Come Tuesday, J.T. Johnson and the Rev. Willie Bolden will be somewhere in Washington, D.C., hoping to get a closer look at history —- the inauguration of the nation’s first African-American president.
Lula Joe Williams, though, will be here at the Martin Luther King Center watching with fellow foot soldiers —- those unsung yet invaluable warriors on the front lines of the civil rights movement.
Either way it will be a crowning moment for all three, a time to reap seeds sown many years ago in their fight for voting and civil rights for African-Americans.
“I just have to be able to stand on that ground,” said Bolden, his eyes dancing above a big grin.
Although the civil rights era will forever be defined by such icons as Martin Luther King Jr., Joseph Lowery and Andrew Young, it was lesser-known leaders like Johnson, Williams and Bolden who personified both the struggles and the victories of the movement.
A place in turbulent times
Recently, in anticipation of the inauguration and another King day, they gathered at the Atlanta offices of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and talked about the movement that helped make Barack Obama’s presidency possible, providing tantalizing details of that turbulent time and their place in it.
On the one hand, they said, Tuesday’s inauguration will be a bittersweet moment. Unlike the Tuskegee Airmen and members of the Little Rock 9, they had not received any special invitation to the inauguration. On the other hand, it was hard to suppress the jubilation and pride they felt first at having voted for an African-American president and now being about to witness his inauguration.
“I thank God for letting me be here to witness it,” said Williams. “Nobody knows but us what we had to go through. The many times we were beaten down in the street and thrown into jail because we wanted to register to vote. It’s just overwhelming to me.”
As she started to cry, Bolden reached over to console her. Both he and Johnson understood.
There had been many moments between King’s assassination in 1968 and 2009 when their efforts seemed to be in vain, when the gains made seemed so fragile.
Now they were seeing real progress.
“The face of America today is the face of Barack Obama, an epochal change, whatever happens in the next four or eight years of an Obama administration,” said Maurice Isserman, history professor at Hamilton College and co-author of “America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s.”
That change would not have come without the likes of Johnson, Williams, Bolden and the thousands of other foot soldiers from the movement, he said.
“Without their courage and their commitment to making America live up to the best aspects of its democratic tradition, it is impossible to imagine how Barack Obama could be about to take the oath of office as president of the United States,” said Isserman. “January 20th, 2009 is a moment of triumph for President-elect Obama; but it is also a moment of triumph for Dr. King, for Bob Moses, for Fannie Lou Hamer, and for thousands and thousands of others who were foot soldiers for freedom.”
Joining the movement
Williams, a resident of Decatur, grew up in Montgomery where her parents were active in that city’s bus boycott of 1961, the year Barack Obama was born.
She was 15 when she witnessed Freedom Riders being beaten and decided to join the movement.
“I made up my mind I wanted to be a freedom fighter,” said Williams, now 62.
She signed on to work with the SCLC helping with the “get out the vote” campaign, sitting in at lunch counters and helping integrate the schools and other public facilities.
Bolden, now 70 and living in Atlanta, was a 22-year-old former Marine working as an assistant bell captain at two of Savannah’s plush hotels when he first became engaged in the movement.
It was his job, he said, to make sure the hotel was locked tight when the late Hosea Williams led protests across the street.
Once after listening to Hosea Williams preach against segregation, Bolden decided to leave the door unlocked, giving the protesters entry into the hotel.
Several days later he was playing nine ball when Hosea Williams and King came to the local pool room. “I was getting ready to bank the eight ball cross side, play the nine in the corner and get paid,” he recalled.
King introduced himself and asked Bolden to stop for a moment. He wanted to talk. Bolden, who’d been fired from his hotel job for leaving the door unlocked, didn’t want to hear about the movement anymore but he acquiesced and took a seat against a wall.
Later that night instead of going to a nightclub as he’d planned, Bolden went to St. Phillips Catholic Church where King was scheduled to speak.
“The church was jam-packed,” Bolden recalled.
He watched as King’s oratory picked the audience up off the pews and set them down again, much the same way he witnessed Obama do during his run for the White House.
“I had chill bumps,” Bolden said.
Several days later, Hosea Williams called and said King wanted him to come to Atlanta to work with SCLC, and in 1962 Bolden left Savannah on a Delta airline jet headed here.
He would spend the next three years galvanizing communities, passing out leaflets, preparing the way for King.
“We were the ground crew,” he said.
Isserman said they were more than that: They were among thousands of unsung heroes who risked their lives in the cause for equal rights and in the end helped to pave the way for Americans to elect its first African-American president.
“They demonstrated, they registered voters,” he said. “They had little and risked all.”
J.T. Johnson, who at 71 is the oldest of the three, is a native of Albany. He joined the movement in 1952, when he organized a walk-out at his high school to protest the board of education discouraging teachers from joining the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
Johnson left Georgia for New York six years later but decided to return when he saw his classmates being beaten by police on television.
That’s when he met Bolden, who’d traveled to Albany to recruit people to go to St. Augustine, Fla. one of the bloodiest sites of the movement. “We marched morning, noon and night,” Johnson recalled.
Now they were finally seeing the fruits of their labor.
Johnson and Bolden intend to be somewhere in the mix on Inauguration Day, they said, thanking God for allowing them to see the day.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Monday, January 19, 2009
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