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A group of young lawyers opened the People’s Law Office (PLO) the same week Fred spoke at the People’s Church. We wanted to become lawyers for the movement. Who were we and how did we get there? I begin with me, not because I was the most important; I wasn’t. But it’s my story. I knew Fred Hampton only briefly, but as with so many others who knew him, he changed my life.
It’s difficult to separate the parts of my life that led me to become a Panther lawyer. Who knows for certain how or why we become who we are? I don’t. But there were people and events that influenced the course I took.
I was born in Crawford Long Hospital on September 18, 1942. My sister Sue, four years older, and I are from a German Jewish family that settled in Atlanta in the 1850s. My grandfather, Herbert Haas, was one of the lawyers who defended Leo Frank, the Jewish manager of the Atlanta Pencil Factory. In 1913, Frank was falsely accused of murdering a thirteen-year-old, white, Protestant girl named Mary Phagan, whose body was found at the factory on a Saturday morning.
Defending him was so unpopular my grandfather hired a detective to protect his family. The anti-Semitic Hearst newspapers and local press portrayed the murder as a Jewish ritual killing, and with southern resentment against northern carpetbaggers fanned by populist Tom Watson, Frank was convicted and sentenced to death. Governor Frank Slaton, convinced of Frank’s innocence, commuted his sentence to life, further angering the riled-up public, and a fellow inmate stabbed Frank in the neck. While he was recuperating, a lynch mob, organized by some of the most prominent families in Atlanta, kidnapped him from the infirmary at nearby Milledgeville, and hanged him outside Atlanta.
My grandfather had been the first person Frank called when he was arrested, and they wrote to each other frequently. The last letter from Frank arrived the day before the lynching. My grandfather refused to discuss the case for the rest of his life, and my father said the Jewish community was traumatized for a generation. Yet as far as I know, and despite the fact that the Anti-Defamation League was born out of this case, the Jewish community failed or refused to make the connection between Frank’s death and the lynching of fourteen black people in Georgia alone that year without any trials at all.
My father, Joseph Haas, while primarily a business lawyer, was also the attorney for the Southern Regional Council, a civic organization concerned with racial inequalities in the South. He worked with civil rights organizers including the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s chairman John Lewis to implement the 1965 Voting Rights Act. My dad came up with the name the Voter Education Project to make the group eligible for grants from charitable foundations. The IRS would not have allowed them to fund a voter registration drive. When Dad died in 2000, John Lewis, today a U.S. congressman, wrote the eulogy that I proudly read at the memorial service.
His work made a major and lasting contribution to the civil rights movement and to liberating white and black Southerners. The Voter Education Project registered more than four million new voters; black voters in the eleven Southern states where it operated. We relied on his legal advice and counsel and “can do” spirit. Without him, those of us on the Freedom Rides and elsewhere on the so-called front lines could not have done what we did.
My mother, Betty Geismer, grew up in middle-class, integrated Shaker Heights, a suburb of Cleveland, where she was a classmate of the track star Jesse Owens. When Mom attended Wellesley College in the early 1930s, the school was swarming with would-be Bolsheviks, socialists, and New Dealers. She fit right in, and became an ardent admirer of Eleanor Roosevelt. She had a shock when she married my father in 1936 and moved to Atlanta, a city still in the long-entrenched throes of segregation. The racial attitudes of most white Atlantans at the time she moved to the South were reflected in the big social event the next year: the grand opening of the movie Gone with the Wind, a story of nostalgic longing for a romanticized antebellum South that, of course, included slavery.
In the late 1950s my mother organized the Atlanta Committee for International Visitors (ACIV). Its function was to host persons brought to the United States by the State Department and other governmental agencies. Atlanta was becoming the government’s showcase for Southern cities because it had not fought integration with the violence of Birmingham, Alabama, or Little Rock, Arkansas. Rather, a majority of Atlanta’s white business leaders united with leaders of the black community to implement slow but peaceful integration. A notable exception was segregationist Lester Maddox. At his Pickrick Cafeteria he sold ax handles to use against blacks who might try to integrate segregated facilities, including his own. This stance got him elected governor of Georgia.
My mother’s work for ACIV included hosting African delegations, which put her in touch with Coretta Scott King, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and the deans of the Atlanta University colleges. One problem the newly formed ACIV faced was that most Atlanta hotels were still segregated. A few, including the Biltmore, were willing to house all-black delegations from other countries, but they would not allow mixed delegations to stay at their hotels or eat in their restaurants. One day I heard my mother on the phone. “That is unacceptable and simply won’t work,” she said. “If you want our business you have to accommodate integrated delegations and that includes their black and white hosts.” The Biltmore acceded, and soon other hotels became integrated as well.
Like many Southern white kids from upper-middle-class families, I was raised in part by blacks. When I was five, we moved to a farm just north of Atlanta. By the time I was eight, my parents hired Walter McCurry to work the farm. Walter was six feet tall, barrel chested, and muscular, with light brown skin, a small mustache, a round face, and a shaved head. A World War II navy veteran, he returned to Georgia after the war to take up farming, which his family had done for generations. Walter wore overalls and drank sweetened iced tea out of mason jars. He was forty years old when he started working for us.
Our farm consisted of twenty-six hilly acres containing a small lake, a two-acre vegetable and berry garden, several hay fields, a barn with a pasture behind it, and thirty-three pecan trees. With Walter’s help we raised chickens, turkeys, and pigs, and kept a horse and a mule.
Walter taught me how to plow behind our mule, Boley—not only how to handle the reins but how to address her with the commands “gee” and “haw” to get her to turn right or left. He chuckled when the plow got stuck or I would get off course.
“Boy, I hope you learn how to plow while we still got some rows left,” he would say, adding with a smile, “I spec you ain’t done too much damage.”
My favorite activity was when Walter put a bridle on Boley and brought her around to the haystack where my two friends and I could get on. Off we’d ride into the woods, where we built forts and kept our stash of sardines and saltines.
I emulated Walter, and he took great pride in showing me what he knew. He was my Jim, and I was his Huck. But unlike our predecessors, the traveling Walter and I did together was to baseball games. My friend Henry lived near Ponce de Leon Ballpark, where the Atlanta Crackers, our local all-white minor league team, played. Only forty years later did I learn that the Black Crackers shared the same ballpark.
The first time Walter took us to a game we were ten. It was a warm, humid evening, and Henry and I went to buy tickets. I looked around and saw Walter was walking off toward the hill in right field, where the black spectators were sitting. I wanted to call out to him, Come back and sit with us. But I said nothing.
“Why should he have to sit out there?” I asked Henry.
“Yeah,” he replied. “There’re plenty of seats here.”
There was silence as we each waited for the next thing to be said, but neither of us would take the next step of inviting Walter back to sit with us.
“I hope Country Brown is in the lineup tonight,” I finally chipped in. “You got money for lemonade?”
After the game we met Walter outside. We all knew it was wrong and mean that he and other black people were banished to the worst seats. But I never talked about it with him. Nor did he mention it to me. I’m not sure why. I think Walter didn’t want to embarrass me.
As for why I didn’t say anything, it was probably my fear and timidity, issues that I would confront years later. I was ashamed of the status quo but not willing to take it on. As Alan Paton wrote in Cry, the Beloved Country about white South Africans’ fear of challenging apartheid, “It was not a thing lightly done.”
Lily May Glenn also played a large role in raising me. She worked for us as a maid five and a half days per week, from the time I was six or seven until after I went away to college. Lily had her own small bedroom and bathroom in our house. She was tall and statuesque, with high cheekbones, suggesting some Cherokee roots. She was one of twelve children whose family had been sharecroppers on the remains of a cotton plantation in Georgia.
I loved to hear Lily’s stories about growing up in the country, in particular her animated accounts of the horrors of picking cotton. “It was hot and sweaty with long days, dirty work, and boring to beat,” she said. “Seemed like the sun would never go down. I’d be sick or hide, anything. If I was forced to pick, I’d put rocks and green cotton boles in my sack to make it weigh more so I could make my quota earlier.”
Nearly three decades later, in 1975, one of the main presenters at a radical women’s gathering made the mistake of speaking nostalgically about being raised by her parents’ black employees. Servants was the postslavery word. Her listeners took her presentation to imply that she believed her upbringing was acceptable because it was such a fertile source of memories and support. My friends who attended were appalled at her seeming acceptance of the exploitation of the black people who worked for her family. She was tarred and feathered politically.
As I write about my memories of Walter and Lily, I realize the contrast between the benefits that flowed to me and my family from these relationships and the extreme cost to Walter and Lily. Both worked long hours for low wages with no social security, health, or retirement benefits. They were not equals in our house. They never ate dinner with us, and they addressed my parents as “Mr. Haas” and “Mrs. Haas,” while we addressed them by their first names.
I was the first Jew to attend Liberty Gwinn, the county elementary school near our house. My classmates were country white kids, and before they knew I was Jewish, they told me, “Jews have horns.”
One day I decided to be bold. “I’m Jewish,” I told a group of classmates after school. They looked for my horns and found none. That was the end of the anti-Semitic comments. I liked the kids, they liked me, and I achieved the highest honor, being voted captain of Safety Patrol.
While my classmates withheld name-calling of Jews, they showed no similar restraint with respect to blacks. Like all the other schools in Fulton County, students at Liberty Gwinn went downtown to hear the Atlanta Symphony at least one time each year. Atlanta was totally segregated in the early 1950s. Black kids not only went to different schools but were assigned different times to go to the symphony.
One morning, as my mother was driving my classmates and me back from the concert, we saw three black kids walking on the sidewalks toward the auditorium.
“Niggers, go home,” one of my classmates yelled through an open window.
“Y’all niggers don’t deserve to go to our auditorium,” another yelled.
I was embarrassed. The black kids stopped, hurt and anger on their faces. One of them reached down as if to pick up a rock. Their teacher, who had been walking behind them, intervened and stopped him.
“Roll up the windows,” my mother said. “We’re getting too much cold air in the car.”
And that was that. The racial slurs stopped, but she said nothing more. I too remained silent.
One day in the late 1950s, some teenage friends and I drove to Lake Spivey, a privately owned lake near Atlanta, to enjoy a swim and some relief from the Georgia sun. As we were walking down the beach, a beefy white man in a uniform yelled “Get out of there” to a young black kid knee-deep in the water.
“Why?” the boy asked simply.
“Cause we don’t allow no Negras here.”
“But this is a public place, ain’t it?” the boy replied. Public pools in Atlanta had been ordered integrated and had either integrated or closed down.
“No, this is private, for whites only, can’t you see the sign? I don’t know how you got in here at all.”
We looked past the uniformed man to see a sign on the beach that readNOCOLOREDSALLOWED. Theboycontinuedtoprotestandwasdragged from the water crying. His mother came over to comfort him and take him away from the security guard.
As he and his mother started toward the exit, I watched. The security guard weighed more than two hundred pounds to my scrawny one hundred forty. I said something under my breath, low enough not to be heard. When the boy and the guard were gone, I walked to the lake and waded in. I was still outraged and also felt humiliated, having done nothing to stop or even confront the guard. I couldn’t enjoy the swim. Our failures to stand up against segregation made cowards of us all.
In 1958 our temple (called the Temple) was bombed because our rabbi, Jacob Rothschild, supported Dr. King’s push for integration. Unlike the Frank case, where the Jewish community withdrew for a generation, our congregation rallied behind our rabbi and became more committed to civil rights for blacks. Jews in Atlanta were more secure, and many were inspired by the struggle of black people to end segregation.
When I was a high school senior in 1960, one of the few hip things I did was frequenting the Royal Peacock Social Club on Auburn Avenue, where you could drink if you were under twenty-one. It was on the second floor, a couple of blocks from the Ebenezer Baptist Church headed by Martin Luther King Sr. and his son. Lily May had told me about the Peacock and usually knew who was playing there.
The Peacock had the best music in town and was the city’s only integrated nightclub. Part of the “chitlin circuit,” its patrons were 90 percent black. The white 10 percent was mostly Jewish. Whites were usually seated together, but the warm feelings in that room were unique for me at that time. I think the black people knew we came there to appreciate their music and their scene.
Otis Redding, Sam Cooke, Aretha Franklin, B. B. King, and Marvin Gaye made regular appearances at the Peacock. We brought our own half-pint bottles of bourbon or Seagram’s Seven inside our coat pockets and poured generous amounts into the paper cups of Coke we bought for mixers. Packed in there together, at the table or on the dance floor, even I lost my inhibitions, overcoming my self-consciousness enough to do a little making out.
The band I remember best was Hank Ballard and the Midnighters. Hank wrote the original music and lyrics to “The Twist.” Unfortunately for him, he let Chubby Checker record it, and Hank never quite made it past being a regional hero. Hank and the Midnighters put on quite a show. Somewhere toward the conclusion of their act, the room darkened. The music started quietly and slowly, and then gradually picked up its tempo. Suddenly a spotlight appeared directly on Hank. He had a pair of women’s panties draped over his head. He slowly removed them using his tongue as the music got louder and the beat got stronger. The audience, black and white, clapped to the beat as the panties slowly descended. When they were gone, the audience erupted. It was crude, and I loved it.
At one or two in the morning, climbing down the stairs from the syrupy warmth of the Peacock onto Auburn Avenue, I felt like I was putting on my white skin again and separating into the two familiar worlds of black and white.
After high school I attended the University of Michigan, from 1960 to 1963, where I remained mostly oblivious to political events, disinterested in the formation of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) on the campus. After I graduated, I sat in my parents’ living room, drinking beer and listening to Tchaikovsky and Brahms, conjuring up lofty ideas inspired by my readings of Camus and Sartre, Nietzsche and Kierkegaard. What to be or not to be?
Not quite ready to answer that question, I realized I had lived a privileged life. I needed an equalizer. What better leveler than army basic training at Fort Jackson, South Carolina? There I would be an enlisted man, going through the same physical training as other lowly privates. I wanted to prove to myself that I could survive in a setting without relying on my privilege or my family’s money. I had no awareness of the U.S. troop presence building in Vietnam when I enlisted in the Army Reserve in 1963.
I reported to Fort Jackson, near Columbia, South Carolina, on November 19. Three days later President Kennedy was assassinated. Rumors spread on the base that the Russians or Cubans had killed him.
“You men better shape up fast,” our drill sergeant, a Cuban exile, yelled on our first day on the tarp. “We’re sending you straight off to Cuba as soon as you learn to fire that rifle.” He told us with certainty that Castro killed Kennedy and we would soon be invading the Caribbean island. This was not what I had had in mind. All of a sudden I felt like I was in a straitjacket headed for war. This was not the nonthreatening, life warm-up experience I had signed up for.