Lanterns Read online

  Sitting in my room listening to Brahms’ violin concerto, again my mind goes to Martin Luther King and life. What people do with life—how much some do and others how little. Thank God for a glimpse of beauty, a taste of life’s savor. I must go back for more and more. I want to live. To live well, high, humble, loving, completely.

  APRIL 28, 1960

  To my dear God and life. If I lived to be a thousand years old, I could never be thankful enough for the great goodness given me, for many wonderful people have come into my life and touched me profoundly: Howard Zinn, Charles Merrill. I want to be great to say thank you to You and to them. Mr. Merrill and I had a 2½ hour talk Saturday and he offered me a job at his Commonwealth School in Boston whenever I wanted it. This morning beyond my wildest dreams came a letter from the John Hay Whitney Foundation saying I’d been granted a $1700.00 fellowship for graduate study next year. I don’t know what to do. I’m so happy and grateful. I never expected to get it. Howie wants me to apply to Harvard. Help me God, to do what is right. Strengthen and direct me. Oh God—work through thy unworthy servant.

  APRIL 29, 1960

  Dear, dear God of my life. These are the most exciting, rewarding, and gratifying days of my life. Change is pervading—change I’m helping bring in. I’m useful and I’m serving and I’m so thankful.

  Tonight I went over to the Congregational Church to hear Martin Luther King speak about weak decency. He was wonderful. He’s almost Christ-like. Went up afterwards and he greeted me as if I were an old and dear friend. Has promised me a conference next week. Before the service began, I met Lillian Smith, author of Strange Fruit, and how accessible she was—so free and friendly. She graciously agreed to come over to Spelman and speak to my freshman study group.

  Marvin Martin told me tonight—he’s a Southern boy from Tennessee who’s perfectly wonderful and is Arne’s [my Norwegian exchange student friend] roomy—that Arne had repercussions from picketing last Saturday from the KKK and Georgia Tech officials. I love and respect him dearly. After the program, we all went to the Co Co Tree on Peachtree—a mixed bunch of 5 Negroes and about 8 Whites….

  Have decided to apply to Georgetown and get my masters and then go on to Harvard next year for my doctorate.

  June [a White college student who grew up in Bennettsville] wrote the most wonderful editorial in the Agnes Scott paper about me and the racial situation after I spoke at Agnes Scott.

  We grew up in the same small town but never met until after the sit-ins brought her White women students and my Black women students together in Atlanta. Things are moving all over. They [Agnes Scott] invited our exchange students over last night and more are making plans to come over and visit. There were many Agnes Scott girls to hear Dr. King tonight. Oh dear God—thank you for purpose and struggle. Make and keep us thy humble and dedicated servants.

  Help us to become the best possible persons. Teach us to seek after truth relentlessly, and to yearn for the betterment of mankind by endless sacrifice. Help us to find life—to serve life—to feel life. To be alive and aware is my prayer. Help us to blossom and grow and to give absolutely. Make me steel-strong in my purpose and the best person I can be.

  We are making history. We are taking upon ourselves the problems of the time and what a good burden. Help us to be worthy of our great call!

  MAY 5, 1960

  What a sweet, humble, and wonderful person Lillian Smith is! Went to party the Mike Goldbergers gave for her. She hugged me goodnight and said how beautiful she thought I was. I was overwhelmed…. She has cancer. She’s very brave.

  Went to see Martin Luther King, Jr., today but he was busy in press conference with African leader Kenneth Kaunda. Am to see him next Tuesday.

  Let us be Thy humble servants.

  A new South is being born with a new people. A new world is being made thanks to the Lillian Smiths and Martin Luther Kings.

  MAY 17, 1960

  Yesterday was a great day for the Negro people of Atlanta. We marched towards the Capitol (were detained by Police Chief Jenkins) and went on to Wheat Street. Were about 1000 of us. The meeting at Wheat Street was phenomenal and the spirit rejuvenating. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., came out of nowhere and the place went wild. Otis Moss gave a gem of an address. College presidents, who were against it but students did it despite their biddings, now greeted “their” students. Make us Thy humble servants. Use us.

  MAY 19, 1960

  Had the most fabulous afternoon with Dudley Doust from Time. They’re doing a cover story on the sit-ins and they are interviewing students the South over. We talked for 7½ hours. Had dinner at Paschals.

  On this heady note the Atlanta portion of my diary ends. I spent a far less engaging summer as a switchboard operator in Arlington, Virginia, saving money for Yale where I’d been accepted and had decided to go for law school. I lived in Washington with my sister Olive and her family. It took many job interviews for a young Black college graduate to find work. An Arlington firm—Psychological Research Associates—finally hired me. One of the firm’s principals, Dr. Paul Berry, was a Swarthmore graduate married to a fellow Swarthmore graduate, Sarita, who was Black. One of the firm’s White secretaries, Carol, outraged at finding me at the switchboard and being asked to train me, overcame her initial racial anger and did so. She and I became fast friends and she later enrolled as the first full-time White student at Spelman College. I never knew of Carol’s antipathy until she wrote about it in a paper for one of Howard Zinn’s classes at Spelman.

  7

  THE YALE YEARS

  William Sloane Coffin, Jr., Malcolm X, and Getting Ready for Mississippi

  I WENT TO LAW SCHOOL because law was the tool I thought I needed to fight racial discrimination in the South in the early 1960s. Law school had never crossed my mind until one day during my senior year in college while I was doing volunteer work in the local NAACP office in Atlanta. After sorting all the requests for legal assistance from poor Black citizens who could not afford lawyers or who sought to challenge discriminatory practices, cases White lawyers would not touch, I wondered why in the world I was thinking about studying nineteenth-century Russian literature or going into the Foreign Service when the freedom and justice struggle was right here at home. It was time to jettison plans to live abroad and jump into the home fray for freedom.

  My diary shows my mother was not excited about my decision to go to law school. There was no precedent in my family or community for such a choice. She did not know any Black women lawyers. I didn’t either although I had heard of the formidable Constance Baker Motley who had worked with Thurgood Marshall at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund on many important civil rights cases. Connie later helped gain James Meredith’s admission to “Ole Miss” and became the first Black woman federal district court judge. My mother wanted me to get a graduate degree (she was ahead of her time there) and, like many mothers, she wanted me to get a good job and a good husband. But as she always did, when she saw my mind was made up, she supported me. And she was proud of my being at Yale even if she did not fully understand why.

  I wasn’t sure how I would support myself through law school but took it one step at a time. The John Hay Whitney Fellowship, student loans, and jobs—and Yale chaplain William Sloane Coffin, Jr.’s generosity with free housing and food for a year—got me through. I had no idea how I was going to support myself afterwards or pay off my law school loans, but I knew I was going to Mississippi. Like my parents I had learned to live by faith and not just by sight.

  The first day I walked into the dining room at Yale Law School in 1960 with my newly discovered group of Black women friends—Amelia Cobb in the drama school, Hildred Roach in the music school, Eleanor Holmes (now Norton) in the law school, and Ruby Puryear (now Hearn) in the biochemistry department—Black male students, shocked and delighted with the unexpected bounty of Black women students, appeared instantly out of the woodwork to greet us.

  Ten women were in my law school class in 1960. From some of the c
omments I overheard about us you would have thought that a massive invasion of aliens had descended. Yale Law School dormitories were closed to women and constitutional law professor Fred Rodell still held some of his classes at Mory’s on High Street which did not admit women. I lived my first and third years at Helen Hadley Hall on Temple Street which was the segregated dorm for female graduate and professional students. Women had not yet been admitted to Yale’s undergraduate college.

  I was elected to the Yale Corporation in 1971 as the first woman alumni trustee (Hanna Gray, former Yale provost and later president of the University of Chicago, was selected as a successor trustee the same year and Eleanor Holmes Norton and Ruby Hearn were elected alumni trustees in later years). I decided to join the Yale Club in New York City, which still had not opened its membership to women. It was quietly done.

  I hated law school but I had a mission and Mississippi on my mind. Many of my college friends in SNCC and Bob Moses had gone to Mississippi to begin the arduous and dangerous task of voter registration. In that state there were about 900,000 Black citizens and only four Black lawyers. Three of them had not gone to law school but had studied on their own. The one who had attended law school did not take civil rights cases.

  Depressed by my complete lack of interest in property and contracts and corporations and legal procedure courses and wondering what in the world I was doing in law school when my friends were out on the front lines in Mississippi, Georgia, and Alabama, I threw myself into the Northern Student Movement designed to support SNCC’s work in the South. A Yale undergraduate named Peter Countryman was a key figure in this effort as was Al Lowenstein, who entered my life during the Yale Law School years.

  I spent my first summer during law school in the Ivory Coast, West Africa with Operation Crossroads Africa. A forerunner of the Peace Corps, it had been founded by a charismatic Black pastor, Reverend James Robinson of the Church of the Master in New York City. He sought to build awareness and bridges between American and African youth. Before we left for Africa our group stopped in Washington, D.C. where we were housed at the College of Preachers at the Washington National Cathedral in the neighborhood where I now live. We went to the White House to hear and meet President John F. Kennedy. Unbeknownst to me until 1998, CDF’s current board chair and Philadelphia School Superintendent David Hornbeck was in the same White House group and also participated in Crossroads that summer.

  My Crossroads trip was made possible by a scholarship from St. Philip’s Episcopal Church, Thurgood Marshall’s church in Harlem. Its distinguished and kind rector, Dr. Moran Weston, had me speak to the congregation and has remained a lifelong friend. He was a founder of Carver Federal Savings and Loan Bank in Harlem which my niece Deborah Wright now heads as president. My Crossroads group lived at and built a fence around a secondary school in Bouaké, the Ivory Coast’s second-largest city. We also traveled to Ghana where we stayed at the University of Ghana, met students, and co-existed with what seemed to me legions of lizards everywhere. I learned to step over rather than flee them and to try to scare them to hide my fear since there was no escaping them.

  My second year of law school was immensely lifted by living with Yale’s chaplain, Bill Coffin and his wife, Eva Rubinstein, and their three children: Amy, Alex, and David. I luxuriated hearing Eva’s father Arthur Rubinstein play the piano downstairs as I lay upstairs in my bedroom. Bill Coffin, inspiring, outspoken, and eloquent, was mentor, friend, and billboard for faith in action. He cagily used me to integrate the all-White male usher board at Yale’s Battell Chapel, calculating that some Yalies would be afraid to protest the revolutionary presence of a woman usher for fear of being perceived as anti-Black. When Freedom Riders seeking to end segregation in interstate transportation ran into violent resistance, he recruited friends from Yale to join with Wesleyan University faculty members John Maguire and David Swift to go South. I begged to go. Bill refused on grounds it was too dangerous for a woman and took a Black male Yale law student named George Smith instead. I still haven’t forgiven him! But his commitment to racial justice and his later arrest with Dr. Benjamin Spock in opposition to the war in Vietnam made him a lifelong hero to me. On the weekend in July, 1968, when he married me and my husband in Virginia, he met with one of his defense lawyers, former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg, who spoke at our wedding and graciously held my flowers when my husband and I exchanged rings.

  Bill Coffin’s civil rights and Vietnam antiwar witness provoked much controversy at Yale but he never wavered. He later became senior pastor of the Riverside Church in New York City and then head of SANE—Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy. A versatile and gifted musician who played his guitar and sang Russian songs at my wedding to my Russian-born motherin-law’s delight, a peerless preacher, a generous friend, and an exuberant and courageous bearer of God’s word, I count him among the brightest lanterns during a dark era of national life.

  I visited Mississippi during one spring break in law school to remind myself why I was sitting in classes I found deadly dull and living in New Haven when my friends were organizing voters in the South. Medgar Evers picked me up at the airport, took me home to meet his wife Myrlie and their children, and then drove me up to Greenwood, Mississippi to join Bob Moses and others at the SNCC headquarters which was my destination.

  Immediately upon our arrival in Greenwood we heard news of a drive-by shooting. The fear this provoked in the Black community and in me was palpable. Bob Moses and his SNCC colleagues knew they had to answer back by continuing to take people down to the courthouse to try to register to vote. I had promised my mother I would not get arrested and was warned by a Mississippi-born Yale law professor, Myres McDougal, that an arrest would surely keep me out of the Mississippi bar where I already faced high odds of exclusion. I approached the SNCC office the next morning determined to be helpful but to stay out of trouble.

  As Bob, Jim Forman, and others persuaded some of the scared, raggedly clad but brave souls to walk in a line with them to the registrar’s office, I found myself tagging along at the very tail end as a determined observer. That day was the first time police dogs were brought out to attack Black citizens attempting to register to vote. I watched in horror and shared the terror of the people who began to scatter and run as a German shepherd attacked Bob and ripped his pants. Bob did not flinch. I caught the car keys my SNCC friends threw me as they were being arrested and felt chilling isolation and fear watching local Mississippi law enforcement officials act ruthlessly and lawlessly. Helpless and outraged, I ran to a nearby phone booth and dialed John Doar in the Justice Department’s civil rights division in Washington to tell him what was happening and to demand that FBI agents observing but doing nothing do something.

  I remember his firm steely voice instructing me just to tell him the facts and to skip the emotion. I did but after I hung up shed furious tears of frustration as I wondered what to do next and whom else to call for immediate help. Jack Young, Jess Brown, and Carsie Hall, the three Black civil rights attorneys, were more than ninety miles away in Jackson. Huge numbers of Whites surrounded the courthouse where Moses and Forman and other SNCC workers had been taken to be tried immediately without a lawyer. The only person I recognized in the menacing crowd as I walked towards the front courthouse steps was Claude Sitton, the veteran New York Times reporter. He neither acknowledged me nor met my eyes. I knew then what it was like to be a poor Black person in Mississippi: alone. When I was blocked at the front courthouse door I attempted to enter by the side entrance but was again repelled by burly policemen. As I walked away through the milling mostly White male crowd and past the police cruisers with police dogs, I knew I would get through law school, however dull, would come back to Mississippi, and would walk into that and other courthouses to provide counsel to those unjustly treated.

  MALCOLM X AT YALE

  It was at Yale Law School that I met Malcolm X. I was sitting in the Law School auditorium reading and waiting for him to come on stage
and speak. Although I was a Tolstoy, Gandhi, and King disciple, Malcolm X’s sharp, sarcastic, funny, irreverent, tell-it-like-it-is rhetoric labeling Whites as devils who had oppressed Black America struck a resonant chord in my psyche. Experiences like the one I’d had in Mississippi were testimony to the evils of racial oppression he described. He provided a much needed outlet for the rage embedded in my and nearly every Black heart and soul in America. The Civil Rights Movement channeled much Black anger and rage into positive avenues. But Malcolm X knew how deeply White resistance and White privilege remained ingrained and how much needed to be done to free many Black minds enslaved by a sense of inferiority and many White minds enslaved by a sense of superiority instilled over nearly two centuries of slavery and segregation.

  I was dumbstruck when I looked up from my reading and saw a tall, clean-cut, nattily dressed, freckle-faced man with glasses and neatly trimmed reddish hair smiling down at me, calling my name—“Miss Wright”—and introducing himself as Malcolm X. I was struck even dumber as he proceeded to tell me a number of facts about my life. I eventually recognized his source—a childhood friend in his entourage with shaved head, bow tie, and new last name of X, who was now a member of the Bridgeport mosque. I later renewed contact with another hometown friend who had become a Black Muslim when I went to New York to have several meals with Malcolm X in the Muslim’s Harlem restaurant.

  I was buoyed and enthralled by Malcolm X’s intelligence, by his barbed humor (he chided me for ordering white bread during my first meal with him, saying it was utterly without nutritional value like White folks generally), and by his keen analysis of America’s racial divide. But I was not recruitable. While many of his words resonated deep within me, made me laugh and clap and say “Amen” as much as they made many White people squirm, I was too deeply grounded in my Christian faith, unconvinced of the religious authenticity of the honorable Elijah Muhammad, unclear about the Black Muslim’s true political agenda, and utterly unwilling to accede to their subservient role for women. I nevertheless felt enriched by the chance to cross paths and listen and converse and debate with this extraordinary man.