The march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, in 1965 was on Alice Lacy’s mind this week as President Barack Obama was sworn into office.
She showed up to march for Civil Rights nearly 44 years ago.
For the 88-year-old New Harbor artist, the fact that an African American now leads the country validates the effort she and many others made to overturn racial discrimination. On Jan. 20, Inauguration Day, one day after the national holiday commemorating Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, she said, “I put my hopes in the candidate I helped put there.”
Lacy believes that Obama would not have succeeded without the Civil Rights movement, without the political and educational freedoms King put his life on the line for.
Possibly King was in a group ahead of her on that historic and dangerous march to Montgomery; she isn’t sure. She never saw him in the throng. She was late getting there because the train she was riding was stopped outside Atlanta the night before, prohibited from moving on until, she said, “somebody got in touch with Attorney General Robert Kennedy and he made them let us go on.
“We stayed in the station all night. People on the train snaked through the cars singing, ‘This Little Light of Mine, I’m Gonna Let It Shine’. We were blocked by Atlanta whites, I guess. There was no food, no water.”
She also remembers that those taking part in the protest march “were taught to get our heads between our knees so if we were hit with billy clubs our shoulders would take the brunt of force.” She wasn’t injured.
A primary reason for joining the march was the death of a friend and colleague, Rev. James Reeb, a white Unitarian minister, who had gone to Selma earlier with other ministers. He was attacked by club-wielding segregationists and died a couple of days later. Lacy said, “I immediately got as many people as I could to go to Selma.”
Once back in Washington, DC, where she was living at the time, “I volunteered for everything I could that interested me.” One effort she made involved a black woman she’d met during the five-day march. Instead of having to sleep on the floor with the backpack her husband John had given her, Lacy lucked out.
“This woman took me in,” she said. “She looked after the children of other black women who worked in white people’s homes. She was a natural (teaching children). She’d show kids the tin can stoves the marchers used to heat water for coffee.”
Lacy said she helped set her up in a daycare center/preschool program through Head Start, a project that got underway the summer of 1965 as part of President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty.
Before the Selma experience, Lacy’s life in the 1950s and early 1960s was taking her in a direction that would link her with Alabama Blacks fighting for their voting rights.
Having been raised in Baltimore and schooled mostly at home, she studied race relations at the University of California at Berkeley. An early instructor, who had been interned during WWII with other Japanese Americans, shared a tiny attic apartment with her mother where Lacy would come to study. The woman was a living example of social injustice.
Back east, Lacy found various jobs, including doing research for the Democratic Party. She taught an introductory course in sociology at American University. From there she went to Howard University, which was historically all Black.
Stokely Carmichael, who would go on to found the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and later head up the militant Black Power movement, was one of her students. She assigned a paper that required the class to conduct interviews. Carmichael, who wanted to write about white landlords “who took money away” from their black tenants, at first resisted the requirement.
He already knew what he wanted to write, Lacy said he told her.
When she said he wouldn’t pass the course, “he decided to do it. He went to interview a woman and I followed up on it. He was so charismatic. He had a strong Jamaican accent and he had that woman, who came from North Carolina, convinced he was kinfolk to her! He almost took over the class,” his personality was so compelling, Lacy added.
Other work she did in the 1960s included teaching a course in women and society, and working with Eleanor Roosevelt on the Presidential Commission on the Status of Women, established by President John Kennedy.
“We had a terrible time convincing people we weren’t trying to get women out of the home,” she said. “Actually we wanted women at home to raise their children.”
The National Organization for Women (NOW) evolved out of the commission.
Lacy also was involved in an organization striving to integrate neighborhoods in the Rock Creek Park area of DC. It was a time when whites were panicking about blacks living next door to them. Later, after Johnson became president, “we had VISTA volunteers and I was head of a Community Action Agency in Florida,” she said.
“Obama, as I do, believes in justice and you don’t get justice necessarily by being a Vanderbilt and having economic power,” Lacy said.
A memory of the Depression, when “the whole country was together,” stays with her. “We kept singing, ‘Good Times Just Around the Corner’.” Good times are undoubtedly farther away in 2009 than then, “but it’s a huge difference when everybody’s in it together. Whether Obama can pull it off, I don’t know,” Lacy said, but having listened to his inaugural speech, she has hope.
