Meeting a Giant

Still coming off a stubborn cold this week, so have been spending a lot of time inside, reminiscing.

A few years ago when I was touring film festivals with “Apsara”, I took Maryanne, my girlfriend at the time, with me to Sidewalk Film Festival in Birmingham, Alabama for a weekend screening. There some local friends of hers joined us.

Being a bit of a Civil Rights buff, I was pretty impressed with visiting a city known for being a hotspot of protests and clashes during the Movement in the 60’s. Birmingham is a bit of a quiet city now. On final approach to the airport, you can spot the footprints of long abandoned factories from when the South served as a source of cheap labor, before production went overseas. The Downtown area is eerily quiet, considering the violent images that came out of its past: police unleashing attack dogs and firemen hosing down its black citizens.

On our last day I dragged MaryAnne and her friends to a place I really wanted to visit: The Civil Rights Institute. The Institute tells the story and houses archives of the Movement. It’s located adjacent to the 16^th Street Baptist Church that was bombed in 1963, killing four little girls.

Inside the place was as quiet as a library on a sunny day. There were maybe two other people outside our group of four. I could kind of tell MaryAnne and her friends were half humoring me by coming along. I didn’t get the sense it was at the top of their list for spending a Sunday afternoon, (they had never been there) but they all knew it was a special weekend for me, so they took my lead.

After watching a fifteen minute video projection about the Movement in a small theater, the screen rose and revealed a large room full of small dioramas, all depicting various aspects of the Movement. There was a display of a drug store counter for the sit-ins, a display of separate water fountains for blacks and whites, etc.

We split up and meandered around the room in silence, checking out the various exhibits.

I arrived at a classroom display, featuring several children’s wooden school chairs. On a plaque before it I began to read about Birmingham’s first school integration. With the description was this photo:

It was an image of a father bringing his two boys to a white school for the first time in 1963, with his lawyers and Movement leader Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth in the lead. They had a federal court order to allow it, much to the dismay of the State governor and his troopers.

As I studying the photo, this man walked up to me:

He was dressed in a gray suit and had an unassuming air about him. He pleasantly asked if I would like an oral history of the school integration. I said sure.

As he spoke about the struggle to integrate schools in the early sixties, Maryanne and her friends joined us and listened in. The man went on, occasionally referencing the photo and mentioning “his boys”. After saying this several times, it finally sunk in.

The man in the light suit and striped tie behind the two boys in the photo was the man speaking to me.

His name was James Armstrong and he was the first man in Alabama to win the right to bring his two boys, Dwight and Floyd, to a white school and integrate the school system.

My jaw dropped.

When I finally realized who he was and showed my respect, Mr. Armstrong , who volunteers his time as a living part of history on Sundays, went into more detail about that time.

He and his family had lived less than a mile from the white school for years, yet had to bus their boys off to a black school ten miles away. Mr. Armstrong, a WWII veteran, had participated in some of the Movement’s protests and had decided in 1957 to band together with eight other black families to sue for the right to send their kids to the local school. It took about five years for the courts to rule in their favor.

Mr. Armstrong said that during that time all the families involved in the suit were intimidated and threatened regularly by the white population. Over those years, every single party dropped out of the lawsuit, out of fear for their families’ lives.

Mr. Armstrong and his family were the only ones to stay the distance.

When they finally won the right to attend the white school they were met that morning by 250 white hecklers and 35 state troopers who would not allow entrance. Mr. Armstrong and his boys had to return the next morning with a second court order, and they were allowed in.

Five days later, someone set off that bomb which killed the four young girls.

Mr. Armstrong told me that the Movement had taught him Gandhian principles of non-violent resistance, which he strictly passed on to his boys. If they were hit, turn the other cheek. If someone knocked books out of their hands, pick them up and move on.

That first year in school the boys were constantly pushed, teased, and spit on by the white kids who tried to provoke a reaction. Mr. Armstrong said his boys were disciplined and never fought back.

Their second year was very different. The younger boy began to receive valentines from the white girls and the older one was made captain of the baseball team. After that, things were generally fine.

One of his boys went on to be a high-ranking naval officer and the other a successful Harvard-educated lawyer.

But Mr. Armstrong paused, and said something that struck me as sad. He said the sixties were different. Then he could embrace and believe in the principles of non-violence. He said now, however, if his boys were to go through the same thing in modern times, he’s not so sure he could advocate the same principles to survive. He looked off into the distance as he told me this.

Regardless of the dubious state of present values, we thanked him profusely for his time and lessons.

I think we all felt privileged to have been granted the audience of James Armstrong, who in my mind is a giant among men, and will stay with me forever.