My parents were deeply involved in the civil rights movement in the American South. My father was a minister, born in Kentucky, who in his first jobs after seminary in the late 1950s and early 1960s, chose to work at churches in communities that were embroiled in the civil rights struggle: Daytona Beach, Fla., and Little Rock, Ark.
My mother grew up in Edwards, Mississippi, a small town halfway between Jackson and Vicksburg, on the campus of Southern Christian Institute, a historically black educational institution founded in 1882 on a 1,275-acre former slave plantation. Her father, my grandfather, was dean and later president, and my grandmother was librarian among other things, from the 1920s into the 1950s. My mother grew up in the mansion, where her family and some other faculty members, white and black, lived.
My parents on the day before their wedding in Edwards, Mississippi, in June of 1952
That was in a day when interracial socializing in the Mississippi Delta outside the boundaries of Southern Christian Institute could be a quick ticket to getting lynched. Therein lies a family story that I’ll tell later. For now, I’ll tell the story of my parents’ run-in with some neighbors who were apparently terrified by interracial socializing in Daytona Beach, Florida, in 1963.
That town was in turmoil over desegregation, as was much of the South, when my parents arrived in 1958, when I was a year and half. One of their many efforts to promote reconciliation was something my father called Project Friendship, which brought together members of his all-white church with members of black churches in town. Two such get-togethers had been held at our house on Live Oak Avenue when a group of neighbors got wind of it, apparently consulted a lawyer, and drafted a petition, addressed to my father but hand-delivered to the chairman of the board of his church, expressing their alarm. The 16 people who signed it, some of whom lived blocks away, told my father they had “come to realize that you have decided to entertain racially mixed groups in your home,” and they “requested” his “cooperation” in making that stop.
It is a remarkable document. (See it in full below.) I am struck especially by how polite and respectful it seems. The signers, one of whom was the father of one of my neighborhood pals, insisted that they “do not dispute the privilege of every American to choose the friends he pleases” and to “practice his religion in accordance with his own conscience.” They weren’t using the N-word or uttering any sort of threat. But what they proceeded to demand, in the form of a request, is breathtaking.
Other Posts in My On-Going Exploration of Family Archives:
- Three Southern Legislators’ Reasons for Rejecting the Civil Rights Act of 1964
- How the Ku Klux Klan Welcomed My Father to Arkansas in 1964
The petition informed my parents that having “social gatherings of racially mixed groups in homes in our Highlands area exceeds the bounds of your privilege, and infringes upon our liberties to pursue our lives in accordance with our traditions.” The petition added that “liberty without respect for the rights of others will result in anarchy.” It is hard to fathom how they could repeatedly invoke “liberties” and the “rights of others” in a petition asserting, in all sincerity, that my parents had no right to invite small groups of black Christians to social gatherings inside our own home. But that was their mindset. Highlands, by the way, wasn’t a gated community for members only or anything like that. It was an ordinary middle class neighborhood on one of the main routes into Daytona Beach. There is no date on the petition but in his reply, dated Dec. 16, 1963, my father mentions having received it “a month ago.” President Kennedy was assassinated on Nov. 22, 1963, so the petition must have been sent days before that tragedy.
My father’s three-page response was masterful. (Here it is.) He thanked the signers for the “courteous way” in which they voiced their complaint but wondered why they hadn’t bothered to send him a copy. If they thought the church board would be horrified to learn what their minister was up to, he noted that he had kept the congregation fully informed about Project Friendship in the church newsletter. He ended by asking the signers to call my mother and tell her whether they would accept a “cordial invitation” to come over to our house at 8 p.m. on Dec. 19 for refreshments and “friendly conversation” about how to make America a better place.
I suspect he so effectively put them to shame that, my mother says, only a few of the 16 accepted. A number of the others, she says, were embarrassed by the whole episode. My mother says the Ku Klux Klan bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, that September, which killed four girls and injured 22 others, was what compelled my father to start Project Friendship. He first floated the idea in his sermon the next Sunday. (Here it is.) The Kennedy assassination followed two months later. The United States, in short, was in quite an upheaval in the fall of 1963. “If I am correct in assuming the best about you,” my father said in his response to the petitioners, he was sure they, too, wanted to improve the “human relations situation which prevails in our land” in these “days so filled with bitterness and hatred.” If they found Project Friendship so objectionable, he looked forward to hearing their “positive alternatives.”
My parents continued to engage in mixed-raced socializing in Daytona Beach, and by the next year at the next stop in my father’s career as a minister, in Little Rock, where restaurants and many public facilities had just been desegregated. I’ll have some things to say about that later.
Meanwhile, here is the petition my parents received in Daytona Beach in November of 1963:
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