Freedom's Children (12 page)

The crowd outside would surge forward, and they were throwing bricks and everything. Some of our windows were broken, and the tear gas seeped into the church. I remember the tear gas, and how the fumes came in and hurt our eyes. The marshals had cordoned the church off and were repelling the crowd. Some of these marshals were really hurt by the bricks that were thrown. One or two marshals were, think, damaged for life. I can only say this: those marshals prevented a massive bloodshed that night. If that mob had gotten into the church, it would have been just ... there would have been many lives lost, many lives.

The key in the sixties for me as a young person was the Freedom Riders. When they arrived in Montgomery in May 1961, I wanted to go down to the bus station. We heard on the radio that people were being beaten up, chains, baseball bats, all kinds of stuff. I thought it was important for me to go, but my aunt Chick, who I was staying with, did not participate much in civil rights activity. So I got mad at her because she had the car and would not take me down to the station.

Two or three days later we had a mass meeting, and some of the Freedom Riders came. I brought some of them back to my aunt Chick's house. We were sitting in the living room when my aunt came through the door. She was just outraged. She said, “Gwendolyn, come to the kitchen with me.” Then she said, “You have white people in there.”

I said, “Yes ma‘am, I do. They're the Freedom Riders.”

She said, “I'm going to tell you, I don't want them in my house.” That's when I discovered her militancy. She said, “I cannot go in their homes, and I don't want them in my home. I can't go through the front door of anything that they own and I don't want them coming through my front door. Now you be just as ladylike as you can and serve them lemonade and cookies, and I want them out of the house.”

Somehow that weighed on me. I said to myself, Well, she has a point. Then I turned around and I said, “Aunt Chick, these aren't the white people like that. This is a different kind of white group.”

 

Fred Shuttlesworth, Jr.

Ricky Shuttlesworth