My People, My Time

By Deborah McCrayer

The African American people fought for the basic right afforded to us by the constitution to live free, then to be seen as equals in a world that often dismisses us. We have overcome many obstacles placed in front of us. While we can quickly recognize problems caused by others such as police and rightly seek justice, the biggest impediment we have yet to overcome is our intentional destruction of our people based on greed, success, money, and drugs.We, as a people, need to be like-minded and like-looking. We need to balance our beliefs and integrate faith into real life. In times of trouble, we lose perspective. Bad things happen to good and bad people; good things happen to good and bad people, but with the good and bad, we must find common ground for all to flourish.Inside, you will discover documented events in African American history and one woman's personal journey through two turning points that would have a profound impact on her people. This book is meant to remind us of the path we have journeyed and ask us to look, as a race, where are we headed and will the road we are on get us there. Together, we are strong. Our strength cannot be stolen but can be surrendered by our lack of action. We determine our destiny!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Covenant Books, Inc.
• Release date: Mar 5, 2021
• ISBN: 9781636301457

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My People, My Time

Deborah McCrayer

ISBN 978-1-63630-144-0 (Paperback)

ISBN 978-1-63630-145-7 (Digital)

Copyright © 2020 Deborah McCrayer

All rights reserved

First Edition

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods without the prior written permission of the publisher. For permission requests, solicit the publisher via the address below.

Covenant Books, Inc.

11661 Hwy 707

Murrells Inlet, SC 29576

www.covenantbooks.com

Table of Contents

Preface

Twentieth Century

The Sixties

The Seventies

The Eighties

The Nineties

Twenty-First Century

2000

2010

So What’s Next?

Conclusion

About the Author

Also By Deborah Mccrayer

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ISBN 978-1-64471-588-8

Available in Paperback and eBook

Is how you interact with others based on your professional aspiration? Have you lost friends and damaged family relations as you achieved professional success? Follow this remarkable true-life story of how one woman struggled with success. By sharing actions and choices from personal experience, she demonstrates what it means to live with success, faith, and trust in God and others.

This book is dedicated to all African Americans. My hope is to encourage you to open your eyes to the direction and needs of our people and to challenge you to get involved to make a difference for the betterment of our race.

Preface

As fate would have it, my mother moved me from Buffalo, New York, to St. Louis, Missouri. Later in life, the US Navy will move me to Baltimore, Maryland. St. Louis and Baltimore has had a critical impact on the African American race during the twenty-first century. These two cities would play a pivotal role in the destruction of our morals and hurry our race down a path of self-destruction.

My intent for this book is to document, during my lifetime, how the African American race went from fighting for basic civil rights to a total disregard for human life, not by others but by our own hand.

Part 1

Twentieth Century

The Sixties

The 1960s was one of the most tumultuous and derisive decades in world history, marked by the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, antiwar protests, political assassinations, and the emerging generation gap.

Throughout the 1960s, African Americans held the title of heavyweight champion of the world and witnessed the birth of the civil rights era that began with a lunch counter sit-in at a Woolworth’s in Greensboro, North Carolina.

In the dawn of the ’60s, three key events—the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama; the murder of civil rights activist, Medgar Evers; and the march on Washington, D.C.—drew two hundred thousand protesters who witnessed the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King’s legendary I Have a Dream speech and would shape those early years.

On September 15, 1963, the congregation of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, greeted each other before the start of Sunday service. In the basement of the church, five young girls, two of them sisters, gathered in the ladies’ room in their best dresses, happily chatting about the first days of the new school year. It was Youth Day and excitement filled the air; they were going to take part in the Sunday adult service.

Just before 11 o’clock, instead of rising to begin prayers, the congregation was knocked to the ground. As a bomb exploded under the steps of the church, they sought safety under the pews and shielded each other from falling debris. In the basement, four little girls, 14-year-olds Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and 11-year-old Cynthia Wesley, were killed. Addie’s sister Susan survived, but was permanently blinded.

Why This Church?

The 16th Street Baptist Church was a large and prominent congregation located downtown, just blocks from Birmingham’s commercial district and City Hall. Since its construction in 1911, the church had served as the centerpiece of the city’s African American community, functioning as a meeting place, social center, and lecture hall. Because of its size, location, and importance to the community, the church served as headquarters for civil rights mass meetings and rallies in the early 1960s.

Birmingham was the most segregated city in the United States and in April 1963, after an invitation by Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth to come help desegregate Birmingham, the city became the focus of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). The desegregation campaign conceived by Shuttlesworth was known as Project C and was to be a series of nonviolent protests and boycotts.

Despite resistance from some of the church’s leadership and members of the congregation, the 16th Street Baptist Church joined the SCLC in their campaign. The church became the departure point for many of the demonstrations that took place in the city. On May 2, 1963, students ranging in age from eight to eighteen gathered at the church to march downtown and talk to the new mayor about segregation. After leaving the church they were met by police and many were jailed. By the time the Children’s Crusade and the ensuing demonstrations ended on May 10th, thousands of children and adults had been injured by fire hoses and attack dogs and incarcerated by order of Bull Connor, Commissioner of Public Safety.

The church came to be viewed by many as a symbol and a rallying place for civil rights activists; and the focal point for racial tensions and white hostility towards the civil rights movement in Birmingham.

Why Now?

Due to the success of the Birmingham Campaign, on May 10, 1963, the city agreed to desegregate lunch counters, restrooms, drinking fountains, and fitting rooms, to hire African Americans in stores as salespersons and clerks, and to release the jailed demonstrators. White segregationists opposed desegregation, however, and violence continued to plague the city.

On May 11th, a bomb destroyed the Gaston Motel where Martin Luther King, Jr. had been staying and another damaged the house of King’s brother, A. D. King. NAACP attorney Arthur Shores’ house was fire bombed on August 20th and September 4th in retaliation for his attempts to help integrate the Birmingham public schools. On September 9th, President John F. Kennedy took control of the Alabama National Guard, which Governor Wallace was using to block court-ordered desegregation of public schools in Birmingham. Around that time Robert Chambliss, who would later be named as a suspect in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing, foreshadowed the violence to come when he told his niece, Just wait until Sunday morning and they’ll beg us to let them segregate.

Eventual Justice

The FBI office in Birmingham launched an immediate investigation. In a 1965 memo to J. Edgar Hoover, FBI agents named four men as primary suspects for the bombing—Thomas Blanton, Robert Chambliss, Bobby Frank Cherry, and Herman Cash. All four men were members of Birmingham’s Cahaba River Group, a splinter group of the Eastview Klavern #13 chapter of the Ku Klux Klan. Eastview Klavern #13 was considered one of the most violent groups in the South and was responsible for the 1961 attacks on the Freedom Riders at the Trailways bus station in Birmingham.

The investigation ended in 1968 with no indictments. According to the FBI, although they had identified the four suspects, witnesses were reluctant to talk and physical evidence was lacking. In addition, information from FBI surveillances was not admissible in court. Hoover chose not to approve arrests, stating, The chance of prosecution in state or federal court is remote. Although Chambliss was convicted on an explosives charge, no charges were filed in the 1960s for the bombing of the church.

In 1971, Alabama Attorney General Bill Baxley reopened the case, requesting evidence from the FBI and building trust with witnesses who had been reluctant to testify. Investigators discovered that, while the FBI had accumulated evidence against the bombers, under orders from Hoover they had not disclosed the evidence to county prosecutors. Robert Chambliss was convicted of murder on November 14, 1977; however, it would be decades before the other suspects were tried for their crimes. In 2000, the FBI assisted Alabama state authorities in bringing charges against the remaining suspects. On May 1, 2001, Thomas Blanton was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. In 2002, Bobby Frank Cherry was convicted as well. Cherry boasts that he was the one who planted the bomb next to the church wall helped send him to prison for life. Herman Cash died in 1994 having never been prosecuted for the murders of the four girls. (National Park Service, 2016)

Then, Alabama Governor George Wallace was a leading foe of desegregation, and Birmingham had one of the strongest and most violent chapters of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK). The city’s police commissioner, Eugene Bull Connor, was notorious for his willingness to use brutality in combating radical demonstrators, union members, and Blacks, and it was later revealed that the FBI had information concerning the identity of the bombers by 1965 and did nothing, since J. Edgar Hoover, then-head of the FBI, disapproved of the civil rights movement (Editors, 2010).

The second event was the murder of civil rights activist, Medgar Evers. During World War II, Evers volunteered for the US army and participated in the Normandy invasion. In 1952, he joined the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). As a field worker for the NAACP, Evers traveled through his home state of Mississippi, encouraging poor African Americans to register to vote and recruiting them into the civil rights movement. He was instrumental in getting witnesses and evidence for the Emmitt Till murder case, which brought national attention to the plight of African Americans in the South (Editors, Medgar Evers assassinated, 2010).

During the early 1960s the increased tempo of civil-rights activities in the South created high and constant tensions, and in Mississippi conditions were often at the breaking point. On June 12, 1963, a few hours after Pres. John F. Kennedy had made an extraordinary broadcast to the nation on the subject of civil rights, Medgar Evers was shot and killed in an ambush in front of his home. The murder made Evers, until then a hardworking and effective but relatively obscure figure outside Mississippi, a nationally known figure. He was buried with full military honors in Arlington National Cemetery and awarded the 1963 Spingarn Medal of the NAACP. (The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2019)

After a funeral in Jackson, he was buried with full military honors at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia. President John F. Kennedy and many other leaders publicly condemned the killing. In 1964, the first trial of chief suspect Byron De La Beckwith ended with a deadlock by an all-white jury, sparking numerous protests. When a second all-white jury also failed to reach a decision, De La Beckwith was set free. Three decades later, the state of Mississippi reopened the case under pressure from civil rights leaders and Evers’ family. In February 1994, a racially mixed jury in Jackson found Beckwith guilty of murder. The unrepentant white supremacist, aged 73, was sentenced to life imprisonment. (Editors, Medgar Evers assassinated, 2010)

The third event, the March on Washington, D.C. for Jobs and Freedom took place in Washington, D.C., on August 28, 1963. Attended by some 250,000 people, it was the largest demonstration ever seen in the nation’s capital, and one of the first to have extensive television coverage. The stated demands of the march were the passage of meaningful civil rights legislation, the elimination of racial segregation in public schools, protection for demonstrators against police brutality, a major public-works program to provide jobs, the passage of a law prohibiting racial discrimination in public and private hiring, a two-dollar-an-hour minimum wage, and self-government for the District of Columbia, which had a Black majority were just a few (Siteseen Limited, 2014).

The two most noteworthy speeches of the march came from John Lewis and Martin Luther King Jr. Lewis represented the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, a younger, more radical group than King’s. The speech he planned to give—circulated beforehand—was objected to by other participants; it called Kennedy’s civil rights bill too little, too late, asked which side is the federal government on? and declared that they would march through the Heart of Dixie, the way Sherman did and burn Jim Crow to the ground—nonviolently. In the end, he agreed to tone down the more inflammatory portions of his speech, but even the revised version was the most controversial of the day. King’s speech remains one of the most famous speeches in American history. He started with prepared remarks, saying he was there to cash a check for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness while warning fellow protesters not to allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again, we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force. But then, he departed from his script, shifting into the I have a dream theme he’d used on prior occasions, drawing on both the American dream and religious themes, speaking of an America where his children will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character (Ross, 2000-2017 Sandbox Networks, Inc., publishing as Infoplease.).

This is when I was born—1965. By this time, the African American people were just past what would become the high point of the Civil Rights Movement, the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. However, the Selma Voting Rights Movement, its Selma to Montgomery marches, and the tragic murders of two activists associated with the march inspired President Lyndon B. Johnson to call for the full Voting Rights Act of 1965, which struck down barriers to black enfranchisement (Wikipedia contributors., 2019).

By the mid ’60s, then-president Lyndon B. Johnson sent troops to Vietnam in what would become a source of division in the United States in the years to come. The Vietnam War saw the highest proportion of Blacks ever to serve in an American war. During the height of the US involvement, 1965–69, Blacks, who formed 11 percent of the American population, made up 12.6 percent of the soldiers in Vietnam. The majority of these were in the infantry, and although authorities differ on the figures, the percentage of Black combat fatalities in that period was a staggering 14.9 percent, a proportion that subsequently declined. Volunteers and draftees included many frustrated Blacks whose impatience with the war and the delays in racial progress in America led to race riots on a number of ships and military bases, beginning in 1968, and the services’ response in creating interracial councils and racial sensitivity training (Butler, 1999).

By the beginning of the Vietnam War, the racial climate in the military had improved. The Department of Defense not only desegregated the military in the 1950s, but also on-base schools for military dependents and civilian defense facilities as well. Yet despite these efforts, as the United States sent increasing numbers of troops to Southeast Asia in the 1960s, racial inequality in the armed forces persisted. African Americans entered the military in large numbers as volunteers and draftees, and they continued facing discrimination in areas such as training, promotions, assignments, and administration of military justice.

During the advisory period and as the war escalated, African Americans consistently volunteered and reenlisted, serving in numbers roughly proportionate to their overall population percentage. Many volunteered for combat units because, as African American Green Beret Melvin Morris pointed out, it was the prestigious thing to do, and if you got in, you went. These units also offered faster promotions and additional pay.

By 1966, African Americans represented over 20 percent of the Army’s two airborne units in Vietnam. At the same time, African Americans frequently lacked access to the same economic and educational resources as whites. They were less likely to receive occupational or educational deferments, and they scored lower on military entrance examinations, leaving them ineligible for some of the more technical military occupational specialties.

African American military personnel after 1968 represented a new mentality. Only a few steps removed from the movements on the home front, black service members around the world (including some career military personnel) became less willing to tolerate systemic discrimination, cultural intolerance, or overt bigotry such as racial epithets, expressions of white supremacy, and Confederate flags. African American and white military personnel grew increasingly distrustful of one another. Racism, misunderstanding, and a Department of Defense largely unprepared to address institutional inequalities left an environment primed for racial conflict.

Beginning in 1968, those tensions erupted into violence on bases in the United States and in Vietnam. By the summer, African Americans made up almost half of the prison population of the major stockades in Vietnam, despite constituting less than 11 percent of the armed forces. Factors such as inconsistent sentencing for minor infractions contributed to these disparities. On August 15, 1968, at the Navy’s Da Nang Brig in Vietnam, a group of mainly black prisoners fought with white prisoners and guards. It took commanding officers nearly a day to restore order. Two weeks later, on August 29, a small scuffle between black and white prisoners at the Army’s Long Binh Jail escalated into disorder and arson throughout the compound as several hundred black prisoners took control of the facility and held it for a month. Between January and September 1969, more than 20 violent racial altercations occurred between U.S. troops in Vietnam.

The majority of racial violence occurred at large bases or support units in the rear. In the field, where men depended on their comrades for survival, troops had less opportunity or motivation to engage in racist practices or political disputes. Vietnam veteran General Colin Powell, a major in 1968, recalled that, Our men in the field, trudging through elephant grass under hostile fire, did not have time to be hostile toward each other. But bases…were increasingly divided by the same racial polarization that had begun to plague America.

While the records of their service are incomplete, somewhere between 7,000 and 11,000 American women volunteered and served in Vietnam. Statistics on African American women are even