Back from the South: A Couple’S Transitions from Segregation to Integration

By Teressa V. Staten PhD

In Back from the South, author Dr. Teressa V. Staten offers an autobiographical picture of how events of the segregated South defined her character and that of her late husband, John. This African-American couple was married forty-one years until a tragic accident ended Johns life.

This memoir chronicles how Teressa and John overcame blatant racism to achieve numerous accomplishments. It shares the couples personal struggles with depression and the unexpected, heartbreaking suicide of their son. Back from the South explores the positive and negative consequences of being the first to integrate many situations in a rapidly evolving culture resistant to change. Staten describes how their character, education, and sheer determination led them to leave their hometowns in the South, move to the north, and work through institutional odds to become middle-class Americans, often being the first blacks to work and live in all-white workplaces and communities.

Covering a span of a half century, Back from the South provides insight into one couples pilgrimage during the height of the civil rights movement.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Archway Publishing
• Release date: Jul 11, 2017
• ISBN: 9781480846456

Teressa V. Staten PhD

Teresa V. Staten, PhD, earned a doctoral degree from the University of Michigan and did post-doctoral study at Harvard University. She has written articles in educational journals, magazines, and has also written technical documents related to education policy. Staten held positions at all levels of education and retired as Chief Deputy Superintendent of the Michigan Department of Education.

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Copyright © 2017 Teressa V. Staten, PhD.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This book is a work of non-fiction. Unless otherwise noted, the author and the publisher make no explicit guarantees as to the accuracy of the information contained in this book and in some cases, names of people and places have been altered to protect their privacy.

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ISBN: 978-1-4808-4644-9 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4808-4643-2 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4808-4645-6 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017908634

Archway Publishing rev. date: 07/07/2017

Contents

Prologue

Chapter 1 (1939–1959) Growing Up in Pulaski, Tennessee

Chapter 2 (1945–1959) Growing Up in Birmingham, Alabama

Chapter 3 (1959–1962) After the Marine Corps

Chapter 4 (1959–1962) College Years and A&M

Chapter 5 (1963–1965) Integrating the Huntsville Police Department

Chapter 6 (1962–1964) Civil Rights and Marriage

Chapter 7 Author and John Staten (1965–1968) Working in Segregated and Desegregated Jobs

Chapter 8 (1968–1971) The Move to Muskegon, Michigan

Chapter 9 (1971–1997) Move to Lansing

Chapter Ten (1965–1992) Stoney

Chapter 11 (1992-2004) Beyond Stoney’s Death

Chapter 12 2004 Move Back to the South

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

Prologue

Back from the South is an unusual dual memoir of my beloved husband, John Staten, and me. The story is written in my voice and echoes that of my husband who never got a chance to write his memoir due to his unexpected death. I only expanded the story in areas that helped me to tell the story. The narrative begins with our separate childhoods growing up in two distinct communities in the south. John grew up in Pulaski, Tennessee, which was at the time considered a very segregated town and the home of the Ku Klux Klan. I share memories of my growing up in Birmingham, Alabama, which was the most segregated city in the United States. I share vivid memories and experiences that I encountered living there and participating in the civil rights movement. The narration details experiences of John and my high school and college years, his experience in the marine corps, and how we met, fell in love, and got married. The book covers a span of a half century. It chronicles events each of us encountered being among the first blacks to work and live in all-white workplaces and communities. I define how these events and experiences growing up in the segregated South shaped our lives. I share the events leading to the suicide of our son, Johnathan. I provide true events about our lives together until the death of my husband who died from a serious car accident five months after we moved from Michigan back to the South. I have written all of the book in the first person, writing my husband’s sections after the tragic accident that took his life.

Chapter 1

(1939–1959)

Growing Up in Pulaski, Tennessee

Pulaski, Tennessee, home of the Ku Klux Klan, was where I was born. Giles County, Tennessee, where Pulaski is located, is known for its moonshine and good whiskey-making stills. Pulaski is the county seat and is very hilly, with lots of creeks and houses built close to hills. My mother, a very strong woman who always worked more than one job, married my father, James Staten, when they were both nineteen years old. She was beautiful with dark brown skin and long, black hair, and he was very fair-skinned with green eyes and straight, light brown hair.

Mother was around six feet tall, and according to her, my father was around five feet and eight inches. I do remember seeing a picture of them, and she towered over him at what appeared to be a whole head taller. He, his six brothers, and his one sister were considered to be well-off within the confines of the black community, which was made up mostly of sharecroppers and farmers. I also remember family members saying that the Statens were respected by the white folks because they were known to travel together, and the Staten boys would fight anyone who messed with them or their sister. There are lots of tales about them cutting or shooting white hillbillies who stole from them or got into a skirmish with them. According to the tales, for whatever reason, they were able to get away with this fighting.

My father farmed and lived on his family’s land. He did well for a black farmer, delivering in a horse-drawn wagon beets, sweet potatoes, corn, and peaches to white families around Giles County. I remember one time being on the back of the wagon when he met a train and sold a lot of peaches to a white man on that train. That was my first time seeing a train, although at night we could hear trains in the far distance.

My mother was the head of our household, and there were no questions about it. She determined what food we would eat and when and where we would go and gave out assignments about chores like a drill sergeant. My father worked in the fields most days and would wash up in the yard before coming in for dinner at about the same time every day. We could not eat until he came to the table. I remember wishing he would hurry home and to the table so we could eat. I remember always being hungry and ready to eat. As soon as he asked the blessing, I would greedily eat whatever was for dinner, and even as a little boy I was proclaimed to be a big eater.

When I was five years old, my father became sick with some type of illness, which I have become to believe was some form of cancer. People would come to see him, go into his and my mother’s bedroom, and close the door, oftentimes sitting and quietly talking or praying for hours at a time. Sometimes people would ask my sister, brother, and me to stand and listen as they prayed. While there was sadness, I am not sure I understood that my father was near death.

After I came home from church one Sunday, my mother in tears and a strange, trembling voice told my brother, sister, and me to come into the kitchen. She told us that my father had died while we were at church. My sister just screamed and jumped, so I screamed too. Mother told her that she would have to cut that screaming out as she was scaring me. My brother Dallas hugged both my sister and me and took us to sit on the back porch steps. He then began to sweep the house and wash windows,in the same way we would have to do at Christmas time. My sister Delcie started cleaning too. I just sat on the steps and waited, feeling really scared. My aunt and people from the church came by, and before long, I fell asleep, and Delcie was waking me to wash up and go to bed.

Early the next day before the sun came up, an undertaker had come from Nashville. My mother woke me up that morning, telling me to hurry and get dressed that she needed my help. I had to carry and empty buckets of what seemed to be blood and water down to the ditch that ran down behind the house. Dallas had gone to work, and Delcie was cleaning up the house. The undertaker must have given me at least five buckets about half full to empty. I really don’t remember the exact number, but I can remember that smell until this day. I became so sick and weak from trembling and throwing up. My sister came and hugged me, and then she and I laid down on my bed. She told me that everything was going to be all right and that they had to empty those buckets of stuff to get our father dressed so people could see him before he was buried.

After that day, the next several days, including the day of my father’s funeral, are all just a big blur in my memory. I do know from later discussions that the funeral was on the following Sunday and lasted about two hours. I also know that after that time, I was afraid to attend funerals. I was forty-three years old before I attended my second funeral, and then I felt sick to my stomach until the service was over.

A little over a year after my father’s death, my mother had to find a job to take care of our family. She had to walk over six miles to and from our house to get to her job, so she decided that we needed to move from the country and the farm to be closer to the city of Pulaski. She then got a new job working for Mrs. Woodson, the wealthy and only department store owner in Pulaski. She would leave for Mrs. Woodson’s house early in the morning to prepare breakfast for the Woodson family—Mr. and Mrs. Woodson, their son, and their daughter. She would keep their house clean, prepare dinner early for them, and then get home in the early evening most times and would then prepare dinner for our family.

The nice thing about Mrs. Woodson, I thought then, was that sometimes she would let my mother bring home leftover food and desserts—fresh cuts of meat, fresh milk, and sliced bread. Later as I grew older, I think my mother was just taking the extra food doing what she had to do to keep her family well fed.

We were able to move into what was then a fairly decent house for coloreds with four rooms upstairs, a big kitchen, a dining room, and a big living room downstairs. The story is that an old white man had died and none of his children came to see about the property. Since it was close to where coloreds had begun to move in order to work at the Pulaski chicken factory, my mother was able to pay on the house and eventually buy it. So each of us—my mother, sister, brother, and I—had our own bedroom. Getting my own room in this big house really gave me a feeling of being rich. I would spin around in my room, and it seemed like as much space as we had in our entire old house on the farm.

We had some furniture from the farm that the Staten men let us have, but my mother put two beds on layaway and two different dressers. I got a new bed, my brother got a new bed, and mother and my sister had the two new dressers. For about a week afterward, I was really happy about our new house. My brother got the old chest of drawers brought from the farm, and I got an old desk that had a roller top. My mother’s oldest sister, Aunt Alene, came from Nashville to live with us. My mother gave her my bedroom and told me to sleep with my brother Dallas. I was really angry and wished Aunt Alene would die. Well, Aunt Alene was so kind and good to me, making whatever pie she thought I liked, kissing me on the cheek, and biting my ear, which