re: #45 Stanley Sea

Waiting patiently for your story.

it’s not a ‘story’ - it was a chapter of my life a long time ago. And I don’t usually talk about it in public like this.

I was eighteen or nineteen and hitch-hiking to the Appalachians from Chicago. I read about some actions to integrate a municipal swimming pool, etc., etc. being undertaken in another state by some ‘Negros’. I was an idealistic guy from a traditionally left-wing liberal family. This was several years before the Freedom Rider movement, and I figured I could just show up. I did, and discovered I was the only white guy on the scene. Like I say, doing this kind of thing hadn’t exactly become fashionable yet with kids of my generation - which is probably what saved my life both in jail and when I was stopped on a deserted street in the black part of town by a car full of very polite even-voiced guys who patiently explained to me that they would be obliged to kill me if I didn’t get out of town pronto. From that point on, I was never permitted to walk around by myself.

Lewis had been dispatched by the SCLC to co-ordinate things. We had a kind of instinctive liking for one another - he was barely older than I and radiated a kind of seriousness and natural goodness that was unusual for people of our age. He used to tell me stories of how much he liked chickens and ducks - and how he used to practice preaching to them in his family’s hen-house. I understood that completely - we were really on the same wavelength.

One afternoon - for reasons which I still don’t understand - he suggested that we have someone drive us over to another town where there was a small restaurant in an interstate bus terminal. We went into the ‘Whites Only’ area - I don’t remember even seeing anything other than that - sat down and ordered a couple of Cokes. We were arrested for ‘trespassing’ and taken to the county jail. When I discovered that the jail was segregated (something that never occurred to me) and I was going to be put in with the white prisoners, I began to understand that I was in deep shit. After Martin Luther King, Lewis was the key guy in the SCLC and he was bailed out the same day. I was kept in to serve as I don’t know what kind of positive example. In retrospect, the only example I could have conceivably served would have that of a young, idealistic white Northerner turning up dead in a Southern prison. It would have been a first - and just what the movement needed to get the kind of media coverage and government interest that was to come several years later - when young white students did starting turning up dead.

Anyway, they locked me up alone and the other guys on the block came over and explained the situation. They weren’t as quiet-spoken or as polite in that special Southern way as the car-full of White Citizen’s Council men I had encountered a week or so earlier. I was so afraid that I could no longer even speak. I just tried to retreat out of range of the cigarette butts and matches they were flicking at me through the bars.

This is a long story, and quite frankly, I never really intended to tell it here. Maybe I’ll continue another time, but for now, I’m going to cut it short.
As for their death-threats, once I found my voice again in the darkness, I literally talked them out of it, quoting verses of the Bible I didn’t even know I knew (I had had a summer job in the library of a Methodist theological seminary, which must have helped) and, I have to confess, by lying my head off like I’ve never lied before. About being a seminary student myself. About having been diagnosed as being incurably ill and wanting to do what I considered to be God’s work in the few months that were left to me. About how Jesus Himself had spoken to me about his love for all men - including the blacks. And on and on and on into that August night. At the end, there was a BIG silence.