni, from her Foreword
When four black college students refused to leave the whites-only lunch counter of a Greensboro, North Carolina, Woolworth's on February 1, 1960, they set off a wave of similar protests among black college students across the South. Memphis native D'Army Bailey, the freshman class president at Southern University -- the largest predominantly black college in the nation -- soon joined with his classmates in their own battle against segregation in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. In The Education of a Black Radical, Bailey details his experiences on the front lines of the black student movement of the early 1960s, providing a rare firsthand account of the early days of America's civil rights struggle and a shining example of one man's struggle to uphold the courageous principles of liberty, justice, and equality.
A natural leader, Bailey delivered fiery speeches at civil rights rallies, railed against school officials' capitulation to segregation, joined a sit-in at the Greyhound bus station, and picketed against discriminatory hiring practices at numerous Baton Rouge businesses. On December 15, 1961, he marched at the head of two thousand Southern University students seven miles from campus to downtown Baton Rouge to support fellow students jailed for picketing. Baton Rouge police dispersed the peaceful crowd with dogs and tear gas and arrested many participants. After Bailey led a class boycott to protest the administration's efforts to quell the lingering unrest on campus, Southern University summarily expelled him.
After his ejection, Bailey continued his academic journey north to Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, where liberal white students had established a scholarship for civil rights activists. Bailey sustained and expanded his activism in the North, and he provides invaluable eyewitness accounts of many major events from the civil rights era, including the protests in Washington D.C.'s financial district during the summer of 1963 and the gripping violence and arrests in Baltimore later that year. He sheds new light on the 1963 March on Washington by exploring the political forces that seized the march and changed its direction.
Labeled "subversive" and a "black nationalist militant" by the FBI, Bailey crossed paths with many visionary activists. In riveting detail, Bailey recalls several days he spent hosting Malcolm X as a guest speaker at Clark, hanging out with Abbie Hoffman in the early days of the Worsester Student Movement, and personal interactions with other civil rights icons, including the Reverend Will D. Campbell, Anne Braden, James Meredith, Tom Hayden, and future congressmen Barney Frank, John Lewis, and Allard Lowenstein.
D'Army Bailey gives voice to a generation of student foot soldiers in the civil rights movement. Moving, powerful, and intensely personal, The Education of a Black Radical offers an inspirational tale of hope and a courageous stand for social change. Moreover, it introduces an invigorating role model for a new generation of activists taking up the racial challenges of the twenty-first century.

1
Growing Up in Memphis

Because of the friendly feeling that I have for Negroes, especially many Negro friends who I hold in esteem and affectionate regard, it is with reluctance that I call attention to weaknesses common in the race. But since these multitudes of Negroes have joined together with others in pressure groups to force on us national programs that would mean calamity to our posterity, there seems to be no honorable choice but to inform the public of what appears to be in store for us if we yield to these pressures. If we can continue to develop a program of friendly cooperation between the races, with separateness in social life, we can go forward in promoting the talents of the white man and the Negro and can contribute to the welfare and happiness of both. Otherwise, tragedy lies ahead for the American people.

— A DECLARATION BY THE SOCIETY FOR THE PRESERVATION OF STATE GOVERNMENT AND RACIAL INTEGRITY, LOUISIANA, 1955

IN LATE SUMMER OF 1959, I was preparing to leave the small world where everything I was—and to some degree much of what I am still—had come into focus. At such times, when we approach the boundaries between the confines of childhood and the larger world of adults, a fog of excitement about what is to come reduces our ability to reflect on what we are leaving behind. It seems to me now that the courage and endurance that was to characterize my experience in the next five years was a potent legacy of the small world of South Memphis where I grew up in the late 1940s and 1950s. In those days, black Memphis was a separate and isolated society. Even though the heavy hand of white oppression was everywhere, I didn’t connect the dots and recognize that mine was a small intertwined world in the grip of the larger white-dominated society. In the midst of this slow-burning violence, my family managed to create an insular yet supportive little world off the corner of Mississippi and Walker in South Memphis. I am told that I was born in 1941 in a little shotgun house—about as plain and functional a home as it is possible to imagine—off Mississippi Boulevard, on Wicks Street. It was a quiet and sheltered place to be born, full of hope and gentle wisdom.

My earliest memory of that world is of a rented duplex on Ford Place, significant in my mind later as our next-door neighbor was a girlfriend of the man who was to become the legendary B. B King. He would saunter down the street, guitar under arm, to court one of two sisters. Ford Place was a block of wood-frame shotgun and duplex houses. It was sandwiched between Mississippi Boulevard one block west—the major business and residential thoroughfare in black Memphis—and Porter Street, a block east. Porter Street was the western boundary of the city’s largest public housing project, Lemoyne Gardens. Not far away was the kindergarten and grade school where my long encounter with education would begin.

A few years later, we moved to a nicer duplex three houses up, which my grandfather, D. A. Bailey, built for us. D. A. held a prominent place in our small, sequestered community. As a builder and contractor, he was a man strong and intelligent enough to negotiate the thicket of oppression to help create for us this haven of strength. I am named after D. A., whom my brother and I called “Papa.” Actually, his name was spelled “Darmy” and pronounced “Dee Army.” He went by the initials “D. A.” in an apparent effort to simplify a name given to him, as family lore tells it, by a Gypsy midwife in Mississippi. Like Papa, I struggled with the name, so between the eleventh and twelfth grades I added the apostrophe and made the A uppercase in the hope that friends would pronounce it correctly rather than call me “Darmie.”

The family story goes that Papa was born to Ferry and Mary Jane Bailey in Michigan City, Mississippi, a country area fifty-seven miles away along the Tennessee-Mississippi border. After his father died in 1922, Papa, with his older brother, Uncle Albert, moved to Memphis—often called the largest city in Mississippi—as young men seeking a larger opportunity. Papa’s first wife, Georgia Sease Bailey, had died when my father was a one-year-old so that Papa’s second wife, Mary, whom we called “Sister,” was the only mother he knew and, of course, my grandmother. I remember Papa as an always well-groomed, upright, dark-skinned man with a pleasant face and serious demeanor.

It was Papa who insisted that Walter and I go to the private kindergarten and elementary school our father had attended. He paid the five dollars a week each for us to attend kindergarten at the Rosebud School. Two stately black women, Ms. Jordan and Ms. Williams, ran the school and taught the children. The principal, MS. Sally Florence Jordan, was in her late fifties, with a slightly wrinkled neck and arms and beautician-curled and demurely coiffed hair. Her assistant, MS. Bernice Williams, was a strikingly slender younger woman who always wore shoulder-length black hair, had amazing stylized eyebrows, high cheeks, and a classy but businesslike smile. Remarkable for her tailored dresses, she spooled around town in a late-model fish-tailed Cadillac.

As one might expect, a school run by these polished characters was orderly and focused. Somehow Ms. Jordan and Ms. Williams transformed their charges through an admirable balance of learning and playtime. We started each day by singing James Weldon Johnson’s “Negro National Anthem.” To this day I can still hear our small chorus sing, and I imagine the singing of that song as a formative event in the lives of every child who encountered these two stern and serious educators. Every morning our little voices would carry words destined to give us hope in the midst of soul-breaking frustration. I also remember well how grand our graduations were: we were proud little troopers sporting our short-sleeved white shirts, with tie, short pants, and Oxford shoes, a rosebud pinned to our shirt. When my elder brother, Walter, had gone through his fifth and final year at Rosebud, we both transferred into the Memphis public schools.

Within this little world, Papa lived around the corner from us, on Stephens Place, a short block with no sidewalks that connected our street to the beginning block of the housing project. He and Sister had one-half of a spacious duplex, the other side of which was occupied by Sister’s sister, Aunt Azilee, and her husband, Julius. I remember love-filled days visiting at their kitchen table, feeling safe, drinking buttermilk out of heavy, tall-stemmed, rounded glasses as I waited for Sister to put a plate on the table. Our cousin Mae Ella Gholson and her kids lived on the next block over, across from the projects. Here also on Ford Place, next to us in our new duplex, lived Sister’s first cousin Miss Onnie, and her husband, Mr. Henry.

On the other side of our house was D. A.’s little sundry store, Bailey’s Stand, and next to that was another cousin of Sister’s, Miss Verlie, and her husband, Johnnie Edwards. Mr. Johnnie, as we called him, operated an auto and truck mechanic garage just down the street. Two or three men worked with him doing all sorts of repairs to cars, dump trucks, and other heavy vehicles.

This small world sat within a three-block radius of the stately grounds of LeMoyne College, a four-year Negro college focused heavily on training teachers. (The school later merged to become LeMoyne-Owen College.) It was a handsome cluster of buildings in a parklike setting that spoke of opportunity and pride. At the opposite intersecting end of Ford was Williams Street, on which sat the black-owned and -staffed Terrell memorial Hospital. I remember it as a neat, white frame structure on a hill, with a long front porch. When I walked to LaRose Elementary, I passed Terrell memorial every day, where the nurses in their starched uniforms and crisp nursing caps moving purposefully about the porch and grounds of the hospital gave me to understand that there were many avenues of opportunity open to blacks.

In the same block of Williams, in a second-floor apartment, lived the pop and rhythm-and-blues pioneer Johnny Ace with his wife and children. He was a smooth, romantic crooner in the tradition of Nat King Cole and the later work of Sam Cooke. My father loved collecting records, and as a young teenager at night I would sit on the floor next to one of the speakers of the stereo console listening to Ace and other great musicians. In his late teens, Ace, one of three brothers, supported himself cutting yards in the neighborhood. An old-timer from Ford Place, Cleo Starks, remembered Ace—earlier known as Johnny Alexander—as argumentative and as someone who “would take a chance on anything.” Ace’s career grew from the Beale Streeters, an influential group that also nurtured B. B. King and Bobby Blue Bland. His life ended tragically at age twenty-five on Christmas Eve 1954, when the burgeoning star shot himself in the head playing Russian roulette backstage in Houston, Texas. Speaking of Ace’s death, the longtime Ford Place resident said: “It’s a wonder he didn’t get killed around here.”

Ace’s death drew me to the Lewis Funeral Home, and I still remember standing at his casket next to a floral arrangement in the form of a clock, the flowers a reference to one of his biggest hits, “The Clock.” Lovers of Johnny Ace transitioned from shock to adoration the next year with the posthumous release of what would be his biggest hit, “Pledging My Love,” which rose to the pop top-twenty and spent ten weeks at the top of rhythm-and-blues charts. The jazz great Louis Armstrong had taken a liking to Ace, and the month after his death Armstrong had recorded Ace’s “Pledging My Love” as a tribute.

Needless to say, for adolescents our small world had its sexual challenges as well. I remember that, in the ninth and tenth grades, homosexuality—as we later came to call it—was a fact of life in and outside the school. In our little world, we were much easier with gay people than one might expect given the contemporary hysteria over all things gay. There were two or three well-known homosexuals in the school who were popular and very open about their sexual orientation. But there was a predatory side to this even then. There was quiet rumor that one or two of the more handsome and popular high school boys had sex with gays for money. We mostly felt that same-sex relations didn’t compromise the manhood of the straight boy so long as it was just a lark. It is a simple reality that gay men have always found a more congenial environment in the South generally, and in the black community particularly. We always knew that gays were among us, and they were relatively welcome, eccentric characters. This all changed rather dramatically, of course, with the advent of AIDS.

Across the street from blues icon W. C. Handy’s shotgun Memphis home, and three blocks in the opposite direction from us, lived my maternal grandmother, “Big Mama.” Nearby were my Uncle Albert and his family. I remember the momentous event when they became the first family in the neighborhood to have a black-and-white television. As I think now about how we all crowded into their living room to cheer on the black championship boxers like Ezzard Charles, Joe Louis, and Jersey Joe Walcott, I realize that the television was a transformative force in our lives. It gave us electronic community: we black families were as one, cheering around thousands of televisions and radios across America. Somehow, without our understanding how it happened or why, our unbending resolve to fight for equality was nurtured in part in such communal gatherings around the television.

Papa and Sister, my grandparents, eventually moved the half block to Ford Place into an elevated white shotgun house he owned, with brick columns on the front porch that matched those on our duplex. As it happened so often in those halcyon days, houses often served double duty when family needed extra space. Accordingly, built onto the back of Papa’s house was Ersula Yarbrough’s beauty shop, which we accessed by a side entrance. Mrs. Yarbrough herself lived across the street on Ford, and her husband, Denver, was Sister’s first cousin. What Mrs. Yarbrough did for women in our small world, Mr. Yarbrough accomplished for the men: he operated Yarbrough’s Barber Shop, which was the main area barber shop, close by at the corner of Mississippi and Walker. I remember Mrs. Yarbrough as friendly, talented, and popular with her customers. I can still hear the steady conversation in her shop just above the quiet hiss of the small gas fires in the cast-iron holders as the pressing and curling irons were heated to accomplish the magic of beautician-coiffed hair.

I have always been amazed that, given his limited education, Papa was able to build a small contracting company, have a handful of men working for him, and to own his own home, as well as the duplex we grew up in. Though he could not read or write, he could build a house according to blueprints, from the deeply rooted concrete foundations through the double-tiered floors, plaster walls, and double-layered roofs. Pacing one foot in front of the other, he would measure the length of a building, and he could tell its height by looking up at it. As teenagers, Walter and I often worked for him, doing the same hard work and being paid the same dollar an hour as his other men. To calculate the payments, Papa made four vertical marks with a fifth mark crossed through. Uncle Albert did the plaster work, including unusual patterns on walls using his trowel and a burlap bag to twist the designs. Papa was also the main repair contractor for Van Court Realty, then one of the largest rental property companies in the city.

My first real encounter with a white person came when Papa did work as the property caretaker and maintenance man for two elderly white women, Mrs. Mattie Ford and her sister, who lived in a large colonial white house on a hill on the corner of Bellevue and McLemore in South Memphis. Occasionally, when I would go over and help Papa, Miss Mattie would drive me home. Although it seems odd now, she would be in the front seat, and I in the back. We chatted as she drove along—a sort of reverse Driving Miss Daisy.

Always on the lookout for a way to make an extra dollar or two, Papa convinced the two sisters to let him grow cotton, peanuts, and sweet potatoes on the half block of land behind their house. I will never forget those occasions when Papa would take the cotton he grew on the sisters’ land to the cotton gin in Mississippi. Sitting in the cab of the truck in the heat of summer, we drove through the fields of the Delta, watching the teams of pickers with their long bags dragging behind them as they worked the rows. Papa would negotiate the ruts of the dirt road on the way to the huge, barnlike, tin-roofed building containing the cotton gin. As we drove up to the loading dock to get our cotton sacks weighed, I could see into the dark interior where heavy men in overalls tended giant machines with great cog wheels and whirling belts. Mostly I remember the ear-splitting noise the machines made as they chopped up the mounds of raw cotton at one end and spewed out seedless lint from one vent and seeds from another.

In another of his entrepreneurial efforts, Papa and Sister owned and operated a small variety store called “Bailey’s Stand” near the center of the block, which drew walk-in business from a three- or four-block radius. The Stand was a flat-roofed wooden structure with a front door and one large picture window painted with the store’s name.

The store was about 30 by 30 feet, with a sink but no bathroom since all the operators lived nearby. In front of the store there was a sloped concrete patio on which sat benches and chairs handmade by Papa and his crew. Because coal oil was a popular heating and cooking source at the time, just next to the entrance of the store was the large, red, steel coal-oil drum, about four feet tall and almost that wide. On top of the drum was an iron hand pump that we used to fill up customers’ one- or five-gallon coal-oil containers.

This little store was the epicenter of my small world. On the left, inside the screen door emblazoned with the words “Colonial Bread,” was the custom-built L-shaped glass-and-wooden display case and sales counter that showcased the candies and children’s goodies that excited us with anticipation as we walked into the store. The wooden cash drawer pulled out to reveal four cupped slots for holding change. On top of the front counter were two one-foot-high plastic see-through Jackson cookie containers with red metal tops that held the freshest and best oatmeal and lemon cookies in memory.

To the right of the entryway were floor-to-ceiling wooden shelves on which canned vegetables, lard, flour, bread, meal, and other goods were shelved. At the center of the back of the store was a waist-high wood-burning stove that was constantly going in the winter as neighbors sat and stood around to talk and share perspectives on sports or the issues of the day. One might hear an adamant voice: “You know, them Brooklyn Dodgers gonna beat the hell out of the Cardinals—that black boy they got, Jackie Robinson, is tough!” Or the center of attention might be a game of checkers, one player emphatically slamming the checker as he moved it for a double or triple jump.

In the midst of all this mostly male fellowship, the one thing I dreaded was the arrival of Mr. Crozier, a one-armed man with a strong garlic smell that would funk up the whole store. He claimed the garlic was for his blood pressure. An accident at the neighborhood icehouse had cost him an arm, so from the elbow down he had what to my youthful eyes appeared a menacing metal clamping arm. Notwithstanding this impediment, Mr. Crozier had a mule he used in plowing and other handiwork that he regularly beat with a plank in front of his house on Ford. Directly across the street from the Stand, the elderly Mr. Johnson sat under a tree in his front yard keeping a particular eye on Walter and me. When he saw Mama returning home, he’d call out, “Lil Bit, I’m going in now.”

My sense of community was forged at Bailey’s Stand, where, during summers, a half dozen or so neighbors would frequently be found sitting on the armchairs and benches on the store’s sloping front patio. A radio outside broadcast the baseball games as we listened to Harry Carey’s graphic game commentary. Coal oil–soaked rags burned slowly in five-gallon buckets to generate the smoke needed to ward off mosquitoes, which were a significant plague so close to the Mississippi bottomlands. To provision Bailey’s Stand, Papa would drive weekly to the South Memphis docks of the Malone and Hyde grocery warehouse to load up on canned goods and other foods, which we stacked into the jump seat of his black Model-T Ford. White salesmen also came to the store in large trucks to deliver soft drinks, milk, fresh bread, Jackson cookies, and fresh ice cream, which was kept frozen in coolers packed with dry ice. As they made their deliveries during the early and late 1950s, the white salesman rode shotgun in the truck. He took the orders and collected the money in a leather satchel that hung off his hip. Inevitably, the driver would be a black man who loaded the goods off and into the store.

How sharply I remember these encounters. Since these whites were making part of their living off my grandparents, they usually treated them with a modicum of respect. But even then their attitudes reflected the prevailing assumptions of white racial superiority. So there was no “Mr.” Bailey, though the salesmen expected courtesy titles in response.

I remember my father early on working with Papa in home repair and construction, as we all did. He was a hard and steady worker. After working a year or so each at three local plants, Daddy landed a job loading mail on and off trains for the Illinois Central Railroad. Then he became a Pullman porter, staying with the company a total of thirty-two years. His supervisor would call the house and say to our mother or one of us, “Shotgun in? Let me speak to Him.” “Shotgun, come to work!” he would say to my father. Daddy worked the line from Chicago, through Memphis to New Orleans. He would call Mama to meet him at the Memphis station with clean clothes as he was loading passengers.

My father enjoyed being out in the neighborhood playing checkers or shooting pool with his friends. He considered himself a master checker player, and he and Mama would vacation in various states where he could play in checker tournaments; sometimes women would also play. It was not a very well-kept secret that over the years he had quietly had his girlfriends. Because Daddy worked for the railroad, he was able to travel and sometimes even take us with him. Mama remembered her first trip with Daddy to Chicago to attend a professional baseball game: “I was so dressed up, with my hat and gloves on. I was so embarrassed I eased the gloves off and slipped them in my purse. I never did dress up to go to another ball game.”

Walter and I went on a number of trips to professional baseball games on the Illinois Central. We were in the crowd in St. Louis when Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella, and Don Newcombe first broke the color barrier in professional baseball. Occasionally, we even made pilgrimages to Chicago or Detroit. I never knew until years later how special these train trips were as most blacks in Memphis seldom left town. To see these big, teeming northern cities with all their enormous buildings and milling crowds of every nationality and color was an initiation of sorts. It opened up my young mind to a peculiar kind of mobility that would later be useful as I moved from Scotlandville, Louisiana, to Worcester, Massachusetts, then to Washington, to New Haven, and even to the other side of the continent to San Francisco. Somehow these trips liberated me geographically, taught me how to navigate the nation, and made me a larger man than just another Memphis Negro growing up in the 1950s whose horizons stopped at the city’s riverbank.

Where my father opened the world to me, my mother seems, in retrospect, to have given me the kind of structured maturity that has been so necessary to my ability to grow even in adversity. Mama; her mother, Lureana; her two sisters, Bessie and Georgia; and her brother James first came to Memphis when she was three years old. They had been living in Knowlton, Arkansas, about one hundred miles south of Memphis in the Ark...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• dedication
• Contents
• Foreword, by Nikki Giovanni
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Growing Up in Memphis
• 2. On to Scotlandville
• 3. Protest Comes to Scotlandville
• 4. Klieg Lights and Microphones
• 5. How to Kill a Protest
• 6. Encounters of the NSA Kind
• 7. NSA Summer Camp Transformations
• 8. Singing in the Tear Gas
• 9. Arrested Development
• 10. An Offensive Christmas
• 11. Eye to Eye with the Enemy
• 12. Expulsion, Dismissal
• 13. Turning the Page
• 14. A Siege Mentality
• 15. The Journey Home
• 16. Radical is as Radical Does
• 17. The L-Word
• 18. Provocateur
• 19. The Original X Man
• 20. Brother Rat
• 21. DARE
• 22. Encounters of the First Kind
• 23. DARE in Action
• 24. The March on Washington
• 25. A Bona Fide Negro
• INDEX