Clay Lee didn’t baptize me.
The last days of summer dripped out of the bottle like sweet syrup. School starts soon. My teeth are freshly scrubbed, and I sit at the breakfast table in my cowboy pajamas, reading my baby book while my mother cuts out patterns to make a dress for my sister. Baby books are pre-printed journals where mothers mark down significant events in a child’s first year. They were popular in the sixties, so were having babies. We were at the end of the post-war baby boom, so different from our older siblings that they started calling us “Generation X.” We had different tastes and values than the earlier boomers.
I was accustomed to the idea that my baby book was considerably slimmer and less complete than my brothers' or sister's. My mother explained that this was “middle child syndrome,” meaning that older and younger siblings take up most of the mother’s time, so middle children get less attention. It was true that my baby book was smaller, and the only family member in fewer of our home movies was my father. Still, I never felt bad about the middle child thing because my mother spent more time with me than anyone while trying to figure out a way to circumvent my dyslexia so I could read. Without reading, I could never become any of the things they wanted for me. There might also be other reasons why the mother of a newborn in 1963 in Jackson, Mississippi, might not have the time to fill out a baby book.
My fingernails were broken and jagged from climbing trees. My cuticles were cracked and stained from digging holes and playing with dogs. In my baby book, my thick finger pointed to a name on my Certificate of Christian Baptism. “Who is W.J. Cunningham?” I asked.
“That’s the man who baptized you.” My mother answered.
“Why didn’t Mr. Lee do it?” I asked. Clay Lee and Bill Gober were the only ministers I’d ever seen at Galloway.
“Clay was associate pastor.” Mother said, pointing to a typed letter to the six-month-old me from Rev. Cunningham, congratulating me on my choice to be baptized and promising to watch over me the rest of my life. I could read individual words well, but blocks of text might as well have been Sumerian cuneiform due to my dyslexia. At the top of the letter, I saw the print saying “Clay Lee, Associate.”
“What’s associate mean?”
“That’s like assistant.”
“Why was Mr. Lee an assistant?”
“Because this was a long time ago, and Mr. Lee was still a young man.”
Saying that Clay Lee was a young man obscured the fact that my mother herself was only thirty-three years old in 1963. A little less than half as old as I am now. Ed King, who features heavily in this story, was only twenty-seven. From my perspective, my parents, Clay Lee, and Ed King, were always the senior people in the room and the most in charge. In 1963, they were all young associates.
“It can’t be that long ago,” I said. “I’m only seven.”
“You’re a big boy now.” My mother said.
Even now, I have no memory at all of Rev. Cunningham. “Did I ever meet this Cunningham guy?” I asked my mother.
“I think so.” She said. “He was there the day he baptized you.” and she smiled at the joke she made at my expense.
Not really understanding my mother's story, I accepted it as the truth, and it was the truth, just not all of it. I was too young to remember Cunningham when I was baptized, but why didn’t I remember ever meeting him after that?
My mother told me many things about the year I was born, all of them were true. She told me about the twin boys she miscarried the year before. They were to be named John and Allen, after my uncles. She planned to call me John-Allen until my Uncle Boyd died in February. Everything changed after that.
She hadn’t planned on getting pregnant. With Uncle Boyd very sick, my father’s job became more demanding. More than that, following the miscarriage, she just wasn’t emotionally ready. A weekend at the Broadwater Beach Hotel during a National School Supply and Equipment Association meeting was romantic enough to change her mind, and I was conceived one balmy fall night in the sea air.
She told me that spots of blood started showing up in her underwear just before Christmas and continued until weeks before I was born. Dr. Pittman could sometimes pick up a fetal heartbeat, and sometimes couldn't. Sometimes, she would go for weeks without feeling me move, and then I would keep her up all night, kicking. As the spots of blood got worse, Dr. Pittman ordered her to stay in bed for the last three months of my pregnancy. Fortunately, my grandmother lived with us and could watch over my two brothers while my mother was bed-bound.
She told me that, after she started having contractions and checked into the hospital, Dr. Pittman told my father the contractions weren’t nearly coming close enough together, and it could be another day before I was born, so he and Jack Flood crossed the street to get hamburgers at Primos. When they returned, with a hamburger in a sack for my mother, the nurses were cleaning me up, and my mother returned to her room. The contractions started coming much more quickly after they left, and in moments, I was born.
There were scary parts to the story. There were funny parts to the story. I was satisfied that was the whole story, and everything my mother told me was true, but she didn’t mention a word about what else was going on when I was born.
I was born at Baptist Hospital because that’s where Dr. Pittman delivered babies. After losing the twins, my mother was very particular about pre-natal care. There were times when they didn’t know if I was alive inside her or not. I can only imagine what it must have been like. I was born alive, healthy, and strong, with a prominent beauty mark above my left eye that turned red when I cried.
My mother and I were still in the hospital when, two days later, an ambulance brought a twenty-seven-year-old Methodist minister from Vicksburg named Ed King to the emergency room after some nameless men ran his car off Hanging Moss Road. He had significant jaw, cheekbone, and mouth damage, but no surgeon would see him. The fix was in. No plastic surgeon in Jackson would treat Ed King. Some men carried scars from the Civil Rights Movement in their hearts for the rest of their lives. Ed King carried them on his face.
Three weeks before, King ministered to some students who dared to violate the color barrier at Woolworth’s on Capitol Street. Photographs of the incident are famous. King was young, strong, and beautiful in his clerical collar while an angry mob pelted the protestors with food and condiments, hoping for more tangible violence. Nurses sewed his face up two days after I was born and bandaged him the best they could.
Ed’s life and mine tangled together like vines on the same tree. I walked much of my life in the path he made, even though I rarely understood it that way. When I asked my mother about the man with the scars on his face that sat at Galloway, she said he was a minister, and the scars came during the civil rights times, which I understood to be long before I was born. It wasn’t. My mother told me the truth but didn’t tell me all of it.
I understand why she left things out. I was a sensitive boy and very empathetic. I also tended to make whatever tragedies happened in people’s lives my own. If she had told me the whole story from the beginning, my response would have been unpredictable and probably extreme.
Before 1950, most of the world wasn’t willing to do or say much about the South’s peculiar institution of maintaining geographic proximity to our African neighbors but keeping iron locks on every conceivable cultural gateway, especially schools, restaurants, public transportation, and churches.
As the world came home from World War II and the Korean Conflict, attitudes began changing. Some young ministers, like TW Lewis and Ed King, both graduates of Millsaps College, began to question whether the South’s peculiar institution violated the scriptural teachings of Jesus. Critics of Ed King would say his time in Boston, after Millsaps, had made him a communist, and that’s why he was interested in all this racial equality stuff.
Brown v. Board of Education was decided while King was at Millsaps. Not long after, Methodists around the country began discussing ending segregation at the church door—Methodists who were not from the South.
King might have then, and now, had socialist tendencies, but he’s far from a communist. Despite what you hear, they are not the same. Like most things in life, King’s ideas about integration are scripturally based and informed by the prevailing methodist opinion on issues.
It’s a mistake to assume King was “just another liberal.” In the eighties, I was friends with a woman who was very involved in abortion rights. The clinics in Jackson were under constant attack, and some episodes in other parts of the South turned violent. She assembled a group to defend the clinic, its employees, and its patients from these possibly violent protestors. She rented the Heritage room at Millsaps to hold a meeting to discuss clinic defense and training, but someone associated with the college was demanding a hearing on the issue and she asked if I would speak on her behalf. I made it clear that I could only go representing myself and not as an agent of my father, but as I was personally interested in this issue, I would be glad to do it.
The meeting was set. We were to meet in Stuart Good’s office with Wayne Miller, representing Campus Security, a tenured professor from the English Department, my friend and I, and the person filing the complaint. Sitting quietly in Good’s office, wondering who might come through the door with a complaint about our having an abortion rights meeting at Millsaps, I was shocked when it was Ed King.
I’d had discussions with people who had a scriptural argument about abortion before and felt confident doing it, but this was Ed King. I was profoundly intimidated and unprepared for this. Wayne Miller turned out to be the deciding factor in this issue, and we ended up having the abortion rights meeting without event. That day, I learned an important lesson: never assume you know what Ed King thinks about an issue.
The struggle for civil rights started at a quick pace, and by the year I was born, it became burning hot.
July 1953, the Korean War ended.
May 1954, the Supreme Court decides in favor Brown in Brown v. Board of Education. School segregation in the South would end with “all due haste.” That verbiage would become important later.
July 1954, The Citizens Council forms to “defend” the South from the effects of Brown v. Board of Education.
August 1955, Emmett Till murdered.
December 1955, Rosa Parks arrested.
March 1956, Mississippi forms the State Sovereignty Commission. Its initial purpose was to counter bad press about Mississippi, but it becomes a segregationalist spy agency.
September 1956, James Campbell Jr. Born
October 1959, Joseph William Campbell Born
June 1961, Despite direct orders to the contrary from the National Methodist Conference, Galloway United Methodist Church Lay Board votes to empower ushers to keep any “colored people” from entering the sanctuary.
December 1961, John and Allen Campbell are stillborn.
September 1962, The “Battle of Oxford” to prevent admitting James Meridith into the University of Mississippi.
January 1963, Twenty-eight Methodist ministers sign the “Born of Conviction” letter; most notable among them was Keith Tonkel.
In February 1963, Boyd Campbell, former US Chamber of Commerce president, dies in Jackson.
April 1963, Allen C. Thompson, Mayor of Jackson, closes all Jackson swimming pools rather than integrate them.
May 27, 1963, 600 African residents of Jackson meet with Thompson to demand the desegregation of public places and schools.
May 27, 1963, The Justice Department publishes a plan to integrate Southern Schools “with all due haste.”
May 28, 1963, Ed King and students from Tougaloo College attempt to integrate the lunch counter at Woolworths on Capitol Street. In less than a month, an attempt is made on King’s life that ends with his face scarred for life.
May 31, 1963, The Mississippi Methodist Conference severs all ties with Rev. Ed King.
June 12, 1963, Four days before I was born. Medgar Evers was shot dead in his driveway, a little more than two miles from where I was born.
My mother had been in bed since the start of Spring, not knowing if I’d be born alive or dead. W. B. Selah, who had been the head pastor at Gallow since 1945, was the longest-serving minister in the already long history of Galloway. After the Brown decision, Selah began advocating for an open-door policy at Galloway. He pushed for a plan that when “Negros” came to Galloway, ushers would invite them in under the condition that they come with a worshipful heart and not to disrupt the service. The Lay Board voted overwhelmingly against it. In the Methodist Church, the lay board has much more power than in the Episcopal Church or the Catholic Church, which have a much more powerful central organization.
Selah believed his congregation loved him and would follow his lead, even though they voted against it. On June 9, 1963, two weeks after I was born, five African protestors showed up on the steps of Galloway. Ed King was in his car, not far away, his face still bandaged from his atack. Galloway ushers violently rebuff the protestors, who are then arrested by the city police. Selah tells the police that he is the minister of Galloway and he will not press charges against these people. The police say it doesn’t matter because they’re being charged on a city ordinance, not trespassing. W.B. Selah, who had been at Galloway longer than any other Methodist Minister in the history of Mississippi, walked back to the podium before his beloved congregation and resigned. His associate pastor Rev. Jerry Furr, went with him.
Without a pastor or an associate, the Lay Board at Galloway petitioned the Mississippi conference for a new Minister and a new associate. On September 1, 1963, they sent William Jefferson Cunningham and Clay Lee to take over ministerial duties at Galloway. On November 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Texas. December 29, 1963, I was baptized at Galloway, not by W.B. Selah, whom everybody loved and baptized my brothers, but by WJ Cunningham, who nobody knew.
Like Selah, Cunningham preferred an open-door policy at Galloway. Like Selah, the lay board opposed it. Nat Rogers, the state's most important banker, whose groundwork led to the rapid growth of Deposit Guarantee Bank, which became the state’s largest bank, was the head of the Galloway Lay Board. He conceded that Galloway should eventually work toward an open-door policy, but at a very slow and deliberate pace, a much slower pace than Cunningham wanted. Selah had members of the congregation who supported his open-door plan, and Cunningham inherited them. Their numbers were growing, but not fast enough. Conflicts between the stubborn Cunningham and his congregation grew.
A hardline segregation group rose up and blocked every effort Cunningham made. They sent anonymous and signed letters to the Conference asking for a new pastor. The Conference, wanting to avoid soiling the career of the young and promising Clay Lee with the conflict in Jackson, moved him to a rural congregation in Philadelphia, Mississippi, thinking things would be quieter there. Lee had not finished unpacking the boxes in his new home when Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner were murdered in June of 1964.
Lee did his best to minister to the people of Neshoba, Mississippi. He was even instrumental in putting together what they called the Philadelphia Project, which sought to combine the efforts of multiple churches to pull the community together. Still, he was swimming upstream in a strong current.
Cunningham made slow, painful progress at Galloway. Nat Rogers worked to keep the conference and the hardliners at Galloway off his neck. On July 2, 1964, Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act by using every political trick he knew and every ounce of intimidation he could muster. The act made it illegal to discriminate based on race in places of public accommodation. The question of whether that included the church caused many arguments. Forces that favored an open-door policy at Galloway were emboldened, and hardliners formed an escape plan.
June 8, 1965, long-time affiliate of Galloway, Millsaps College Board of Trustees, voted to desegregate the school, including Nat Rogers. Segregation hardliners at Galloway began transferring their membership letters to a new church that would become the Riverside Independent Methodist Church. Over the next two years, over two hundred Galloway regular members moved to Riverside, which promised to continue the fight for segregation.
On January 10, 1966, Galloway again voted to open its doors. This time, it passes. Galloway is desegregated. My little sister, born three months later, was baptized in a fully liberated Methodist Church.
WJ Cunningham would go on to write a book about his experiences at Galloway. You can’t blame him for having ambiguous feelings about the rough handling he received there. In 1966, WJ Cunningham asked the conference to transfer him out of Galloway, and they agreed. Clay Lee returned to Jackson, and Galloway became the church I knew.
The Civil Rights Movement would never again be as hot and active as it was in 1963 when I was born, but it wasn’t over yet. In 1968, over one hundred young men and women signed the “Letter of Belief and Intention” in the Jackson Clarion-Ledger Newspaper, asking for an even more open society. In October of 1969, the Supreme Court decided in favor of Alexander in Alexander v. Holmes County Board of Education, changing the verbiage of Brown v. Board of Education from integration “with all due haste” to integration “immediately,” prompting a panicked mass exodus from the Mississippi Public School System.
When I became a man, both my mother and my father would tell me the truth of all these things. They would tell me all these things and more–some that I will never write down. But when I was a boy–when I was seven, they believed I didn’t need to know all the ways the world around me was nearly torn apart. Between my stuttering and my dyslexia, I was a pretty shy boy and easily frightened. Knowing that these things were going on around me probably would have been upsetting. There were many other lies my mother never told me. I think that happens with little boys. You have to wait until they’re strong enough to take on the world the way it really is.
