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Alabama Drama in Red, White and Black

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Christmas Eve, December 24, 1956, Fred Shuttlesworth is asleep upstairs in his parsonage next to the church. The Ku Klux Klan gifted him with sixteen sticks of dynamite in a white bucket. It blasted the parsonage into collapse. But Shuttlesworth emerged from the basement unhurt. Years later, he would describe the event as him being "blown into history."[8]

Christmas Day dawned and Shuttlesworth, unperturbed, would lead one hundred demonstrators to the Birmingham Bus Terminal to test the rigor of the enforcement of the Browder v. Gayle de segregation ruling. There, they fully occupied the white sections of buses. Twenty-two arrests ensued, including his.

And time wore violently on for Reverend Shuttlesworth. Multiple arrests, multiple beatings, multiple billy clubs, baseball bats, bicycle chains, firehoses, snarling dogs, tear gas at the Pettus Bridge at Selma, his eulogy at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church for the "four little girls." Martin Luther King called him "the most courageous civil rights fighter in the South."[9]

The future held worse. The "heat of the night" violence that erupted in 1961, beginning with the torching of the Freedom Rider's bus in Anniston, Alabama. The welcoming mobs in Birmingham, the bus-station beatings in Montgomery, the iron pipes. Alabama was boiling. Sit-ins and bus burnings all over the state. Bull Connor and his snarling dogs in Birmingham. Beatings. Killings. Violence. Hatred. The Mother's Day bus firebombed in Anniston. Black tears and white fears and the Alabama streets ran crimson. And church burnings, four more little girls will die in the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, George Wallace "stands in the schoolhouse door," and more bombing in Birmingham. "Bloody Tuesday" in Tuscaloosa. "Bloody Sunday" in Selma. Martin Luther King jailed. Martin Luther King awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Martin Luther King murdered.

Fred Shuttlesworth died in Birmingham at eighty-nine. Unfailing courage defined him.

BLACK AND WHITE

As West Point cadets, The New York Times and The New York Herald Tribune came to our rooms every morning. They didn't help us learn much about Alabama. Neither did study of the American Civil War, nor "Stonewall" Jackson's bold campaign in the Shenandoah Valley, nor Grant's campaign at Vicksburg on July 4, 1862, that finished the Confederate Army on the Mississippi River. Nor would deconstructing line-by-line Stephen Vincent Bene't's poem "John Brown's Body."

We did know that public transportation, particularly buses and trains, more specifically seats thereon, were sensitive items down South. As were drinking fountains, restrooms, and waiting areas. I had discovered that in a bus station in Fort Bragg, North Carolina. The evening bus to Rocky Mount was ready to go. And so was I, urgently. I remember the expression on the black man's face next to me as I urgently used the urinal in the colored-only men's room.

* * *

Now consider another Fred from Alabama, my West Point classmate. He was born in Anniston, about two hundred miles north of Fort Rucker. Fred left Alabama as a child and grew up in Battle Creek, Michigan.

Fred and I were similar. Like me, Fred was tall and slim. We were in the same cadet company. We were in the same gym-class section that was organized by weight. To further assure fairness for boxing and wrestling class, we were further ranked by height. So there we stood, always beside each other, evenly matched. Such similarity granted us the equal right to pound each other with left hooks and right crosses. Freed us to grab and pull, push and grope each other, our sweaty faces contorted and often wedged in unseemly places. This was called wrestling. These programs of learning the manly arts lasted one year. They were all about making contact.

In the end, we came out where we started. Even. A fair match, both of us limited only by our innate deficiencies. Similar in physical ways, except one-I was not black. My classmate, distinguished by nature and ever distinguishable, was the only Afro-American in the entire class of over six hundred cadets. Only one young black man! An infinitely small, sad representation, 0.16% of our class of 610. The institution seemed mindless of the infinitude of the insult. That too was the kind of America we would all soon swear to serve.

And mark this too-the Jim Crow Ordinance 798-F then prevailing in Birmingham, Alabama, entitled "Negroes and White Persons Not To Play Together."

It deemed unlawful for a "Negro" and a white person to engage in cards, dice, dominoes, checkers, baseball, basketball, or any similar games in any public space or house or tavern or restaurant or ball field or stadium. Blacks and whites must be "distinctly separated [...] by well-defined physical barriers." [10] If my boyhood hero from Fairfield, Alabama--Willie Howard Mays, now starring in centerfield for the San Francisco Giants--came to Birmingham, he could not play with or against a team that included me. Nor could I play checkers with Mr. Mays in the dugout or anywhere else in Birmingham. Nor could I play with my classmate Fred in a public library.

This was the America that we as new officers would soon swear to support and defend.

* * *

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James (Cem)Ryan is a writer living in Istanbul, Turkey. A graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point, he has a MFA from Columbia University.

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