***A Simple Act Of Bravery-Concerning The Second Selma To Montgomery Civil Rights March, Circa 1965

 

 

From The Pen Of Peter Paul Markin

We all know the heroes or at least the names of the highly publicized heroes of the black civil rights movement down South (and later up North and West in the 1960s led by the courageous Doctor Martin Luther King and his compatriots. Less well known, and generally unknown except perhaps at the margins of specialty books on the subject, are the mass of average, well maybe more than average, citizens, mainly from the North, and mainly students or the young who put themselves on the line, put themselves on the line of fire to do the right thing in the face of civil evil. This is a short sketch about one such simple act of bravery.  

Not everybody who participated in the civil rights struggles down South came to those tasks fully aware politically or with the deepest motives-but they were there. Take the case of Dave Patrick from my hometown of North Adamsville, a small city just outside of Boston which despite its proximity to the city had virtually no blacks living there in the early 1960s the time of the great struggles down South (and according to some fairly current census information the black population of the town today is still minuscule). And we had no blacks, none in our graduating class and one sole black  teacher during our  four year stay. Dave Patrick, although we graduated together in 1964 was unknown to me until recently when through a 50^th Anniversary class reunion site we “met” and he related the information that he had participated in the second Selma to Montgomery march in 1965. Not necessarily for the highest political motives at first but he went.

I was surprised by the story of his action because I believed, as mentioned below in my e-mail responses that I was the only vocal pro-civil rights activist in the school or the neighborhood. Certainly the town, white working-class, mainly third and fourth generation Irish and Italian, at its core and dependent on the local ship-building industry for many jobs and industry-related jobs held the common racial views of day and might have had, if it rose to that level then, some sympathy with the whites down south. And certainly in the high school to the extent that such dramatic social issues drew any attention at all as against who the hot girls or guys were, who had a hot car, who was doing what to whom down at the midnight “submarine races” lovers’ lane beachfront well-detailed in Monday morning before school boys’ and girls’ “lav” talkfest students would reflect for the most part what was being said at home. Of course once a lot of us got away from the town, got emerged in issue-oriented campus life and away from the high school norms many things changed. They did for David anyway.  

David had gone away to college after being a very bright high school student. But he like a lot of us then (and maybe now too but I see very little when I am on real campuses) got caught up in the turbulent social life of the times, the experimental 1960s time of blessed memory -drugs, sex and rock and roll to put a short name to it. While at one particular party, a frat party at his school he was confronted with a blatantly racist-themed event (mock, and maybe not so mock, honoring the KKK) and plenty of street-wise racist talk and balked at it. He told me that event, and the cold hard fact that he was going to flunk out of school anyway because of his excessive social life, led him to the Selma march. A mixed motive. He also said that he was afraid every minute that he was down there in Alabama since he had never been that far south, had been heckled, and the whole police state presence there unnerved him.  But he marched and survived to tell the tale.      

Below are my e-mail responses to the details of his story and some observations of my own.  
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Kudos, Dave Patrick, Kudos

Although you really should have placed your fine piece about your participation in the second Selma to Montgomery march in 1965 in the “Message Forum” section so all your fellow classmates could read it I am just glad you placed the piece somewhere.

Since we have exchanged previous e-mails on this subject I would now publicly honor your brave act of heading south whatever your private reasoning. Alabama and Mississippi were murderous dangerous places foremost for militant black freedom- fighters and just behind then white Yankee civil right supporters.  As you know from one of our previously exchanged e-mails in the summer of 1964 when the civil rights movement was desperate for people to head south to Alabama I had volunteered to go. When my family, including my mother usually supportive but not on this one, heard about that idea they threatened to disown me, to throw me out of the house. I buckled under and did not go. The most I did in those times was to be part of a small group of students in high school sending books to children in Alabama, earlier joining an occasional picket line in front of Woolworth’s in downtown Boston in support of the lunch counter sit-in demonstrators down South, and some work a few weeks one summer on voter registration in North Carolina. So you can see why I say, and continue to say, kudos, brother, kudos.

As we have been recollecting those bedeviled times I keep feeling how strange it was that you and I, others too maybe, who came out of very white working-class North Adamsville and were just a step or two economically above the blacks we were supporting had decided to cast our fate with what Jack Kerouac called the fellaheen of the world, the downtrodden and forgotten ones. Given the racial climate around town then, and probably now too, it seems almost impossible except as an act of extreme idealism that I could have thought of heading, and you did, head south then. Those were certainly heady times.   

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Dave- interesting story about how you got to Alabama. I will tell you however that rather than hide the fact you should have just left it as is on your profile page. It did not matter why you went. YOU WENT and coming out of lily- white North Adamsville where we only had one black teacher and no black fellow students (we might as well have been in the South on that account) despite the historic black community of Roxbury being within a stone’s throw right over the bridge  that speaks to me as a very brave and honorable act.

Moreover- to place your act in context- in high school I, along with some students from North Adamsville and Hullsville High were involved in a books for Alabama program sponsored by the NAACP in Boston and we took a lot of heat from our friends and neighbors for that small action. As well as the few times I went into Boston in support of trying to de-segregate the lunch-counter down south by picketing Woolworth’s where we took much heat from local yahoos. You actually went down to the heart of the beast so kudos, brother, kudos.

My more serious work with the black liberation struggle actually came later when I lived in Oakland and got involved with Black Panther defense as the government was trying to jail and/or kill every black militant it could get its hands on and still later on apartheid in South Africa. I will keep what you sent to me by private e-mail in confidence if you wish but believe me I have great admiration for what you did.

Later Peter Paul Markin      
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Dave

To finish up on the Selma-Montgomery March second e-mail of 3/16 I should note that I faced some of the same family hostility that you encountered. With the exception of my mother who has some kind of low-level Dorothy Day Catholic Worker spirit that drove her on social issues (her social concerns for other people, for her sons nothing but rancor and “disappointment”) that hostility was palpable. My mother is probably where I picked up my own fledgling sense of social consciousness (overlaid back then with that loner, existential “king hell king” thing). My father was nothing but a good old boy Kentucky coalminer displaced by World War II and the Marines who wound up being stationed at the Hullsville Naval Depot before being demobilized. The best I/we could ever get him to say about black people was “nigras.”

On my mother’s side there were nothing but Irish rednecks many of whom still lived over in the old family town of South Boston and who in our generation were well known in the fight against desegregation that rocked that area in the mid-1970s and 1980s. Hell I could not even go over there then without being harassed the minute I hit L Street where they hung out. Here is the kicker though- in 1964 when the civil rights movement was desperate for people to head south to Alabama I had volunteered to go. When my family, including my mother on this one, heard about that they threatened to disown me, to throw me out of the house. I buckled under and did not go. So you can see why I say, and continue to say, kudos, brother, kudos.

Later Peter Paul Markin
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Kudos again Dave of such small acts human history rather than an unending story of piles of bones gives hope.